Telling it like it is
The word critic doesn’t put a good taste in one’s mouth. It sounds as if somebody’s spitting.
And when a critic is written into a script in film or television, he (always a he) tends to be petty, harsh and cruel.
Think of when Paul Lynde played a restaurant critic on a “Carol Burnett Show” skit. He announced his arrival with, “I decided to give your dump another chance.” It got nastier.
Despite that enduring and entertaining caricature, critics are people, too — at least, a lot of them are, says A.O. Scott in his rousing and erudite “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.”
Maybe the only way to sell a mass-market book about criticism is to make it sound like self-help. Yet Scott’s tour of a critic’s collision with art and aesthetics — high, low, pop and urbane — is a better fit with the book’s subtitle. Yes, he’s talking about almost everything.
Scott writes at a challenging time for professional critics, who are vanishing like the rhinoceros, with a lot less protection or sympathy. As a film critic for the New York Times, Scott knows that the most profitable movies in the marketplace tend to be critic-proof action films or tent-pole family experiences. If that weren’t discouraging enough, the world of the critic is marginalized by armies of fans, obstinate consumers who have been encouraged by the Internet to share their opinions with the world. Marketing data show that these nonprofessional “reviews” are as sought after by readers as the judgments of working critics. So much for expertise and ex- perience.
Is this the public’s revenge? Only if indifference can be vengeful.
Scott gives his book a hybrid structure that helps mute a tone that can sound like an earnest commencement speech. In between sections of dialogue, modeled on Oscar Wilde’s clever debates on the missions and methods of art, Scott argues for the position of critic as guide, informed reader and judge.
“We all get a little sensitive when the people whose work we write about — or for that matter our readers — find fault with what we do. That’s only human. What I’m more interested in here is the general tendency — I would really say the universal capacity of our species — to find fault. And also to bestow praise. To judge. That’s the bedrock of criticism. How do we know, or think we know, what’s good or bad, what’s worth attacking or defending or telling our friends about?”
And Scott has a lot to tell his readers about in his soup-to-nuts (“The Avengers” to “Ratatouille”) guide to the role of the critic and to the disappearing habitat in which that critic works. In between his commercial movie sandwich is his encounter with the performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose show at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 consisted of facing visitors, one by one, across a table. Masses of them were moved, as was Scott. Many critics (myself included) shrugged at a naked empress.
Scott also revisits the scorn of Times critic Frank Nugent in 1938 for the comedy “Bringing Up Baby.” Nugent called Katharine Hepburn’s performance “breathless, senseless and terribly, terribly fatiguing.” (“Breathless” must have been negative in those days.) Time and the marketplace would make Nugent look like a stuffed shirt, which ill befits critics then and now.
“It’s the job of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom,” Scott retorts in one of his dialogues. “That everyone is a critic means, or should mean, that we are each of us capable of thinking against our own prejudices, of balancing skepticism with open-mindedness, of sharpening our dulled and glutted senses and battling the intellectual inertia that surrounds us. We need to put our remarkable minds to use and to pay our own experience the honor of taking it seriously.”
Every man or woman a critic? If much of this sounds as if you’ve heard it many, many times at someone’s graduation, you’re right. Yet before anyone gives a thumbs-down in the style of critic Roger Ebert to the notion that life might be improved by taking the advice of a movie critic, bear in mind that Scott’s arguments are no less valid for being well worn.
Scott’s advice won’t change the world, but it may inspire a motivated reader or two. His book will no doubt be on film school syllabi. For would-be future critics, he even offers a list of words to avoid — the list is far too short, and leaves out “riveting” — and the footnotes could keep any reader busy for months. Keep the author’s motivational fervor in check, and this self-help book is likely to work better than most diets.