Hatchet jobs, anonymity and the internet: being a film critic in the 21st century

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/29/hatchet-jobs-anonymity-internet-kermode

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"Forrest Gump on a tractor." Those five words are probably my favourite film review ever. More importantly, they constitute the most damaging hatchet job I ever encountered, managing to do something I had often argued was impossible – to kill a movie stone dead. I didn't read them in a newspaper or on a blog, I didn't hear them on the radio or television; rather, they were whispered in my ear by a trusted friend and colleague, David Cox, as the house lights went down on a screening of David Lynch's The Straight Story.

I'd been really looking forward to that movie. I've been a huge Lynch fan ever since being blindsided by a late-night screening of Eraserhead at the Phoenix East Finchley in the late 70s. I'd wept buckets at The Elephant Man, taken several runs at Dune (it still doesn't work), been both outraged and strangely exhilarated by Blue Velvet, swooned at Wild at Heart and even argued that Mulholland Drive "makes perfect sense". Now, there was something illicitly thrilling about the fact that the high priest of weird had pulled the most audacious trick of all – he'd made a "straight" movie, a film praised for its simplicity, lack of outlandish visual and aural experimentation, and almost wilful adherence to strict narrative linearity. Like Johnny Rotten turning up in a suit and tie, this was the one thing Lynch aficionados didn't expect, a movie with a beginning, a middle and an end – and in that order. This was Lynch's masterstroke, like that line in The Usual Suspects about the devil's greatest trick being to convince people that he didn't exist. Was this Lynch as the devil in disguise? Or had he finally followed Laura Palmer to take his place among the angels?

All these questions were rushing through my head as we sat there in the Curzon Soho, quivering with anticipation. I was ready of spirit, willing of heart, and open of mind. I wanted only to be ravished. Instead, I was rubbished, brought low from the lofty heights of expectation by five words that sucked all the life out of the movie and left it writhing in silent space before the curtains had even opened. I found myself possessed of the spirit of sneering cynicism as I endured the next two hours in which an old man swapped homely platitudes with folksy caricatures while making his extremely slow way across America in the absence of a full driving licence.

Forrest Gump on a fucking tractor, indeed.

What's particularly evil about the effect those words had on my state of mind is that I actually really like Forrest Gump (and I'm quite partial to tractors too – although what Richard Farnsworth actually drives in the movie is technically a lawnmower). While many other lazy, left-leaning liberals – of which I am one – were merrily slagging off Bob Zemeckis's Oscar winner as some kind of rightwing Reaganite wet dream, celebrating old-fashioned down-home stupidity over disruptively rebellious intelligence, I always thought (as does Danny Boyle) that the outlook of any film starting with a single mother having to have sex with a headmaster in order to ensure a decent education for her special-needs son was anything but rose-tinted. For me, seeing Forrest Gump as some kind of neocon tract was a perfect example of what happens when film theory gets in the way of film-viewing; when people start reading movies rather than watching them. Cinema is a slippery audiovisual medium that, at its best, is ill-served by mean-spirited reductionist critiques.

Yet as wrong-headed as they may be, mean-spirited reductionist critiques can be really funny, particularly if served up in a pithy one-liner that pierces the heart of the movie and bursts its shimmering creative bubble. Today, David Cox says he wishes he'd never uttered the five words I have carried around with me ever since. He insists he didn't mean anything by them, that it was just a silly joke, not to be taken seriously, and certainly not to be held up as a reason to hate Lynch's low-gear road movie. Hey, according to David, he really likes The Straight Story and if he can get over that damned phrase, why the hell can't I?

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The answer is simple: no matter how much you love a film and how many good notices it gets, it's the bad reviews that stick. Always. I have first-hand experience of this phenomenon. I am a film critic, and for all the movies I love and praise and try to get other people to be enthusiastic about, it's the ones I hate that people remember. Take a look at my reviews on the Kermode and Mayo YouTube channel, where the numbers speak for themselves. No matter how upbeat and excitable I may be about any number of films, the reviews to which people are drawn are my bilious rants – Pirates of the Caribbean, Sex and the City 2, the complete works of Michael Bay – the angrier the better, apparently.

For better or worse, those who read or listen to film reviews have a fondness for vitriol, a sobering truth not lost on critics themselves; no wonder Dorothy Parker's bitchy assessment of Katharine Hepburn running "the gamut of emotions from A to B" remains perhaps the most oft-quoted review in movie critic circles – a killer line we all wish we had written, even if few of us agree with its sentiment.

