Piracy and the such: A letter to Matt Zoller Seitz (updated)
Piracy is a crime. But in some societies, when the harm is to the few and far away, it’s also a necessity.
If you’re a movie or culture fan, you can’t NOT know the name Matt Zoller Seitz. The man is an impeccable writer and critic, contributing both for the New York Magazine and Rogerebert.com. He’s written a companion book to all seven seasons of the acclaimed AMC series Mad Men, and two books on Wes Anderson’s movies, including one dedicated to the unique filmmaker’s masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel. He is usually funny, insightful and a joy to read.
And then I read this tweet yesterday.
Apparently, this was due to a lengthy discussion — which I believe devolved into a full-blown argument later in the night — because Terrence Malick’s latest, Knight of Cups, became available to download yesterday, more than three months ahead of its scheduled March 4th opening date. Of course, his complaining attracted some… well, colorful comments.
Yes, as a critic, Seitz has “had shit given” to him for free. But he doesn’t upload it immediately to the Internet for sure. So moot point.
What did bother me about the whole thing — and now I’d like to address Mr. Seitz directly — is that it almost immediately revealed something I, as a movie lover who lives outside the United States, have to endure from people who have the privilege of having any kind of art immediately available to them.
Of course, Mr. Seitz, I would like to think you weren’t adressing foreigners. I agree that pirating movies in a society that makes EVERY SINGLE MOVIE available eventually, be it on DVD or Blu Ray, or digital download, or streaming, is at the very least entitlement. But I live in Venezuela, a country where, to cite just one example, Where the Wild Things Are was never shown in theaters. I ordered the DVD on Amazon, but we have a currency control system in place for the last 12 years, and that was perhaps the last DVD I could order. My Netflix account got cancelled because the dollar quota we get (US$300 a year — how many movies would you be able to consume if you could only use 300 bucks a year?) was cancelled as well, with no idea if it will come back. Many of the most pirated TV shows simply weren’t available to most of us in the country. (On the flip side, all the most pirated movies were shown here, and I saw all of them save one in the theater.) And then, there’s the power of how good TV brings people together.
(It’s Person of Interest, by the way.)
Mr. Seitz, I’m not asking you to care about a country that has economic problems you would not even begin to imagine (may the line for movie tickets be the only one you ever do). I am asking that you consider that not all of us who occasionally download movies from torrent sites do not use “phony, watered-down Marxism” to justify why we do it. In many cases, it’s simply because we have no choice. Yes, art is not a right, and just because it’s out there doesn’t mean we’re automatically entitled to watch it any time we damn well please and shouldn’t need to pay for it. But if we can’t pay for the content we constantly read about — if we keep reading how amazing The End of the Tour is, for example — and we know, know, it will never be shown in a movie theater here… then should we just not watch it?
Update: Mr. Seitz did read this letter, and responded immediately on Twitter. I was very much surprised that he would do so.
I don’t have Mr. Seitz’ permission to reproduce the exact conversation, but I can say he was not pleased that I had made quite a few assumptions about himself without contacting him before writing the letter. He had made the exception for foreign countries where piracy was basically a necessity (I simply hadn’t gotten that far into his timeline). After a few back and forths, we ended the conversation in peace, no harm done to either one of us.
Looking back at the incident, I can’t help but think how often we stop doing things just because they’re “out of our league”. There is a famous story about Claudio Pérez Míguez, a 15-year-old high school student who had to do an interview for a school project, so he decided to contact the most famous author of his time, Jorge Luis Borges — and the man agreed (link in Spanish). Míguez avoided doing something I unfortunately did with Mr. Seitz: I assumed.
I admit it, I’m a bit jaded when it comes to the Internet in some ways. It comes from a bit of low self-esteem that comes with the nationality, I guess. So I go and write this piece, both hoping one of the most renown entertainment authors in pop culture right now would read and completely ignore me. I know now, I wasn’t so much writing at him, I was dealing with a bigger frustration.
A friend later chastised me for giving in so easily, saying that I let him bully me “just because he was this famous critic”. I honestly did not feel bullied at all. Not to mention that in the end, he acknowledged that I seem like a nice guy (I am, I swear). I shielded myself in saying that this was not for some big magazine or anything, in which case I absolutely would have contacted him for a quote, but I assumed, again, I was too small for that, and I wanted to get it out. Bad combination. And besides, don’t I always say that I don’t turn off the journalist inside me?
I certainly learned my lesson. I do hope Mr. Seitz will agree one day to have a lengthy conversation over coffee, and at the very least sign one of his books that I will absolutely purchase. I’ll certainly ask. And I especially hope that this be a lesson to both aspiring and working journalists: contact that source. It’s worse if you simply assume.
Matt Zoller Seitz’s latest book, The Oliver Stone Experience, is out now. I also strongly encourage you to read this piece he wrote on the tenth anniversary of his wife’s death. Have a tissue handy.
