View imageThe Pale Man knows how to do The Contrarian. He sits motionless until an external stimulus prompts him into motion.
There's a brand new dance
That's easy to do
It's called the Contrarian
And it's all about you!
Strike a hipster pose
And admire your reflection
Just be sure you're facing
In an opposite direction!
(apologies to Rufus Thomas)
Is Armond White too easy a target? Does any other movie critic have a blog devoted to "parsing the confounding film criticism" he produces? (See the hilariously titled Armond Dangerous.)
At the risk of sounding contrarian, I want to suggest that White (published on the web via the weekly New York Press) is by no means the worst movie reviewer in the United States. He just pretends to be the baddest.
The all-too-common White review is a reactionary tirade that owes a lot to the angry shtick of aging hipster comedians like Dennis Leary and Dennis Miller back in the 1990s ("hipster" being White's favorite term of disapprobation). White can also be funny, but I wish he thought so, too -- and that his humor arose from his observations about movies rather than his hysterical indignation.
In this sense, White doesn't necessarily practice film criticism, although what he writes is almost always based on his real or imagined characterization of what other critics have already written. The movie itself sometimes gets lost in White's internal monologue as he rages against some chimerical critical consensus.
In the Bizarro World, Armond White is Jeffrey Lyons. He's the negative campaigner's blurbmeister. Just substitute disses for superlatives and you'll find a similar (anti-)promotional blurb mentality at work. This is the most elementary form of so-called "criticism" -- purely heirarchical rather than analytical or exploratory. It's not even "This is why I prefer this to that"; it's just "This is better than that because I choose to say so."
(Speaking of rankings and hierarchies -- check out Charles Taylor's ratings at the National Society of Film Critics web site, which have a pronounced tendency to go for one extreme or the other. On a scale of 0-100, Taylor goes for both. Zeroes include: "The Good German," "Slither," "Junebug" and a DVD release of "The Sound of Music." 100s include: "The Painted Veil," "Pan's Labyrinth," "Days of Glory," "Shut Up and Sing," "The Departed" and "Marie Antoinette. " I'm not sure what's going on here -- if he's satirizing the whole idea of ranking movies on any kind of of qualitative/numerical scale, or whether he really believes these movies are worthless or ideal (respectively), or whether these numbers just reflect his internal political ploys to throw off the average NSFC ratings for movies he likes or doesn't like.)
Here's a dandy deceptive excerpt from White's "Dreamgirls" review: "Critics generally accept that 'Dreamgirls' recreates the story of Detroit’s black-owned Motown Records and how entrepreneur Berry Gordy chose Diana Ross to be the leader of The Supremes, prompting the demotion of the late Florence Ballard. But this fable is historically inaccurate, the plot an inane excuse for melodramatic hysteria."
That second sentence may an accurate observation (and would make a terrific blurb), but there's a heap of dishonesty behind his disingenuously vague, but carefully worded, opening phrase: "Critics generally accept that 'Dreamgirls' recreates the story..." Who are these ignorant critics, and how have they expressed their "general acceptance"? An example would seem appropriate here. Do these same critics generally accept that "Bye Bye Birdie" "recreates" the story of Elvis Presley? Is there a soul who believes this 1981 Broadway musical is the real story of Diana Ross and the Supremes? How dumb does White think these critics -- and his New York Press readers -- are? Pretty darned dumb, evidently.
(For a smart and funny examination of "Dreamgirls" and what it does with/to the life of Florence Ballard, see Steven Boone's wittily (and meaningfully) anti-anti-contrarian piece at The House Next Door, which includes a passing reference to The Contrarian One:
As embarrassed as some white critics (and one White critic) have been about "Dreamgirls"’ lumpy mix of flamboyant negritude with bland, cruise ship arrangements of faux Motown pop, black audiences have mostly returned the love. Here, the music’s quality matters less than its thematic resonance; the characters’ thinness and broadness are less important than their vibrancy and familiarity. "Dreamgirls" is a white moviemaker’s sorta wrongheaded but sincerely besotted Afro fantasia, destined to go in the Ebony subscriber’s collection alongside "Carmen Jones," "Wattstax," "Sparkle," "The Color Purple" and "Coming to America." Love is what keeps this parade float of a movie aloft -- until a failure of nerve and insight built into the Broadway original sends it floating far away from emotional reality on the helium of hope....See, Boone actually has something to say. About the movie. Contrast that with the beginning of White's second paragraph: "All this is worth pointing out in order to understand that the hype surrounding the gaudy movie version of 'Dreamgirls' is unacceptable." This is the language of an unreformed Soviet bureaucrat, not a film critic.)
