what is a critic? a miserable pile of opinions.

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It’s been a really long time since I've written about what could be charitably described as the Extremely Millennial Music that I built a lot of my internet presence off commenting on and analyzing. I was reflecting on this because I do semi-annually get comments on my old Bands You Weren't Supposed to Like series that I have to manually approve so they actually show up; surprisingly, there are people who wish to earnestly engage with my years-old glorified personal essays about washed-up emo bands amidst the avalanches of usual Wordpress-Spam-Word-Salad-Bot comments.

Now, I stand by at least 60 or 70 percent of what I wrote in the Bands You Weren't Supposed to Like series. I think the standout is probably the piece I wrote about The Used, which is very well-researched and some of my absolute best work. I think my Fall Out Boy piece is also very strong, if a bit messy and overwrought. The Paramore piece is strong, too. The Bring Me the Horizon piece quite frankly sucks.

But enough navel-gazing! What I wanted to focus on was specifically my piece on My Chemical Romance, which is, unsurprisingly, the piece that still generates the most attention, traffic, and even a few comments. There are a few comments accusing the piece of being poorly researched, but when I asked one of these commenters which facts are poorly researched their only real reply was that I was stating certain things as facts when they are actually just my opinions. This might be because of my quote-unquote "academic" background in writing essays, but for what it's worth, it's usually considered bad form to preface your opinions with "in my opinion" or "I think." It also weakens your credibility and confidence as a critic to constantly hedge your statements like that, and personally, I've always felt like if I'm writing the damn thing it should be assumed that everything is just "my opinion." Regardless, there are a few things that I should correct the record about from the My Chem essay. I think I will probably leave the piece as it is for historical purposes, but primarily, I have two major differences in opinion.

The first is that I've changed my mind about "Famous Last Words," and I actually think it's good now. No longer do I think the song erodes the power of that hard-as-nails Iron Maiden riff, and I believe that the chorus really bolsters the power and message of the record as a whole. A few months ago, Deanna and I were listening to The Black Parade while preparing her classroom for the next month of works and lessons (my wife does themed months for the kids in her Montessori classroom, which is very cute and a lot of unpaid work on her part). It might have been the distance I had from when I wrote the original essay, a period during which I listened to their entire discography multiple times ad nauseam until I started to almost hate it, but the record as a whole felt completely refreshed and, in particular, "Famous Last Words" took on a new resonance, possibly as a result of my existential OCD diagnosis. Its power at the end of the record was undeniable and I actually felt my eyes getting a little misty, a physical reaction that music rarely provokes within me anymore. It's pretty great, okay?

The second, and much more embarrassing, correction is that Danger Days is good actually. Like, to the point where I actually feel kind of bad about how much I hated it in the original essay. (I very rarely feel bad about being a hater, although I have become much less public about my haterade consumption over the last two or so years.) I still don't really think it lies in the sass lineage, but I am a notorious Sass Gatekeeper, so best not to take me too seriously there. On the subject of the album itself, I'm not really sure what the turning point for me was. I've always loved old-school glam rock a la T. Rex and Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs-era Bowie and particularly The Stooges' Raw Power, which are all pretty major touchstones for the record. Maybe it's me finally embracing my vestigial fondness for hair metal, which left a few of its own particular fingerprints on the album ("Sing" and "The Kids from Yesterday" are nothing if not power ballads!). But whatever it is, I've been finding myself throwing it on more and more lately. It's definitely not the concept aspect, which is even more of an inscrutable mess than Three Cheers, nor is it just some desperation for more My Chem material because I'd lived without this album in regular rotation for the last 15 years just fine. I guess sometimes things just click.

That actually leads me to an interesting point, which is that often things that annoy me the most, or that I dislike the loudest, usually only evoke such a strong reaction because I feel like there is something there that I should like, but it just isn't connecting with me. This is something I talk about sometimes with David Anthony, usually in the context of music. "This album is definitely good," I'll say, "but I think I'm listening to it wrong." In other words, lack of enjoyment on my end is not an inherent fault of the media being consumed. I think this is something that's often lost in a lot of the recent discourse about "critics being out of touch." And to be clear, I definitely do not wish to imply that when critics, well, critique something, that means that they just Don't Get It, Man. The whole point of any kind of art criticism is to analyze why this certain piece of art does or does not connect with you. Sometimes there are cases of User Error, like with Danger Days, where I need to go back to recalibrate and fine-tune my critical instincts. As you can tell from my puzzlement, I'm still in that process with this particular album. (I might write an essay about it sometime!) But other times, the work simply fails for me, and there's no amount of re-orienting my perspective that can rescue it. This is the case for me with a lot of things that are widely beloved-- for example, I haven't been able to make it through more than 40 minutes of any movie in the original Lord of the Rings trilogy since I saw them in theaters-- and it doesn't make me any more wrong than it makes any given throng of fans right.

