I wrote this email to the guys at slashfilm in response to Armond White’s visit to the SlashFilmCast.
Hi guys,
Ryan from Denton, TX here.
I’m in the middle of the episode with Armond White right now and I’ve listened to about as much as I care to. This is not to dismiss the episode or Armond White, I think you guys have done a stellar job interviewing him (I would have ripped his throat out MacGruber style) and to his credit, White has some interesting things to say. There’s just only so much pretentious bullshit I can take in one sitting. Maybe after I write this email I’ll finish the episode.
So why am I writing in? Basically I feel like Armond White is misunderstood as a film critic. Or maybe it’s that there is a disconnect between what Armond White thinks a film critic is and what you and I and most people feel a film critic is.
The best I can do to describe what Armond White does is to say that he is a practitioner of Academic Film Criticism (capital A, capital F, capital C. In fact, underline that A and that C). I have encountered many such people through articles and books as I have pursued a Master of Fine Arts in Film and I can tell you that, in my experience, academic film critics can be a bit hard to read, but in general have really interesting things to say. They look at movies from a perspective that is much different than an average moviegoer and is indeed different than many professional film critics.
Mostly, an academic film critic is someone who is looking at every film as a cultural artifact and/or a representation of a director’s view on the world. Academic film critics are also interested in notions of genre. How does a particular film function in terms of the genre it’s working in? What does that genre say about our culture. Some critics are interested in psychology. How is a film working within (or perhaps playing with) certain theories of psychology? I would also say that most academic critics look at films from many different points of view at once, even if the focus of what they’re writing has to do with a specific academic train of thought. For example a critic might be writing a piece on how post classical American films deal with the idea of pedophiles in suburban culture. A paper like that would be firmly rooted in theories of psychology, gender and sexuality. However, the author would most likely also pull in genre theory or auteur theory if they felt it germane to their paper or article.
This is the type of critic I feel that Armond White is (or is “trained” to be). When he talks (or writes) he refers to how films work in cultural terms. What is the film saying? How is the film working in relation to our cultural or artistic past? And there’s nothing wrong with this. I find academic film criticism really interesting and I’ve written of film in this manner quite a bit in grad school. Where White goes wrong is in two main ways.
First, he has so isolated himself by ideas of academia, and has placed so much importance on these ideas, that he has devalued the craft of making film. He places no value on whether a movie is good or bad (at least good or bad in conventional ways). No value on entertainment. No value on technical achievement. And apparently no value on dialogue, music or sound effects as he stated quite clearly that you don’t need sound to make a film.
To boil it down even further I would say that he has lost his ability to FEEL anything about movies. His concerns are with the head, not the heart, which is a damn shame because movies are able to tap into our emotions like no other art form.
White’s other main problem is that he has positioned himself as a Professional Film Critic (capital P capital F capital C). But professional film critics answer to casual readers and people who want to know which movies are good and which are crap, as opposed to answering to other academics. Professional film critics HAVE to feel. They have to use their heart.
White gets into trouble because people read his reviews looking for what is good and what is bad and instead get a cultural analysis of the film. And to be honest, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some of my favorite critics mix in the academic with their reviews. Guys like AO Scott and Roger Ebert are great at this. You guys even manage to mix in the academic sometimes. And this is ok, so long as it is part of a holistic view of the film, which is what people want from their professional film critics. They want to know if a movie is good or bad and why.
Overall, I think Armond White is a frustrated academic who has turned to professional criticism to pay the bills. I have done no research on this, but I would be willing to guess that his writing is not received well in the academic community (after listening to him on the SlashFilmCast and reading some of his reviews I can see where his ideas are contradictory and muddled—I mean, there’s probably a good reason why his Michael Jackson book is only for sale on a blog rather than Amazon or other major book sellers). And so, rather than continue to work as an academic, he has turned to professional film criticism and probably hopes that his unconventional (read: contrarian) views will amp up his readership and page views.
I could go on more about why, as an academic, White fails as a critic, but for now I think it is enough to say that he has no heart and thus he is an utter failure as a professional film critic as well.
Sorry for the long email, hope it doesn’t get lost in the insanity of ComiCon. I’d like to know what you guys think.
Best, Ryan
