What the hell do you want?

You don’t know what you want, do you? You readers who make up ‘the public’ are empty vessels, waiting to be filled with drips of opinion. In the hope of forming a credible world view from second-hand ideas.

In the past critics were rightly vilified for being journalists who commented on those who made things. As if the ability to write in newspaper prose ever blessed a person with an detailed knowledge of the world. Now we seem to find the critics as the only game in town. Forming opinion around work that many will never themselves experience.

There are some critics who have a deep and profound love for their special area of interest: the majority write across areas so broad that their commentary is as debased as a waste tip: full of everything but with no structure. I could talk about the fool who contributes to a broadsheet media section and every time a Fist Full of Dollars is on the T.V. says ‘It’s a remake of Yojimbo you know?’ Yes, of course we bloody well know! If it’s Miller’s Crossing the comment becomes ‘It’s a remake of a Fist Full of Dollars, which is a remake of Yojimbo?’Never realising that their shallowness of knowledge is masking the more interesting truth of a gangster story by Dashiel Hammett (Red Harvest) being used as source material by Kurosawa to make a samurai epic, being used by Leone to make a cowboy movie and in turn being used by Hill to make a gangster movie: all of which shows the power of the original tale of a modern day Odysseus, shilling and shooting his way to justice. It’s only worth showing your knowledge if by doing so you are illuminating some otherwise hidden truth. This is being critical as opposed to being a critic.

But we, the readers, lap this pap up. In the mistaken belief that uninformed criticism is informed criticality and doing so in the belief that we are acquiring something of value that makes our understanding of the world richer. Crap! We’re soaking up someone else’s words to the point they start to dribble from our mouths. Think for yourself you lazy bums.

What has sparked this outburst? It’s simple. I’ve been watching The Watchmen, I confess that I like it very much. I loved the original comic (I can’t make myself think of it as a ‘graphic novel’; graphic novels are pale, anaemic things about wistful love and bad haircuts. Watchmen is a comic. Colourful, brave and tackling issues just to big for the page). Snyder has done a damn fine job of working with dense material to make movie that understands its origins without being hamstrung by them. Loosing the Black Freighter was smart. The psychic alien casus belli was a bit overplayed (even in the eighties) as a deus machina. After 9/11 we all instinctively recognise the big war starting or war ending maguffin and so the film required a more subtle spin. Dr. Manhattan served well without unduly messing with the plot. We see an intelligent adaption of an original text. Robin Hood changes with each generation, Dracula is a mirror of our sexual fear and is different with each telling. Even The Bible is dressed with different clothes for different times. Is The Watchmen so very special?

What we saw in the critic’s hostile response to the movies is a clear confusion, on behalf of both the public and the critics, of opinion and criticality. They are not the same. Apparently being a critic and being opinionated are. Sometimes it is better, when exercising critical judgement, to be honest and just say ‘I have no opinion right now. Give me some time to think about it and I’ll get back to you.’ But the pressure of journalism driven by commerce erodes the ability to act in this way. Asked to have an opinion in time to go to press the critic produces one: as journalists they have to hit that deadline even if they have nothing to say.

So rather than look at the film and say:

‘A story that in the eighties showed a hero saving the world from nuclear annihilation in spite of itself, now asks us to judge those who would stage horrors in the great cities of the world in order to promote their vision of a better world.

After 9/11 we cannot view this film in the way we once could.’

We are asked to look at the film as a flawed attempt to make the comic with actors. Which rather ignores the age old cycle of stories being retold to speak about the times we live in.

You wonder whether Homer had the same problem, back in the day?