The Breakfast Table

Our Entertaining Onanism

What is happening here, boys?

Alex, you’ve put me in a mega funk. I feel like this entire project is starting to feel a lot like that moment in Real World: Seattle when Irene blurted out that cameras were making her crazy, not her lyme disease. We’re beginning to make this a reflexive exercise that is actually beginning to make my soul cough. To some extent, this is closed loop.

But I firmly believe that the loop can swell into some kind of critical merry-go-round where people can watch all the pretty horses bob up and down–hopping from trick pony to trick pony. That’s what the Voice’s “Pazz and Jop” music review and their annual “Take Two” film critics’ poll are: amusement parks for art nerds and people who want to froth and rage. There’s a reason those features are found in alt-weeklies and not in the paper I write for. The jab made against crits who never see the world is a ludicrous complaint. That’s like dancing about architecture. If those reclusive pop junkies who’d been hermetically holed in their bedrooms suddenly started living in the world with the mailmen and the bank tellers and the bus drivers, you get McSweeney’s. (And Timothy McSweeney’s visceral fear of human contact.)

The alternative voice is always talking about the mainstream (even parenthetically). You can still count on People’s Picks and Pans and the drive-by reviews in your local daily. But Film Comment is now bootie-bumping with Entertainment Weekly. They’ve been known to share to cover girls–Gillian Anderson’s Scully on EW, her Lilly Bart on FC. I think that their taking really interesting cues from each other, if not taking each other’s writers. I’d like to direct your attention to EW’s Lisa Schwarzbaum’s gorgeous ballad of Jane Fonda in the March/April Film Comment.

It’s weird critical synergy. But it’s fun. And every time I start having the what-the fuck-are-we-doing moment (found on page 122 in the critics’ crisis handbook), I remember that as much as I can be goaded into thinking that what we do is onanistic, thousands of people like to watch.

Let’s get happy tomorrow.

Wesley