‘It Hurts Me a Little Bit to Say This…’
A.O. Scott on cultural overload, bad movies, and being the institutional voice of the New York Times
I’ve been having a conversation in my head with A.O. Scott since 2000. That was the year Scott took over as one of the New York Times’s film critics and began to demonstrate his mixture of wit, erudition, sound judgment, and the indefinable thing that transforms a reviewer into a critic — a familiar, friendly voice, an explainer of the inexplicable, a trusted guarantor of quality, a provider of much-needed perspective, and an assurance of must-avoid dreck. Every week for the last decade and a half, I’ve turned to Scott for guidance, admiring the crackle of his prose and the vigor of his arguments, even when, on occasion, I might disagree with his judgments.
All of which made it all the more jarring to be knocking at the door of the real-life Scott’s Brooklyn home, ready to discuss his insightful new book, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. It’s less a how-to for his fellow critics or manifesto in defense of his profession than an argument for the value of critical judgment in all our lives. We are all critics, he argues, and we must all parse the meaning of our Netflix queues and Spotify playlists and Kindle libraries for their larger meaning in our lives: “It’s the job of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom.”
The 49-year-old Scott — Tony to his friends — effortlessly held court during our three-hour-plus conversation, on topics ranging from Macklemore to Susan Sontag to Quentin Tarantino to the glories of Toy Story 2. We were only occasionally interrupted by the furious barking of his boisterous dogs, Treecko and Pilot, at perceived intruders. For all his efforts to separate Tony Scott, private citizen, from A.O. Scott, representative and wielder of the critical power of the New York Times, the man sounds much like the voice on the page: calm, measured, bitingly funny, and effortlessly intimate. As Scott argues in his book, “The voice of the critic is, above all, an honest voice, a voice that can be trusted. Not obeyed or blindly agreed with, but trusted in the way you’d trust a friend.”
Below is an extended excerpt from our conversation.
SAUL AUSTERLITZ: I felt like I should help you live out a dream and start with the questions from the Paris Review interview you imagine in your book: ‘Do you write first thing in the morning or in the small hours of the night? Sharpen your pencils? Do you sit or stand? What kind of typewriter do you prefer?’ Some of these questions have obviously dated a bit since you were dreaming of them.
A.O. SCOTT: I was always fascinated by those questions. I still love to read interviews with writers about that. I have almost no routines or habits. The kind of writing I do, I got a late start on. I was in academia, and then I started writing professionally when I already had a small child. I was living in a small apartment. I would wake up in the morning, try to get up before the baby, or write during his naps. I got very accustomed to writing not in ‘a room of one’s own.’ I write in coffee shops with everybody else with their laptops. I like, actually, to have a little bit of life around me. Not too much distraction, not too much noise.
I need to get up and walk. I do it sometimes when I work in the newsroom at the Times, which I don’t do very much. I can’t sit still in my cubicle; I have to get up and pace around. Then I’m in front of someone’s desk and wonder what I’m doing there.
You had mentioned you made a late transition from academia to writing journalism. Did you find that to be a difficult transition in terms of the writing, or the lifestyle?
It was a slow and painful transition for a number of reasons. In a way, the writing was the easiest part of it, or the thing that made it possible. I graduated from college — I studied comparative literature — and didn’t know what to do with myself. At the time I had some kind of dream or fantasy about being a journalist or a magazine writer, but it was a fantasy because I didn’t really have the nerve to do it, and I didn’t know how it was done.
I entered a PhD program in English at Johns Hopkins. That went OK for a while. There are certain research skills that are very useful. The ability to identify what you don’t know about a subject and fill in the gaps quickly, and more or less convincingly, is a good graduate-student skill. But it took me several attempts to find a workable dissertation topic to realize that my heart wasn’t in it. I was too impatient, and too much of a natural dilettante. Every time I would start working through something, I would get interested in something else.
I also had real trouble with the writing part of writing a dissertation, with the length and depth of the writing project, and how not fun it is to write academic prose. How you feel like you have to stake out a very narrow swath of territory and justify anything you might say with reference to all previous authorities.
And write in as bland or uninteresting a way as possible. That’s what’s often rewarded.