But it does raise questions about the reasons that we come to art/media/cultural critique in the first place. Some people come to it to have their biases confirmed and/or further refine their constructed sense of identity. Whether that's the comfort of knowing that 92% of Tomato-certified critics agreed that Oppenheimer was a good experience or the blood pressure spike and dopamine rush you crave from looking down your nose on the SJW cultural marxists who dared to give The Last Jedi a better-than-wretched review, there's always an element of vindication when something allows you to strengthen your connection to your self-identified tribe. I think this is one of, if not the predominant responses to media critique in the 2020s. It's why a lot of music critics are terrified to hate things because there's nothing an online community loves more than directing their collective anger toward a public-facing figure. Remember when K-pop fans tried to get Tom Breihan fired from Stereogum? The actual offending article did not disparage BTS in any way (and I believe that Breihan was not even responsible for BTS being in the article's headline), but it generated such a virulent response that he still had random haters in his replies for months. That's how we get shit like Rolling Stone's Twitter coverage of the 2022 Grammys.

The other primary reason I think a lot of people come to criticism is, basically, for a product review. "Is this thing worth my time and/or money?" From a certain perspective, this makes the most sense, particularly in an era where we are absolutely drowning in entertainment options. Tastemakers often provide the service of helping those desperate to find time to fulfill their interests-- in between getting crushed by seemingly unending work hours-- to decide how to spend that precious time. On the other hand, thinking of something as deeply human as a movie or album getting the same level of thoughtful consideration as, I don't know, a fucken Ridge Wallet or some shit is deeply deeply depressing.

This idea of critique-as-product-review is most apparent in video game reviews. Because the medium of games has only relatively recently been thought of as "art" rather than "commodity," there is still a lot of game journalism that focuses on how the game works as, like, quality software, and not as a curated experience in and of itself. (I also firmly believe that this is why gamers have such low standards for the quality of storytelling and narrative, but that's a rant for another day.) Ali from Zero Brightness has a very good Patreon-exclusive episode about the history of video game journalism that goes into some degree of depth about this topic.

I think this fundamental ideological difference is one of the primary reasons for the distrust many audiences seem to have for "the critics." I can't count how many times we've had this same fucking conversation about trusting the Audience Tomatometer over the Critics Tomatometer, and how critics are so out of touch with what people want, and how critics are just trying to virtue signal their own progressive politics (this is, frankly, a laughable assertion), and how anyone can nitpick anything to death if they really want to and no one cares about symbolism blah blah blah. It's an exercise in anti-intellectualism at worst and pseudo-intellectualism at best.

And the kicker is that really no one should trust the fucking Tomatometer at all. Have you seen some of the dipshits who get certified as RT critics? It's not like there's a test you need to pass or anything. You just need to write for an outlet that gets a certain number of hits per month. People will act like "the critics" are this hypothetical blob of ivory tower assholes and then you read the reviews on a Rotten Tomatoes page and you'll see A. people who can barely string a goddamn sentence together, let alone went to film school, and B. reviews that are functionally book reports and/or are so poorly constructed that you could hardly tell why this qualifies as a "fresh" or "rotten" review were it not for the arbitrary numerical value they assigned to the movie in question.

To be clear, I am absolutely not implying you need to have a college degree to have an opinion on a movie. That's absurd. But the idea of aggregating reviews in this fashion is also absurd and pretty much always has been. I'm pretty sure Wet Hot American Summer has a score of 30% or thereabouts, and its First Day of Camp Netflix revival show has an 85%. Does that mean that First Day of Camp is better than the original movie? No, it means that 30% of critics were on the wavelength of Wet Hot American Summer at the time of its release and because of the influence it had on the type of people who grew up to become culture critics, a lot more people had "gotten it" by the time the revival came out.

