The Death of Auteur Theory & The Birth of Something New in Cultural Criticism

We live in an age soaked in superhero nonsense, a generation of film watchers who walk out of theaters and look up to the sky like something from above is coming to save us. No one is coming. What if the last best hope to save ourselves is our art?

It is a severe weakness in the human frame where we look to others to solve our problems, and how we end up with a never-ending stream of childish superhero films and ancient adolescents leading countries and companies, throwing tantrums, and behaving like the supervillains they have been cast as in this synthetic, binary world of good and evil. Positive cultural progress always begins with art, but could end in eternal silence if we don’t get our act together as a species fast.

From presidents making war decisions to directors making big-budget superhero sci-fi movies, these fallible human beings are held up on pedestals. It feels delicious to knock them down, almost like power, except that the ones being knocked down are often walking away with the money and decision-making authority. In contrast, the modern critic holds their pride in esteem and subjugates the needs of art to the will of their corporate editors in exchange for a salary. Blood money. This sick cycle of modern criticism has little to do with the value of art. Instead, it has become a celebrity-worshipping pantomime, and Auteur Theory is at the heart of this sickness. Art deserves more than the return that Auteur Theory has delivered. This essay is about what comes next.

In his seminal book of critical essays on Film, Totally Tenderly Tragically, Critic Phillip Lopate defines Auteur Theory as a critical approach that recognizes the director as the leading artist of a film and is focused on exploring stylistic consistency across a director’s entire body of work.

Auteur Theory is a perspective that has reigned supreme in Cinema criticism for decades, shaping our engagement with films around the director's vision and voice. However, a new shift in criticism challenges the cult of personality surrounding film creators and instead champions the film itself as the primary subject of critique. This was how film criticism was born, at the level of the art itself. This shift away from Author Theory is called New Criticism (though it is as old as Cinema itself), and it refocuses the analytical lens on the canvas of the screen and the symphony of sounds that comprise the cinematic experience. Director be damned.

The grip of hero worship within Auteur Theory has contorted the landscape of film criticism and cultural perception to the point where cults of personality and art have become commodified within the petulant cycle of worship, only to be torn down. Lovers of Cinema now suffer a surreal, looping superhero narrative, with directors as temporarily infallible demigods, crafting universes from their “singular” vision repurposed from old comic books. And the insufferable people who worship art rather than appreciate it are now given megaphones to pass off their opinions as intellectual analysis. This cult of celebrity eclipses art, diverting valuable attention from the narratives and craftsmanship conveyed between the screen and the audience, where the value of Cinema has always existed.

New Criticism proposes a dual-focus approach: one prong technical, the other narrative. It urges a dissection of film devoid of the director’s mythos, exploring the language of Cinema — the angles, cuts, effects, editing, acting, and music instead. Narratively, New Criticism is about character journeys and human odysseys unfurled sans the shadow of their creators.

Imagine an alien anthropologist, hundreds of years from now, deciphering our visual stories without knowledge of Spielberg or Lynch, simply engaging with the raw, emotive power of the medium of Film. This point of view is the heart of New Criticism — a consistent dialogue with the art about its existential impact on the viewer.

Technical and narrative layers should be addressed through the New Criticism of films. The former examines the technical choices from the options of Cinematic craft; these include camera placements, lenses used, special effects applied, music, editing, and other technical components involved in the artistry of Cinema. The logistics of writing, planning, and shooting films should be minimized in New Criticism, as they properly belong in the realm of Auteur Theory.

For example, knowing that a planned shoot for a clear sunrise was plagued by fog, forcing the director of photography to make alternative choices, adds nothing to the critical analysis except to break the flow of art and retreat into hero-worship of the director’s vision. It is recommended that New Critical authors include this material in first drafts and, in revision, sweep them into an “Auteur Index,” included as footnotes and endnotes, relegating these distracting details to the substrate where they belong, no longer occluding the art that should be the focus.

Oral histories and superficial episode guides are not proper criticism.

The narrative layer concerns the human characters who undergo struggle, change, and growth in the film, and has nothing to do with the director, the writer, the actors, or the producers, other than that they worked together to deliver the art into the world. When a baby is born healthy, the last thing anyone cares about is the doctor who delivered the baby and the other babies they delivered in the past. We should treat film directors the same way. New Film Criticism is about the movie being watched and what’s outside its frame, not what’s behind the camera.

The New Critic is like the alien anthropologist who crash-lands on a desolate Earth hundreds of years in the future. They find this weird machine and these files. They click on a file that plays a strange story with synced visuals and audio. Who made this creation is unknown. What the creation conveys is interesting —a puzzle to delve into and understand through a structured framework of appreciation and analysis—New Criticism.

Nearly everyone alive watches movies. Isn’t it time we allow these works of art to speak to us on the deepest level possible, where our humanity is equal and can bring us together? The purpose of Proper Art is to help us transcend and find our common humanity in the middle of all this mess and noise. New Criticism offers an oasis as we work through a burgeoning fatigue over being gorged with politically charged social theory passed off as criticism.