And you certainly don’t get rewarded for being funny. I always liked reading writers who were funny, including critics. Some of the critics who I go back to, like Randall Jarrell or Mary McCarthy, write brilliantly witty, funny, and also sometimes terribly unfair and irresponsible, crazy stuff.
A big part of criticism, or a useful tool for any critic, is hyperbole — going too far and knowing you’re too far.
But in academic writing you can’t go too far.
I started writing book reviews on the side, first for The Nation. I’d get great assignments because no one else would want it, like tackle the big John Updike novel for ten cents a word. Ten cents a word seemed fine to me. I discovered I had a taste and a knack for it. You could make claims and assertions just because you thought them, on the authority of your own voice. And you could make jokes.
I reached a crossroads. I saw my friends in graduate school were moving on and getting jobs. I didn’t find myself particularly envying them, or being excited at the prospect, or having my ambitions piqued.
I had a kid, and I was like, well, you can’t stay in this limbo forever. You need to have health insurance. You need to figure out how to have a grown-up life. You can’t be a part-time marginal freelancer and a part-time marginal academic and keep that going on forever.
You ended up working at the New York Review of Books. How was that as a formative experience?
It was a wonderful place in a lot of ways, and I look back very fondly on it. It was a good place to get an education and explore opportunities. It was menial work. It was basically answering the phones and running the fax machine, dropping off galleys for Joan Didion’s doorman — which was thrilling.
I remember coming in early one morning on Saturday, before anyone was there. The phone was ringing, and I picked it up and said, ‘Hello? New York Review of Books.’ ‘Oh, this is Vidia Naipaul calling from London.’ That’s a fun thing to happen in your life.
I came across your review of Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel City on Fire in GQ, and you make a reference to ‘bourgeois liberal values’ as being the bedrock of the novel, and the city. Do you think it would be wrong to see, in the defense of criticism you make in your book, a similar, silent defense of those same values? This idea of shared perceptions, or there being certain standards of judgment that actually exist outside our subjective perceptions?
One of the things I was getting at in that review, both about the novel as a form and the city as a social space, is [they are] both elitist and democratic. It’s elitist in the sense that you believe that standards and judgments are important, and it’s important to be able to say that some things have more value than others, and to articulate those norms and standards and values.
But it’s also important that those are communally or conversationally or collectively established.
One of the things I’m interested in arguing against, as a critic, is the idea of critical authority: the idea that there is a vested and secure authority that’s the source of these judgments.
We do, in the end, just have our subjective impressions, and our needs, and our interests. But it’s about how we negotiate those with each other, and how we listen to each other.
There are people — let’s say James Wood — who are interested in defining what the novel is and excluding things that don’t match up to that. I think that’s precisely wrong. Maybe you can do that with a symphony or a sonnet or lyric poetry, but the whole history of the novel is a hybrid and hodgepodge.
So you imagine it as this big, hectic, noisy thing that produces a lot of truth and beauty and insight. I am trying to imagine that criticism comes out of something similar, and there are always people who are trying to regulate it. There’s a great T.S. Eliot quote that talks about how criticism is just a bunch of people setting up soapboxes and shouting and yelling without being able to articulate their differences. This is terrible. There should be a more orderly, and rigorous, and confined, and strictly defined, activity. Part of my argument is, ‘No, it’s never gonna be that.’ It’s always going to be people yelling and screaming. That’s not the bad, degraded state of criticism that it needs to be rescued from. That’s just what it is.
I want to come back to this idea of the critic imposing ideas from the top down. In some ways, I think you’re exactly right, that that does happen. But is there a point at which critics can say, I respectfully disagree because I actually know a little bit more than you do?
I try to describe two bad choices, or two pictures that are in some ways equally or symmetrically unsatisfying. They’re not literal descriptions, they’re allegorical in a way. One is the critic as high priest, saying this is worthwhile, this is not. You must like this, and you must not like that. On the other side, there is this — perhaps at the moment more dangerous — populist or pseudo-populist idea, that whatever the market decides, whatever people like, that’s the determinant value.
I’m interested in criticism as an everyday activity, and as something that everybody does, or that everybody should be doing more of. Because I think that populist idea, that the popular stuff is the good stuff, or [that] you can turn a mass of private subjective experiences into data, and that data could be turned into some kind of evaluation, strikes me as profoundly wrong, and also self-defeating.
