Jamie Kennedy’s 2007 film Heckler just jumped back to life on Netflix Streaming. In it, Jamie Kennedy gets over his depression about the flop of his 2005 movie Son of the Mask by making a documentary in which he confronts his critics.
I’m not going to insult Jamie Kennedy, because after watching Heckler last night, I’m pretty sure he’s got some kind of Russian-mob-made super bot that crawls the internets looking for criticism. The last thing I need is for him to show up at my house with a camera crew and a set of questions about why I don’t like him.
But his movie got me thinking about what the role of a critic should be, especially in the Internet Age, when the qualifications to be a critic seem to be sentience and a keyboard.
If you leave out people using one word racial epithets on YouTube, internet criticism essentially boils down to three main categories:
WATER COOLER CRITICISM
So even though most water coolers are basically an experiment in how many bacteria fungible plastic can hold, we still use it as the go-to metaphor for where people congregate to discuss their favorite shows and movies. I think a lot of internet criticism really isn’t “criticism” as we commonly think of it, but rather basically just a few paragraphs that function as a water-cooler.
What I mean is that Water Cooler Criticism is less about the criticism as it is about the comments. People want to get together and chat and it really doesn’t matter what the original author thought about the piece, because each reader is only thinking about what they’re going to write.
To put it yet another way, the Water Cooler Critic is like a porn star: everybody is watching for their own benefit.
JUDGMENTAL CRITICISM
This is what most people think the role of a critic should be: someone talking about what was bad and what was good about a piece of art. When Jamie Kennedy confronted his critics in Heckler, he was confronting these kinds of writers.
Now, I’ve been a Judgmental Critic. When the late, lamented TV Squad was still in existence, I wrote something like 300,000 words about not just TV shows, but INDIVIDUAL EPISODES of those TV shows. Occasionally, I asked some deeper questions, but mostly I just listed what I thought was good or bad about each episode.
(Think about that for a second: I wrote 100,000 words about seasons 4 and 5 of The Office. That’s a 600 page book. About a sitcom. I literally wrote more words about the sitcom than there were words in that sitcom. Do you have any idea how hard it is to look myself in the mirror? I mean, literally, because having written that many words about whether Michael Scott’s character was realistic enough, my soul left my body, which means I don’t have a reflection any more.)
I think that qualifies me to say that I — gasp — agree with Jamie Kennedy. These kinds of critics add nothing to the conversation.
One of the questions that Jamie Kennedy asks his critics is, “Why say all those mean things?” Not a single one has a good answer. Mostly, they mumble something about their criticism making the product better, but we all know that’s baloney. It’s not like Jamie Kennedy is going to read a review of Son of the Mask and decide to try harder.
No, Judgmental Criticism doesn’t make anything better. It’s basically just second-hand art — an essay that couldn’t exist unless a real artist made something first.
About the only thing a Judgmental Critic can claim as useful is helping people to decide whether or not to spend their money or their time on a product — “curators” to use a phrase out of a failed Web 2.0 business plan. While there is some utility in this, the Internet has given far too many people the ability to be a Judgmental Critic. No one needs to wade through forty million words by 400,000 different writers before deciding whether to watch the Season Two DVD of Full House.
TRUE CRITICISM
True Criticism works best when you think of it as a companion piece to the original work. The goal of the True Critic isn’t to tell you what the artist did wrong or right, but rather to expand and deepen your understanding of the work.
There isn’t a lot of this, because it’s really, really, really hard to do. Anyone can tell you why they think Son of the Mask sucks, but only a select few can tell you where the movie fits into the zeitgeist, and how the PG rating might restrict the traditional actions of a Trickster God like Loki (or tell you why they’re spending so much time writing about Son of the Mask without using the words “crystal meth addiction”).
I’ll submit that the only critics history remembers are the True Critics. In 500 years, no one is going to be watching holograms of Gene Shalit or combing the blog archives to find out my opinion of Season Four, Episode Sixteen of The Office. But they’ll probably be reading Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert’s essays on “The Great Movies”, Todd VanDerWerff’s work on The Sopranos, and Alan Sepinwall’s insanely speedy weekly deconstructions of Mad Men.
What Jamie Kennedy’s movie got me to realize is that only the True Critics have value. I’m not sure that was his conscious point — I think mostly he just thought it’d be funny to confront angry bloggers and read their hilariously childish and savage reviews of Son of the Mask to them — but that’s the point he wound up making.
If you have 90 minutes and a Netflix Streaming account*, check it out yourself and then post below. Because while I’d love to be a True Critic, I’ll settle for being a Water Cooler Critic.
After all, I can hold bacteria just as well as any water cooler can!
*DVD and Digital Download also available at Amazon.com … just click the links below!
Clacked by Jay Black 
on Jun 11, 2012 @ 11:00 EST5EDT
