*Why Movie Criticism?

Why is movie (and pop cultural) criticism such fertile ground for popular political analysis? It’s certainly something I engage in whole-heartedly.

You may have read about sportswriting becoming a liberal profession, and while that is interesting too, this is a fairly different dynamic. Sportswriting has long produced far-ranging criticism because it’s such a Rorschach blot. Sports is so empty and so chaotic (and so emotionally charged) that what we read into it says a great deal about ourselves. Like financial opinionating, there’s a lot of information and little hard theory, so it’s the perfect sea for projecting your ideology onto. (It’s hard not to see the ideology in the hilarious Fire Joe Morgan.) This is not entirely a good idea.

Movie-criticism-as-political-analysis doesn’t come out of the same tradition, especially when you devote thousands of words to decade old movies. There will always be a market for adding to the hype of an upcoming movie by saying How One Actress Is Racist or Defending The Casting Of A Racially Charged Role, but that’s not the same as thumb-suckers about movies past.

In fact, presentism is always a problem in philosophical writing (and no there’s not a hard line between political and philosophical.) Bloggers write essays on timeless subjects, people ooh and ah over them for a few days... and that’s it. If you’re very lucky you get as remembered as Tolerance For The Out Group, but usually such insight porn gets no more than a few days shelf-life. Who links to Less Wrong or The Last Psychiatrist posts anymore?

Instead, virality demands insight-porn about ongoing events. Tell us how your theory of anomie explains Trump. Look at feminism through the lens of a gamerbro’s bad breakup. Explain how Hillary Clinton is the perfect incarnation of the posthuman subject (oops I need to write that one.)

However, as most comedians and philosophers know, fuck topicality. Your “insight” is now trapped in a context that will seem over-rated and over-discussed next week, and completely foreign and opaque in five years. You’ve given your deepest thoughts a shelf life, and a very short one at that.

(This was much of the drive behind Vox’s “explainer journalism card stacks” where topical content could be evergreen and easily refreshed for whenever a subject comes to the fore again. I think history has given that approach a resounding “eh”.)

So no one’s going to read your dry thesis on social cliques and judgment, or they’re going to forget your fragile hot-take on Mencius Moldbug once everyone stops caring what Lambda Conference is. What are you to do.

The answer is movies (or, if everyone has read it, some books. Or a play if for some reason everyone in the country becomes obsessed with a Broadway hit.) If you write a political analysis of the themes in a movie - not whether a certain actress is in political trouble, that’s just gossip, but about the movie itself - then it feels like a live story. But it’s also a story people will understand decades later, as one they know the details of and can even immerse themselves in by rewatching the movie.