It’s fascinating how that popular opinion can turn, especially in popular music, but also in movies — how fickle and extreme that judgment can seem to be. A couple [of] years ago, my daughter and all her friends seemed to be listening to Macklemore and buying all his records.
Now everybody hates Macklemore; he’s a widely loathed cultural figure. So who bought all those records?
It’s easy for us to fall back on that kind of demographic or sociological theory: I like this because I’m this kind of person, and it reflects my prejudices, or my taste, or what I think I should like. All of that may be true, but it’s also not quite sufficient to explain it.
Do you find it daunting at all that you’re not just Tony Scott, guy sitting in your dining room, but A.O. Scott, New York Times? You’re almost removed from the equation at some point. Some people will say, ‘I’m going to see this movie because A.O. Scott really liked it.’ But a lot of people will say, ‘I’m going to see this movie because the Times said it was great.’ It’s like you are the Times.
There [are] all these different layers of identity. There’s the fact that my byline is different from the name most people know me by, which is intentional. I’ve grown to like this distance that creates, the idea that I exploit in the dialogue sections of this book [Better Living is broken up by Scott’s humorous conversations with himself] that this A.O. Scott is to some degree a fictional character that I’ve represented, or a mask that I put on.
There’s also the institutional fact of the New York Times. Ads will quote the New York Times, not me. Sometimes, people will even confuse the bylines. My own mother, after she saw Moonrise Kingdom, sent me an email: ‘I saw Moonrise Kingdom, I went back and read your review and I thought you just captured it beautifully.’ I wrote her back, and said, ‘Thank you. That was Manohla [Dargis].’
The other thing that happens is whether I feel the presence of that institutional authority when I write. One of the reasons I tend to [write] more here than in the offices is that I think I would be completely paralyzed if I sat down to think, ‘What I’m about to compose is the New York Times’s judgment on this film.’
There’s a certain type of movie that seem[s] to me to have been engineered entirely to get a positive review in the New York Times.
The fall season in particular is designed for that.
Sometimes that’s based on a not completely crazy idea about who the readership of the paper is, and who the audience that the Times reaches is. But again, I try not to be aware of that, not to conform to it.
What you hope is, if someone out there who doesn’t fit into the market research categories finds it and picks it up, it’ll be just as useful to that person. I’ve come to really like that, too — the fact that the New York Times insists on being non-specialized, non-narrow. So the idea is to get as much of the world in front of as many people as possible in some kind of intelligent and intelligible form. Every day. It’s great to be grounded in that.
In the book, you talk about the idea of those of us interested in art and culture chasing down this ecstatic experience that we hope to find. As we get older, it’s harder to have that intense rush of feeling we have when we see a movie or hear an album at age 16, when we’re perhaps more open to it. This is more of a philosophical question, but what can we do, as professionals or as amateurs, to keep our openness to that sort of ecstasy?
I think you’re right. It dilutes with age, simply because you’ve seen more, so less is likely to be new. That force of revelation or of shock. Also you get a little hardened [laughs]. And a little more impatient.
We live in an extraordinary age of plenty when it comes to culture, and entertainment, and things designed to give us pleasure and sensations and vicarious emotions. Sometimes, the sheer glut of it can become overwhelming. One of the things that I’ve found that can reawaken that and help get it back is to share that experience. I have a vivid memory of taking my son and a friend of his when they were 7 to E.T. It was more moving and intense for me to see that movie with them than it had been when I’d first seen it, which had been when I was a teenager and I was a little too pretentious to totally let it happen for me.
A few years later I took my son and maybe that same friend to see Blade Runner. They rode the subway home, and they were talking: “Was Deckard a replicant?” Just geeking out on that movie, which was totally new to them.
I wanted to follow up on this idea of criticism and fatherhood, because in some ways they feel diametrically opposed. When your children were younger, did you find yourself trying to turn off that critical mode while watching something with them, or was it still there, lurking, taking mental notes while you sat through Cars?
I remember taking my kids to movies, and for a while, every single thing they saw that they could see from end to end that didn’t freak them out was the best thing that they ever saw. Which poses a real challenge for a critic. Because they would see Finding Nemo, and then they would see Eddie Murphy in The Haunted Mansion, and they would be like, ‘That was better than Finding Nemo!’ By which they meant, ‘I saw that more recently.’
