The Four Deadly Sins of Literary and Artistic Criticism

Roger Ebert, film critic:

Criticism is a destructive activity. If I like something and
the critics didn't, they can't see what's right there before their eyes because
they're in love with some theory. They don't have feelings; they have systems.
They think they know better than creators. They praise what they would have
done, instead of what an artist has done. They use foreign words to show off.
They're terrified of being exposed as the empty poseurs they are. They are
leeches on the skin of art.

I have often entertained the idea of becoming a film critic; not because I think I know more about movies than anyone else, but because there are so many critics (not just in film, but in other areas too) that are doing such a bad job of it. The challenge is to be as fair as possible; something that many critics don’t seem to know how to be.

When I was studying Drama in college, one of the things that I was taught was the definition of what critiquing is in its purest form: a reflection back to the artist of the effect that his work has on his audience. Criticism is the measuring stick by which the artist can judge whether the audience has received his work the way that he intended them to; did they enjoy it, or did they hate it? Did they learn what they were supposed to learn from it, or did they fall asleep during the first act? And if they didn’t get the message, what can the artist do to improve his work so that he will reach his audience more effectively?

Also, criticism has a simpler (but equally important) purpose: informing the rest of the audience about the piece, letting them know whether they will be interested in it or not, and maybe educating them about what it is trying to achieve along the way.

All this is important to the success of whatever piece (be it a book, a painting, a song, a play, or any other such media) the artist has created, and as a result, the critic is a necessary evil in the mix.

But all too often the critic trips and lands in deadly pitfalls that alienate him not only from the artist, but from the audience which he serves as a kind of conduit to, whether he knows he is doing it or not. There was one critic who, in my mind, exemplifies harmfully bad criticism at its worst. I was acting in a community theater in Southern California at the time, and this critic was well known in the area for attending plays, falling asleep during the performance, and then going home later and writing a review that would blast the show. Whether the show was really good or bad is irrelevant; that kind of review can do a great deal of unnecessary hurt and damage. I knew a lot of actors who were tempted to focus on him when they were on stage delivering their lines to him, in order to publicly embarrass him.

His is an extreme example, but many other critics do just as much damage by allowing themselves to fall into certain traps that are just as deadly.

These are what I would consider “sins” to be avoided, but which occur all too frequently: 1.) Becoming jaded as a critic. This is the worst offense; the number one sin. Many a good piece of work has been overlooked because a critic, who is suffering overload, has panned it. Still, one can see how it happens: a critic’s job is to review books, films, music, etc., day in and day out. This means that he must wade through a multitude of offerings, ranging from mediocre to bad, to get to the cream which rises above all the rest.

Unfortunately, to the audience, this means that a piece that they might enjoy gets slammed by the critic, and as a result the piece does not reach its’ audience. Let’s say that the classic Roddy McDowell movie Lassie Come Home has just been released to a present day audience (rather than in 1943, when it came out). Although it might be the movie which you would call your favorite movie of all time, even though your eyes mist over when Lassie runs into Roddy’s arms, and your three-year-old child is in tears for the doggie as she struggles to find her way home to her young master, the film critic (I guarantee this) will pan this as trite and overly sentimental. This is because these buttons have been pushed one too many times for the reviewer, and he has built up a conditioned response to this.

