An article in The Guardian today disses Martin Scorsese:

Just as the light from a distant star is said to reach us long years after the star has actually snuffed it, so the reputation of a great artist shines on even once the art has gone soft, sour or plain unspeakable. Such is the case with Martin Scorsese. Judge him on his back catalogue and he’s the world’s greatest living film-maker. Judge him on his last decade and he’s an over-cautious, anodyne bore with an arsenal of half-remembered camera tricks.

(By the way, I had to look up “anodyne”: it means “capable of soothing or eliminating pain.” Those British sure do use big words.)

I happen to agree with the writer—Scorsese is only compelling for me when he’s got Robert De Niro knocking someone’s block in—but articles like this are easy. Take on an icon, win points for being daring and outré. Nobody is as good as they’re reported to be (well, except moi, of course), so you look like a genius for saying the emperor has no clothes. Taking down the idols has been a way to make noise and to make a name: even Tom Wolfe stirred things up with “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast,” an essay decrying “metafiction” and calling for a return to the naturalist school of fiction, a la Balzac or Dickens. “The Reader’s Manifesto,” an essay by a complete unknown likewise caused a giant commotion.

I’m not sure when the unclothed-emperor school of analysis is appropriate. It’s just human nature, I suppose: someone does something great, we build them up with superlatives over and above the call of duty, and then when their greatness becomes the accepted meme, we tear them down. I’m sure there’s a nice Greek word for this rhetorical device. I’m quite sure I don’t know what it is.

It’s probably even easier to get away with taking potshots in the film world, especially in America, because we don’t like to think hard about the hard subjects, let alone the “light” arenas of entertainment. (Yes, I know it was an article in the Guardian; just bear with me.) Americans also hate to think that anyone is better or more talented than they are, which is why everyone here is “middle-class” or an “above-average” driver. We like hard data to back up rankings of superiority (money will do nicely, thank you, or GPAs, or…). Gradations of “quality” tend to make us extremely nervous, which is why we ain’t never going to make it as a meritocracy.

Americans have a very hard time taking entertainment seriously, which is strange because it’s a gigantic industry, much bigger than many of the “serious” sectors of the economy. According to this article at mpaa.org

In 2001, the creative industries, which include theatrical films, TV programs, home video, DVDs, business software, entertainment software, books, music and sound recordings contributed more to the U.S. economy and employed more workers than any single manufacturing sector, including food and kindred products, industrial machinery and equipment, electronics and other equipment, fabricated metal products, and chemicals and allied products.

Americans are extremely respectful of money as an indicator of quality, andwe can’t take entertainment seriously as an economic force. You think we’re going to have enlightened discussions of art? Or even worse: artists? I mean, the term “intellectual property” contains the word “intellectual,” and that’s guaranteed to start most Americans sweating. (Which is a rant for a different day: we wonder why we have trouble with education in this country when a slur used by the ruling party is “intellectual elites”?)

Of course, a lot of film criticism is lazy when it comes to the big names: it’s a lot easier to give into the cult of personality than to, you know, review the work at hand. One of the things I can’t stand about Roger Ebert’s reviews (the TV ones, at any rate; sometimes I read him online too) is that I can predict with absolute assurance that he will give a film a “thumbs up” if it has a Big Name director and/or a lot of sex and/or pretty young things.

I don’t know what the answer is. Is there a way to say “Big Name So-and-so is coasting on his reputation!”? Is it worth doing? Is it better to simply talk about the work, or is that not possible in our celebrity-driven culture? Or has this sort of thing been going on for thousands of years and the Romans gossiped about some scribe’s attack on a famous poet?

Critical theory, or how to criticize with intelligence. If I knew what the answer was, I’d write a manifesto about it. And stir up a lot of attention.