The Job of a Critic

A.O. Scott’s recent piece on the yawning gap between movie critics and their audiences (uh-oh—better warn Matt Yglesias about a rise in inequality!) is a somewhat ungainly essay, a winding, tangent-laden affair that builds into an empty puff of nothingness. At its most basic, though, it’s a question: What is the job of the movie critic? Scott doesn’t have an answer, and there certainly isn’t one “correct” definition of what a critic is supposed to do. There may, however, be a few broad roles into which a critic might fit.

On one hand, many critics serve merely a consumer guide. They’ll tell you if a movie was good or bad and, if you’re lucky, a little bit about why. A few critics serve as sort of movie diarists, chronicling their own mental topography through their personal reactions to films. Others seek to interpret film using formal means, often with a larger desire to talk holistically about film, or at least narrative filmmaking, as a medium. Some critics write about film’s cultural relevance, what it says about politics, gender roles, and societal institutions—they’re armchair sociologists. And many critics, of course, tend to blend these elements together—maybe with a particular emphasis—but with a willingness to tackle film from a variety of perspectives.

The subquestion, I suppose, in Scott’s essay was about what, if any, responsibility a critic has to the general moviegoing public. This is a tough question for many critics, and for someone like me especially. Most critics would bristle at the thought of having to serve the masses. Pandering, they’d call it, and dismiss the whole idea. As a firm believer in the usefulness of markets in determinging value, however, I'm not as sure. Now, while I have no love for the inscrutable non-taste of the moviegoing masses, I find myself wondering if a critic doesn’t have some obligation to them. Newspapers and magazines are businesses, after all, and they have an obligation to sell papers. A critic without a public is hardly worth whatever investment—however tiny—his or her publication has made in his or her writing.

There are nuances and exceptions. Partisan political journals like The New Republic, The Nation, or National Review don’t make money and don’t expect to. In cases like those, the critic’s job, as with any other writer’s, is to contribute intelligently to the publication’s discourse on arts and culture. This, I suspect, is why publications like these helped birth some of our more thoughtful, respected film critics.

This is not to say either that a critic always has to have a public that likes him or agrees with him. Does anyone really know what the hell Armond White is talking about half the time? I mean, maybe I really did fail to see the virtue of Biker Boyz, but would it be too much to ask for him to, you know, explain … anything. Regardless, he’s a great example of critic who has found an audience by being incendiary, even unlikable. Not to mention batshit insane.

When Scott writes that he and other critics frequently wonder at box office receipts and ask “what is wrong with you people,” he’s not entirely kidding. I hear this sort of talk not infrequently; many critics do have a disdain for the ticket-buying public, and even for their emailing readership. And while I sympathize with this to an extent—it is frustrating when so many people continually ignore cinematic gems in favor of silver screen fool’s gold—I think it’s best to take this not as reason to condescend to the uneducated masses, but instead as a reason to try to pleasantly, helpfully, enthusiastically impart both passion and knowledge.

For, in the end, it seems to me that the best description of a film critic is as a public teacher, one whose job is to be interesting, helpful, available (answer those emails!) and knowledgeable. One hopes that film critics are also film enthusiasts who enjoy not just the entertainment part of film but the intellectual side as well. The job, then, is to spread that enthusiasm, helping readers both to understand film and to enjoy doing so.