I haven’t seen You Can See Everything. Or the other Lance Oppenheim film, Primetime. Digger, too. I was going to see The Odyssey in a theater, but things kept coming up. I missed the one week of hype for The Drama. I stayed away from Tony, and not just because I got tired of recommendations for Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The bigger Backrooms got, the more I wanted nothing to do with it; the same with Obsession. The polarization towards Camp Miasma—with friends militantly on either side of the pro and con debate—made me not want to have an opinion on it at all.
This is plenty for people to write me off as a bad film critic. Which is fine, given that I never set out to be a film critic, let alone a “good” one. Although, it’s my lack of drive and commitment there that also works as an advantage. When I’m at a major festival, for instance, I have little incentive to go out of my way to catch something buzzy, or something I “have to see,” because I’ve allotted myself the freedom to try and find what I’ll like, think about, and potentially expand those thoughts into writing or an interview. It’s freewheeling and fun, and there’s basically no money in it, which is also fine: in an industry where criticism increasingly functions like little more than PR, I’m happy to sling drinks for a living rather than battle over the scraps of cash.
Some of this stubbornness is an attitude problem. A psychoanalyst (armchair or otherwise) might draw a parallel to how, when growing up, the more my parents pressed me with questions, the less I’d want to answer any of them. But even if there’s some simple root, that personality quirk has developed into a stance against the way media is, more and more, designed around metatextual content (i.e. the content that spurs from the work itself, like posts on social media) rather than primacy being given to the content of the test itself. “Viral” advertising is older than the medium itself, but things like Hitchcock banning late admissions to Psycho or any of the parlor tricks William Castle pulled were different than the phenomenon we have now. In those cases, the point was to experience the work.
While a trick like a mid-film twist or a zap in your seat might grab your attention the first time around, they’re nothing compared to the afterlife of a good discourse cycle, where people spend days, weeks, if not entire months, circling endlessly around the same ideas in the same movies, like a content farm bot posting the same viral video with the same caption from elsewhere over and over to try to make a few bucks off Twitter Premium.
It took the film industry (like pretty much every business) some time to figure out how social media marketing could change their PR strategies. It wasn’t until companies like A24 really started to crack the formula in the mid-2010s did we find ourselves on the trajectory we’re on now. It’s one thing to have a “real” website made for The Blair Witch Project, and it's another entirely to have the medium being marketed on also be a public space of never-ending interaction. The internet isn’t a start-to-destination entity anymore, it’s ever-present and ubiquitous, and to make a “successful” marketing push, the product has to somehow become ubiquitous, too.
When the product is theoretically a work of entertainment, it’s fair to ask if part of that entertainment comes out of the afterlife of viewing, in the way that the people who saw it also now get the privilege of participating in the zeitgeist. On the one hand, this does maintain some of the social aspects of cinema. But on the other hand, it cheapens the work overall. Why do we have to talk about it so much? Is it not enough to just experience it?
The act of writing has a finality to it that online discourse doesn’t: once I’ve written about it, I’m done. When I’ve participated in the zeitgeist, I’m often disappointed, but not combative, I just want to talk about something else. When I saw Weapons last year, I thought it wasn’t a very good movie, so I wrote an okay column on it, and moved on while so many others were stuck in an endless orbit around it. But going into Weapons I knew that I’d have something to say about it, good or bad, and it did wind up being enough to spit out a few hundred words.
I wouldn’t know how to write about a film that doesn’t interest me, the words would never make it to the page. And now, more than ever, films are trying to get me to lose as much interest as possible by having people insist that these are things we need to talk in circles about until the next discourse movie pulls enough gravity away from the last one.