When New York Press critic Armond White panned the universally admired Toy Story 3, the disapproval he expressed and the backlash it inspired were so "predictable" that they were, well, predicted. Bumping TS3 from its briefly "100% Fresh" standing at the critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, White's piece (entitled "Bored Game") channeled a steady stream of pissed off Pixar loyalists to the Press website. "Registered just to say I think you are a massive twat and I feel really sorry for you," user woahreally weighed in. "Whoever ur boss is should be slapped for allowing you to publish this disaster of a review," opined the inventively pseudonymed usuckballs.
The comments-section calls for White to be fired are occasionally hilarious in their venom and vulgarity, all the more so for being so spectacularly self-defeating—could the Press have mounted a more successful campaign to increase their web traffic and user registrations? And there's the rub. White's detractors accuse of him being a "contrarian," someone who bucks the critical establishment and defies popular taste out of little more than cynical self-promotion and antisocial perversity. (This highly circulated chart of Armond's pans and praises has been offered as definitive "proof" that his opinions are reflexively reactionary.) But if this is true, any principled stand against White paradoxically rewards and enables him. "Don't feed the trolls," as the saying goes.
For what it's worth, White insists these aren't his motives: "I don't say these things to call attention to myself or to get a rise out of people. I say them because I believe them." And he is not without his supporters; check out House contributor Steven Boone's celebratory profile. More common are the agnostics who abstain from passing judgment on White's sincerity but object to the mob-like mentality manifested in, say, a petition to have White's byline expunged from Rotten Tomatoes. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, the anti-backlash argument goes, Tomatometers be damned! Even if Armond is a contrarian, his consensus-busting reviews make for a useful kind of thought exercise, forcing readers to look "beyond the hype."
Now honestly: does this whole post already sound a little blah blah blah? Armond-fueled flare-ups have attracted progressively larger crowds of commentators and rubberneckers, but the (let's be charitable) dialogue hasn't advanced in any meaningful way. Each new controversy, dominated by culture-war caricatures and the politics of personality, feels increasingly manufactured for its own sake. Substantive insights tend to get lost in a sea of snark, ad hominem and empty polemics. New York magazine's 2009 profile of White was admirable in its way for lowering the temperature of the debate, but its even-handed insistence on balance (that there are two sides to every argument and each must be presented in an equally sympathetic light) was ultimately just as mystifying. Is Armond White a principled critic or an opportunistic crackpot—or something in between?
Here's what I'd like to do in this post. Let's concede White his de gustibus however much he insists on the disputandum. With all due respect to Cinema Blend's Joshua Tyler, there is no such thing as a film "so self-evident[ly] good" that arguing "the opposite isn't just a different opinion, it's a wrong opinion." To counter an evaluative judgment with an "objective" consensus is simply untenable—critical orthodoxy evolves over time and even the most rarefied masterpiece can be productively critiqued. But Tyler is right in his belief that not all opinions are equal. We can evaluate the evaluations. Reviews should be challenged on the grounds of descriptive accuracy, clarity of expression and intellectual consistency. More ephemeral qualities like fairness, usefulness and originality can be grounded in textual evidence and comparative criticism. No one's opinion is more objectively right than any other, but there's no question that some are better argued, better supported and ultimately more interesting.
So let's go through White's TS3 review one paragraph at a time. (There are five total.) Maybe you think this is a tedious waste of time. It's one thing to retweet "What an idiot!" but to offer a comprehensive close-reading may seem pointless, even pretentious. My feeling is that if the subject is worth discussing, it's worth discussing well. At a time when fuzzy think pieces repeatedly wonder "Do critics still matter?", Armond has been one of the few professional reviewers whose arguments have inspired popular debate—for better or for worse? White will no doubt find himself mired in future dust-ups and the same arguments will be trotted out yet again. So what's the harm in a piece that tries to tackle the topic systematically? We all know how White has been judged by his peers. What interests me more is how he will be judged by history.
The core of White's critique is right in the lede (somewhat predictably packaged in one of his better-than tropes):
"Pixar has now made three movies explicitly about toys, yet the best movie depiction of how toys express human experience remains Whit Stillman's 1990 Metropolitan. As class-conscious Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) tries fitting in with East Side debutantes, he discovers his toy cowboy pistol in his estranged father's trash. Without specifying the model, Stillman evokes past childhood, lost innocence and Townsend's longing for even imagined potency. But Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism."
Metropolitan is a film that White likes a lot; he refers to it regularly in his reviews and last year introduced a screening of the work at New Directors/New Films. So how can he so categorically misremember this moment? The scene involves Clements and Stillman stand-by Chris Eigeman, and it's the latter who discovers the junked toys and lets loose a wistful reverie: "It's incredible the things some people throw away: Steiff stuffed animals, an Aurora model motoring set, a Derringer! Do you remember the Derringer craze? These are the toys of our generation. The childhood of our whole generation is represented here." The toys are not Eigeman's own and yet he too has an immediate emotional connection with them, one that hinges explicitly on brand-name nostalgia; the "specif[ic] model" of cap gun is not only named, it's named twice. There's something of the connoisseur in Eigeman's reaction—these are collector's items!—but his monologue mainly speaks to the ways that our childhood memories are inextricably (trade-) marked by the corporate past.
