In the American
Prospect,
Tom Carson yokes together two recent developments – the
National Film Registry’s choice of Forrest Gump in its
annual list of 25 “culturally, historically or aesthetically
significant films” and the
Village Voice’s firing of highly regarded critic J. Hoberman
after 24 years at the paper – to conclude that the “Yahoos are
winning” the Kulturkampf. Carson writes: 

Watching the Voice lobotomize itself over the past
decade or so—a process pretty much complete now that he’s been
canned—has been something I can’t help feeling a personal stake in,
even though business is business, and I should know better.

Whether or not he’d care for the title, Hoberman, along with
The Nation‘s Stuart Klawans, is the most honorably
anti-yahoo movie critic in the country. The art of film is his
beat, and that’s all there is to it; when it comes to deciding
what’s consequential and what isn’t, compromises with the
non-cinephile public’s proclivities aren’t in the cards…

With Hoberman’s departure, the paper has gone from being a shell
of its former self to a shell of its former shell—a process most
people blame exclusively on finky New Times Media, the
Voice‘s owner since 2005 and the single outfit most
responsible for gutting the alternative press in general.

I can sympathize with what Carson, to his credit, admits is a
fogey’s lament. During my own salad days in the Big Apple, the
Voice’s main attraction was Carson himself, and the weekly
generally had more pages but less interesting content than the
rival New York Press (speaking of shells of their former
husks). And I will say Hoberman (who recently
spoke with a fair amount of optimism about the current state of
cineastery) has become one of the LA Weekly’s few
remaining points of interest, excluding the American Apparel
ads. 

But is movie criticism really the frontal lobe of the culture? I
am, ahem, an actual Hollywood
professional in addition to being an occasional movie writer.
(Dig my woolgathering about Night Nurse, The
Thing, Mildred Pierce, The Road Warrior and
other pictures in Chris Fujiwara’s Little Black Book of
Movies,
yours for a reasonable $0.93 at Amazon.) I’m tempted to say
that film analysis by somebody who’s never made a movie is like a
sex column written by a virgin. That isn’t fair of
course. 

But I question the idea that the highbrow movie critic is being
undone by the ruthlessness of the competitive market or the triumph
of conventional wisdom. I think the critic’s job has been obviated
by surfeit. It’s just not that hard to find a variety of opinions
on any movie. I don’t need to leave the site you’re reading right
now to find strong arguments that some year’s Oscar-winner is in
fact the worst movie ever made, that Men Behind the Sun is
a lost masterpiece, or that you are no better than a blind cave
fish if you haven’t seen every movie made in Korea (South
Korea! South Korea!) in the last decade. 

Carson is right that there’s a generational element and a
political element at work here. I think both of those resolve
themselves into the auteur theory, that durable French
import which holds that the director is the author of the film.
Hoberman was not precisely a prominent auteurist only because by
the mid-seventies the theory was universally accepted. (Talk about
conventional wisdom!) 

Writers are supposed to hate the auteur theory, but my
reason for thinking it is of little value has nothing to do with
any confidence in scripts. The problem is that for once the Academy
has it right in giving the Best Picture Oscar to the producer. In
all but a vanishingly small number of movies, the producer(s)
is/are responsible for the largest share of the outcome. 

That doesn’t mean the producer
could be called the author in any conventional sense. Sometimes the
biggest contribution is made by the editor or the writer or (more
rarely than you’d expect) the financier.  In some cases the
star has the biggest impact, and that’s true even with the
mightiest directors: I’m pretty sure if you took a group of
reasonably dedicated movie fans and asked them to categorize a pile
of DVD boxes by type of movie, more people would stack The
Searchers with John Wayne movies like Hondo and
Chisum than with John Ford movies like What Price
Glory? and My Darling Clementine. (For my money
The Quiet Man is the Ford/Wayne movie that truly could not
have been made by anybody else.) The Mission: Impossible
pictures have all been helmed by very distinctive directors: Brian
De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird. The scripts are by
some of the most successful writers in Hollywood. Yet Tom Cruise is
the closest thing to an author those movies have. 

It’s a mystery why a bunch of socialist critics came up with a
Great Man theory to describe the most collaborative art form
outside of North Korean mass-gymnastic exhibitions. What we really
need is a death-of-the-auteur
theory. Making a movie is such a
crap shoot, involving so many parties with conflicting motives,
that we should consider it a fluke when something gets made that
holds together as well as My Cousin Vinny. An actual
masterpiece (whatever your choice of masterpiece may be) has to be
considered a heroically improbable event, and one that depends on
both the movie itself and the audience’s response to it. 

In that respect I’m not sure the hardcore cinephile is all that
rare a bird. I enjoy Hoberman’s phrasings and laughed at one of his
zingers of yore about how Steven Spielberg’s vision encompasses the
world like an infinitely expanding piece of Saran Wrap. (You can
always count on these guys for cheap shots at Spielberg.) But a
real contrarian would be able to argue that Forrest Gump
is in fact a masterpiece, not for the way it flatters conservative
boomers with repotted history but for the surreal vision with which
it embraces its own artificiality, as Forrest Gump is sent to every
Vietnam movie ever made, dashes through a perfectly representative
college football film, attends an obvious Hollywood mockup of a
sixties protest, and so on, while the audience is let in on the
joke through all the wry stock-footage chicanery. 

A good critic might even plug Gump into the series of
movies Tom Hanks made in the 1990s that in one way or another
revisited the “generation gap” between the Greatest Generation and
the Dearest Generation, and resolved most of the old
issues in favor of the squares. Tellingly, Hanks did this in
some movies as an actor, in others as a director and/or producer,
but he deserves at least some author credit for all of them. As
motion picture stars from Boris Karloff to David After Dentist can
tell you, there are many ways to get your personal stamp on a
movie. 

Jesse Walker named Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms as
one of his best
of 2011, and I dug his comments
on zombie films back in the Bush Administration. More recently
I
raised my monocle in praise of Carson’s book Daisy Buchanan’s
Daughter. And for movie criticism so hard and gemlike you
might cut yourself on it, check out Reason’s Kurt
Loder.