I once asked viewers of my video-blog, Kermode Uncut, to let me know their own favourite celluloid massacres, the pithier, funnier and nastier the better. The response was typically overwhelming – in under 48 hours I received well over 100 suggestions of succinctly splenetic put-downs, which provided hours of sour-spirited delight. In the blog, I had cited the now infamous reviews of Psycho ("Sicko") and I Am a Camera ("Me no Leica"), both being notable for their economy of wordage, if not their critical judgment. Inspired, commenters proffered a number of one- or two-worders, such as Leonard Maltin's verdict on Isn't It Romantic? ("No"), Empire magazine's assessment of Battleship ("Miss"), and the advice offered severally regarding the live-action Flintstones movie ("Yab-badabba-don't"). After three hours of watching Exodus, Mort Sahl delivered the succinct critical cri de coeur "Let my people go!", which is good, but isn't quite as funny as his summation of Ben-Hur – "Loved him, hated Hur". The best titular pun I ever encountered was coined by John Naughton, with whom I first worked back in the days of Manchester's City Life magazine, and who would later become the film editor of Q, where he memorably dubbed Kevin Costner's disastrous end-of-civilisation epic The Postman "Post-Apocalyptic Pat".

Of the somewhat wordier favourites, the great American critic Roger Ebert naturally scored high, with several people citing his untrammelled loathing of Rob Reiner's North as a particularly splendid example of comedy through repetition. "I hated this movie," wrote Ebert. "Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. I hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it." While this is all well and good, personally I'd opt for Ebert's withering assessments of Vincent Gallo's abominable road movie The Brown Bunny ("I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining") and John Travolta's Scientology-based sci-fi debacle Battlefield Earth ("like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time") as funnier and therefore better. Ebert had a nice line in anti-analogies (The Spirit – "To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material"; The Village – "To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes") and a special talent for absurdist hyperbole (Freddie Got Fingered "doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels").

As for myself, I received a few honourable mentions (of course I did; after all, it's my bloody blog) for describing Movie 43 as "the cinematic equivalent of herpes" and Marley & Me as "less fun than having a real dog put down". There were also nods for the phrase "Eat, Pray, Love, Vomit" (of which, I confess, I am pathetically proud) and the inevitable resurrection of the spectre of my reviews of Sex and the City 2 ("consumerist pornography") and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ("The IMDb says they started without a completed script – no, they finished without one"), for which I am now far better known than for anything nice I ever said about a film. Ironically, I was also reminded that in berating David Fincher's self-regarding, life-lived-backwards boreathon The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I had airily dismissed the movie as "Forrest Gump with A-levels".

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Occasionally, words have failed me, leaving only violent self-harm to do the job. My online review of Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, for example, consisted entirely of a short film of me banging my head against a number of hard objects, including a concrete post, a metal table and an iron railing, before hurling myself enthusiastically at a wall.

Whether or not you agree with any of these value judgments matters not a jot; what matters is that you remember them. I may love Hal Ashby's sublime black comedy Harold and Maude, but the only review of it I can remember is the one in which the critic from Variety described it as containing "all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage". Why? Because it's nasty – and funny. The best hatchet jobs are not only amusing, but lasting, and the more amusing they are, the longer they last. No surprise, then, that when Roger Ebert died in early 2013, it was his scathing put-downs rather than his ebullient praise of movies that were quoted in memoriam.

Like it or not, negativity is noteworthy, and – to invert a popular adage – "good news is no news". Everyone who has ever worked in film journalism knows that there's far more chance of grabbing a headline by getting an actor to admit how much they disliked a particular director or hated working on a certain film than there is if they simply tell you how marvellous the whole experience was. In general, anyone involved in the promotion of a film is contractually required to be positive about it, hence the incessant repetition of all those "it was wonderful" mantras trotted out by stars and directors.

If actors and directors demur when it comes to slagging off movies, for fear of damaging their careers, the opposite applies to critics, for whom it is often more expedient to dish out a few blood-spattered hatchet jobs rather than waste time attempting to explain why they really liked a movie. And while there is (as we have seen) genuine beauty, grace and craft involved in the fine tuning of a properly poisonous one-star review, most of us know there's a lot more at stake when you stand up for a movie than when you knock one down.

