Maybe we should stop having opinions

A few weeks ago (because I am always on top of these things) the Guardian ran a sobering piece about the current state of cultural criticism in the face of respected outlets like Vanity Fair and the Chicago Tribune getting rid of their full-time film critics. Earlier this week, it was announced that Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone's long-time TV critic, whose thoughtful insights on The Sopranos were some of the best media writing of the 21st century, was out of a job. As with the Vanity Fair and Tribune layoffs, the vague, ominous-sounding excuse for Sepinwall's sacking was that new leadership was taking the publication in a "different direction," which almost certainly means relying on freelancers (if not just AI-generated content) and focusing on YouTube and TikTok.

I gave up semi-professional film writing last year. It was only supposed to be temporary, because I was dealing with a very sick cat and all the mess that came with that. Then the cat died, but even after I moved past the initial grieving period, I had no real desire to return to film reviews other than in a casual newsletter format. Mostly it was because I was pretty sure I had done all I could do with it. Though I had been hacking away at it for a few years, my only notable accomplishments were acceptance into the Critics Choice Association, and getting Vincent D'Onofrio to retweet an article I co-wrote about The Cell (and how weirdly attractive he is in it, despite playing a megalomaniacal serial killer).

But I lacked the skill and the wherewithal to network and make myself into a brand. The words "hustle" and "grind" are not in my vocabulary, and I don't say that in an arrogant "and that makes me better than other people" way. Shit, I wish I was good at all of that, I'd be much more successful. Also, while I'm a pretty good writer, I'm also a very slow writer, who struggles with opening and closing paragraphs (and sometimes everything in between). In an industry where you're expected, particularly during festival season (which is now a year-round concern), to have a turnaround time of just a couple of hours between watching a movie and putting out a review of it, I often felt like Rerun in the credits for What's Happening!!, running behind a pickup truck full of my fellow film writers.

And there was no way my old ass was going to "pivot" to making YouTube or TikTok content. No one wants that, least of all me.

I don't miss it very much. It helps that I barely made any money from it, and didn't lose any "clout," whatever the hell that means. Also, it just doesn't seem fun anymore, and when I say "it," I don't mean just film writing, I mean putting an opinion out there for other people to see and respond to in general. This isn't entirely referring to what happened last week, but obviously it's a big part of it, both in the cults of personality that form around some people's opinions, and the hypocrisy of deciding who gets to have an opinion and who doesn't.

The Guardian article, which suggested that cultural criticism must adapt or die, was greeted with dismay, but also an unsurprising (yet still depressing) amount of indifference and even glee. It's not actually good when an entire industry slowly dies on the vine, let alone when it's replaced by AI slop and passed off as a "new direction." It's a bad sign about the state of journalism when publications like Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, both of which have published some of the most important cultural, true crime, and political writing of the past 50 years, are focusing on TikTok. Yet, the general response to writers being out of a job is "lol learn to code." The answer to the question of whether there's still a need for cultural criticism is no, because people don't need to be told what to think, which isn't what critics do, but never mind.

Social media has made it so anyone can do their own take on cultural criticism, and that's, on the most basic level, a good thing. I don't believe that you have to have gone to school, or read the complete works of Pauline Kael, or understand what a best boy does to be "allowed" to write about why a certain movie does or doesn't work for you. I think some of that will make you a better writer, but the basic requirements should be a reasonable command of language and a passion for what you're writing about. There are some well-regarded film writers whose writing is the equivalent of fart noises for me, so clearly there's no singular "right" way to write about movies.

We're oversaturated with self-proclaimed "critics," who gives a shit. The beautiful thing is that there are so many that if you read a review you don't agree with, you can just keep scrolling until you find one that you like better. Rotten Tomatoes makes this real easy, you can even filter it so that you see only positive or negative reviews of something. And yet, despite having such a bounty of varied opinions at our fingertips, a veritable continental breakfast of options, we are angrier than we've ever been before at other people's opinions, and offended that they think they're allowed to have them.

Over at The White Pages, Garrett Bucks wrote that instead of finding community on social media, "we're all increasingly vulnerable to grifters, salesmen, and algorithms set permanently to 'maximum vitriol.'" Somebody somewhere decided that anger gets more attention, and so we all collectively picked up that particular ball of shit and ran with it. We're all very offended, all the time, whether it's about someone liking something we don't like, or worse, not liking something we do like.

Jude Doyle recently wrote about the transition of music journalism into fan service, noting "The proper role of a music journalist — or any journalist — is always adversarial, not in the sense of being needlessly mean or hostile, but in the sense that it is our job to publish the truth, whether or not our subjects like it. A journalist is not a fan; a journalist is not a friend; a journalist is someone who says what happened." He also noted that Taylor Swift fans have become so bitterly hostile against anyone who might speak out of turn about her that negative reviews of her albums have been posted without a writer's name attached to them, because no one wants that kind of heat over goddamn pop music.

But that's the thing, isn't it? It's all heat all the time. Even among so-called online "friends" we're all too eager to argue over a meaningless subject because we're bored, in a bad mood, or, more likely, feeling helpless about things out of our control and taking it out on an easy target. Posting an opinion or a criticism for strangers to read is a different kind of minefield. December will mark ten years since The Force Awakens came out, and there are still people who treat it as the most heinous crime against society since the Armenian Genocide. God help the person who claims it was "okay" (in truth, I've only watched it once and barely remember it), because that seems to trigger a flying monkey squad of people who will not only disagree with you, but rant that Kathleen Kennedy should have been publicly tarred and feathered, and folks, I don't think they're joking.

We came into social media to find community and exchange ideas, and it ended up mostly being a bunch of people screaming about one thing or another. If I see one more YouTube thumbnail of a bearded man with his eyes bugging and mouth agape like someone is stepping on his balls, I'm going to disconnect my internet. Too many people have made their mark in the 21st century specifically by being very angry all the time. It's their brand. It's currency. And like actual currency, we like to think there should be a hierarchy of who gets to have it and who doesn't. Some hapless freelancer is shouted down for giving a positive review to Superman, meanwhile Steve The Comic Connoisseur or whoever posts a video ranting that the new Superman is a beta soy cuck or some shit and gets four million views.

Even writers I like often have to resort these days to hyperbole, describing movies no one will remember three months from now as the worst thing they've ever seen. We're all collectively walking around with stroke-level blood pressure. It's exhausting. I'm exhausted. It is very unfortunate that cultural criticism, as we know it, is a dying art. But, honestly, we killed it.