Reviews
John August 29th, 2008
Years ago, shortly after Crash came out (the one about racism in L.A., not the one based on the bad pun on auto-eroticism), I wrote a piece about the film. It was a strongly felt criticism of the film as absurd, crass, predictable, and manipulative; and while I was pleased with my writing at the time I realized later that it had some serious failings. The most serious of the failings was that the review was as much about my reaction to the film as it was about the film itself.
Recently I fell into nearly the same trap in reviewing the graphic novel The Walking Dead on my library’s internal forum: I judged it predictable and overwrought, glossing over important ethical concerns while pretending to take them seriously. The criticisms engaged with the text more than in the piece on Crash , but I still judged the work against my expectations rather than against what we can determine about the author’s.
I don’t want to get into the ‘death of the author’ debate, though it’s certainly worth acknowledging that the author’s intentions aren’t always clear, even to him- or herself. What I do want is to give authors a fair shake.
I’m not a fan of the Pauline Kael approach to criticism, where the writer is as forceful a presence (and sometimes more forceful a presence) as the subject. But apparently I’ve been writing with that same approach without realizing it.
It’s retrospectively obvious that everything said says something not just about the subject but also about the person who says it. If you’ve read much of their work you’ve probably noticed Leonard Maltin’s aversion to violence, Roger Ebert’s occasional free pass to derivative storylines in films on uncommon subjects.
In both of those cases I accept the author’s personality as part of the review, but what I want for the things posted here is to determine as much as possible what the work is trying to do and to judge the work against those intentions. I’m puzzling over how those reviews are best written, not at all sure if or when I’ll find out.
This doesn’t even get into the /Watchmen/ experience: reading it in high school, being largely unaffected by it (except for Dr. Manhattan’s issue on Mars), remembering it as not terribly good. Then rereading it last month and finding that it was a completely different work from what I’d remembered: complex, intelligent, affecting, and immensely rewarding to close attention.