But that's without even taking into account a variety of factors, like the fuzziness of "fresh" vs. "rotten" and the shifting demographics and goals of film criticism. On the one hand, you had (and of course, in many cases, still have) people like Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Elvis Mitchell, and Mark Kermode, who did have an academic interest in film as art and could intelligently deconstruct what movies were trying to say and how well they said it, while simultaneously being able to take a step back and see how well the film functions as populist entertainment. Granted, they may be wrong quite a lot of the time (Ebert in particular is famously very wrong on a wide variety of movies), but they still had enough respect for the average filmgoer to assign them some level of media literacy and critical thinking skills, and therefore, capable of forming their own opinion and not taking whatever they said as gospel. I really don't wish to lionize these critics too much, because they've had some batshit awful takes (again, especially Roger "games aren't art and also Freddy Got Fingered is bad" Ebert, as much as I genuinely loved and admired the man's writing and manic love for film). But dammit, what mattered is that they were genuinely passionate about film, and that plus their knack for intelligent and readable critique is what made them so formative and important. On the other hand, you've got arrogant assholes like Rex Reed, who hates everything and hates you for liking anything, or Armond White, who fashions himself the "popular contrarian" and is, I suspect, a long-running piece of performance art.

What people tend to forget is usually the lower rung of film critics, i.e. the people who were assigned to watch and review movies for the local paper or whatever and that's how you get the "two thumbs up!" blurbs on the back of movies like Free Willy 2. The narrative is usually that these people who are not necessarily "professional film-watchers" are more likely to have their finger on the pulse of what the average filmgoer wants/will like, but I don't really buy this idea since I'm pretty sure the average filmgoer doesn't have very much interest in the cinematic equivalent of shovelware-- the type of stuff that usually ends up in the Dollar Store's "Weekly Wow!" section. It's far more likely that whoever wrote the positive review for Norm of the North or whatever probably just didn't give a shit what was happening on screen and gave it a made-up score out of 5 based on its three-sentence summary. This isn’t even getting into the insanely patronizing implication that the “average filmgoer” is incapable of understanding artsy and sophisticated movies. (Patently untrue.) In any event, clock-punching reviews like this have effectively disappeared entirely in favor of genuine enthusiasts, which has had... mixed results.

The Internet, of course, radically democratized the review process for both better and worse. A lot of younger movie enthusiasts are more familiar with YouTubers like Chris Stuckmann or Jeremy Jahns than any published film critic. There's nothing inherently negative about this, and I do think the YouTube set has produced a lot of people with smart, interesting ideas about film, like Lindsay Ellis and (flawed they may be) the Red Letter Media guys. I picked these two as examples because their approaches to critical discourse are radically different but both are compelling and insightful. Unfortunately, with one hand the Nostalgia Critic giveth, and with the other he taketh away, as the flipside of intelligent film analysis on YouTube is absolute dreck like the Critical Drinker. Or manosphere-reaction guys.

Either way, YouTube reviews don't count towards the Tomatometer for shit as far as I know, so print reviews still "matter" in that regard. And in the earlier days of the Internet, it was the print reviews that I, personally, found most revolutionary. I feel like I might sound sort of like an elitist gatekeeper which is the exact opposite of how I actually feel, and would be pretty laughably hypocritical as one of my largest gripes with professional criticism, particularly music journalism, has been its gatekeeping and elitist tendencies. I've written reams of invective about the classism and condescension of music criticism, particularly in the blog rock era, and the folly of not applying that logic to other mediums is readily apparent.

The ability that the Internet gave people to experiment with critical thinking, and find their critical voice, is unparalleled and I firmly believe that my taste was shaped as much by the voices of "ordinary filmgoers" like Mutant Reviewers from Hell or even the AV Club comments section as it was by professional critics. One of the best, most insightful, and most emotionally moving pieces of film criticism I've ever read was on the Letterboxd page for a Gamera movie from the 90s. The Internet has made everything more accessible and if I'm gonna bitch about the bad I very much have to take the good as well. Because for as much as any random asshole with a domain name can spew their awful opinions and count towards a movie's immaterial online metrics, the thing that remains the same is that people need to do the work to find critics and communities that are on their wavelength, who speak to their understanding of film and who they reliably get great recommendations from.

I follow people like Katie Rife, AA Dowd, or the Film School Rejects crew because I like the way they think about movies, even when I disagree with them (and I often disagree with them strongly!) It's the same reason I follow music critics like Ian Cohen and Craig Jenkins and Nina Corcoran, or why I'll read anything Nathan Rabin does, or why I'm buying the book Emily Van Der Werff and Zack Handlen wrote about The X-Files, or why I'll always read a video game review with a byline from Zoey Handley. The act of actually thinking and talking about music and movies and TV shows and games and books should never come second to glancing at a fucking Metacritic average to see if you should give something a chance.

But what do I know? It's just my opinion. And I'm a critic, so who gives a shit?

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-xoxo, Ellie