“I’m sorry officer I’m too busy smoking to hyper-speculate”

About a year ago, when it was decided that my wife and I would move back to the US, I began to devour healthily any and all information I could about the US economy; catching up on the state of affairs back home. I felt it important to know just what I was getting myself back into and moreover what in hell had gone so wrong in the first place to create such dire conditions. The main culprit, as I have grown to conceive of it by wading through small daily doses of economy and capitalist theory, seems to be the practice of speculation. The actual figures or quality of items and work are no longer the deciding factors in investment or success; prices are set and decisions are made based purely out of trust and what one possibly could dub a process of hyper-speculation. Just ask the governments who based their budgets this year on exorbitant oil price that subsequently fell through the floor. Bets of this nature are common place and if a bet is wrong then things go to hell for the players involved; funny enough I’ve come to see a similar tendency within this topical series I have been writing about over the course of the last few weeks.

What  the logic of speculation has to do with this series is simple; the same type of mentality and tendency has begun to rear its ugly head in a place where it definitively does not belong. A great deal of news and info pertaining to cultural items such as upcoming film releases consist mainly of a glut of speculation, information and rehashing of pictures and trailers that try and guess how the film will turn out even before its first screening. There exists hardly any patience or restraint to reserve judgment until after exhibiting the materials, and one can definitely not, as I have previously posted upon, exhibit semi-objectively with a clear mind.

It is perhaps one of the macabre sides of postmodernism; we are there before we get there. We go on vacation first through the travel brochure, and then follow someone else’s trip. Some of us think the Stature of Liberty is closer to Brooklyn Bridge then it actually is because it appeared that way in a film. Finally now through pure and utter hyper-speculation, minus even someone else’s walked path, interpretation of distance or well founded review, we formulate our opinions on music, films and art in general that no one has yet to actually feast upon.

This year when I sat down and made a list of the films I had missed from 2008, I realized that it’s a full-time job for a person truly interested in culture to keep up. To obtain the essences present in the varying works and to be able to fully appreciate something and learn all one can from it requires a great amount of concentration, attention to detail and comparison to what one has carried with himself into the process. With all the opportunity that surrounds us to learn from an already released piece of literature or art I find it funny that any one has the time to participate in speculation. Perhaps someday soon we will experience our own cultural recession caused by over speculating that forces us to make whole sale changes. To focus on what matters; what is already here bearing down upon us. It’s one thing to stand outside a burning building and frantically scream that it’s on fire, another to run in and save someone and finally to be part of the crew putting out the flames. One of the three positions does not belong; it has simply parasitically attached itself there feeding off from the body of the spectacle.

Now that I have started to write about film I’ve naturally sought out the opinions of others, to aid my research, blog, and in general to juxtapose my thoughts. This intake of opinions coupled with a small conversation I recently had about film criticism led me to the importance of articulating another aspect in this overall series, namely to criticize the critics. I wracked my brain over the last few days and have found an appropriate clarification or at least a point of departure to open the matter up to debate. I included it under this series because it underlies some of the other points I have previously discussed and moreover most certainly impacts future posts in this series.

I’ve read and participated in many debates as to why criticism and review in any field is important, it “attempts” to impartiality give advice and help consumers pick the proper way to invest their resources in cultural products. To buy or not to buy, that is the question! The issue however is what makes any of our modern critics, especially the anonymous glut of those writing reviews on IMDB or on blogs such as this one, appropriately expert enough to slag off something they couldn’t in a million years improve upon? What in fact gives anyone the right or ego to say, matter of factly, this movie, song or art piece isn’t worth a piss? How does one’s own subjective opinion carry that much weight? How or why are we so easily swayed by an opinion formulated by another?

The answer is found in the death of universalism. A great intellectual friend of mine once explained that he thought the death of universalism occurred when nuclear scientists essentially possessed the knowledge (albeit specific knowledge to their field) that carried with it the potential to impact all of mankind. Up until this point the requirements to achieve this large of an audience were monumental, requiring years of interdisciplinary learning and study; spots typically reserved for brilliant philosophers, writers and other driven individuals. When this aforementioned fact became apparent, that scientists possessed such powerful knowledge, a fragmentation was created. No longer would the majority of societies intellectuals strive to be knowledgeable in all things, they could simply focus on just one thing in an attempt to become “impactful” or experts. This fragmentation however created a much larger need for something else, it necessitated a go between or “body” that appropriately could relay or choose for all the fragmented “experts” what was important on any given day in an attempt to fill them in and allow them to focus entirely on their pursuit. This de-emancipating body of course is the modern news media, which now extends onto the internet and the blogsphere.

This explanation is important as it explains why most reviews don’t really convey anything; they are simply journalistic and fragmented, and lack any kind of concrete theory. They stem from individuals that now exist, write and analyze from the void created when universalism fell. They attempt unjustly to tell people who are too busy with their individual fragmented pursuits how to think about things; very rarely making any attempts to put films into a larger discourse. As a classmate proposed to me, maybe we as critics, reviewers and theoreticians need to build the future of “criticism” upon a much more focused attempt at understanding the reason and reasoning behind any given film, to become more universal in our understanding of films and art in general; to cease with the shortcuts and reviews that only explain away our own individual shortcomings.