Take, for example, the case of the Twilight movies, which are widely regarded within the critical community as fair game for the literary equivalent of hunting with dogs. For the most part, very few reputable critics have dared to put their heads above the parapet and admit to tolerating, let alone actually liking, this massively popular teen-oriented franchise. Nor is this scorn limited to critics – on the contrary, it has become popular currency among a wide range of naysayers, including film-makers themselves. Back in 2008, director David Slade, the rising star behind edgy horror-thrillers Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night, made some casually disparaging remarks ("Twilight drunk? No, not even drunk. Twilight at gunpoint? Just shoot me…") about what he called the "repressed hormone teen vampire" series. He would later retract those comments, stating that they were made before he'd ever read Stephenie Meyer's novels about a young woman whose affections are divided between a vampire and a werewolf, or seen the blockbusting movies they spawned, all of which turned out to be far more interesting, intelligent and inspiring than he had ever imagined. Cynics dismissed this retraction as a contractual mea culpa by Slade who had coincidentally just signed on to direct the third Twilight film, Eclipse, but it has about it the ring of truth. The world is full of people (many of them middle-aged men) who feel duty bound to be sniffy about Twilight without having seen the films.

For me, an unabashed Twilight movie fan, the collective critical belch that greeted the arrival of each new screen instalment said more about how out of touch the film-reviewing fraternity was with a certain section of the movie-going audience than it did about the films themselves; the sight of stuffy, bespectacled, greying men berating movies aimed primarily at teenage girls is as farcical as it is depressing. In a Guardian blog in 2011, critic and writer Anne Billson correctly noted that "Twilight attracts a lot more vitriol than any other nonsense aimed at the young male demographic" and pointed out that, love it or loathe it, the series catered to a market otherwise sorely unserved by the "young adult fantasy genre that inevitably reduces females to also-rans and decorative sidekicks".

While this may be true, the idea that you have to be a teenage girl to "get" Twilight is equally off the money. I say that as a stuffy, bespectacled, greying man who has enjoyed the Twilight movies a lot – and who received a barrage of abuse for an Observer article I wrote saying as much. As I read those comments – which included some startlingly personal insults screaming abuse about my unfitness as a film critic and a father – it struck me that in all my time as a bitter and twisted critic, my negative reviews have never provoked responses as rabidly hostile as the positive ones. For years I have merrily slagged off movies loved by millions, but only when I go out to bat for something do the knives really come out, as had happened here. But why did these people get so cross? And why were their responses so personal? The reasons, I believe, are twofold. The first is that the anonymity afforded by online communication clearly brings out the worst in some people, allowing them to say things they would never otherwise repeat in public. The second significant factor is that liking something involves a level of personal investment and vulnerability that will always leave one open to ridicule. In terms of individual risk (to reputation, to dignity, to pride) it's invariably safer for a critic to laugh than cry – to reach for the hatchet rather than the garland, no matter how good or bad a particular movie may be. History (and "Forrest Gump on a tractor") proves that the killer punch endures, and it's easier to attack someone for admitting to being moved and affected by a film than for cynically slapping it down – in playground terms, the equivalent of telling someone you like them rather than hitting them with your satchel. We've all experienced the adolescent pain of puppy love, being laughed out of school by our shrieking classmates, thereby learning an important life lesson that while jeering is done in public, admiration and affection are best kept strictly private. On some level, saying you love a film is a bit like admitting you have a crush on someone – it opens you up to accusations of foolishness, setting you up for inevitable heartbreak.

None of which matters, of course, if no one knows who you are, hence the recent rise of unattributed endorsements that increasingly adorn movie posters in the consequence-free age of social media. Giving a movie an enthusiastic thumbs-up without the possibility of repercussion (personal or professional) is the equivalent of what Erica Jong called "the zipless fuck" – the no-strings-attached casual sex of film criticism. ("Sex without love is an empty experience," Diane Keaton tells Woody Allen in Love and Death, to which Woody memorably replies, "Yes, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.") Only if you have something to lose – something valuable, such as your heart, your reputation, or your job – does a declaration of love become anything other than simply talking dirty.

For a critic's opinion to have value beyond the mere joy of the savage put-down or the well-constructed defence, I believe they must have something personal at stake, something they care about and are in danger of forfeiting. Whether praising or damning a movie, it is the risk to the critic's reputation and livelihood that ultimately lends weight to their words and ensures the integrity of their review. And if no one knows (or cares) who you are or what you have done, then what have you invested in your review? What do you have to lose?

In March 2012, Radio Times film editor Andrew Collins – an excellent writer of long-standing service – drew his readers' attention to an interesting phenomenon. Browsing through his local paper, Collins had noted that the current edition carried an advert for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel duly spattered with delighted reviews ("the must-see film of the year!"; "a truly wonderful experience") attributed not to Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian or Derek Malcolm of the London Evening Standard but to "Sheena, 55, Pudsey, West Yorkshire" and "Richard, 51, London". A few pages further on, Collins would find similarly ringing endorsements for teen video-camera comedy Project X, this time citing the source of the rave reviews ("One of the best movies ever, everyone should watch it") as Twitter, the social networking site without which no self-respecting teenager can function in the modern world (nor indeed any self-respecting 50-year-old journalist).

