Our House

Andrew Dignan’s 5000 word essay, “The Wire and the Art of the Credit Sequence,” at The House Next Door is really rather incredible—and not just because it’s a patient, subtle piece of criticism. Of course, it certainly is that: The knowledgeable, passionate, insightful crew Matt Zoller Seitz has assembled at the site is dedicated to keeping film criticism focused on cinema’s essence: sound, image, editing, camera movement—all those things that distinguish the medium. Dignan’s essay on The Wire’s four short opening credit sequences relies almost entirely on these filmic elements, teasing out a season’s worth of meaning from each 90 second montage. It’s great, smart criticism, plain and simple.

But even more remarkable, I think, is that it’s a thoughtful 5000 word essay that obviously took significant time and research… at a blog. And this isn’t Instapundit or DailyKos or any of the A-list blog mainstream. It’s at a site run by a New York Press film critic that gets, according to the Sitemeter, an average of just over 1,000 hits a day. Now, that’s not traffic to scoff at, and it’s a good deal more than this site gets, but it’s hardly a massive reach, and, even if the site ran ads, it’s certainly not enough to generate significant revenue. So Dignan is writing a well-researched 5,000 word essay for an audience of a few thousand people, and he’s writing it for free.

Maybe this has happened before: There have, after all, been zines and self-printed small-run publications circulating for a while. But it can’t have been all that common, and what’s changed is the breadth of audience these cheaply-run publications can reach, meaning that niches that never could have formed before are now possible. This sort of thing—smart, time-intensive, passionate, long-form criticism—is the promise of one-click web publishing (the blogosphere, whatever you want to call it), and the rebuttal to all of those who scorn the web as no more than teen diaries, vulgar political ranting, and illiterate, time-wasting filler.