I wonder what White would write about if he didn't first have other critics' opinions to react against. What if he had to critique a movie on its own merits, all by himself, without reading other critics' opinions (or otherwise discerning their views) before he published -- like, say, most daily newspaper critics in markets outside New York? It would be a fascinating experiment ("Please put Mr. White in an isolation chamber until he has finished his review...").
It takes time and effort to craft a counter-argument rather than simply fall back on an autonomic contrarian/reactionary reflex. White typically not only strikes the predictable stimulus-response pose, he turns it into a full-on tantrum. His auto-contrarian approach is indicative of the new PC mentality that has become a massively popular star-making tactic for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, A-- C------ and Bill O'Reilly. Overheated rhetoric is mustered to shoot down Straw Men, discourage and distract attention from issues of substance, and (most important) focus the spotlight on The Teller of Truths. (He's Lookin' Out for YOU!)
But in this superficial form of discourse, there's no need for argument; there's no argument at all. As Michael Palin explains in the Monty Python "Argument Clinic" sketch: "Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes."
It's easy to spot the glaring Armond White Seal of Disapproval (aka the Mr. Yuck Sentence: Warning! Unacceptable!) that's slapped onto/into virtually every anti-whatever review. It usually takes the form of an ad hominem insult aimed at some vaguely identified third party that White insists represents the status quo:
"Borat": "Avoid the trap of calling Borat polarizing; that’s a code-word of media-hipsters who long for social divisiveness."
"Children of Men": "Alfonso Cuarón is not a virtuoso, although his "Children of Men" style might convince the politically obtuse that a decorative illustration of their social alarm is a visionary achievement."
From the intro to his "Better-Than List" for 2006: "DON'T BE FOOLED by the '10 Best Films' lists from critics who never even saw the year's most interesting films. They're merely corroborating the promotional campaigns of the most highly publicized movies and failing to seek out the best. This year more than ever, it's necessary to separate genuine achievement from pure hype, thus my alternative: 'The Better-Than List.'"
Well, I don't know who those nameless critics are trying to "fool," or what they're trying to fool us into (watching movies, maybe?), but it would be hard to disagree that it's a good idea to separate genuine achievement from pure hype. (Perhaps especially when it comes to Advertisements For Oneself.) How I wish I could discern a little tongue-in-cheek behind White's cheekiness. (More on that list later.) Instead, his tone of exasperated, self-righteous condescension reminds me of a more verbally adroit George W. Bush: He lectures his audience as if they were schoolchildren who "must understand" (the unavoidable Bush phrase) that they shouldn't be fooled by what "the critics" are saying: "All this is worth pointing out in order to understand that the hype surrounding the gaudy [violence in Iraq] is unacceptable."
I admit, White plays to many of my long-held pet peeves about movie reviewers -- including his habitual attempts to dissuade you from considering any opinions but his (good grief, don't even think of reading other critics or developing an aesthetic of your own -- accept the commandments from on high!); his reliance on pointless comparisons that tell you nothing about a movie, but are intended only to disparage it (a classic: "Borat recalls one of those Madonna records whose flatulent sound and odious ideology get promoted into a hit."); and his annoying, heavy-handed use of other movies and moviemakers to bash whatever he's writing about, simply by name- or title-dropping. Each reference is a little carp-bomb, but White doesn't bother to use them as evidence to develop a rational case.
It takes three titles (two unfavorable comparisons and a damning resemblance), and a fusillade of insults in all directions to take down "Children of Men" in his lead paragraph (the first part of which is quoted above):
Below the garish surface of this paranoid fantasy lies political antipathy—not the sort of soulful detritus of Tarkovsky’s "Stalker" tableaux or Spielberg’s hallucinogenic "War of the Worlds," but Cuarón’s cheap specialty: fashion. By distorting contemporary social fears into facile apocalyptic imagery, "Children of Men" does little more than rework the ludicrous, already-forgotten "V for Vendetta."(I think I kinda agree with White's feelings about the movie's ending, which he mentions later on; I just don't think he offers enough coherent observations to support his reading of the movie. He just pelts it with references and bad words.)