On the surface, these movie endorsements seem disarmingly candid and (more important) demographically specific. Never mind what the snot-nosed critics think – here are people like you who have seen and enjoyed these movies, and who know from shared experience that you will do the same.

In fact, although Project X got a pretty rigorous kicking from much of the critical establishment, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was generally well received. The critics were enthusiastic, but clearly, as far as the marketers were concerned, nothing I nor any of my fellow reviewers said could match the personal endorsements of the film's target audience, who seemed to be represented on that advert in abundance.

Or were they?

In the case of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, it was impossible to verify whether the opinions of Sheena from Pudsey or Richard from London were bona fide, although Collins conceded that "if I'd stood outside my local cinema after seeing it and harvested quotes from my fellow patrons, I'm sure I could have filled two adverts with raves", noting that it was "at the end of the day, a people's film". What worried him more were the quotes pimping Project X and so he decided to check the Twitter accounts to which those quotes were attributed. The results: one belonged to someone with 119 followers whose account featured "no other biographical information" except for a name and an "avatar of a sunbathing woman whose head is cropped off"; the other belonged to "a London band 'using music to spread the message of Islam'" whose "quote is nonetheless being used to spread the message of Project X". They had 37 followers.

"Two questions arise," wrote Collins. "One: are ads in which the reviews and quotes come from members of the public poised to oust the once-regal film critics from their ivory towers?… Two: why should we trust these quotes?" Despite tiptoeing very carefully around any accusations of fraudulence ("I'm sure the two quotes used by Project X are 100% independent and genuine…"), Collins could not help but conclude that: "Anybody could start an account on the social networking site, give themselves a stupid name, and write a great review of Project X. Who's to know?"

Exactly. Who's to know?

When I started writing my book, it had a very downbeat ending: all the film critics died and nobody cared – least of all the audience. I liked that ending, and I was determined to stick to it. But despite my constant attempts to be a completely miserable bastard, I now find myself facing the very real possibility of a happy Hollywood ending.

Just as most modern animated features combine the skills of hand-drawn and computer- generated imagery (Japanese legend Hayao Miyazaki is no more a stranger to the digital world than Toy Story creator John Lasseter is to the pen-and-ink), today every print journalist has an online presence whether they like it or not. File a review for a magazine or newspaper and the chances are the physical publication will have a website to which its readers are increasingly drawn. Philip French may not have had a Twitter account (he set one up, tweeted twice, decided it wasn't for him, and cancelled it) but he had a huge following of fans accessing his "print" reviews online. Like it or not, we're all bloggers now – all of us trading in "graffiti with punctuation".

The same is doubly true of me. No matter how much anxiety its advent may have caused, I have the internet to thank for the fact that I still have anything resembling a career. My Observer columns have long had an online presence; largely unrelated to the physical circulation of the paper, driven instead by alerts on Twitter and Facebook, they now have a potential international readership unimaginable a decade ago. Meanwhile, as the listeners to Kermode and Mayo's Film Review on Radio 5 Live continue to increase (God bless them), the importance of those who download it as a digital podcast becomes ever more significant.

And then there's the Kermode Uncut blog. Like the 5 Live show, it relies heavily on the interaction of its online audience, something that has turned film criticism from a series of declarative statements into something closer to a conversation. No longer is the film critic's word final, if indeed it ever was. Now, there's an active interplay between critics and their audience, the wit, knowledge and cine-literate smarts of whom should encourage any critic to raise their game. Far from dumbing-down, the input of online contributors has (in my experience at least) caused everyone to sharpen up, for fear of making fools of themselves in public. No longer can a critic operate from a position of ignorance without fear of correction. Despite my efforts to avoid factual errors, whenever I make them (and I do) I can be sure they will be trumpeted from the virtual rooftops within minutes of publication – and rightly so. In the same way, unsound judgments may be challenged in a trice, meaning that every critic wishing to retain their lofty position should be ready and able to defend their views in the bear-pit of the digital public gaze.

