Summer-Fall Thoughts on Criticism, Part 2
This is the thick second part of a three-piece series. This one has games crit, Barbie, the MCU, Bluesky allusions, *and* podcast recommendations
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the films being covered here wouldn't exist.
I said before that there is always a crisis. There is always a controversy. There is always a backlash. Earlier this summer, games critic, author, and IP director Austin Walker said on the podcast Bonfireside Chat recently something I’ve noticed to a more limited extent, particularly on conversations about propaganda, that the exhaustion of Trump and the election of Biden correlate with a change in the general audience member’s tolerance for thinking critically and deeply about art. Either the material ineffectiveness of legitimate concerns, the way legitimate concerns get stretched until they’re applied where they don’t fit, or both have led to people dismissing political critiques. Lately, I feel like something about videogames specifically (among those things, their toy-adjacent nature or relative youth as a medium, perhaps) keeps discourse around them held back several years. More than the fault of critics, it seems the corporate-incentivized artistic-limitations in major releases and the closely-connected coverage limitations in ad-based revenue models preclude enough development along lines, say, of representation on the industry side that we can’t get past the first order of critical concern (“Why are all these characters white men?”) to the second- (“What would be a good version of a queer protagonist of color besides just being there?”) and third- (“How does the inclusion of the queer protagonist of color enrich the world and how can they, as player character or party member tell us about the world?”) and so on. “How do we complicate notions of inclusion and representation without simply throwing them out?”1
While it is likely tied in part to the plaything nature’s resultant storytelling limitations, that’s relative to genre and selling intent. Related to the funding concerns, criticism and journalism are hard businesses to stay in, especially writing about art, games maybe more than other forms (many of the companies that make the games and the people that play them and send critics death threats both think of the underpaid writers as especially privileged). It is infinitely precarious, so people often leave before they can build up the stores of knowledge to shape conversations in the long term and pay that knowledge forward. We are not overrun by dueling factions of notable formal manifestos of game criticism (not that there are no notable blogs that echo on, like ludonarrative dissonance).
Tastes change over time as we are exposed to new experiences and information. That’s one reason I don’t like numerical ratings. I might like one movie more than another on a given day, and I don’t always feel sure how to quantify that objectively, but whatever I express in how they speak to me is likely to stay true regardless of where I rank them in the year, or perhaps even as I like them less. For instance, I have largely soured on the MCU, but I still find fascinating Black Panther’s marriage of allegorical representation of U.S. foreign policy concerns and historic U.S. foreign policy crimes or Captain Marvel’s existence as military propaganda that is textually about how endless war and xenophobia are bad.
Those films specifically speak to another radiant issue already touched on, the double-edged sword of representation concerns. There is widespread understanding among businesses that claiming to stand for the marginalized or good causes (so-called pink/green/rainbow capitalism) can lead to more money. This is also on offer for artists. There is a tendency among some consumers to try reverse-engineering moral-political reason for the corporate art they like to exist, as if a corporation realizing better exploitation of a demographic’s purchasing power is the biggest, most important step on the road to liberation. In attempting to make boosterism and consumption into a net moral gain, they can avoid thinking critically about their sources of amusement. Moreover, this is how the industry wants it. The games industry, the film industry, any industry really, wants consumers to identify with the brand and the corporation that owns it more than the journalists (who are fellow workers) who act in their defense or the developers, testers, and other laborers (even more obviously fellow workers) that create the product. Part of the critic’s job, evidently, is to disrupt that.
Conversely or relatedly, some artists will use sociopolitical markers of some importance (most obviously but not exclusively race and gender) as selling points about a work even with little truly substantial or novel observation or expression, or if that substantial or novel observation or expression is buried under things that are more palatable and marketable. This is a direct consequence of the need within our system to always be selling oneself, and a byproduct of brokerage politics where the artistic expressions of people from minority or marginalized backgrounds are often made to stand in, as the poet Saeed Jones recently quoted Christina Sharpe as writing in Ordinary Notes. In a parallel observation, the critic Sean McTiernan pointed out recently on the podcast SF ULTRA episode about Anna Kavan a tendency for literary critics to reduce women writers to doing autobiography if their fiction overlaps with their reality while men are often given a benefit of the doubt or creative license when they do the same thing.
To clarify: Identity, marginalized or otherwise, is always fraught and contested and the critic must beware assigning too broad or narrow a meaning to a work based on the biography or demographics of an author, director, writer, designer, artist, or team. Just because something is by a member of an ascriptive identity group does not mean that they speak for everyone within that group and, frankly if they claim to be, they ought to be looked at with suspicion because there are no identity monoliths. At the same time, wanting to represent your people (whoever you claim them to be) is not the same as saying “we are, all of us, identically me.”
The critic must beware their own biases not for the sake of dismissing one’s own interpretation but for the sake of giving a work the honest benefit of the doubt of intent. You don’t have to assume you know what the intent is, but it is in your best interest to not always assume the art you are engaging with is less intelligent than you.