Ah, but the above is exquisite nuance compared to the grand-standing finale of the "Borat" review, which indiscriminately poops all over everybody from Michael Moore to Emir Kustarica (yes, the Sarajevo-born director who once made a movie about gypsies) to "Green Acres":
Borat’s cruelty is not surprising; it begins and ends by demolishing the people of Kazakhstan. These toothless, incestuous, corrupt townsfolk recall the pathetic denizens of Slavic director Emir Kusturica’s stylized, cacophonous "Black Cat, White Cat." But Cohen’s piled-up ridicule is nastier; it’s a Comedy Central set-up with a Michael Moore follow-through. And the 35mm video transfer is as visually ugly as a Michael Moore movie. Connoisseurs of genuine cinema satire will find nothing like Buñuel’s elegant visual subversion or even the polished absurdism of TV’s “Green Acres.” Still, Borat is primed for dubious “classic” status because it exemplifies the angry Left’s vicious temerity. It should be ashamed that its “dissent” finds expression in Cohen’s “Ethnic-Cleansing” humor.Woo-hoo! It's like a rickety ride on the pop-culture Matterhorn! And it's just as full of holes and cheap effects (look out -- it's the Abominable Moore Man!) -- but it does make you wish the guy had a sense of humor. He could be really funny if he knew how.
I've saved the best for last. In the appropriately named "Better-Than" List (yes, something cannot be good -- it can only be better than something else), which is actually two side-by-side lists, with White's "Better Than" genuine achievements on the left and those hype-driven phonies on the right, with a facile squib of copy between them. You've got to read the whole thing, but here are White's choices, and (as near as I can tell) the criteria he used to compare them:
"Broken Sky" vs. "Pan's Labyrith," "Children of Men," "Babel," "Duck Season" (Point of Comparison: Made by Mexicans)
"A Prairie Home Companion" vs. "Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story" (POC: "Backstage" movies about performers)
"Running Scared" vs. "The Departed" (POC: Movies with guns.)
"World Trade Center" vs. "United 93" (POC: Both set on September 11, 2001)
"The Promise" vs. "Letters from Iwo Jima" & "Flags of Our Fathers" (POC: "War poem" vs. war movies)
"Infamous" vs. "The Queen" (POC: Bio-portraits of "idiosyncratic" personalities, Truman Capote and Queen Elizabeth II, the commonality apparently being that both consider themselves queens)
"Nacho Libre" vs. "Borat" (POC: Comedies featuring foreign-born characters)
"Bobby" vs. "C.S.A.: Confederate States of America" (POC: Fantasies about American history)
"Akeelah and the Bee" vs. "Half Nelson" (POC: Protagonists are black teenage girls)
"Neil Young: Heart of Gold" vs. "Dreamgirls" (POC: Both have songs)
"Changing Times" vs. "Army of Shadows" (POC: One "confronts urgent issues of modern sectarian confusion," while the other placates those "seeking the safety and security of WW II")
"The Forsaken Land" vs. "Three Times" (POC: No posited connection)
Meanwhile, no word from White about what movies he didn't see this year...
More on the virtues of contrarianism (as well as the pitfalls of practicing it for its own sake) to come in Can Your Monkey Do The Contrarian (Part II)...
I laughed the first time I read it, and I'll laugh again now. "The safety and security of WW II" Yep, those mortars and nuclear warheads; let's cuddle up right now!
Seriously; [i]Army of Shadows[/i] might be almost 40 years old, but it's just as - if not more - relevant today. I'll take it's damned depressing look at the sacrifices made by subversive pockets of rebels over modern-day liberal tripe like [i]V for Vendetta[/i] anyway. But truthfully, I wouldn't mind his views so much (seeing as I agree with some of them, and tend to value contrarian opinions on the whole simply for having the balls to speak up from the masses) were it not for his holier-than-thou-ness. That, and while I didn't love [i]The Departed[/i] by any means, I'm going to have a hard time sharing views with someone who favors [i]Running Scared[/i] - a movie whose experience I equate to rolling around in broken glass.
Some of the criticisms of White are well taken, but what I want to know is what's so different about White than the late, Pauline Kael, who's revered even by those who hardly ever agreed with her.