One thing, though, that’s so interesting about the way kids watch things is that repetition. I watched Toy Story 2 and Chicken Run, if you added it up, probably 70 times. A few minutes of them were always on. I have to say, those movies hold up really well. What the kids are doing in that repetitive watching is, they’re learning narrative codes. They’re learning to decode these images. They’re also feeding their own imaginations and fantasies.
In the book, you seem skeptical about the idea of lists of cultural masterpieces — the ‘1,000 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ and the like — but I wanted to suggest that newcomers to culture might be overwhelmed without them. We enter this world of culture and ask, how do I even begin? So we want a guide to what we should see, what makes us a good citizen of culture, in a way.
I think it’s especially true now that there’s this possibility, or this ideal, of the universal archive — Borges’s Library of Babel coming to life. That kind of retrospective sorting and list-making gives people a way in who are just discovering things and starting out, and provides exactly that kind of pedagogy you’re talking about: I know you liked this, so look at that.
But it also provides the way forward. That is, all art is actually built out of other art, and out of the critical engagement with other art, including the discovery of their insufficiency or inadequacy. Yes, this is a masterpiece, but this isn’t doing what I need to do; this isn’t telling me what I need to hear right now.
One of the things that I was struck by when I was doing the research [for] this book is the strong feeling that comes up, that people don’t admit to as such, [of] this desire for it to be over. It’s too much! I feel that sometimes too. I look at the review schedule, and there are 25 movies opening up this week in New York. And it’s like, ‘What the fuck? Stop! Stop! Give me a chance to catch up.’
This book is partly a confrontation with endlessness.
It’s trying not to be wishful and nostalgic in that way of saying, ‘OK, let’s just all stop, and take a deep breath, and be calm,’ because that’s impossible. I guess what I’m trying to figure out is how it might be possible to be calm and reasonable and measured and thoughtful given that the chaos of our cultural situation is not going to change.
It feels like part of what you’re arguing against is a symptom of a larger cultural interest in this idea that the Internet will disrupt culture by providing direct access to its masterpieces, and you’re not going to need the critical middleman anymore.
Criticism will always exist because there will always be people who want it and need it and benefit from it. That won’t necessarily be everyone. You have to be a little bit modest. There are millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people in the world who have seen hundreds or thousands of movies and never read a word of film criticism. I would argue that they nonetheless participate in criticism, that they are critics and are involved in criticism if they talk about or argue about or think about what they’ve seen.
Maybe sometimes critics are at a disadvantage from normal consumers of culture. Reading critics, you sometimes feel the unspoken burden of, ‘I’ve had to sit through so much garbage and I can’t take it anymore.’ Whereas a regular moviegoer or a regular book reader, reading and seeing less, has a narrower but perhaps more accurate view.
In some ways, [that] turns out to be in the long run more accurate. Part of the process of the passage of time is getting rid of a certain amount of that dross.
One of the big set pieces in the book deals with one of my favorite instances of that, which is Frank Nugent’s review of Bringing Up Baby [in the New York Times]. I’m obsessed with that piece of writing, which is maybe 400 words long and probably typed on deadline in 35 minutes, as an example of exactly what you’re talking about. He reviewed it the way I would review Grown Ups 2. You come back to that, now 80 years later, and you’re like, ‘What are you talking about? It’s Bringing Up Baby!’ That’s part of the weird professional deformation that critics undergo.
I loved the example of Frank Nugent and Bringing Up Baby. Do you see critical blind spots today that readers are going to laugh at or cringe at 50 years from now? Things that get lost in the shuffle, or undervalued? Or overvalued?
I’m sure that there are. I’m absolutely sure that the canon of the early 21st century as it’s established in the middle of the 21st century will look very different from the way it does now. I don’t know if it’s going to be discovered that reality television series are actually great works of art.
It often feels to me like comedy gets short shrift. I would think that some of the better comedies of the 21st century are the ones where we’re going to look at reviews and say, they didn’t catch that one.
It hurts me a little bit to say this, but I think some of the acclaimed serious TV masterpieces may suffer [and] lose a little bit of their luster. Those old screwballs hold up pretty well. The Adam McKay comedies, they’ve always been funny. So the Museum of Modern Art will [one day] be showing Talladega Nights.