Rather than running away from this dialogue, those who wish to learn from their mistakes must embrace it. In the decade or so that I've been doing the 5 Live radio show, I've learned a great deal about cinema from the listeners' emails, texts and tweets. Yes, there's a lot of unsupported blather, hostility, and sheer bitchy bloody-mindedness out there on the net, almost all of it anonymous and therefore unworthy of attention. But there's also a genuine groundswell of honest, intelligent debate to which only the comfortably numb would turn a deaf ear. If you're a visitor to the Kermode Uncut site, for example, it's entirely possible you've contributed to this book, for which I am eternally grateful (although not grateful enough to pay you, obviously). Perhaps you were one of the many who helped choose the best of those acerbic critics' quotes. Or perhaps you a re one of the hundreds who responded so enthusiastically to a post asking for recommendations of movie websites that had captured (and held) your online interest. Those responses were (to quote the mighty Manfred Cutshaw) "too numerous to enumerate", but included mentions for RedLetterMedia's Half in the Bag (which had previously attracted the attention of Roger Ebert), and fast-talking Jeremy Jahns (whose YouTube reviews do for movies what Tobuscus does for videogames), alongside Indiewire's The Playlist and BadassDigest.com. There was praise, too, for HopeLies.com, a site with which I have long been familiar, whose declared mission is to provide "a tailored approach to online film criticism, with an emphasis on (but not limited to) silent film and French cinema… drawing together reviews of modern theatrical releases and forgotten gems". For the best and most industrious of these sites, there is funding to be found through advertising, which can yet sustain the kind of quality journalism that (as we have seen) "does not come for free". Just the other day I was in Swiss Cottage for an Imax screening of Star Trek Into Darkness and I crossed paths with Den of Geek mainstay Simon Brew. He was in buoyant mood because I had recently tweeted that Den of Geek (which covers films, TV, games and comics) had been cited by two separate movie publicists as the UK online outlet they most respect. Den of Geek's success is heartening, particularly since it's refreshingly free from the kind of competitive snarkiness that characterises some other similarly themed sites. Rather than seeing them as rivals, Brew seems to view all others in the field as co-workers, toiling alongside him at the coalface of internet journalism. He's also no fan of uncredited reviews, respects the need for embargos, understands the role of good editing, and generally thinks it's better to get things right than first – all old-fashioned values, which have helped attract nearly 3m unique users a month.

As someone who earned his spurs in the lick-and-stick world of the Manchester print trade, I have worried a great deal over the years about the anonymity engendered by the internet and the lack of accountability this inevitably entails. If writing this book has confirmed anything at all, it's that criticism without risk to the critic has no value whatsoever – that an opinion is only worth as much as its author has to lose: their good name; their reputation; their audience; their job. And after a decade of blogging in which the grounds of the publishing world have shifted beneath us, it appears this maxim has as much traction in the online domain as it does in the world of print.

The idea that the internet as a whole is some kind of unattributed bandit country only has currency in those areas where people have reason to be embarrassed about their true identities – sending abusive messages, engaging in online theft, stalking, or tweeting puff reviews. Most online journalists worth their salt despise anonymity as much as their print counterparts, if not more so, because it undermines the very medium in which they are trying to make a name for themselves. And the fact that bloggers en masse seem increasingly to be rejecting such anonymity in favour of honesty and accountability offers the clearest indication yet that the "traditional values of proper film criticism" are alive and well on the web. Whatever the medium, the key questions remain the same: who is saying this? Why are they saying it? And what do they have to lose by saying it? And if the answer to those questions is "don't know"; "don't care"; and "nothing", then proceed with extreme caution.

Having my name in the public arena has not been without its downsides. In the course of dispensing my duties as a named and eminently traceable film critic, I've been threatened professionally, physically and legally; in person and in print; online and on the phone. I have been banned, barred and blacklisted from screenings, festivals and venues. I have had arsey American lawyers yelling at me in the middle of the night and coke-addled Groucho Club habitués swearing at me in the middle of the day. I have been the target of obscene videos and outrageously defamatory remarks posted online by the unwell, the unhinged and the unnamed.

And it's not just me. Every critic doing their job (or at least every critic doing their job properly) has experienced some version of this aggressively hostile fall-out. It comes with the territory, and putting up with it is the price you pay for doing what is basically a dream job – watching films all day long! Looking around me at the daily press screenings, I see a mix of print stalwarts and a new generation of internet writers, all of whom understand the cost of standing up to be counted. It doesn't matter if your reviews are published online, in print or broadcast, or whether you shout them through a megaphone at Speakers' Corner – what matters is that you wade through the good, the bad, and the ugly, all year round, producing accountable reviews that combine pithily expressed opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and (at best) entertainment, in whatever medium. Anyone who does that, and puts their name to it, is OK in my book. Whatever our personal or critical differences may have been over the years, I like and admire all those who take film criticism seriously, and I'm proud to have been able to work alongside them.

Hatchet Job: Love Movies, Hate Critics by Mark Kermode is published by Picador on 10 October, priced £16.99. For details of Mark Kermode's book tour go to www.picador.com

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