“Vive le Nouveau Critique”: The Difference Between the 'New Critic and the BS that Passes for Popular Criticism These Days
The Why Critic and the How Critic are 98% of what passes for pseudo-intellectual criticism popular on the current sad state of the Internet. People who probably once loved movies and TV shows have been so shit-dipped in cyber-cynicism that they likely believe what they are writing is intelligent. It’s not.
The first fake critic out there is the one writing the How books. How did they film this? How was this made? What were the scandals? Did the actors fuck? This is gotcha journalism passing itself off as substantive writing. It’s not. While there's limited value in learning how movies and shows are made, it’s not a criticism of high caliber. It’s popcorn thinking.
The other fake critic out there is the one obsessed with the directors and the writers. Why did they make this? This type of criticism is mildly valuable to a deeper experience of art. Still, it is also debilitating in the sense that it tends to elevate the writers and directors of these films and shows to a place of near-worship, which is always the death of art and the beginning of religion with all its instant and inevitable wars that follow.
Now, the New Critic seeks to understand what the art means to a human being watching it. The New Critic doesn’t rely on other films, texts, thinkers, or anything outside the frame of what is displayed on the screen and the audio synced to it and projected through speakers.
In the 1950s, the French New Wave changed Cinema, but the movement began as a shift in cultural criticism of the viewer’s film experience. Those directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, and Varda) were, for the most part, critics of cinema's current limitations. They wanted more, so they dug deeper and produced more.
The visionaries who will change cinema now, in the middle of a commercial cinema crisis, will be New Critics unconcerned with how and why movies were made in the past. They will pick up their iPhones, tap the record button, and change the world. Vive le nouveau critique!