So it's not surprising that recognizable brands provide the models for several of TS3's main characters (Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Barbie and Ken, Slinky the dog) and a few minor ones (the Barrel of Monkeys, the Farmer Says See-n-Say, Chatter Telephone). White's complaint that this is commercially crass "product placement" misconstrues a much more interesting reality. As a subsidiary of Disney, Pixar could have best maximized the ancillary profits from prefabricated toy sales in one of two ways: limiting themselves to the Disney pantheon (like in the Kingdom Hearts videogame series) or the roster of a single, highest-bidding manufacturer. The TS3 lineup is instead drawn from the stables of many companies: Milton Bradley, Hasbro, Tyco, Mattell, Fisher Price. By licensing individual properties from multiple agencies, Pixar is making far less money than they could; their choices have little to do with the financial imperatives of corporate synergy.
So what do the above toys have in common? I'd say they are all iconic brands, perennial favorites that have transcended their historical specificity to become timeless classics. They are brands in the way that "Kleenex" and "Band-Aid" are brands. In that sense they are not that different from the original characters based on generic models: Woody (the cowboy), Buzz (the spaceman), Hamm (the piggy bank), Lots-O'-Huggin' (the teddy bear) and the majority of TS3's characters, instantly identifiable but non-proprietary. Of the vast array of playthings on display at the Sunnyside Daycare Center, only a handful correspond to trademarked designs. There are literally dozens of opportunities for product placement that are not capitalized on. The branded exceptions are of a piece with the film's world-making and with the Pixar team's layered homages to their creative predecessors. In an era of productions that mechanically monetize preexistent properties (Alvin and the Chipmunks anyone?), White's canned anti-corporate critique is embarrassingly misdirected.
You'd never know it from Armond's review, but the entire plot of TS3 is a self-evidently explicit critique of commercialism's two complimentary principles: endless novelty (Andy's emotional connection to the toys is based on his life-long relationship with them) and disposability (the idea of simply junking old toys is made horrifying, that of donating them to a younger generation elevated to a moral good). One could argue that these themes are insincere or hypocritical in the context of a commercial mega-production, but this is not an argument White makes. He dismisses the film as "strictly a celebration of consumerism" without any reference to these tropes. That's either oblivious or dishonest.
Paragraph two is primarily plot synopsis, with a second better-than thrown in:
"I feel like a 6-year-old having to report how in Toy Story 3 two dolls—Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen)—try to save a toy box of childhood playthings from either disuse or imprisonment as donations to a daycare center because their human owner, 17-year-old Andy, packs them up as he heads off to college. The toys wage battle with the daycare center's cynical veteran cast-offs: Hamm the Piggy Bank pig, Lotsa Hugs and Big Baby. But none of these digital-cartoon characters reflect human experience; it's essentially a bored game that only the brainwashed will buy into. Besides, Transformers 2 already explored the same plot to greater thrill and opulence."
As many commenters have noted, Toy Story mainstay Hamm is not one of the daycare's denizens. It's a small but glaringly obvious mistake that your average "6-year-old" could have caught, and arguably a testament to how little attention White was able to muster.
The comparison to Transformers' "greater opulence" seems beyond dispute—one may prefer the cartoonishly simplified Pixar aesthetic to Michael Bay's retina-searing CGI, but on a purely descriptive level the latter's greater visual complexity is undeniable. The question of "thrills" is more subjective. Transformers' cinematic spectacle is more viscerally overwhelming, but one could counter that TS3's investment in characterization enables a deeper emotional investment in the action. White's criticism about a lack of "human experience" is somewhat nebulous, but preceding an unfavorable comparison to Transformers, it seems willfully perverse. Bay's Autobots were barely differentiated characters; one could generously describe them as "archetypal," but even that seems like a stretch. Beyond the literal point of comparison (visual styles), this better-than juxtaposition seems intellectually inconsistent and self-negating.
Paragraph three:
"While Toy Story 3's various hazards and cliffhangers evidence more creativity than typical Pixar product (an inferno scene was promising, Lotsa Hugs' cannily evokes mundane insensitivity), I admit to simply not digging the toys-come-to-life fantasy (I don't babysit children, so I don't have to) nor their inevitable repetition of narrative formula: the gang of animated, talking objects journey from one place to another and back—again and again. It recalls how Tim Burton's atrocious Alice in Wonderland repeated narrative stasis without exercising the famous line: "It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place." Burton's omission of that legendary, therapeutic slogan parallels how Toy Story 3 suckers fans to think they can accept this drivel without paying for it politically, aesthetically or spiritually."
The breathless run-on sentence that opens the paragraph is syntactically confused; one of White's two parenthetical examples of "hazards and cliffhangers" is an unrelated point about characterization, and what exactly does the preposition "their" refer back to? Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear (White both gets the name wrong and tacks on an apostrophe that would be incorrect in any case) is an emotionally warped and diabolically manipulative character; to say that he embodies "mundane insensitivity" (everyday thoughtlessness?) is just incredibly wide of the mark.
White's categorization of the franchise's "narrative formula" accurately describes the storytelling template, but he then pawns off this descriptive insight as an evaluative appraisal. Yes, the story is based on a quest scenario—much like the majority of children's fantasy. Another franchise where the characters "journey from one place to another and back, again and again" is the Indiana Jones series, which White (a Spielberg enthusiast) adored. Again it's a question of intellectual consistency. As for "not digging the toys-come-to-life fantasy," should one take this as a tacit confession that White never gave the film a chance? But how would you then square this with his enthusiasm for Small Soldiers (below)?
The Alice in Wonderland analogy is indefensibly incoherent. The "legendary" line White quotes is from Chapter Two of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where it appears in an exchange between Alice and the Red Queen. After running at high-speed to the point of collapse, Alice discovers that she is in exactly the same place as she started:
Alice looked round her in great surprise. "Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'"
"Of course it is," said the Queen, "What would you have it?"
