The Eunuch at the
Orgy
For more than six years in the 1990s, I was a full-time professional film critic.
I was, at Hitchcock might have said, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I thought
movies were windows into American culture. My Clinton-era
That rank
antebellum world of SUV rollovers, blowjob impeachments and the search for the
next
The
complacency and smugness of
In any traditional sense, I had no business writing about movies at all. I wanted to do it to make trouble and conduct experiments—not just on my audience, but with my own philosophies and occasionally with my body.
Whether I succeeded or failed or just put on a good freak show, you can decide.
But I definitely did things that no other film critic has ever done. Like, say, actually saw every movie that came out. And actually sat all the way through them, even if I didn’t like them.
Yep, other critics have argued with me about that. In public. Seems I was setting a bad example.
I never accepted free food (save a couple of times I was truly shaking with weakness in the middle of a double feature) or special treatment. I declined to interview movie stars unless I could see their new movie first, which virtually never happened. I reviewed not only the movies, but the quality of their projection. I minimized my TV appearances. I paid moviegoers to try art-house theaters.
Sometimes I thought I was virtuous, other times just silly or experimental. But I was doing something right, because no other critics stated the obvious: most movies suck. The average movie is below average.
I was an ass and a fool a lot of the time. Maybe it says more about the movies than it does about me that I was also so goddamn right all the time.
Perhaps perversely, I became quite popular and made my paper a lot of money. But I guess, like a pet alligator, I became less cute as I grew older. Things got prickly, and later, when I was just a freelancer, I got canned for being too smart in general and too film-smart in particular. Both my fans and my critics can mine plenty of rich irony there.
The sad thing was that, right around when I left the paper in 2000, mainstream movies started getting interesting again, particularly in terms of grown-up sci-fi and the documentary explosion. And then in 2001 came the real-life terrorist version of our own action movies, the historic cultural moment I was born to write about.
It’s been hard to realize that I missed my moment. But I can say I went out fighting the good fight, or least hogging the best lines. I know that along the way, I let a handful of Midwest-imprisoned weirdos know they weren’t alone, and that, my friends, is more succor than most people are fortunate enough to offer.
I was often told (in a misquote of Brendan Behan and in ignorance of real power behind the thrones in Rome, China and other empires) that critics are like eunuchs at an orgy.
Well, point taken.
But if my reviews prove nothing else (and I’m not sure they do), it’s that I definitely had balls, so that wasn’t it.
The real problem was that you were all just so damn ugly.
J.R.