New Criticism transcends the limitations of our varied backgrounds, beckoning us to engage with everyday human experiences. New Criticism does not seek to silence discussions of diversity and representation but to briefly acknowledge them as among many facets of experiencing art. Then we must move beyond their barbed wire of social differences and get ya politics.

As we leave Auteur Theory behind, like a rocket shedding its boosters after reaching orbit, the New Critic works toward a shared foundation of humanity, inviting a more profound connection to art beyond the flimsy, synthetic boundaries of the artist’s identity. Because diminishing art by canceling artists has become too easy and too cheap, building these directors up only to tear them down has negatively affected how we experience art as a culture. Our illness has turned art into a commoditized by-product of celebrities in pathetic motion. The cycle of worship and destruction of film directors is a moral failure rooted in Auteur Theory. However, by de-emphasizing the artist in New Criticism analysis, art can be embraced (or rejected) on its own merits, completely changing how human beings engage with art and ultimately rising above the differences the powerful use to prey on the weak.

New Criticism allows us to move past a juvenile emotional reaction to art (particularly Cinema). The primary challenge with New Criticism is that it requires the critical thinker and writer to become kinder, more sensitive, and committed to finding commonalities in art rather than the cultural flash points that have become such lazy targets in what passes for cultural criticism these days. Asking Old Critics to be kind is like asking a dog not to bark when it hears its doorbell.

Haven’t we grown weary of constantly looking at art through a lens of political correctness and social theory? Many will find New Criticism refreshing because it rises above the limitations set on each of us by circumstance and geography. By focusing again on the universal elements of humanity in our shared art, we establish a common ground of artistic appreciation. Once that bond is established and the rhythm of that dialogue takes hold, the differences that have plagued us for centuries can finally be marginalized as we approach art from a more fundamental, holistic perspective.

Art should not speak for people; art should speak to people.

New Criticism signals an epoch of change for the film industry, a break from traditional marketing tethered to directorial fame and infamy. If New Criticism has an impact, films will vie for attention based solely on their artistic merit, not on their creators’ reputations or past work. New Criticism envisions a democratized space where content is king, and the throne is open to any film that speaks most eloquently to the human condition across all the segments of humanity competing for attention and dollars in the global entertainment marketplace.

The first step in becoming a New Critic is to get the Auteur Theory content out upfront. Get it out and be done with it. Consider it the choke of an engine to gush about the director, the writer, the actors who are dating, and the hardships that inspired this film. Get all those lifestyle and sociology ideas up and out of the mind so that the serious New Critic can focus on the art. Pretend you’ve never heard of the director or the actors.

That crack I just heard was the spine-breaking on Auteur Theory. That smell wafting up is the decaying corpse of lifestyle journalism, the grandchild of Auteur Theory. Good riddance! It is time to get back to the art.

The Film Industry must recognize that the old advertising model has ended. Selling tickets to theatergoers has been forever changed. Watching movies in theaters is no longer the entry point of cinema. Instead, the entry point is our televisions, phones, and smart tablets. The new marketplace model emerging for film distribution and commerce will see movies initially distributed for free, with focused marketing campaigns engineered to gather positive reviews and strong engagement from New Critics, who publish directly to their audiences, whether free or paid. Sausage factory movie reviewers, episode guide gurus, and oral history interviewers working for digital periodicals are not New Critics; they are journalists who support paid advertising through entertainment news writing. In other words, they are Old Critics.

The emerging model of film creation and distribution will see wildly innovative films of all lengths and narrative scopes, created cheaply and distributed for free, directly marketed to serious viewers online. From the engagement metrics of these front-funnel films, the best of modern Cinema will emerge as talent in the marketplace for direct-funded streaming services. Popular art that makes it through this bottleneck of critical analysis and appreciation can use streaming metrics to establish its market value based on its content, not the social parameters under which it was created. What a liberating moment for human expression and the democracy of entertainment!

There will be a period of adjustment, like the Golden Age of Hollywood endured, when the original studio owners lost their power and influence to an age of glamorized actors molting into influencers, and a few directors became moguls. The early robber barons of commercial film in America were cast aside for the inescapable lure of celebrity directors and actors —the icons of Auteur Theory —and the obsession with lifestyle journalism masquerading for decades as legitimate art criticism.

It is not easy to imagine the early days of film, when the close-up was just invented, forcing viewers to see an actor’s face in vivid detail and wonder about the person behind this character on screen. There was once an audience of film viewers who did not care about who the director was, their skin color, or whether they culturally appropriated a story. It was about the stories projected on the screen through wildly imaginative visual and audio techniques. It was also about the acting. It was about how the movies made people feel. But we lost the thread at some point, and appreciating movies became a boring scorecard of finance, plastic accolades, and gotcha politics.