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
"I'd rather not try, please!" said Alice.
That line manifests the impossible logic of a maddeningly illogical world. How can White possibly construe this as a "therapeutic slogan"? It suggests to me that he is far less familiar with the Carroll works than he pretends. As for the criticism that Burton's film "repeated narrative stasis without exercising that famous line"—what could this mean? That Burton's stasis was static when it should have been dynamic? And what is the logical point of comparison in the final sentence's "parallel" between Burton's narrative structure and TS3's refusal to challenge audience complacency? It seems completely apples and oranges to me. Maybe there's an interesting insight buried there, but it's lost in White's sloppy prose.
Here are paragraphs four and five:
"Look at the Barbie and Ken sequence where the sexually dubious male doll struts a chick-flick fashion show. Since it serves the same time-keeping purpose as a chick-flick digression, it's not satirical. We're meant to enjoy our susceptibility, not question it, as in Joe Dante's more challenging Small Soldiers. Have shill-critics forgotten that movie? Do they mistake Toy Story 3's opening day for 4th of July patriotism?
"When Toy Story 3 emulates the suspense of prison break and horror films, it becomes fitfully amusing (more than can be said for Wall-E or Up) but this humor depends on the recognition of worn-out toys which is no different from those lousy Shrek gags. Only Big Baby, with one Keane eye and one lazy eye, and Mr. Potato Head's deconstruction into Dali's slip-sliding "Persistence of Memory" are worthy of mature delectation. But these references don't meaningfully expand even when the story gets weepy. The Toy Story franchise isn't for children and adults, it's for non-thinking children and adults. When a movie is this formulaic, it's no longer a toy because it does all the work for you. It's a sap's story."
The fashion show sequence is most definitely satirical; one could arguably find its satire witless or excessively broad, but to declare that it is not satire is descriptively inaccurate. Nor is it a "time-keeping" digression but rather a narratively integrated episode in the final act's escape scenario. And the connection White makes between these two points is still more dubious—why can't a narrative interlude be satirical?
The comparison to Joe Dante's Small Soldiers is another self-defeating comparison. In Dante's enjoyable and underrated film, a toy company is acquired by a conglomerate that specializes in Defense contracting. Using microchips from missile guidance systems, the company creates a series of action figures with artificial intelligence who can fully interact with children. Where TS3 is a tale about the "secret life of toys" who become inanimate whenever their owner plays with them, Small Soldiers is a wish-fulfillment fantasy about cutting-edge playthings, ones that come preprogrammed with their own narratives and personalities. It's the latter who "do all the work for you." White's comparison gets it completely backwards. And if Small Soldiers has a critique of commercial culture, it's that corporations shouldn't be marketing violence and militarism to children—a critique that extends more logically to Transformers 2 than Toy Story 3.
The opening sentence of the final paragraph is logically confused. The generic parody in the third-act prison break has nothing to do with the cartoon cameos made by old toys—not only are these separate discourses, they barely overlap (only one new character, Monkey with Tambourines, is introduced in the final act). It's a total non sequitur.
The suggestion that Big Baby references the work of Barbara Keane seems like a stretch; her eyes looks like perfectly average-sized doll eyes to me, nothing like Keane's waifs. The Dali analogy is interesting (the materialist inversion of softness and hardness is apt), though I'm not sure this is really a "reference." (If the animators were referencing anything, I'd think it was the facial disarticulations of late-period Picasso).
The rest of the review is comprised of empty invective. There's an obligatory swipe at the "shill critics" who have praised the film. In characteristic fashion, White rails against his colleagues en masse but does not substantively engage a specific argument by a specific writer. Ultimately though, it's the swipes he takes at the audience that are most objectionably nasty: viewers who enjoyed TS3 are "brainwashed," "suckers," "saps," and (my personal favorite) "non-thinking children." Take that, kids!
So where does this leave us? By my count there are about three declarative statements in this entire piece that are not categorically inaccurate. The rest is a seething tissue of factual errors, self-negating examples, glaring elisions, logical inconsistencies, specious industrial analysis, mystifying rhetorical constructions and basic grammatical errors. It speaks for itself. As White's critical hero and much invoked "mentor" Pauline Kael once said in an interview, "No one should trust any critic who does not take the art form he is writing about seriously enough to write a decent paragraph. I simply do not trust the observations of people who write sloppily or in illiterate hyperbole." Of course, all of these mistakes would be far less objectionable if they weren't used to prop up some of the most misanthropic mudslinging that any "professional" reviewer has passed off as criticism since, well, the last outrageous thing Armond wrote.
Is White being sincere? I think so. I think he sincerely despises his "shill" colleagues and the "brainwashed" audience. I think he sincerely sees himself as a maverick outsider to the media establishment ("They don't see what I see, where I'm coming from—they couldn't") and that he is sincerely invested in this narcissistic fantasy to the exclusion of most everything else. Reading White, I am constantly reminded that the human intellect, which we often analogize to a courtroom judge dispassionately weighing arguments and evidence, actually operates much more like a lawyer-for-hire, rationalizing and enabling our emotional narratives. What makes Armond's reviews perversely fascinating is that he is so obviously intelligent, yet this intelligence has been harnessed to the warped imperatives of an increasingly frustrated personality. Where your average critical hack job is just banal, White's ability to disconnect the dots exerts a kind of bizarro brilliance. Try to take any of his recent reviews as seriously as he insists and you'll find yourself, like Alice and the Red Queen, running in hermeneutic circles, getting nowhere fast. It makes for mediocre criticism but lurid psychodrama.
