Towards A Tickbox-less Criticism
Media Round-Up
Something Different [1963] - I am very quickly becoming a Věra Chytilová stan, because she simply refused to be constricted to a single style and does some fascinating stuff here with some relatively low-key stories
In The Mood For Love [2000] - If you know me then you know how I feel about Wong Kar-Wai and while this isn’t my favourite of his I did love it.
Yussef is Complicated [2014] - I really really despised this. Like, it feels very WHITE BRITISH PEOPLE PLEASE VIEW US AS HUMAN! And I get that impulse, especially in 2014 and with this being aimed at younger people but like - fuck that noise.
Schmeckel - The Whale That Ate Jonah - This album slaps! Some very fun trans Jewish punk and I’m real sad the band isn’t making music anymore.
Towards A Tickbox-less Criticism
Anti-racist media critique has very much been in vogue over the past few years. Publications across the board are very keen to talk about ‘the first Asian X’ and ‘the first Black Y’ and to publish personal essays about feeling represented in the latest blockbuster. This is something that has weighed pretty heavily on conversations around MCU films like Black Panther, Shang-Chi and Captain Marvel - taking up a lot of the oxygen which could be used to analyse those films more critically. Conversely, this atmosphere has also produced a lot of criticism where media is decried for not having ‘good representation’ or relying on stereotypes without providing much analysis beyond that.
The embodiment of this in a publication is Mediaveristy, which grades media on its diversity (alongside some more standard reviewing), which feels like a really busted way to approach art and criticism? Though I do have some respect for the honesty of their approach, since a lot of other places do the same thing but pretend to be more sophisticated, and they’ve given pieces to journalists who have been shut out from reviewing in most publications.
From now I’ll be calling this culture tick-box progressive critique.
Now I think the majority of critics/audiences aren’t operating cynically or in bad faith when they use these frameworks. A lot of this on the media industry side is specifically due to lazy editing and the constant capitalist pressures in both new and old media which encourage/enable bad practice. In any case, this type of crit is very surface and severely limits the ways that we can discuss media.
Talking about his role in Eternals with the LA Times Kumail Nanjiani said
“I’ve been in this industry for about a decade and I looked at the usual opportunities that the brown dudes get. We get to be nerdy. I wanted him to be the opposite of that — I wanted him to be cool. With nerdy goes “weakling,” and I wanted him to be the opposite of that and to be strong physically. Or we get to be terrorists, and I wanted him to be the opposite of that. I wanted him to be this character full of joy.”
It’s great that his role won’t be fulfilling these stereotypes which he has so often been pigeonholed into throughout his career, and it’s true this could provide more interesting ways for brown people to see themselves on screen. In tickbox critique we stop there and say “Good job! Well done! No racism here!” without interrogating the broader structures at play here. While the film itself isn’t out yet we can still put this in the broader context of the MCU and film production writ large to do this more structural analysis.
Why did it take until the 26th film of the MCU for there to be a Marvel film with a South Asian lead? Or if we look into the production side, then most of these big studio heavy CGI films outsource a lot of their gruelling digital labour to exploited labourers in the Global South. Where does the brown dude who spends countless hours with minimal pay to make Nanjani’s non-nerd/non-terrorist character’s suit shine just the right way when he makes his non-nerd/non-terrorist superhero landing fit into this narrative?.
Furthermore, this tickbox critique doesn’t have space for marginalised people with much messier lives and stories to tell.This means that stories like those of/told by transmisogyny affected people (e.g. Isabel Fall), sex workers and a lot of working class people cannot have their stories told beyond a very narrow range because they don’t count as ‘good representation’.
Of course, it’s no surprise that there would be very little room for anything beyond surface-level progressive critique in media spaces - because anything beyond that would threaten the structures of these publications as well. I could write a whole other newsletter on the state of the entertainment media industry and specifically criticism - but for the purposes of this newsletter I’ll narrow my scope to the UK. How many POC or (openly and unambiguously) trans critics with staff roles do we have here? Could probably be counted on one hand, or two at a stretch. Now how many of those are editors? You won’t need a whole hand for that.
When marginalised people are featured in these places it is almost exclusively freelancers who get pigeonholed into writing about media which directly relates to their identities and nothing else. Then the few who do get to become staffers are underpaid, mistreated, and face more flak than anyone else for their work. If looking at structures and institutions beyond surface-level ideas of representation was the norm, then that would perhaps require some self-reflection on the parts of people whose careers are built on obliviousness to their own privilege.
On the other hand, I think one thing which gets lost in these discussions of tickbox criticism is that these critiques often aren’t actually wrong in the general sense? That gut feeling they had about a piece of media being bigoted/carrying certain biases isn’t actually wrong, it’s just that through a surface-level methodology they don’t really get to the heart of the issue.
This was very apparent in the conversation around Joker.