Many movies that are now called classics have been victimized by this kind of thinking. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid surprisingly was one such movie. It was panned by the critics when it came out, but is now considered a western classic. Clint Eastwood, in his early years, was troubled by this kind of criticism. Whereas in hindsight many reviewers now appreciate as classics a trio of movies which he starred in that are part of a sub-genre commonly referred to as “spaghetti westerns” (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), they called his performances “wooden” at the time, the pictures themselves were dismissed as too violent, and were judged too vulgar and cheap in production style. There were several reasons for this; primarily Clint came out of television at a time when the medium was looked down on, and Italian movies were often made very cheaply, and therefore the quality was sometimes very poor. When they showed these “spaghetti westerns” (and Clint’s pictures were no exception) in the United States, the dubbing from Italian into English was poor, and the sound quality suffered immeasurably. Furthermore, the censorship that Hollywood had did not govern Italian films, and an action sequence in a “spaghetti western” would often include an actor shooting another actor with his gun in the same shot, which Hollywood could not do, and which, therefore, shocked many critics’ sensibilities. Lastly, Clint had chosen to emulate the older Hollywood stars (like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart) in his performances, pointing out to Sergio Leone (the director) that these stars often said little, letting their actions tell the story; at which point he then threw out pages of dialogue that Leone had written for him to say. Brilliant as this choice was, it pushed one of these many buttons with the critics, who weren’t ready to see something new come out of Italy, or a TV star. Therefore Clint’s performances were spat upon, and the movies were trashed in the reviews. Fortunately for Clint, a younger audience got the message of what he was trying to do, and he shot to superstardom.

Sometimes it is easy to overlook gems when searching through the rubble.

2.) Snobbery pt. 1: Sneering at the artist. This almost goes hand in hand with being jaded as a major sin. I am not talking about disliking a piece of work because it is badly performed or because it seems dumb. This, after all, is what criticism is all about; reflecting the work back to the artist and letting him or her know how the work effects you. What I am speaking of is the type of reviewer who takes a derisive view of the work in question. For an example, I refer you to Stephen King who once said that he could tell a review was going to be bad because in the first line it would talk about how much money he had made. I am not a fan of Mr. King, but he really doesn’t deserve that kind of criticism. No artist does; simply because all art, even the worst trash, takes a certain amount of hard work to bring it to fruition.

So when you sneer at the artist you do not provide the reflection that he needs; you insult him, and everyone who worked with him to bring the project about. But you also do something worse: you offend, and risk, if you do it often enough, losing your audience. I can’t tell you how often I have been turned off to a critic who took a superior attitude towards the work he was reviewing. In such a review the sarcasm is so evident that it seems to literally drip off the page it is written on. I recently read an article in Rolling Stone magazine, about the Rock group Led Zeppelin, in which I was reminded of a review, that appeared in an issue from the early 70's, of the album Led Zeppelin II by critic John Mendelssohn that he wrote with just that kind of attitude. He said in his review (a sort of sequel to his review of their first album): “Hey, man, I take it all back! This is one f----ing heavyweight of an album! OK - I’ll concede that until you’ve listened to this album eight hundred times, as I have, it seems as if it’s just one heavy song extended over the space of two whole sides.” Did his review turn me off to the album? No, but it turned me off to him, and if Rolling Stone had published more of the same they would have lost me as a reader. (In a recent issue he states that his opinion hasn’t changed over the years, and that “I like melody, wit, vocal harmony, and expressiveness, all of which are lacking from Led Zeppelin.” One wonders what he makes of masters of avant garde classical music Charles Ives and John Cage who purposely lack some of those things too.)

It is interesting to study the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey in this light. Because Stanley Kubrick chose to film this movie as an entirely visual experience, he invited a divisiveness among the viewing audience; you either loved it or hated it -there was no middle of the road. Even so, the reaction of the New York film critics was quite interesting; most of them dismissed the film as being made for eight year old minds. Amazing! Many adults hated it because they could not get what it was about, college kids across America were going back to see the film eight or nine times because they did not understand it, one student did a masters thesis on it which was commended by Kubrick because of how well she did understand what he was trying to say, and the New York film critics were condemning it as childish! Somewhere along the way someone lost touch with the public, and reality. (It is interesting to note that congressmen in Washington D.C., after seeing the movie, had the same reaction as the critics. Goes to show you.)

Lesson number 1: Be careful how you review the piece of work because you may be reviewing the audience for it as well.