Most readers enjoy critical controversy for its own sake and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Spirited debate leavened with a little bit of vitriol is a guilty pleasure I wouldn't begrudge anyone. Personally I find White's dependably combative stance emotionally exhausting, but I recognize that the polemic is a rhetorical form like any other, and I read him in the hope of gleaning substantive ideas. Unfortunately, his work has yielded progressively diminishing returns. His TS3 review contains practically nothing (nothing!) in the way of analytical insight or emotional truth. It's little more than a hate letter to humanity—can't say I'm surprised that humanity has been hating him right back.
But I have to object on principle to the movie-mad mobs who would like to see Armond banished from Rotten Tomatoes. The anger they've expressed may be perfectly justifiable, but their underlying insistence that critics affirm public taste is absurd and even (I'll concede you this one, Armond) fascistic. It's about much more than the reviewer's freedom of expression. It's about the reading public's right to access materials in an open-source culture. I value the free exchange of ideas above and beyond the desire to see White punished for his antisocial agitation. If Armond can be digitally deleted from a public forum, who's next? The Internet age must insist on its own civic virtues.
That said, I think White is only worth engaging if the response expresses more than the reader's indignation. Where there is smoke, there is not necessarily fire. One needn't provide an exhaustive analysis like I've attempted here; this was really more of a one-off exercise. But the above paragraphs on "product placement," for example, could productively stand as an autonomous blog post. In disagreeing with White on this point, I tried to provide my own take on a material issue raised by the film, one that has interest in and of itself. If this scores Armond's review a few extra "uniques," so be it. We can afford to extend White the generosity that he so stubbornly refuses everyone else. After all, isn't it easy to be kind knowing that the history books won't?
This is a powerful piece. Discourse is so cheap now, it's sad how few people take their own diatribes seriously. If more critics could take on the public discourse at an intensive, engaged level, the whole environment would be elevated significantly. I applaud this response for its focused, well-argued approach to movie criticism… something that's lately become too obsessed with smoke and mirrors and intellectual evasiveness.
Excellent piece. I go hot and cold on White…but he is certainly an invaluable sounding board. Whenever I'm in doubt about a unanimously something'd movie, I can always count on White to give me a half dozen different angles to contemplate it. I can't say that I always believe him- so much of it is so predictable, that it may as well have been written before (something not helped by his regular misrepresentation of certain events and characters, on a factual level). The Small Soldiers comparison doesn't really work…but it does illustrate the opinion that Pixar needs a swift kick in the nuts, that Dante used the same tools to go to a far more interesting place.
Outside of being outraged every so often by one of his comparisons or absurd connecting of the dots, the thing that most consistantly brings White down in my eyes is his utter disdain for everyone else in his field. Oh, and stuff like practically accusing Gus Van Sant of pedophelia. And a dozen other things that just popped into my head (Who DIDN'T love the Godardian aspects of G.I. Joe?).
Still unable to come to terms with him. But that in itself is something of a relief. I think I've pegged just about all the critics I read regularly, and am only really engaged by something particularly incisive or entertaining. White is never not engaging, and I find him very hard to ignore. Then again, in this particular case, it may be because I have serious problems with Pixar, and am grateful for someone consistantly calling out "Bullshit", even if its for different reasons that my own.
Round and round it goes…
Spectacular! Perfectly dispassionate, usefully analytical, extremely well-written. It's a rare pleasure to stumble upon something like this in the wilds of the Internet.
I've found that, in general, a critic's value is inversely proportional to how often he or she criticizes other people and their particular opinions of a work instead of simply criticizing the work itself. Using that algorithm, White's value would certainly place somewhere in the negative range.
This is a fascinating piece with much to mull over. I would dispute one point, which is that White does seem to me to understand Lewis Carroll. Missing from Burton's film is that Carrollian illogical logic, which is duh kind of central. Anyway, I agree that this Rotten Tomatoes thing is fascistic. Don't we want more strong alternate viewpoints? Most critics are so impressionable and fear for their jobs if they get too much hate mail. White is unique in seeming to thrive on it.
Incisive, fair and thorough analysis. I think you nailed it!
White is definitely sincere and fairly intelligent. With such an Olympian view of his own intellect and such disdain for most people, he's an individual whom a psychiatrist would find fascinating. His dismissal of children is especially disturbing. He does not seem to be a man with much happiness in his life.
Those who mindlessly rail against him are just feeding his already inflated ego. He has all the right in the world to express his opinions, no matter how misdirected they might be. I have no doubt he works very hard at forming them.
Very nice. I'm glad to see a thoughtful response to one of Armond White's reviews rather than the near-knee jerk ad hominems and dismissals his most notorious articles usually elicit.
Especially appreciated is your extremely insightful response to White's attack on the product placements in the film. However, it feels to me like an incomplete response without an acknowledgment of a) the Totoro cameo (as Miyazaki creations are now at least in some way a part of the Disney/Pixar animation family) and b) the fact that original Pixar creations like Lotso Huggin', Big Baby, bilingual Buzz Lightyear, etc. are now available for purchase on a toy shelf near you. (Probably next to the Transformers.)
Many thanks to everyone who commented or re-tweeted. My tangentially related thoughts on Transformers 2 (for Film Comment magazine) is up on their website; since I'm pretty sure NO ONE read that review, I hope you'll indulge me for riding my own coattails.
