Watching movies for twenty years - not to mention being a cinema and media studies academic for almost a decade now - has impacted my life in several ways. Most of these symptoms have been beneficial to me (socially, my gratuitous popular culture references don't always fly). My love of movies resulted in a life in academia that requires historical research and critical analysis of film form, ideology, and the industry. This, when I look back to the early reviews I wrote for my high school newspaper The Pirate, has made my writing on the arts more refined and thoughtful. I am careful to avoid sweeping generalizations or hyperbolic value judgments that plagued my early material. More importantly, these critical thinking and research skills extend beyond film. This is not intended to be a rallying cry for a humanities education; I fundamentally feel, as both a product of America's higher educational system and as an occasional instructor, that these skills have made me a more informed citizen, a more thoughtful and empathetic person, and I feel like I've made better life decisions - that better fit my lifestyle and personality at least - than I would have if I had stopped at high school or even with a Bachelor's Degree.
My education, my background in print journalism, and my political interests have also ingrained in me what can be best described as an idealistic ethical code that does not necessarily translate to everyday, pragmatic use. This has been particularly evident to me given the current context for film criticism, which is going through digital growing pains as print journalists lose their established positions and become overshadowed by online critics who are normally paid little (or, if you're writing for the new Huffington Post) nothing at all. While I've written at length about this in my post at Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, my views have evolved somewhat over the past months (the post at Mabuse was written after my experiences at last year's San Diego Comic-Con as a first time member of the press junket pool and was posted a few months after the final draft was completed, just to give a sense of the time line and how my views on this have shifted a bit over time).
A noteworthy moment in the evolution of my position occurred last week. My Twitter feed, which flows with the digital thoughts of media studies academics, practitioners, and movie bloggers and critics, had a few tweets about a free screening of an independent film, Bellflower (2011), playing at one of the neighborhood's cinephile friendly theaters: The New Beverly. One tweet, from blogger and critic Jen Yamato - who was hosting the screening - initially gave me pause. She announced the free screening and suggested to her followers that those wishing to be added to the list either contact her or the distributor's public relations department if they wished to attend. The tweet, which mentioned Yamato and studio PR in the same breath, made me a bit uncomfortable and I, without being specific (I was reluctant to mention Jen's name, the name of the film, or the distributor because I felt like I wasn't familiar enough with the situation due both to personal ignorance and a lack of transparency), mused publically if this was a healthy step for online film criticism and blogging to take. Initially, I was more than a little pessimistic.
Almost immediately, two of mutual friends and colleagues of Yamato and myself, Brian Prisco and William Goss, jumped to the defense of both her and the concept of hosting a free screening for an indie film.* Prisco felt that it was a good film and, being an independent film, was worthy of some extra love (how else would people be aware of it, otherwise, in a blockbuster saturated marketplace?). He also made the argument that hosting a screening is no different from giving a friend a DVD to borrow and saying "Watch this, it's good." My argument was film critics and bloggers are already boosters for the industry and that any press, regardless of it being negative or positive (my negative reviews have sometimes encouraged even more people to see a film than my positive reviews), is beneficial and that a positive review should be sufficient to prop an indie film up. I asked the usual questions. Why should we get involved with studio PR teams? Where can we draw the line between blogger/critic and marketer? After all, I replied, Pauline Kael was able to save Robert Altman's Nashville (1975) from the cutting room purely with the power of the written word.
While I posed the question to some friends via a Facebook thread, I realized my historical comparison, while being correct in theory, did not stand on completely solid ground. Kael was writing during a boom in printed film criticism; she American criticism's founding mother and wrote for The New Yorker, Yamato is a blogger and a critic, not quite in the same social position of power. That's not a slight on her abilities or her personality - her pieces are thoughtful and I have not had the pleasure of meeting her - and I would note that my own position on the spectrum of critical influence is far below both Kael and Yamato. We simply do not live in a world where the vast majority of critical influence in consolidated under a few writers. Writing about film - or anything for that matter - has become decentralized and democratized thanks to the internet. This is primarily a good thing. We now have access to a wider range of opinions than ever before. However, given that large number of opinions, the social power of the individual critic has been diluted and spread across websites, not necessarily bestowed upon writers. Essentially, there is more diversity and there are more writers which means that readers have a greater range of publications to choose from.
This realization forced me to ask myself a fundamental question: If Pauline Kael had written a positive review of Nashville today (that's presuming that Nashville would be made today!), would it have saved the film from studio interference? Or would Kael have needed to promote the film via a hosted, complementary, screening? My train of thought took me to this final destination. In order to place the potent spotlight of consumer attention onto a film that may otherwise be lost in the shuffle, you need to be a critic that has a powerful following and in order to gain that following, especially in the context of this digital democracy, one just might have to engage in self-promotion such as hosting a free screening. In other words, perhaps it just is not pragmatically feasible to take a symbiotic relationship with studio PR off the table.