The New Critic represents a turning away from hero-worshipping directors and actors to engaging with visual stories on narrative and technical terms of analysis and appreciation. Once a film rises in online and streaming rankings, the ones that reach the top of those rankings (based on verifiable viewer engagement and feedback) should be the films that make it into theaters —the best of the best, the ultimate reality show for art.

Watching movies in a dark theater with strangers is a sacred experience, like praying in a noisy temple. Only the best films that survive the value crucible just laid out should be featured in theaters, and theaters should be packed with lovers of film from all areas of every country and culture. Worshipping respectfully together in our temples of art sure as hell beats killing each other over different names for the same gods year after year.

The shift from Auteur Theory to New Criticism represents a complete inverse of the current model for releasing films to theaters, followed by streaming and physical media sales, a model now altered forever. Going to the theater should be a revered experience. Sitting in temples of film with strangers and engaging in art together, as mentally and emotionally distant humans briefly sharing the same space in time, remains a critically important social experience. The problem is that the content making it into theaters at the time of this composition is either sad-sack got-ya crap or outrageous superhero fairy tales, heavy on spectacle but paper-thin on spiritual inspiration and subtextual moral instruction. We do not need to watch fewer movies. We need better stories reaching screens of all sizes. And we need better criticism.

Film studies programs may remain structurally the same, but the output must evolve. As the crutches of identity politics and cancel culture are stripped away, the art must be dealt with again, demanding to be understood on its own, unassailable terms. Film studies programs will not change in form and function. It will still be school classes full of wide-eyed students learning about the technical craft of filmmaking, reading other authors’ critical essays, and writing about these films themselves. The role of educators and peers shifts toward guidance, steering students toward the heart of storytelling and away from the seductive simplicity of hero worship, celebrity gossip, and fluffy comic-book daydreams.

What happens when culture and political correctness are no longer the primary lenses through which we analyze and appreciate the art that connects us with fundamental human experiences of living in the 21st Century?

What becomes of culture when the limiting filter of the creator is removed from our critical analyses? This question compels us to confront art directly and grapple with narratives that reflect our deepest fears, joys, and the darkness in every soul, regardless of where we were born, how we identify, who we love, and what biological apparatus exists below our navels.

New Criticism promises to elevate our collective conversation to the universal facets and elemental emotional forces that bind us together as humanity, the ultimate solidarity. Commitment to this common good requires no church, constitution, or focus group. The common good only requires us to pay attention, to be open to new experiences through art and relationships, and to communicate with one another in good faith, with kindness and patience, so that all that truly matters is revealed to those penitents with simple curiosity.

While Auteur Theory has been a necessary and instrumental phase in cultural criticism, we must move beyond it lest it strangle our communities and tear down our democracies. However, we must not rewrite history in our zeal to leave behind what weighs us down. Instead, we should respect the evolutionary journey of our collective ideas as stepping stones to our current crossroads, where every film, regardless of its director’s reputation, can be revisited, re-experienced, and newly appreciated through the untainted lens of New Criticism. Imagine what we will see when the director of a film no longer occludes what’s on the screen.

We should not attempt to persuade Old Critics to adopt new ways. Instead, New Critics must write to educate and encourage a new generation to take up their keyboards and mobile phone cameras in the service of art that matters to everyone. As long as Old Critics are willing to be called out on their hero-worship and navel-gazing over the logistics of making art while allowing for a more film-centric analysis of New Criticism, the Old Critic and New Critic can coexist in the same labor circle.

Either art will light the path of humanity’s future, or the scorchmarks of human war will mark the earthly gravestone where a great light went out in the universe. It is either a universal appreciation of art or war without end until silence reigns.

As we stand at this juncture between the death of Auteur Theory and the birth of New Criticism, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment in cultural discourse. New Critics do not call for the obliteration of what came before but for the evolution of our engagement with the art of Cinema and all other forms of creative human expression.

New Criticism is a step toward a future where films speak for themselves, and we, regardless of our disparate backgrounds, can find common ground in the dark theater of humanity’s shared experiences of being alive and in turmoil. New Criticism is not a eulogy for Auteur Theory; it is an inauguration speech for a more democratic appreciation of art without boundaries, a critique without idols, and the cinematic experience distilled to its purest form: the story, how it is told, and what it means to us to explore fictional human beings in their complex crises, moral decisions, and fleeting moments of joy.

New Criticism will also open second-chance journeys of exploration through films of the past that were funded, created, and distributed solely because of the director’s reputation. New Critics have decades of work to do, none involving personality cults or celebrity gossip. Nothing is more politically relevant now than finding and agreeing upon our shared human values. Our reaction to art is the one place we can do this that is not subject to the human war machine constantly rumbling through our lives, threatening us all with fear and death. In movies, fear and death are simulated for our protection. War is far crueler.

It is either war without end or art without boundaries. A choice is upon each of us, and we must pick a side and choose our weapons wisely. I chose art long ago. Join me.