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/ja09/transformers2.htm
@Brian D: good points which I wouldn't disagree with, but let me offer two qualifications.
a) The Pixar people were proselytizing on behalf of Miyazaki long before they were acquired by Disney. Toy Story director John Lasseter wrote a liner-notes intro for a Studio Ghibli laser-disc box-set way back in 1996 (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/miyazaki/miyazaki_lasseterhomage.txt). I'm sure no one at Disney was upset that these two divisions were mutually benefiting each other, but I think the homage is a deeply meaningful tribute.
b) Commercial movie making is inextricably tied up with, you know, commerce. The production of toy tie-ins is a given. What White was suggesting is that Pixar's primary motivation was to move product, that their creative choices were compromised by crassly calculating decisions. And I just don't think this is true. I think this is a rare example of a creative team being given carte blanche to make the film just the way they want to make it.
Swell piece, and more than White probably deserves. Unlike some of the above, I don't believe he is a sincere operator. His work, on the whole, seems designed to present himself as a maverick, when he isn't settling personal scores (e.g. Noah Baumbach), but is devoid of any critical construct or even logical argumentation to defend his conclusions (unlike, say, Kehr or Kael). He's just a crank.
And an amplification to yours: the main commercial toys in the original Toy Story, which have been carried over to the most recent iteration, were all ones that had long fallen out of fashion (like Mr. Potato Head) who benefited from inclusion in TS1, not the reverse. I don't know the details, but I'm willing to bet Pixar did not exact major money for these placements.
Wonderful piece. You really dissected White's critique with a cool head. I was also shocked by the number of blatant mistakes in his review. If you don't like a movie, fine, but don't base your conclusions on bogus arguments.
Tambourines? Tambourines?! Monkey with CYMBALS, dude! Man, this torpedos your whole argument.
Great piece. However, I can't be the only person who has sympathy for quite a few of the points White makes, one being the Ken "chick-flick fashion show." Satire is, by definition, criticism; there isn't an ounce of criticism in that scene. There are laughs, and there is wit, but it plays on our recognition of the form instead of challenging us to disown it. The same goes for the prison break scene; the joy is in seeing toys inhabit the structure, Dreamworks-style, not tear it down.
That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy these scenes; far from it. But I don't begrudge White for pointing out that these are somewhat lesser pleasures than Pixar is capable of delivering.
@alshain: I like the way you phrased your thoughts on the fashion show: "It plays on our recognition of the form instead of challenging us to disown it." Very insightful. I think the satire is directed less at the form (fashion montage) than at Ken's vanity and narcissism, his "metrosexuality." For me there's something slightly reactionary about Ken's whole character–it's like the film is implicitly making fun of boys who liked to play with Barbie dolls–so it's worth asking if the satire is incisive or progressive. But we *are* meant meant to find his investment in his wardrobe absurd, and in that sense I think it qualifies as satire on a purely descriptive level. As for fashion-show montages in general, I'm not sure I want to disown them! I sort of like watching Julia Roberts try on lots of outfits in Pretty Woman. Guilty pleasure, sure, but any tired trope of popular cinema can be enlivened by a fresh execution, so I don't think we need reject it out of hand.
@Kurt Busiek: Further proof that us "bloggers" really are idiots after all! A professional would never have made a mistake like that. I apologize to everyone here for wasting your time and for my extreme pretense at intellectualizing what is basically a hobby.
@larrydoyle: "[White] is devoid of any critical construct or even logical argumentation to defend his conclusions (unlike, say, Kehr or Kael)." Yes, this is exactly where he comes up short. White's critical heroes, Kael and Sarris, argued all the time and it sometimes got a little personal; but at the end of the day they were arguing *for* something, they had coherent world views. White just grasps at whatever rhetorical gambit is conveniently at hand. Ever notice how he simultaneously dismisses his critical colleagues as "film nerd elitists" out of touch with popular taste AND industry flacks / populist hacks whose failure to uphold critical standards has vulgarized popular culture? It seems so incoherent.
I'd say you could dig yourself a nice little web niche of critical reviews vis-à-vis D.F. Wallace/Klosterman with this kind of quality prose and insight. Well done.
NYPress responds, sort of! http://www.nypress.com/blog-6798-baffled-candians-talk-to-armond-white-to-figure-him-out.html
"Blogging from afar" is a pretty hilarious metaphor to invoke when you refuse to even *name* the person you are referring to in your blog post. And the stuff about Rizov at the end is so typical: just a nasty personal attack, no attempt to respond to anything he's written.
Did you know J Hoberman is the Mabuse-like master of our universe? It's true! He rules a global network from his high-backed, spinning leather armchair. He's even got a pair of hypnosis glasses with spinning red vortexes in the lens. Diabolical!
Hey Paul,
Just wanted to say that this piece is excellent, and enormously helpful. Bravo on sorting through the vacuous with your own substance.
Overall, a very well-reasoned, well-thought out piece. However, I find your characterization of my petition as mob-like to be misinformed and misleading. In order to be mob-like, the petition would have to put passion over reason, or the emotions of fear or anger over rational thinking. Simply obtaining a large number of signatures doesn’t automatically make something mob-like, or else every single successful petition in the world would be the result of a “mob.” If you do believe the idea at the heart of the petition puts passion or fear or anger over reason or logic, then I can understand what you say. However, after having spent an incredible amount of time and effort on debunking White, I’m not sure how you can argue with my conclusions that he is either merely a troll or incredibly misinformed.