Which brings me to the next point:

3.) Snobbery pt. 2: Sneering at the audience. Roger Ebert , bless him, chastised one critic that he had on as a guest (in his search to replace the late Gene Siskel for the show Siskel & Ebert At The Movies) for putting down the audience of a certain movie. Roger was right, in my opinion, to do so, because the critic had just offended a sizable part of his audience, whether he knew it or not. The audience of any piece of work is the bread and butter not only of the artist, but the critic as well, because the audience is going to turn to him to see what he thinks.

An extremely good example of what I am talking about is how many critics reacted to the movies of David and Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams; mainly Airplane! and The Naked Gun. In the case of the film Airplane! (which was compared favorably to Mad Magazine satires), it was widely reported (and I experienced this myself) that you could literally walk into the theater it was showing at, and be greeted by a wall of laughter coming from the audience. No film before or since (with the exception of the Naked Gun movies) has ever had such a raucous outpouring of laughter, at least that I’m aware of. Yet many critics, in their reviews, declared the movie unfunny! I remember wondering if, when they were watching it, they were embarrassed to find themselves the only ones who were not rolling around in the aisles with laughter.

What is indicated here is a feeling of superiority towards other members of the audience. It particularly rears its ugly head when the subject is comedy, which has for centuries been the object of debates which this snobbery monster feeds off of. Comedy, according to experts, has been divided into two levels: high comedy and low comedy. Low comedy, sometimes called low-brow comedy, is, very simply, physical comedy; it is humor derived from all the pratfalls and missteps which occur to us in our everyday life. The slipping on a banana peel gag is often cited as an excellent example of this comedy. High comedy, or high-brow comedy, is defined as more intellectually challenging comedy; it often consists of irony, satire, word-play, and situational comedy. An example of this kind of comedy is the scene, occurring in many plays, where a woman is visiting a man in his room, finds herself in danger of being compromised when another caller, usually another woman, arrives at the front door, and therefore must hide in the closet, or under a bed or table in order not to be seen. (Oscar Wilde used that type of scene beautifully in the play An Ideal Husband.)

The debate over these two levels of comedy can be quite polarizing. At times in history high-cultured people would not be caught dead seeing a play that had references to bodily functions and pratfalls in it, for fear of being compromised like the woman in our little scene. The snobbery of critics who sneer at the other audience members is, to a certain extent, born out of this.

One critic, in his review of The Naked Gun, went so far as to review the audience who were present, putting them down as low intellects for enjoying the movie. This, to me, is uncalled for: aside from being rude to those who were enjoying the film, he told me virtually nothing about the movie by wasting ink on that particular subject, and insulted my intelligence by making me wade through his snobbishness to get to the rest of the review.

Now, mind you, commenting on audience reaction has its place, and is quite essential, in fact, to the future existence of any art form. The artist needs to know who the audience is, and what they want. And reviewing audience reaction on a cultural scale is a major and necessary function of criticism. For example the critic might ask; “Because the audience is more accepting of things that they wouldn’t have been before, is our culture headed to a decline and fall like the Roman Empire?” Recently, horror movies with their continually escalating quantities of violence and gore have often been the subjects of this kind of discussion by no less than critics like Roger Ebert and Michael Medved. But they are discussions, put forth in a form in which the reader or listener can take in each argument and decide for himself how he feels about it. In no case has the critic taken an arrogant point of view and sneered at the people who are, in fact, his own audience.

Remember, no one likes a smart ass.

4.) Limited knowledge of subject. My mother, who was a journalism major in college, once told me that at a newspaper the job of Drama Critic, rather than being assigned to someone with theater experience, often goes to whoever is in the room, so to speak. (I think that our sleeping critic probably got his job that way.) To be fair, I believe that this is more likely to happen at a small town paper than at a big city one. Sometimes, however, one has to wonder.

