American culture is hostile territory for criticism. This is not readily apparent given the central roles free expression and free exchange of opinion play in that culture. Some clarifications are necessary: such as the fact that hostility is not equal to repression or prohibition; just as toleration is not equal to approval. In the same sense free opinion is not always equal opinion and can sometimes fail to meet the standard for free exchange. The American prefers debate to criticism and communal individualism to solipsism. In his mind, the critic is the pure solipsist: talking from himself, for himself, and never on a level equal with the mass.
America’s platonic conception of the critic appeared 80 years ago with the release of Otto Preminger’s necrophilic mystery Laura. Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) sits in his bathtub before a typewriter as the detective (Dana Andrews) interviews him about his murdered friend, the titular Laura. His ultimate role in the crime is a secondary twist, and easily detected by what he says (“Murder is my favorite crime”) and the unsympathetic airs he affects to the contemporary audience. He is effete, perverse and ironic, his gaudily ornate apartment evinces inherited wealth, and the high value he places on himself and his opinions is in equal proportion to the low value he places on everyone else. That he codes gay1 is merely a narrative-historical glitch; it is more that he represents everything that the New Deal was meant to reject: art for art's sake, decadence, and the aristocratic mindset that enabled both. And while the value of those concepts have fluctuated since the war, the Lydecker ideal of the critic has been resolutely static. But that this is so is also America’s own doing.
The critical faculty is not left out of American education, but its status is low, down to that of a tool, and a rudimentary one at that. Your book reports, your term papers, and your “essays” rationed to a meager five paragraphs represent its total use and its minuscule value relative to standardized tests, group projects, and exaggerated extracurriculars. Their mind-melting dullness is a feature. Tools—like dynamite, the ice pick, and the chainsaw—only become interesting outside of their originally designed use. They should never stand on their own, never rise to a craft. As such, criticism is the medium guided more by natural talent than by training. Critics are trained on the job and at their leisure, even more so than any artistic form. Because of this negligence within American education, criticism has no choice but to be aristocratic in the purest possible form.
The critic’s antagonism, then, is only a natural outcome of the critic’s airs. The critics is ipso facto useless, a luxury item. The critic must therefore prove their value in order to exist legitimately. This is not impossible, but once it finds a use the antagonism acquires an impressive spectrum of flavors. There is the pop oracle (Mark Fisher, Sam Kriss), the know-it-all (Robert Hughes, Blake Smith), the scene cop (Paul Morley, Christian Lorentzen), the middlebrow Olympian (A.O. Scott, Alissa Wilkinson), the populist snob (Pauline Kael, Nicholas Pell), the hero-worshiper (Alan Sepinwall, Adam Lehrer), and the ax murderer (Richard Brody, Lauren Oyler, and too many more to name). In these guises wide breadths of style and varying scopes of authority exist. They may, in the service of public enlightenment, be like the teacher or the pastor. If they’re lucky, they may even alter culture’s trajectory like the legislator. In all cases, however, an illusion cannot be entirely obscured, in terms of financial stability, surely, but existentially as well. And critics being tasked in some manner with disillusioning can’t just ignore the irony.
The irony was not lost on Lauren Oyler when she wrote in No Judgment that “I don’t know why I write criticism” in an era where criticism can be practiced more widely, if not more deeply, and ignored more readily. Everyone posts screen caps of their Letterboxd pronouncements on Twitter; everyone else with overlapping streaming commitments just hoards on their watchlists. Criticism’s always encroaching economic collapse is compounded by its authoritative collapse. The critical talent returns to its aristocratic superfluity, and in the same decayed state as a real aristocracy. The further the critic drifts to the margins, the more eccentric their habits; their gothic saturnalia being the catalyst for their renewal.
The aristocratic margins are their own hostile environment. Public enlightenment and cultural stewardship wilt within it. The critical talent survives through adaptation, descending into the elemental maelstrom of impulse. Its vision turns inward, its tonal palette acquires the hues of viscera. What was a craft in the center is a ritual in the periphery. Not pagan as such, but baring distinct traces—ominous undulating glows from the wilderness, bestial keening in the night, ceremonial violence flashing through the shadows. This is criticism shorn of its breeding—heretical, heathen, feral. Criticism of coordinated, transcendent self-harm. Criticism of a barbarous vintage, yet the only one compatible with the wild mood swings of the 21st century.
Let me put it this way: the traditional mannered critic is like a poacher. They hunt, capture, and control culture. But a good critic hunts humanely, bringing their kills to the public cleanly gutted and sharing every usable part without favor. Our feral critics know better, preferring to conjure culture, to let its force work through them, impelling them to divine and document the visions of their encounter, surrendering totally their senses and their intellectual independence. What they lose in humanism they gain in spiritual drama. Analysis is no longer the forcible synthesis of conflicting sets of subjective data. Analysis writhes. Cultural stimuli coils and entangles like frantic, electrified tendrils. But no one deviates from the ritual. The defeat of the critic by the force of culture is inevitable and welcome.
Equally inevitable, but far less welcome, is the backlash of the polite critics against this manifestation. The pattern was long ago established. I can already see the essays, the tweet threads, and the Substack symposiums condemning the emergence of “folk” or “primitive” criticism. The criticism that retreats petulantly from the accepted mode of discourse, whether out of some latent insecurity or inability to keep pace. The criticism that contorts rigorous argument into an incomprehensible gnarl; that is careless in style, indifferent in politics, and neutral in culture war. Worst of all, it is unfriendly to the reader and persuades no one. Persuasion is a kind of sin. It is a criticism of pure mood.
There is merit to these arguments; they can even have a positive inversion. A gnarled argument can just as easily be lyrical. A careless style can also be intuitional. And “culture war” has any number of “fronts” on which any kind of critic can “fight.” And the readers, taken intelligently enough, can be treated as the critic sees fit to treat them. “Folk” is a reliable weapon of the polite critic when under threat from a vengeful spirit. Consider the damage incurred by “folk” art, “folk” philosophy, and “folk” horror. But it seems a different matter altogether when culture itself is exacting the revenge.
Of course revenge has its own positive antithesis. It’s understandably hard to appreciate when those being revenged upon can only contemplate their inadequacy in damming the tide of retribution. Only much later, if at all, does it occur to them they were the necessary partners in a most intimate communion. Who is more present than an object of vengeance? And who is less disinterested in their primary opposite than the vengeful? The former is every bit as dimensional as the amassed wounds of the latter after cycles of poaching and dismemberment. Those condemned as “folk” critics are not the enemy. If they have any coherent aim it is to alert the mannered critic that they cannot deflect or avoid revenge, but they can anticipate the communion, become nearly equal with it, and be better subsumed into its enveloping grip. It is neither a submission nor an annihilation. It is stimuli provoking stimuli; the result is the excreta we now accept as the new mode of criticism. Argument will writhe; style will be torn apart. And so will you if you allow yourself to accept the privilege. The alternative, to paraphrase Kurt Cobain, is the hope of dying before you become Christian Lorentzen.
A key to the film’s strangeness, as Roger Ebert pointed out, was that its title was not Lawrence. The result was the birth of a high camp that, while worlds away from the surrealist and symbolist queer cinema of Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger, reverberated in down to the ironic melodramas of John Waters, Todd Haynes, and Gregg Araki.