As the creator of the “Ban Armond White” petition that you deride, I can only attest to my own motives. When you claim that I want critics to “affirm public taste,” you are simply wrong. I have been saying this for a long time: I want debate on film. I cherish honest debate on film. However, Armond is being contrary for its own sake and that will NEVER spark true discourse. I want those who disagree with me to make real points, not “categorically inaccurate” statements or “seething tissue of factual errors, self-negating examples, glaring elisions, logical inconsistencies, specious industrial analysis, mystifying rhetorical constructions and basic grammatical errors,” as you yourself so elegantly wrote.
I concede your point that it is dangerous to remove voices from the internet. However, I’m not in favor of removing White from the internet. I just think that Rottentomatoes.com, as an aggregator, should not give equal voice to him, as he is either an incredibly bad critic or acting in bad faith. After all, you or I would not be able to post on Rottentomatoes.com. Does that mean that they are committing an act of censorship upon us? Certainly not. They are merely exercising standards of who is an appropriate voice in the critic community and who is not. I am just trying to make sure those standards rise beyond the level of critical nonsense that you yourself just plowed through in great detail. If we can’t improve upon the level of film criticism that we encounter as lovers of film, what is the point of having critics? Or rather, what was the point of all the work you just did?
@koblenza. Thanks for this thoughtful response. In truth, the one part of my article I have been second guessing is my use of the word "mob," which does strike me now as an unnecessarily loaded word choice–one person's lynch mob is another's democratic participation. You're right.
And perhaps I also owed it to you to distinguish more finely your own petition from the sentiments your average commenter has expressed. On principle, one should always address the highest embodiment of an opposing viewpoint, not the lowest. So I will concede you that as well.
Here's what you wrote:
"This troll has been screwing up the Tomatometer for years. He's been railing against the most popular and beloved movies, while praising utter garbage. The worst offense, however, is that his reviews are incomprehensible, off-topic, overly political and generally insulting to his audience. Having bad taste in movies is one thing – not being able to justify it is much worse."
You then list movies he likes, and movies he dislikes. Though you rightly point out that his "worst offense" is the "incomprehensibility" of his reviews, you also frame his taste in movies as damning evidence. Maybe the best way to move forward would be for you to clarify something for me: when you complain that he has been "railing against the most popular and beloved movies," how is that different from wanting critics to "affirm public taste." Maybe there is an important distinction there that you feel deserves clarification.
And thanks again for reading and responding.
@scrasysnow: I'm not really familiar with the work of (Chuck?) Klosterman. Is there any writing of his you could recommend, either pieces online or one of his books? Thanks!
@brunick: C. Klosterman generally uses pop culture as a vehicle for social commentary; it's not nearly as erudite (or esoteric) as Wallace (or re: this essay) but certainly closer in style to say, your 'Transformers 2′ review. 'Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs' is a good place to start.
@scarysnow: Two dollars and change for a used copy = internet impulse buy. Thanks for the tip, looking fwd to it.
Paul, this is a wonderful piece, which cuts through loads of tripe to the heart of the matter. I too have often respected White, but his hit to miss ratio is staggeringly high lately, his reasoning flawed, if at all clear, and his biases barely hidden from site.Whoever put together that bit at the NY Press concerning the Canadian interview is a prick: I get, like much of Armond's snide commentary, that the last-sentence jab at our northern neighbors is intended as a joke, but I don't think it's funny, and nor do I think it conceals the real malice that underlies the statement. WTF was with White's similar comment in his Splice review? Did the man take the South Park movie to heart?
I am with you for much of this, but when you conclude that White's review of Toy Story 3 is "little more than a hate letter to humanity," you are, I think, revealing more about your own biases and commitments than about White's flaws. It's a big leap to start with White's snidenesses at the expense of the "non-thinking" and the "brainwashed" (which clearly have to be read as part of an underlying critique of the marketing of cinema) and to wind up portraying him as the enemy of humanity. The implication of your text is finally that humanity is constituted by the people who love Toy Story 3 and that because White fails to make his case against the film, he is to be rejected as anti-human. This stance betrays the compulsory sentimentality in the name of the "human" that White is implicitly criticizing and that you yourself criticize in your comments on the truly idiotic drive to remove White from the Tomatometer (from which any film critic worthy of the name would probably rather be excluded).
@Rob Humanick: yup!
@roscoe: It's not hard for me to imagine an incisive critique of TS3; in fact, Richard Brody has already written it: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/06/sheesh.html Your implied criticisms of TS3's emotional button-pushing could similarly comprise the basis of a coherent, principled challenge. You shouldn't misconstrue my anti-anti arguments as an unqualified endorsement; I wasn't reviewing TS3, I was analyzing White's own arguments about it. || I did not and would never reject anyone as "anti-human." I'm honestly not sure what that would even mean. What I object to in White's writing is the ethically incoherent nastiness that infects nearly everything he now writes. I have yet to discern a coherent cultural and aesthetic philosophy unifying his critiques; the primary through lines in his work are (a) self-congratulation and (b) contempt for others. The intellectual justifications seem purely ex post facto and–on the micro-level of individual reviews and especially on the macro-level of his entire body of work–increasingly nonsensical. || As for your thoughts on Rotten Tomatoes, I would like to hear you elaborate them. I find that many of the unqualified anti-RT positions manifest an empty, self-defeating cultural elitism. As a clearinghouse for critical reviews, RT is an exceptionally useful tool; if it didn't exist, I would have to manually scroll through google search results to survey the field of contemporary criticism, an incredible waste of time. (Granted there are better curated "aggregators," like David Hudson's excellent yeoman work for Mubi or individually customized RSS feeds.) But the fact is that RT's composite scores are not primarily displacing traditional film criticism, but supplementing and *promoting* it. There's one simple fact that is constantly elided in the hand-wringing "think" pieces over the intellectual impoverishment of internet film crit: more people are reading more film reviews (including those published by the legacy media) then ever before. The journalism industry has a revenue problem but they certainly do not have a readership problem. Because of Armond's inclusion on RT, he has reached more readers than ever before. The NYPress would almost certainly not opt out of RT if they had the option. (Bleg: do they have the option? Is RT's blurbage fair use or could NYP insist on their digital copywright?) In any case, the NYPress editors have clearly fueled the controversies and angry readerships: in February 2009 they posted a poll to their website to vote for White's "worst recent review" (they subsequently changed the wording to "review you disagree[d] with the most.") That is an example of an organization deliberately cultivating an adversarial relationship with their audience in order to monetize that hatred. The relationship there is at best unexamined, at worst hypocritically self-serving.
