We are wallowing in an atemporal zone of cultural production

October 9, 2013 12:04 PM

Habitually verbose pontificator Will Self reviews the latest tome from Mark Kermode - Britain's Rockabilly Ebert - and in doing so, reviews the changing nature of criticism.
posted by mippy (11 comments total)

One of the really fun (in a wicked sort of way) things about this is how Self picks out Kermode's grammatical mistakes and misunderstandings of what certain words mean, and then needles Kermode by using those same constructions/words/phrases correctly a few paragraphs later. Example:

Hatchet Job also contains some howlers: such as an Alanis Morissette-level misuse of "ironic" and all its cognates, and an "inchoate" for "incoherent" solecism that I found hard to square with Kermode's quarter-century hacking away at the typeface, and harder still to take given his view that film criticism can be a craft that in the right hands rises to the status of an art form.

...

But what he wants to preserve against all comers is the work of narrative art as something that is given entire and unchangeable by its makers to its receivers. Unfortunately, like all Gutenberg minds, Kermode can only have an inchoate understanding of what's going on – but what he does get is that if film itself ceases to exist in its traditional form then film critics like him have their necks on the block.

posted by eustacescrubb at 12:15 PM on October 9, 2013

"A sustained cry from the heart that over some 300 pages oddly modulates into melioristic mooing" is a lovely phrase.
posted by dng at 12:42 PM on October 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

I must confess that I like Mark Kermode a lot more than I do Will Self - I listen to Wittertainment pretty much every week, and each time I've tried to read a Will Self book, I've yelled "Oh, fuck off!" and hurled it across the room after about twenty pages. I suppose Self is right, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I don't so much disagree with him as find him disagreeable. His tendency to use a lot of words that most of us have a vague notion we know the meaning of but would have to look up in a dictionary to be sure is probably the most tiresome thing: I'm personally convinced that rather enjoys lording it over the reader in that way.

One area where I do unabashedly feel a certain snobbery is that Kermode is a Proper Film Critic - a Proper Film Critic turns up at screening rooms in the relatively early morning to watch movies that they haven't chosen and wouldn't choose in order to come up with a few hundred intelligent words about it by deadline time. The words have to be intelligent, even if the film itself utterly fails to be. I don't really have the same kind of respect for people who are writing about movies they just happen to have watched on a whim. There we are. Doubtless it's my problem. It stems from the fact that I learned about the movies from reading my father's copies of the BFI's Monthly Film Bulletin, which at that time (the 1970s) contained a plot summary and review of every single film that came out, including the pornographic ones. Summarising and writing a few hundred coherent words on a dreadful, dubbed German soft-porn movie about the adventures of schoolgirls in their mid to late twenties. That's the World War One trenches of film criticism, and genuine heroism in my opinion.

Anyway: Kermode - yes; Self - No thank you; A post-linear, decentred media and criticism, if we must, we must, but personally I'll be content to settle into a Gutenbergian Old Fogeyism.
posted by Grangousier at 12:48 PM on October 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

I wonder how much Self got paid for this.
posted by IndigoJones at 12:50 PM on October 9, 2013

Hatchet job. Geddit?
posted by popcassady at 1:31 PM on October 9, 2013

I got totally angry at this post before clicking any links because I read Will Self but thought will.i.am. An understandable mistake I hope, with will.i.am never thinking about anything but Self...
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:47 PM on October 9, 2013

I'm not too fond of Self's novels, but I feel that he has found his niche as a reviewer and essayist. I enjoy reading reviews by someone who actually gets out and walks.
posted by Agave at 1:54 PM on October 9, 2013

In my working lifetime I've already seen the status accorded to book and film reviews undergo a tremendous decline – not, I hasten to add, because there aren't good reviews being written (this one is especially good), but because the media they are reviewing and the medium by which they themselves are delivered are both in a state of flux.

"Heh" to the part I've bolded. As for the rest, it's all sadly true.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:02 PM on October 9, 2013

The more of Will Self's short form writing I am exposed to, the more I have come to realise that he is essentially the Jonathan Meades of the written word. Perhaps Self is a smidgen less bombastic, but the two of them are surely the present-day epigrammatic powerhouses of Britain.
posted by Talkie Toaster at 3:50 PM on October 9, 2013

...each time I've tried to read a Will Self book, I've yelled "Oh, fuck off!" and hurled it across the room after about twenty pages.



I haven't gotten that upset at him, but I have wanted to take away his thesaurus and smack him with a rolled-up newspaper.
posted by louche mustachio at 3:56 PM on October 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

I just wish the new narrative formats would hurry up and become what they're going to be. The old ones obviously no longer work; but nothing really revolutionary has gelled and become standard yet so we have this annoying jumble of jumpcuts, motion sickness & narrative gymnastics.

One thing is clear: in the long run "television" -- but it won't remain television for long as the difference between a cable network and a website and between a "television" and a browser on a computer will disappear -- will become the more serious media, and movies the less respected one. For all the hullabaloo about shortening attention spans, what actually seems to be happening is that serious story telling is moving to a (much) longer format, not to a shorter one.
posted by lastobelus at 6:35 PM on October 9, 2013