I’d be there. The other interesting aspect for me, in terms of this sifting process and technology, is that the way we access things also changes our taste or what we encounter. I was talking to a friend who teaches teenagers about culture, and she was saying that her students had tremendously deep knowledge of TV shows that were available on Netflix. And things that were unavailable on Netflix were a giant black hole that they were not even aware of.
It’s fascinating the way that’s changed with TV. It used to be, when we were kids, there were some old shows in syndication. When I was a kid, that was Hogan’s Heroes and Gilligan’s Island. They were what you could watch after school. But then things were gone and they were gone.
The habits of consumption now are so completely, radically different that it’s mind-boggling. I notice [that] my son watches TV shows the way that I used to listen to albums, which is repetitively and obsessively.
It’s interesting, because what we’re describing, in a variety of fields, is this shift from scarcity to abundance. It seems like we’re still in the midst of shifting how we relate to culture when it’s everywhere.
The ways that I’m most old-fashioned are in these habits of consumption. I don’t have a tablet. I’ve never read a book on a tablet. I’m on the Internet all the time and I’m reading stuff. I’m not a Luddite in that way.
But I need to go to bookstores and look at books. I need to pick them up, and I need to look at the spines.
We’ve been edging away from this idea of the things we like as indicators of who we are, or our place in the world, but you can’t show off your good taste by having people look at your Kindle. You can look at your bookshelf, though, and be reminded: These are the books I like, these are the things I care about.
It’s a very rich and complicated psychological relationship. You look at the ones you feel guilty about not having read. You bought it. And then [I] look at my copy of Infinite Jest, and you see the spine is cracked at page 1000, and goddammit, I read it all the way through. But also as a way of knowing other people — going to other people’s houses.
The first thing you do is look at someone’s bookshelf.
I often can’t take my eyes off it. My feeling is that kids have not entirely gone away from that. There’s the interesting fact that a lot of millennials are buying vinyl, or that ebook sales are concentrated among older people who already have too many books and don’t have room for them.
In some ways, the most audacious argument you make in the book is your saying, “I want to insist that the critic is also a creator.” This reminded me of the work of some recent essayists, like David Shields, who seem to be trawling similar ground in their own nonfiction work. He’s saying, ‘What I do is art, also.’ It’s not separate, it’s not less-than, it’s not even all that different.
When people ask me what I do, I say that I’m a writer. The critics who I read and have read have the same kind of value to me as any other writers. And the criticism that is important to me exists on a plane with the other literary works.
The immediate occasion of your doing this is [that] here’s this movie or this book or this record that you need to talk about. That’s your job, but your motive is to organize and express the ideas, the feelings, the prejudices, the insights that you have in some kind of pleasing form. Your subject matter is also not that different from any other artist’s, in that it’s just life.
One of the reasons that I love to write about movies is that they’re about everything. So you have to write about everything.
You have to do a certain amount of sublimation or indirection, as any artist does. You have deep, intense feelings, longings, desires, dreams, that you can’t just express as such, that you have to make into something. One way that my friend emilynussbaum once put it to me is that criticism is a form of memoir writing. Something happened to you, you had an experience, and you need to construct a narrative of that experience.
There’s a particular kind of intimacy between critics and readers, which has to do with [my] giving you access to my mind. You are seeking out my company, or my presence, in some way. That’s very close to what happens with artists. The emotional tenor of it may be different, but it’s at least what we’re aspiring to do.
There’s something fascinatingly intimate about the relationship between critics, or writers in general, and their readers. You give readers a real sense that they know you, and at the same time, you’re a stranger. They don’t know you at all. There’s something odd about that.
There’s something odd, and there’s something odd also about the reciprocity of it, which is even odder. You do sometimes get a sense when you’re reading writers who are particularly powerful or insightful that it’s a two-way street.
This morning, I was talking to my wife about the movie The End of the Tour, which I think gets at that better than any movie that I’ve seen, because it is about exactly that. Here’s this guy Dave [David Foster Wallace], living in Illinois, and this other writer, who’s profiling him, David, who comes in, feeling like he knows him and wants to get more of that, and discovering exactly that gap. And that that intimacy is a fiction.