(Sorry Jim, I accidently posted before I was finished. This is what I meant to send, please disregard the original).
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Some of the criticisms of White are well deserved, but what I want to know is what makes him so different or more outrageous than his obvious influence, the late, revered Pauline Kael?
Jim: Exactly. He's a sharp guy, writes well (when he doesn't sabotage himself) and he's unafraid of pop culture, but he's also the most insufferable thing in film criticism. It's not only his inability to say ANYTHING bad about Spielberg, Godard, Altman, or DePalma (check out that Black Dahlia review--the NY Press or the Cineaste--and be amazed that he found the plot "murky"), it's that he rarely qualifies his raves or his pans, as if everthing he's sees is either a challenging, deeply imagined masterpiece or a phony, smug, work that only aspires to "Prada wearing hipsters" (his dig on Olivier Assayas).
Another Armond proclivity: for a critic who will remind his audience week to week what he loves and hates, he NEVER engages the criticisms/weaknesses others have with the films he admires. Instead of building a good counter-argument (say for World Trade Center, which he claims healed all who saw it) he dispenses with all dialogue, turns up the volume, and vents until his is the only opinion standing. Contrarianism is fine, but it has to be shaped by argument, which White has long abandoned.
Great post Jim. As an aspiring film writer I always enjoy reading criticism about criticism from writers that I admire. I agree that White could be a really good writer if he had a sense of humor. He seems to be caught up in creating hype for himself by trying to prove that every critic and moviegoer wishes they could be as well informed and insightful as he is. He has taken the easiest and cheapest route to getting noticed as a critic, taking a contrary position to the overall established consensus.
I've come to the defense of Armond White in the past on this website, but I find it more and more difficult. Of late, White has gone from being a noted contrarian who occasionally dazzles you with his perceptive understanding of the medium to a complete blow-hard. It now seems as if every movie White reviews is judged solely in terms of how patriotic it is (which brings into question White's politics...he always struck me as liberal-leaning but now seems to be a defender of Bush!?!? He's taking contrarianism to new levels!).
It now seems as if every movie White reviews is judged solely in terms of how patriotic it is (which brings into question White's politics...he always struck me as liberal-leaning but now seems to be a defender of Bush!?!? He's taking contrarianism to new levels!).
Boy, I'm glad someone else has noted this about Armond White's recent writing. I first noticed this tendency early last year with his New York Press review of Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo. In it, he, among other things, accused the movie of "[contributing] to the demonization of American foreign policy." Well, uh, that's one way to look at it, I guess; perhaps "being critical of American foreign policy" is closer to what Winterbottom and co-director Mat Whitecross were intending? And what, White doesn't think America's foreign policy isn't worth questioning? If I do so, does that make me anti-American and a "hipster" who "longs for divisiveness"? (He'd probably have to take a whole article to explain his politics in detail so we all know where he's coming from when he makes such statements.)
Despite all his problems, I can't help but turning to him every week, just to see what he writes and thinks next. At his best, he can be illuminating, insightful and fascinating to read (I'm not ashamed to say that his writing has helped me develop my personal film taste...although I liked both Borat and Babel much more than he did). Whatever adjectives you can throw at him---"contrarian," "blowhard," etc.---he clearly has some kind of worldview that influences his thinking and writing. I'm not sure you can say that for every published film critic, so to me, that counts for quite a bit. When he's on, he can be genuinely thought-provoking.
Still, two questions: will he ever hate a Steven Spielberg film? Or will he ever like a Richard Linklater film? Only time will tell, I guess.
In response to Kenji, I also still turn to White every week, because as you said, he does have a well-defined aesthetic and a unique writing style that sets him apart from most critics.
I find White particularly valuable in his discussion of the merits of classic films, especially in the way he emphasizes that Hollywood used to be interested in portraying the nobility of working-class Americans rather than being advertisements for high-class living. White is among the best at trumpeting the virtues of some forgotten classics...his review of Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" led me to that forgotten masterpiece, and boy was I grateful to White for it.
I agree with White about the brilliance of Spielberg, but tend to disagree with him about Linklater. Linklater is no Spielberg, to be sure, but he has a body of work that demonstrates consistent intelligence and compassion...I don't know what it is about him that rubs White the wrong way (perhaps it is Linklater's propensity to be "un-cinematic" in White's eyes).