When the initial trailers and promotional material hit there was a lot of hysteria around it and what its impact would be, with some suggesting it was going to cause another mass shooting. I won't necessarily ridicule these people, or say that I was immune to that line of thinking, I definitely did have some (misguided) worries along the lines of who it was directly trying to appeal to. However, at risk of sounding extremely obvious, portrayal is not the same as endorsement and pretending that is the case massively restricts the art we can make and enjoy.
When the film itself came out and there was no disaster, the panic died down. There was no shooting, just a shit and overwrought film. It could be tempting with something like this to then say "LOOK! You were simply worrying too much! It's fine! Stop trying to moralise about everything!" but that route is intellectually lazy as well. That gut instinct of repulsion that a lot of people (especially POC/women) felt was right - they just directed it in the wrong place (and possibly overstated it).
If a deeper lens is applied to the film the ways that it is both racist and sexist become clear, then we can move beyond the surface-level idea that portraying a lonely incel-ish white dude, is inherently bad and wrong, instead critiquing the actual material.
An immediate point here is that every person of colour Arthur Fleck/Joker comes across treats him badly, or at the very least rejects him in some way. Additionally, none of these characters are even given the pretense of depth. However, this is a film where almost everyone is shitty to him, and most of the characterisation is about as deep as a puddle, so that could perhaps be put down to the awkwardness of (seemingly) race-blind casting.
The real way in which Joker's racism stuck out to me is in how it conceptualises Gotham. The film draws very heavily upon a racialised notion of urbanity which presents it as wild and violent. You see this with the opening scene where he is attacked by random kids on the street for no reason. You never see the faces of this group of largely non-white kids for any extended period of time, and you don't learn their names either. That's not important to Phillips because they don't exist as humans, they exist to show this place as wild and cruel. For him, the inner city is a nihilistic dog-eat-dog world.
This framing holds for the rest of the film. It's very much the nightmarish fantasies of 80s downtown New York from a white dude who grew up in a rich area of Long Island. Even when he's actually critiquing the rich and predominantly white elite in a lukewarm attempt at class struggle, Phillips doesn't manage to shake the racist framing. All that happens is that now there's a hedonistic elite abandoning their duty of care to the sprawling masses, who have subsequently gone rabid and violent in the decaying city. It doesn't make the latter more human. To be human there would have to be some sense of community, or care.
The only times that people really come together in this film is through mockery of the lead, or through largely undirected mob anger. By opening the film with the racialised children and then the Black female therapist who doesn’t care about Fleck, Phillips shows how the deployment of race as a technology of dehumanisation and The City as a racialised boogeyman for the white middle-class is fundamental to establishing his vision of Gotham.
It’s not even necessary to look as deep to uncover the sexism. Every woman in this film rejects the protagonist or is actively cruel to him. None of them have internal lives, no matter how talented the performers are. There is the fucking wild choice of bringing on the badass Zazie Beets, only to use her as a contrived plot device. The misogyny is at its sharpest in regards to Fleck’s mother, who becomes a repository for a million and one tropes of evil and ‘insane’ mothers. Now there definitely should be space for the portrayal of abusive and outright evil women/mothers in cinema, but Phillips lazily relies on misogynistic tropes. At a point, he tries to complicate her narrative with something about how rich men treat their domestic workers - but then he undercuts it with his nihilism and misogynistic bullshit.
Given all of this and the general portrayal of the city as a hellhole full of terrible people - again a notion which when left uninterrogated is steeped in cisheterosexism, racism and classism, the mob at the end doesn’t feel like a community rising up against its class(?) oppressors. It instead seems more in line with the kinds of reactionary violence which usually serve to reinforce pre-existing race/gender/class hierarchies.
(There is absolutely more specific stuff to analyse re: misogyny and racism but I am absolutely not watching that film again without a hefty paycheck)
In any case, the point I’m making here is that when you peel back the superficial critique you can have a far more interesting critique. This deeper analysis also means that you aren’t easily duped by media which ticks all the boxes of ‘representation’ but actually has a lot of issues both in the piece itself and in the production process.
As with everything, this needs to be taken in a broader context. In the past decade we have seen rise of BLM as a widespread mantra, (civilisational) feminism as a popular cause and the advancement of gay rights (at least insofar as they apply to middle class white gay people).A reductive version of these struggles, stripped of revolutionary potential and meaningful structural critique, runs rampant through both social spheres (endless Canva infographics) and political spheres (see Joe Biden’s entire campaign). It’s faces in high places without the liberation to match, you know the drill at this point. These issues in media criticism are simply another head of that hydra.
Liberalism is fixated on aesthetics without depth. It seeks to pin everything on individuals without looking at the structures they stand on. So the solution here isn’t to abandon these worthy causes but to instead have a way more holistic criticism, one that is willing to sit with uncomfortable questions and isn’t sated by easy answers. One that is determined to look at not just the shimmering sign in front of us, but the hands that made it. This is how we start to move towards criticism which is more than just fodder for pull quotes and Quote Tweets from corporate accounts.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.