When it comes to taking out your critical bat and giving someone a whipping, is there a critical Mendoza line below which you’re not going to attack someone? Do you feel more comfortable attacking, let’s say, Steven Spielberg’s new movie than some unknown first-time filmmaker?
You have to be honest. What I’ve realized is there are different kinds of bad movies, for one thing. There’s a difference between a movie that is unsuccessful and a movie that is, I don’t want to use the word evil, but [laughs] — there are movies that seem to me dishonest or cynical or ugly. I was thinking about Entourage, one that I beat up on earlier this year.
That movie just made me mad. The review of that was not, ‘This doesn’t quite work,’ but ‘Fuck you!’
I obviously can’t say that in the paper, and it’s not an effective expression of criticism, but I’ve often felt that way about some children’s movies that struck me as particularly lazy or stupid or pandering. Unfortunately, a lot of the Dr. Seuss adaptations have gone that way. That’s not just a bad movie, that’s a crime in some way.
You say, early in the book, “It’s the job of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom.” Which reminded me in a way of Greil Marcus’s book Mystery Train, which is obsessed with the idea of freedom being, at times, a terrifying thing. The work of cultural criticism bleeds over into political or social criticism, where we’re asking, ‘What do we do with our freedom? Who are we? What do we want to make of ourselves?’
The kind of orientation in the world that I was trying to argue for, and I identify as a critic, was my picture of a democratic citizen. Acknowledging and even committed to your own experience, your own identity, your own specific situation in the world, but also partly open to the experience and the acknowledgement of other people.
And the idea of endless argumentation as being the fuel that drives the culture and criticism forward is an idea of how democracy works.
Greil Marcus, not coincidentally, is an enormous influence on me. What I like about his criticism, and what’s maybe echoed in that idea, is there are certain works of art that do change you, that move you from point A into the unknown. That knock you out of the path of your certainty or your assumptions.
Art, if you take seriously what the claims it makes about itself are, can have that capacity to overwhelm your categories, to put you in a place that you haven’t been. Then you have to figure out what that meant or what you’re going to do with that. But the process of recognizing that that has happened to you, and figuring out what to do with it, is my idea of what criticism is.
I wonder if that doesn’t also explain some of the hostility toward criticism. Part of it seems to me to be that you’re asking people to engage with something that’s about the joy and terror of real life, as opposed to Iron Man, which is a wonderful piece of entertainment, but which is unlikely to really touch that core inside you.
I think people are defended against exactly that kind of experience, and against difficulty. I’m not unsympathetic. Life is difficult. People work very hard and have all kinds of anxieties. The language of these arguments and the tone of them has to be carefully considered. You can’t just shame people into saying, ‘You want to go see Iron Man — no! You need to go see this, and have these difficult experiences and feelings, because they’ll make you a better person.’ That’s where the question of snobbery and cultural elitism comes in. What you hope is the openness to this kind of difficulty is something that people will have and hold onto and cultivate within themselves.
Criticism as a way of looking at the world is a way of orienting yourself toward the unfamiliar, the disturbing, the difficult.
All of those words make it sound so unpleasant! [Laughs.] Like you want to be sad and bored. In fact, to me, when I think of those things, it’s often thrilling and exciting. Obviously, it takes different forms for different people and everyone has limits. I can go pretty far with film in the direction of non-narrative or slow or anti-dramatic or long. I have a much lower threshold for theater or certainly for dance. But I guess I keep trying.
The desire for a certain kind of sublimity in the experience gets a bit lessened. We might not need as much great art because we have a lot of pretty good art.
And still, at least in my mind, there’s such a distinction between good and great art.
There is an enormous gap. You go to Cannes, people will start complaining four or five days in that they haven’t seen any masterpieces. You want to say, well, how many have you seen in your life? Or in the last month? Where do you think they come from, and where do you think they are? One of the things about the culture of the top-ten list and the must-see is this sort of rushing to judgment.
In the end, it is a matter of the test of time that allows these things to become clear. And it’s a little bit mysterious how that works.
Even from the perspective of today we can guess what might be part of some future canon of film or literature, but then sometimes some idea, like Manny Farber’s “white elephants,” or Francois Truffaut’s “cinema of quality,” permanently changes the culture’s idea of itself.