I remember reading a critic in San Diego who, in a capsule review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, made the statement that he did not think the special effects in that movie were very good, and that he had seen better effects in episodes of the Star Trek TV show, and certain TV commercials. In making that statement, it seemed to me that he showed his complete lack of knowledge about what a special effect is. The term “special effects” refers to the process by which an idea is brought to the screen in such a way that the audience is convinced that it is real. There are two kinds of effects in movie making: physical effects (such as explosions, winds, waves, scale modeling, anything that can be done “in camera” as they say), and visual effects, which entails using special photographic tricks to create a believable idea on the screen. 2001 was a film which took a great leap forward in presenting visual effects which had never been seen on the screen before. It artfully brought the idea of deep space to the screen in an incredibly realistic way. This was done by photographing separate elements such as a planet, a spacecraft and a star field and compositing them into a single frame of film. When run through a projector, the resulting image appears as real to the audience.

At the time which I read this review, 1978, the original Star Wars had been out for one year. Although it represented another giant leap in visual effects technology, it confused people about what that technology was. The elements in that film were not only space ships, planets, and star fields, but also laser beams and explosions. Many people assumed that visual effects technology was about how much of this kind of excitement you could throw upon the screen, not the process with which it was created. This, I suspect, is what the reviewer was relating too when he compared 2001 to Star Trek and those TV commercials. (It must be understood that Star Trek was a TV show with a relatively small budget, and therefore had a limited amount of money to spend on visual effects, which had to play on screens that were a lot smaller than we have now. The quality, as good as it was at the time, suffered accordingly when compared with what could be done on the big screen with a lot more money.)

So, what this means here, is the critic did not know what he was talking about. There is no one more dangerous than someone who tries to do something with only a little bit of knowledge. The immediate danger is to the critic and his paper. All a knowledgeable person has to do is read a review like that, and he will say to himself, “This person is an idiot, and his publisher is an idiot too, for hiring him”. But worse damage is done if the person reading or hearing the review knows even less than the reviewer. The audience stays away from the movie. The theater where the play is to be performed remains darkened. The book is returned to the publisher unopened. The painters’ masterpiece remains on the easel and not in the gallery.

There is a terminology which I have referred to earlier in this essay when I spoke of Clint Eastwood, that film and theater critics use all too frequently, and that is “wooden acting.” If I had my way, these words would be banned from any use in critiques of plays and movies. By definition it refers to the inability of an actor to bring to the surface in his performance the emotions that are inherently deep in the character he is portraying. There are actors, and I have seen them, who simply don’t belong either on stage or in a film. I’m not referring to “hams” who overact, but to people who are so pulverized when they are in front of an audience that they can only deliver their lines flatly, and don’t have the good sense to abdicate their roles to someone more talented. (I’m not insensitive to them; I’m afraid I have been among their number myself at one time.) I would say that these are truly wooden actors. There are even some actors whose performance on film seems to warrant this criticism. A lot of critics would cite many of Rock Hudson's performances, and when I find myself watching him and wondering why he didn’t show a little more emotion here and there, I am forced to agree with them.

The problem with the terminology, then, is not that there aren’t “wooden” actors, but that critics wield this term like a sword that they haven’t been trained to use. They simply don’t seem to know what “wooden” acting really is.

Before critics refer to an actor as “wooden” in a part, they need to ask themselves what the part requires of the actor first. Let’s go back to Clint Eastwood for an example. In 1970, he and Shirley MacLaine were cast in the movie Two Mules for Sister Sara, directed by Don Siegel. Her part was Sara, a whore masquerading as a nun, and his role was Hogan, a mercenary who had survived the Civil War, lost his idealism, and was now running guns for the Mexicans who were fighting for their freedom from Maximilian. This kind of man, one would suppose, would be a man of few words who did not wear his emotions on his sleeve, which is how Clint played him.
In the middle of the film they are on their way to blow up a train, when Clint is shot with a Yaqui arrow in his left shoulder. It is up to Sara to pull the arrow out so that Clint not only will survive but can blow up the train. To do this he gets liquored up, in order to bear the pain, and together they extract the arrow and cauterize the wound, using gunpowder at the same time. It is a thrilling and funny scene, all at the same time, and required immaculate timing and on-target characterization from both actors to pull it off; and, in fact, Clint considered it to be his best acting on film for a long time afterward.