Paul, I wasn't criticizing Rotten Tomatoes as an aggregator of links to reviews, which of course is useful, but the Tomatometer as a numerical representation of critical opinion, which does more harm than good since it reduces criticism to evaluation and evaluation to a number, while implying that there is an arbitrary standard basis for comparing all films with one another. When I said you were implying that White should be "rejected as anti-human" I admit I was going farther than warranted in restating your already hyperbolic characterization of his review as "a hate letter to humanity." I just thought it was revealing that you used the category "humanity" rather than "people who love Toy Story 3." Anyway, I agree that Brody's review of TS3 – thank you for linking to it – is better criticism of the film than White's.
@roscoe: Fair enough!
Bravo to this brilliant article. This statement sums up Mr. White perfectly: "…he is sincerely invested in this narcissistic fantasy to the exclusion of most everything else…"
I wholeheartedly agree. While I haven't invested the attention to detail of the author, I believe most people will conclude by instinct that Armond's cynical view of the world is as much of a construction upon itself let alone the misguided comments expressed in his reviews. Mr. White lacks the talent to be a great reviewer, nor does his have the capacity of logic nor the freedom from his own emotionally-jaded psyche to offer any reasonable analysis – so he preserves his notoriety by moving against the grain of the general public. However, will such notoriety survive such a decisive and delicious deconstruction provided above? I think Armond's days are numbered.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing such a well-reasoned critique of Mr. White's maddening reviewing. I'm always happy to read an interesting contrarian viewpoint (I will always treasure Michael Feingold for writing of Vanessa Redgrave something like "She, of course, can't act, and never could" – I don't even agree with him, but it was refreshing to see such an unusual view expressed), but what I've encountered of Mr. White's writing suggests the worst kind of auteurism (I love Spielberg as much as the next filmgoer, but it's hard not to see the flaws in so many of his works), and his bizarre animosity toward Noah Baumbach (I must admit, one of my favorite filmmakers) is especially aggravating.
One of my first encounters with Mr. White's writing was him remarking of the characters in Squid and the Whale (I think he was quoting a friend, but approvingly) something like "I wouldn't want to live next to them, much less see a movie about them," a criticism which would seem to negate much of the best American cinema of the modern era (Scorsese, The Godfathers, There Will Be Blood). The characters in Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers movies are probably quite pleasant to live near but that doesn't make Ephron or Meyers good filmmakers.
And he actually liked Transformers 2? I'd be impressed if he could create a convincing, articulate defense of that ghastly monstrosity, but given the rest of his writing, I'm not expecting it.
Although your criticisms are mostly quite reasonable, I think you are unfair to White. It's true that he's a sloppy writer, and sometimes he says things that don't make any sense, particularly when topics like Capitalism and Race come up, but for all that, he seems to me the closest thing to Pauline Kael writing today, and I have to think that that's a good thing.
Anyways, TS3 is not a great movie, and I'm glad he ruined its perfect score. Richard Brody's review doesn't make much sense either, and his claims are backed up with as little argument. Furthermore, what he calls the movie's "only charming aspect" is in fact its fatal flaw. He says that "the movie gains much from the implicit reminiscence and self-portrait of its own confectioners," but is in fact the nostalgia of its creators that allows the movie's sentimental cop-out ending, an ending that is unfaithful to the emotional conflict implicit throughout the series and materialized in Lots-O-Huggin's nihilism. (and really, who cares how you spell his name?)
Both White and Brody find the movie's sentimentality false, and that puts them above most critics. But neither can explain why, and that puts them at about dead even for me.
@FredJR: my immediate impulse is to make a point by point argument as to why Kael is not just in a different league from Armond but leagues (multiple leagues) above him. But it would be a lot more interesting for me if you could (a) make a point or two about the connection you find between them or (b) choose a single review written by Armond in the last two years that you feel is worthy of Kael (my only qualification: that it be on a new release, not a revival of a classic). I've already made my case against Armond; it would probably be more appropriate and useful at this point to allow for some nuance and give him credit where it's deserved.
A friend of mine on the U.W.Madison film studies listserv just forwarded me some thoughts by the preeminent scholar Joseph McBride in response to this piece (or perhaps to the discussion prompted by the piece, I'm not quite sure). McBride quotes George Bernard Shaw ("New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.") and writes, "Armond White is one of the few contemporary reviewers who appreciates the artistry of Steven Spielberg. In time that will become received opinion in academia, as has been the case with Hitchcock, who similarly was scorned in his prime as a mere entertainer, a manipulator of mass emotion, etc."