As I contemplated this conundrum, the Facebook thread lit up a bit. What I found was a polarized reaction: most of my friends in academia felt that hosting a free screening crossed an ethical line while my friends in blogging and criticism shared the views of Goss and Prisco (I wonder if this philosophical difference is another manifestation of the divide between film criticism and academia that David Bordwell examined a few months back). Some academics argued that hosting the screening aligned the writer with studio public relations and potentially put them in a compromised position - particularly if the host is paid - while others simply suggested full transparency about the terms of the agreement was desired.
My standpoint has traditionally been that a blogger, a critic, or a website (depending on who has editorial control) is entitled to their own guiding theory here and that my only expectation as a reader and colleague is transparency. That said, my ideal wish is that Yamato would have spelt out her agreement publically in her published announcement instead of saying I should have asked in the first place. Is it really the reader's responsibility to ask for transparency? I don't mean for that to be a facetious question and I am generally curious about what your responses will be. I've always assumed it was expected. Still, and I publically apologized for what may have seemed as a passive-aggressive way of dealing with the situation, I give her a lot of credit as a journalist. First, she said she would not be reviewing the film, avoiding any conflict of interest. Moreover, when she was asked, she disclosed the context of the screening publically (via Twitter): she was asked to host by the public relations team and I assume, given the circumstances, that she was unpaid. Moreover, she - like Prisco and Goss- were tactful in continuing a what, for me at least, is a fundamental discussion that we should be having about the journalistic ethics in the film blogging/criticism sphere.
One of the positions that came out of the Facebook extension of this discussion was once again from Goss. He agreed with the concept of transparency but also noted that I my theory and method seemed to assume the worst of the online film blogging and criticism community. While I admit that my limited interactions in the press pool have been largely pleasant and I have not personally observed any ethically questionable shenanigans, I have also had the opportunity to hear lectures and to interview studio marketing heads in a confidential environment through my work at the University of California-Los Angeles. One quote from one of the heads has always stuck with me: "The best marketing decision the studio ever made was inviting the online community onto the backlot." That quote has always haunted me as an academic and as a film critic and blogger that came out of journalism. I'm not sure how much truth there is to it and perhaps the head in question was merely supplying a classroom of students with a controversial money quote, but I don't want the paradise we have inherited to fall apart.
In the end, after talking with members of the community (especially Goss), I don't think widespread corruption has gripped my colleagues in online film criticism and blogging. My interest in the subject has been inspired not so much by socially awkward policing (I'd hate to think that my calls for transparency are being equated with Donald Trump's insistence on seeing Barack Obama's birth certificate) and more with an eye to the future. Goss insisted that the corruption of objectivity does not exist and I pessimistically added "Yet." I don't think the current community of film bloggers and critics has it in them to be fall into this trap. They're smart, passionate, and gifted writers and thinkers, many of whom came out of humanities and journalism backgrounds, so they're undoubtedly aware of ethics and the journalist's ideal position as an objective observer. My worry is about the future. It's not that I think every blogger or critic - focused on film or not - needs the benefit of a humanities education, be it a B.A. or a Ph.D, but they need some sort of education (be it provided by an internship at a newspaper, a book on the subject of journalism, or by reading the material of other writers).
That said, with the cost of tuition rising faster than household incomes, college is quickly becoming a luxury that is not economically feasible for many members of the lower and middle-classes (to bring us full-circle). Moreover, with print suffering in sales and journalism jobs becoming harder and harder to come by, internships have also become a treasured gift. My rather depressing prediction is that the bulk of tomorrow's journalists are going to learn the trade by example, as readers of the work we produce. For me, as a blogger, critic, and educator, this means that we should not treat the journalistic concepts of objectivity, transparency, and ethics as dirty words that inspire self-defensive or calls of smugness on behalf of those requesting it. My ideal hope is that, as online journalism and criticism picks up steam, we can pick up where print journalism left off and begin offering our own internships and educational programs (perhaps even the Online Film Critics Society can aid in this objective). Essentially, let's be transparent about transparency and lead our future colleagues by example. Why do I care about the ethics of film criticism? Well, to indulge one of the lesser symptoms of my cinephilia, "The future, Mr. Gittes. The future."
*Letter of Correction: William Goss, after reading this article, tweeted me: "In the interests of accuracy, I didn't say Bellflower was a good film; I hadn't seen it by that point. Even now, I'm mixed." I may have conflated Brian Prisco's tweets with Goss's unintentionally (In retrospect, I do seem to recall that the enjoyment angle was more of Prisco's and less Goss's). Given that my TweetDeck timeline only goes back so far, I was having trouble getting precise tweets as comments for the article. One of the problems of using Twitter as a discussion forum is the instability of the archival mechanisms (this occurred at a few academic conferences I've tweeted at as well). My apologies for any confusion.
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