Surely, sometimes it will be. Part of a problem with making assumptions about what stories are, or shortchanging them to score easy points at humor, is an obsession with being not just correct in a read but smarter than a piece, assuming the art can’t be meaning to do what it’s doing if it comes to feel smarter than one the premise. This was one of my problems with Barbie discourse. As a corporate product by an acclaimed director and a movie targeted toward women, it was easy enough to get mainstream marketing chugging in the direction of it being something groundbreaking even though it was a two-hour toy commercial. And in exploring the tension between claims of “this is the smartest movie I’ve ever seen” and “this is the dullest movie I’ve ever seen,” I found that it was a film smart enough to know its limitations, and in naming them it expressed something genuine about the limitations of corporate art. I did not and do not think that is accidental.
My expectations for director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film (co-written with her husband, Noah Baumbach) started nonexistent, then hit an apex a week or so before reviews and impressions. I avoid reading other people’s reviews before writing my own because I don’t want to accidentally regurgitate or, worse, plagiarize other people’s work. I read one review which, in combination with some of the forms of breathless praise I saw on Twitter, helped me reach a nadir. When I saw the film, I liked it, though I found its attempts at social commentary not infrequently reductive and it is, at its base if not in its heart, a marketing exercise for a children’s toy. It is hardly unique in this era of corporate filmmaking or the long history of Hollywood. As audience internet impact goes, it is somewhere between the MCU and Everything Everywhere All at Once because some of its biggest proponents are cloying and condescending (though I would also say the more serious critics among what I see of the nebulous “film twitter” are more mixed on it than they were on either of those films). Because there were regressive conservative alarmist nitwits marking it down, people feel free to dismiss legitimate well-aimed critiques, grouping it all as hateful misogynistic blasphemy, even when it is coming from women.
I saw this overlap with the recurrent internet meme of the “film bro,” which I believe began as a joke-critique aimed at a certain brand of dude who cultivated his personality around a few good but violent films from the 1980s and 1990s (sometimes it was even named that films like Pulp Fiction, Scarface, and Fight Club contain implicit and explicit critiques of masculinity that these lads were evidently missing) and whose realm of engagement with and expectation of the world of film did not expand beyond that. In recent times, I have seen this term first evolve to derisively describe anyone that likes any sort of serious, noncommercial, foreign, or art film, or even a corporate film made by an auteur; somehow comic book films went from being the provenance of nerds to the masses. This shift in the definition of the term coincided with a rhetorical decision that any woman that claims to like any of these films or critiques corporate four-quadrant films is doing it for male attention, which seems very nakedly sexist. Somehow now “film bro” even encompasses people that like the more interesting forms of corporate art (e.g. Andor). Somehow this feels like it dovetails with the drive of the censorship-seeking pseudo-progressive art consumer because it uses generalizations about identity to reduce rather than enrich the experience of engaging with art. Gender essentialism is not liberation. I would think that is obvious. I would argue it’s among Barbie’s most fundamental points as a film.
Every piece of art says something, sometimes more than it means to, sometimes just more than people expect. Each individual audience member and critic brings expectations to a movie about the work it can and should be doing. We ask too much of art if we think it can start a sociopolitical revolution on its own. We ask too little of ourselves if we think of art as purely a vector to inform us of a message, to inscribe upon our souls a truth about the world, and to think that all art must make the same universal prescriptions.
In considering the tendency or trend to try to outsmart every piece of art and point out what it’s missing for cheap political points (I say cheap because they don’t equate directly to material action for a sociopolitical cause), we lean toward pointing out the film consumption tendencies exacerbated by things like CinemaSins, a YouTube channel whose shtick is pointing out movie plot holes for humorous effect. No one ever points out How It Should Have Ended, probably because it’s a good-natured cartoon done with affection for what it satirizes. I believe I’ve heard some former Cracked writers take some regretful minor responsibility. But in my past writing about what a film is not about and how it’s not about it, it’s come from academia. I don’t have a Ph.D., but I do have is experience reading and writing academic book reviews, which tend to spend between twenty-five and ninety-nine-percent of their length (ratio varying by the style of the reviewer and how much they liked the book) on things the book didn’t cover, because academic texts are contributing to knowledge production and ways of understanding the world that shape conversations within academia and eventually outside of it. So “what is missing” is especially notable. Not everyone that looks for holes in the logic of films is learning it in school, and noticing a hole or a lack of context doesn’t make you a bad critic; it’s more about how that notice is applied to analysis. There is nonetheless a relationship between feigning at or grasping for expertise and being ungenerous in analyzing a film. On the other hand, one benefit of engaging with academic criticism (of historical works primarily, but also of sociological, anthropological, literary, and other texts) is the understanding that, among art and among criticism, there is always room in the field for further study, as many academic reviews conclude. The findings of one work being problematized by the notions of another work leads to development and sophistication. A conversation happening between artists and pieces, from historical monographs to speculative novels to paintings and photographs to films and games, is enriching to humanity. Limits aren’t necessarily flaws (this piece is probably flawed because I didn’t set a hard word limit) but more importantly a work having flaws doesn’t make it useless or bad. And a work can have many uses, such that where it fails and succeeds are in tension depending on expectation and engagement…
I am not literally saying that no one in games crit is saying anything interesting or deep about inclusion, representation, or marginalization. This is just an example that came to mind and felt useful to keep there for the transition to the next point, to help give this sprawl some form