A weird way to learn criticism

And a movie recommendation for this week.

Every critic’s got a thing, and by thing I mean something they’re good at, perhaps uniquely so. (Here I am talking about film critics, for the sake of ease.) Some critics are good at recreating the emotion of watching a film; others have deep knowledge of film history; others understand technique, and how it works to build the whole. Some just know the business, and can help you see how a movie fits into the landscape; others are well-versed in geopolitics. Or they have a memory for images, composition, lighting, color, all of the things that make a movie a movie.

I know a little about all of this. But I have no formal training in cinema studies, didn’t really watch any movies until after college, had little connection to pop culture until then, and can’t remember images to save my life — my brain doesn’t work that way. (I have almost total aphantasia, though I didn’t really know this till a few years ago.)

That’s mostly okay; I think of myself as a cultural critic who mostly writes about film, and over the last 17 or 18 years I’ve worked really hard to build up a body of knowledge that, while shot through with gaping holes, is helpful — I mean, you should know something about the art form you’re writing about, but you’re never going to know anything.

But I do have one weird trick that’s served me well, which is that I’m a pretty good close reader of texts and the symbols in them — which, in the case of films, ranges from literary to cinematic to theological to historical. Over the last nearly two decades of writing about movies, I’ve honed that down, to the point where it’s my thing.

So if I am writing about, say, The Lost Daughter, I am writing about the web of literary and mythological allusions in the film. Writing about Nope, my brain immediately snags on theories of spectacle culture but also the verse from Nahum that opens the film. The Rehearsal, which occupied a great deal of my brain space this summer, somehow led me off on a Martin Buber tangent. And I went to a Jackass-athon last January and ended up writing about the medieval feast of fools.

Recently Miriam Toews, the author of Women Talking, on which Sarah Polley’s terrific new movie is based, told me that I am somehow the only critic — including those who wrote about the book, which was a big deal when it came out in 2018/19 — who saw the very obvious allusions to Augustine in the text. I almost sighed with relief when I spotted them, and figured out what she was doing, because I knew that would be a springboard for whatever I was going to write. Same for The Banshees of Inisherin, for which I curiously seem to be the only critic, or one of very few anyhow, who noticed that it was very specifically set during the Irish Civil War, and that that has meaning.

Do I know anything about the Irish Civil War? Absolutely not. Am I well-versed in Buber, medieval shenanigans, Nahum, or Yeats’s Leda and the Swan? No, no, no, and no. (I do know a little about Augustine, but only a little.) I do a lot of very rapid but hopefully high-quality research before I write.

I’ve been thinking a bit about how I landed on being able to do this sort of thing. Part of it is, undoubtedly, that I did actually get an M.F.A., and part of our coursework involved close reading of texts, popping the hood and seeing what’s underneath the surface. Another part of it is that while I have, on balance, a pretty terrible memory for images and plots, I do catch abstractions and theoretical frameworks pretty well; my M.A. introduced me to a lot of ideas that I didn’t understand but sort of filed away, and reading widely my whole life means there’s a lot of random stuff crammed into the crevices that light up when a movie (or whatever) makes them vibrate.

I also learned to research broadly and synthesize rapidly while doing both of those degrees, something I didn’t have to do during my undergraduate coursework, and something I had no idea would serve me well. Writing about art, for me, is like writing a little term paper, pretty much every time.

But there’s another piece. When I was a kid, and a teen, and then in college, I was part of Bible studies all the time — when you’re raised a certain sort of evangelical, you can’t really escape them, and I was that sort — and they were very much centered around “inductive” study, where you really, really, really closely read the text. You ask what every single word means; I remember filling out worksheets where you wrote down all the definitions of a single word in a Psalm. (Using Strong’s Concordance, which I have not thought about much since.) Thus you’d start to see some shades of meaning that may have been lost in translation, especially some of the, uh, worse translations, and it would make the passage seem a bit more alive and vibrant.

I don’t know how common this was elsewhere, but in my circles you’d also ask questions like how this passage relates to other passages in the book, how they “read” each other, how the historical context sheds further light on the passage, what the symbols are in here that recur throughout the Bible, and a lot of other things I’ve probably forgotten.

(This is in part why the insights of the postmoderns about texts deconstructing themselves has never bugged me the way it bugs people who don’t bother to find out what’s meant by that, but I digress.)

I think this is basically criticism, the way I do it, except then I have to craft an argument out of it and make it beautiful and pleasing and convincing and maybe even stirring. It is, I hope, a contrast to the way I see “Christian film criticism” happening a lot — where it’s like, what is some kind of moral lesson this movie teaches us or “truth” it “reminds” us of — which I find shallow and instrumentalizing and disrespectful of the art and the artist. I hope to find what the artist was doing, or in occasional cases didn’t realize they were doing, or how what they’re doing is richer when placed in a broader context.

Funny how that works.

A movie for this weekend

Alice Diop’s drama Saint Omer comes out this week — in limited theaters, but it will certainly be available digitally soon too if theatrical isn’t available to you right now. Based on a true case, it’s been critically acclaimed and in awards conversations, and it’s shortlisted for the Best International Feature Oscar (as France’s official entry). It’s sort of a courtroom drama, but it’s something richer and more resonant, too. Rama (Kayije Kagame) travels from her home in Paris to Saint-Omer in northeastern France, in order to watch and write about the trial of a Senegalese woman named Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), who is accused of leaving her infant daughter on the beach to be swept away by the tide.

Diop stages a lot of the film in lengthy, unmoving, unblinking portrait-like shots. Laurence Coly gives her testimony. She is questioned by lawyers. The jury members watch. Others testify. Rama watches. And quietly, out of the courtroom, we come to understand some things about Rama, too.

If your attention span has been shot by the attention economy, then Saint Omer might be a tough sit, but I’d take the time anyhow. It’s about motherhood and the relationship between mothers and their children, about the strangeness of this in a world where men still, for the most part, dominate, about presumptions of guilt and innocence.

You’ve got to lean in, but you ought to.

Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.