Going back to the 19th century, you look at French painting. We all know that the great French painting of the 19th century was the Impressionists. It was the line that goes Courbet, Manet, Monet, Cezanne. If you said that to anybody in 1875, they would have thought you were out of your mind!
If you ask anyone what is the canon of 19th century, two names that will be mentioned now are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Those are the two great poets of the American 19th century. Not only would people have disputed that judgment 150 years ago, they would not have recognized the names. They would not have had any idea who the hell you were talking about, much less that they were better than Whittier and Longfellow.
It feels appropriate to end this conversation by having you make some critical judgments. I wanted you to suggest some works of criticism that are the kind of things that, let’s say, our imaginary 16-year-old who’s discovering the world of art should have on their bookshelves.
For me, Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train is an amazing book. [It’s] an example of how you can really care about this stuff, and take your response to something, and your enthusiasm for it, all the way into an entire theory of American culture.
In a totally other key, Susan Sontag [is] one of the voices in my head. She’s one of the critics who I’m always contending with.
Pauline Kael is the critic who, if you write about popular culture, of any kind, you can’t avoid. Without even knowing it, you’re going to be echoing her, or dealing with things that she dealt with. Talk about the power of voice. She is great to read, and to graze around in, because you’ll come up against her trashing one of your favorite movies or celebrating a movie that you don’t like all that much.
I would add as a companion, read a lot of Pauline Kael and then also Renata Adler’s review of Pauline Kael in the New York Review of Books, “House Critic,” which is the most brutal demolition. One of the great hatchet jobs, line by line, sentence by sentence.
[Adler] collected all the movie reviews she wrote in her year at the Times. It’s called A Year in the Dark. As an account both between the lines and explicitly of a critic’s life, and the absurdities of the job, it’s really great.
Mary McCarthy’s essays on theater and the novel, some of which I collected in a book of her nonfiction that I edited called A Bolt from the Blue. She did not share the general enthusiasm for Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in the 1950s. I don’t go all the way with her, but her essay on the American realist playwrights [is] definitely worth visiting and thinking about.
Going back further, Oscar Wilde. You need to read Oscar Wilde. I don’t know why the whole curriculum of our education isn’t just reading Oscar Wilde.
I think in particular of “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist,” [which are] sharp and surprising, and counterintuitive, and also dialectical, in the way they start out in one place [and] end up in the opposite place, always keeping opposing ideas in tension.
In terms of contemporary critics, are there people whose voices you turn to?
We live in the age of emilynussbaum, a little bit the way Pauline Kael was in the 1970s.
She’s the critic who found the medium at the right moment, and her voice and her way of doing it.
Also in The New Yorker, Alex Ross. I don’t really know much about classical music, and it’s not one of my areas. Sometimes I get so much pleasure [out of] reading his account of certain pieces of music that it’s actually more than I’d probably get from the pieces themselves, or the performances. I get pretty bored when I go the symphony.
Wesley Morris too, who I’m very pleased is [now] my colleague at the New York Times. I feel like he has the balance, when he writes about music and TV, in particular, [that] of course this stuff is just entertainment and fun, but also notice[s] all of these deeper and more painful issues about racism or sexuality or violence. They’re all tucked in there, if you know where to look. He can draw them out without ruining the fun.
A lot of film critics are constant companions. Manohla Dargis at the paper. I literally talk to her on the phone probably every day. In our work, there’s a lot of back and forth going on under the surface. David Edelstein at New York, Stephanie Zacharek at the Village Voice. Jim Hoberman as a senior figure in film criticism. I don’t feel like our tastes or our sensibilities or our ways of writing are at all similar, but I always benefit from his perspective.
It’s a very big world, and I sometimes wish I knew more languages. Over the years, I’ve met film critics from Mexico and Germany and Romania and the Philippines, and have a sense that there’s a lot of really interesting criticism happening there, but almost none of it is immediately available to me. It’s hard to find, and more or less, in many cases, impossible to read.
What do YOU think about the role of criticism in film, and popular culture more generally? We would love to answer your questions. Please “mention” me in a response, below.
Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth was published on February 9, 2016, by Penguin Random House.
The book is available for purchase here.