Here’s what the review in Variety said: “Eastwood simply does not act (in this film, anyway). The film lacks a single genuine moment. Miss MacLaine and Mr. Eastwood don’t generate any chemistry together and Siegel does little or nothing to fill the vacuum.”

Sometimes I have to wonder whether the critic has seen the same film that I did.

Any time you are in a play which is put on in front of an audience, or you are going before the cameras to shoot a fictional movie, you have to act. You may act well, or you may act badly, but you are going to act. Why? Because a roomful of people, whether it is an audience or a film crew, is watching every move you make, and your nerves are firing at a hundred miles an hour, and it is simply impossible to be calm enough to be yourself in that situation. So any critic who says that the actor isn’t acting is demonstrating his lack of knowledge about what it takes to be an actor.

It may be that the actor did not perform the part exactly the way that you thought it should be played, in which case the door is opened for you to call his performance “wooden,” or anything else you might want to call it. The critic for Variety did not use that particular term about Clint, but he might as well have (others did, for other films). But in using it, as well as complaining about the perceived lack of chemistry between Eastwood and MacLaine, the critic would have completely ignored (as he obviously did) the mechanics of the scene about blowing up the train, and thereby demonstrated his lack of knowledge again.

If you are going to criticize something, anything, then make sure you know something about what you are talking about before you start.

So then, these are the four deadly sins of criticism: allowing oneself to become jaded, snobbery toward the artist, snobbery toward the audience, and lack of knowledge about your subject. These sins, when practiced by the critic in print or other media, can have a devastating effect; his power is not to be underestimated. The history of the film Citizen Kane is a classic example of what damage can be done to a masterwork by the reviewer. When Louella Parsons, the columnist for the Hearst papers, heard that the film was essentially about William Randolph Hearst, her publisher, she did all that was in her power to destroy the film. This included, among other things, a negative review from her and other attacks that she made or directed through the press. Mind you, Louella knew what she was doing, and she brought other things into play besides the press; being a columnist rather than just a critic, she wielded considerable power and used it with deadly accuracy. But if someone like Louella can turn public opinion as devastatingly as she did, think what someone could do without knowing what they were doing. It would be like accidently setting off a nuclear bomb.

Jon Landau taught me in his movie reviews for Rolling Stone magazine what criticism could and should be. Jon has his credentials; prior to reviewing movies he was one of the magazines’ many good music critics, and afterwards went on to produce most of Bruce Springsteen's records, as well as becoming a successful film producer in his own right. In the first regular film review that he wrote for the magazine, he laid out his plan of action for the critiques to follow. He stated that his intention was not to judge whether a film was good or bad, but to analyze what made the film work. In his subsequent review for Clint Eastwood's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, he concentrated on a very minor scene in which Clint and Jeff Bridges are walking along and Clint, seeing something left by a dog on the ground, tells Jeff not to step in it. It was Jon's point of view that this was the essence of Clints’ on screen character; that he avoided the pitfalls that threatened to trip him up, and this was also what his main audience (young adult males) found most attractive about him. When you consider most of Clints’ movies and their overall subject matter (the lone cop or gunfighter going up against established but corrupt authority) this proves to be a most astute observation, and it contributes to the readers’ knowledge of the medium because the analysis shows what makes the movie work; why it has the effect it does on the viewer.

This then is what a review of any particular media should be; it should present an opinion of the subject matter based on an informed point of view. It should stem from a genuine interest in the subject matter, and not be grounded in haughtiness and condescension. It should enlighten and inform both audience and artist.

Be it a “negative” review or a “positive” review, it ought to be a well-conceived and executed one.