Reading grab bag
SE: Does working in L.A. tend to place special demands on a critic?
MD: It's tougher here than in New York for a several reasons. First, because so many people who live in Los Angeles seem to work in the industry or are somehow involved with the industry, even peripherally, they tend to be very attentive, very involved and very unforgiving of film reviews. I was queen of hate mail at the Weekly – one of the paper's long-time copy editor once told me I had received more hate mail than anyone in the paper's history, which is kind of bizarre. And I've already racked up a sizable number of hate letters and e-mails in the three months since I started writing for the Times. For the most part, the criticism doesn't bother me. I just wish that my hate mail was more interesting, more of a spur to discussion than the usual blanket rebuttal. The other demands are subtler and more difficult to negotiate since they involve the human factor. You're more likely in Los Angeles to meet people whose work you're reviewing, which is not something I relish. Unless I'm writing a profile, I don't want to think about the people who make the movies I write about – I don't want to think about their mortgages, their alimony payments or that their last movie was a disaster. Neither do I want to be swayed by the fact that I like a director as a person or – just as bad – that the director seems to like me. Film critics are terribly susceptible to flattery and I'm no exception. It is cool, even a turn on, to have a director whose work you admire tell you that he or she really likes your writing in turn, but flattery doesn't makes you a better critic, to put it mildly. As a result, although they're impossible to avoid outright, I tend to shy away from parties in Los Angeles. The unfortunate thing about keeping this sort of professional distance is that you may miss out on forging relationships with some of the smartest, most interesting people who live in the city. At the same time, you save yourself a lot of grief. There's nothing quite like being at a party at which you're suddenly shaking hands with a director whose movies you've panned – which has happened to me.
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.