I want to say that I am in complete and total agreement with McBride; Spielberg truly is the most unfairly maligned, criminally unappreciated director of that generation. My only qualification would be that White has probably done more to cement the negative consensus than initiate reevaluation. Isn't it just too easy to dismiss his enthusiasm as a willful provocation? By contrast, Nigel Morris' lucid, sustained and much needed corrective (Empire of Light) seems capable of actually converting the skeptics. And of course there's McBride's own biography, available used for $1.48(!) on Amazon.
well, to start out he uses a similar vocabulary ("pop," "phony"), and his sentences, although this is harder to prove, have a similar rhythm. But more than that, I think they have a similar attitude towards movies; that is, that movies are a populist medium. That may sound trivial or obvious, but I think movie critics tend to over-intellectualize their responses, which leads to lopsided reviews.
From this, the most obvious similarity between Kael and White is how they both see themselves as set against a complacent self-congratulating liberal orthodoxy (see his review of revolutionary road, or noise), although I suspect Armond White is some kind of Marxist, which she wasn't.
Of course you're right that Pauline Kael was much better and in a different league, but seeing as she isn't around, I'm glad we at least have him. For instance, White's excellent review of Rescue Dawn ends: "What appears unassuming turns out profound—as when Dengler waves palm fronds at what looks, to his delirious mind, like a rescue helicopter and he cries out, “Oh, God, please be real.” So it’s a gonzo satire of existentialism, too."
Where Armond has really rubbed a lot of us the wrong way that partially points to him being a contrarian for the sole sake of being one was his blatant flip-flop on "The Hurt Locker". In his review when it first got released, he sung nothing but praise; but weeks later after it got nearly-universal acclaim he started going out of his way in just about every subsequent review to badmouth it w/o offering even a word of praise. And something neither you nor any other writers have cited was a similar unjustified flip-flop on "L.A. Confidential". White badmouthed that film for years as much as he did "American Beauty", but if you go to the Crix Picks section of Variety magazine from 1997 when the film was released, you'll see White's name in the "Pro" section along with every New York critic except for only one who was in the "Mixed" section. Again, he initially favored the film until it became a bona-fide critical smash.
And on a non-contrarian matter, White has been (justly) taken to task for masturbating to every single Spielberg film, even dubious dreck like "Always" and "Hook". And not only that, he actually recommended two crappy movies from 1987, "Harry and the Hendersons" and "*batteries not included*, that just *happened* to have been merely executively produced by Spielberg. (However, hardly any writer has cited this because the only way I know about it is because I remember this Critic's Ratings section in the 1987 Premiere magazine issue that they put out every year that listed all these films and 20 critics' ratings of about 70 films of the year. Again, yes, the rememberance of a bona-fide film geek like myself.) And this also applied to Robert Altman's films, even unwatchable stuff by the likes of "O.C. and Stiggs" and "Ready to Wear". Hell, White even creamed in his jeans over every film Alan Rudolph made just becasue he used to be Altman's protege and Altman co-produced several of his films.
@FredJR: Apologies for the delay, I'm just getting back to this. Feeling pretty tired now so I'm going to outsource this rebuttal to the Grand Dame herself. Pauline Kael to Boston Globe magazine, June 1989:
"It distresses me, the number of people who write like me…It's like a succubus. It's awful to open something up hoping to read something [new] and find your own thoughts being echoed. And sometimes your own thoughts of so many years ago–that you wrote about a totally different picture–are being used to apply to something they don't even apply to!"
What a silly piece. Quibbling about spelling mistakes and errors in syntax does not qualify as "thoughtful analysis". Perhaps someone should run one of your reviews through a similar word-by-word interrogation and see what nonsense pops up? (Btw if it's clean, your sub-editor should get the kudos!).
The only valid point you make is highlighting the fascistic views of the Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic mob (similarly exhibited by last week's ridiculous slash film podcast). You'd think they'd made TS3 or Inception with their own hands, the way they protest a negative review!
I've picked up more insight from one of Armond's lines than I have in this entire tediously looooooong piece.
@rrrrrr: Thanks for the feedback. Your argument that good writing has nothing to do with spelling or syntax is bold and unconventional; it seems that you are something of a maverick yourself! I'll take the fact that you don't question the accuracy of these brief asides nor of the substantive bulk of the essay–even as you wish longingly for someone to do just that–as a tacit admission that you find the arguments solid.
And I would sincerely be thrilled it if someone responded to one of my pieces like this. I don't think I've published anything as consistently sloppy as White's TS3 review (though there are typos to be found for sure), and I would welcome feedback that dispassionately pointed out the factual errors in my arguments or the recurring weaknesses in my style. How else am I going to get better at this? Thanks for reading to the end despite the tedious length.
I loved this article! I signed up to comment on here (also, this is my first time here, pretty neat place it seems). I'm glad you did a deconstruction of his review, to try and figure it out.
While I agreed with you on 99.99% of things, there's one small thing I do disagree with you on, respectively- Armond White should be taken off of RT, and please hear me out as to why.
White is not a movie critic. He does not do the job of a critic (any critic). Said job, is to explore why this worked and that in a piece of art. He simply states his opinions as facts, and offers little to no validation for what he says/ writes, and offers no insight as to how he reached his conclusion.
He's just a guy, with an opinion, which happens to get published and read by thousands, if not more people weekly. Since he does not deconstruct, analyze, or in any other meaningful way, support his statements such as "Toy Story 3 sucked" (paraphrasing) he's not a critic, and thusly, should not be counted as one.
With that, excellent article!