I believe I've reached the limit of being able to tolerate this horrible UX known as Blogger. So here's an essay I wrote on Medium that I quite like about the work of the great British painter (not sure why "British" matters), Phil King. Here you go. Thank's for stopping by.
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| Seeing seeing seeing: the camera splays our vision before us, allowing us to see — to see anew. |
Nothing, save for the occasional sexual encounter, entails the intimacy of critique.
To critique something is not, as the popular imagination might have it, an obstacle to living or being present. On the contrary, it is precisely to be present to something — to let something else happen, to follow its contours, to see and taste and consider and enjoy its multiple windings, its folds and modes, its scents and sense.
To critique something is to form what Deleuze and Guattari call a nuptial. In critique, you go together with this thing, entwined. While we tend to imagine critics as standoffish, sitting on the sidelines as life happens proffering quips without sullying themselves, critique in in fact a kind of love.
To clarify, critique or criticism is not judgement or negative assessment. Sure, teenagers and lovers will often yell, Stop criticizing me as they storm out of the room. But what they really mean is stop judging me. Critique, however, is not inherently judgmental. It may fundamentally operate at the level of judgement; critiquing this and not that is judgement. But to critique is not to give a thumbs up or thumbs down.
Critique suspends such gestures for being radically local (my taste) and so, finally, banal. Unless I know you intimately, I don't care whether you like something or not. Your critique of something, however, offers the greatest promise there is: to see something anew. To see something in a way that I could not have seen. Critique is the radical act of multiplying the possibilities of a thing. And, when the critic shares this vision, we readers are in turn opened, multiplied. Reading your critique that opens something else — a dish of food, a book, an idea, a person, a film — I in turn open.
As I said, critique is not without judgement. But this judgement is implicit: if you're critiquing something, you're saying that that thing is worth knowing, crawling into, following, knowing, metabolizing, sensing: loving. A critique is judgment just as introducing a close friend or lover to other friends is: we can safely assume that because you're critiquing it, it is worth our time and energy. By choosing to critique something, a critic tells the wold This is a friend of ours.
This isn't always the case, of course. I once wrote a harshly judgmental critique of Pixar's Wall-E as a guest post on Ryland Knight's great film blog. I don't usually like to spend any energy thinking or writing or talking about things I don't like. As critique is so intimate, I only want to critique things that enthuse me, vitalize me, intrigue me. In the case of "Wall-E," I saw it with my young son and, to make the experience more enjoyable for myself, I leaned in and articulated precisely why I loathed it. I made the best of the situation.
Why'd I then spend the time writing my critique and sharing it? Well, because intimacy and engagement are complex experiences. Sometimes we sleep with or have intense flings with people we don't really like. While the wise thing to do is just to shut it down, at times intimacy with things we don't like is edifying, exciting, engaging at some level.
In any and all cases, though, critique is not judgment. Critique is empirical. To be empirical is to be awash in another thing, to take it up and let it take you up and see what happens, what comes, what new possibilities of life emerge.
I feel like there's a common assumption that cameras, while fun to use out and about with friends, are a layer between you and the world. Stop filming and just live is a common sentiment even as photography is ubiquitous. But I've found that the camera in my pocket is a path to the world, a way of engaging that is deeply intimate. When I take a picture, rather than just seeing the world with all my blindness of assumptions and habit, I see my seeing of the world! Right here on my phone!
After all, most of the time, I'm not really seeing the world. I'm moving through it. The things I see are already known, have already been seen and so are not seen at all — some cars, trees, people, clouds, garbage. It's rare for the world to pop from this background of familiarity to present itself as something, as a force to reckon, as a thing that demands I stop and let myself be reoriented.
And yet we've all had that experience of being stopped in our tracks by an exquisite sky, a huge moon, a streaming sunset, a beautiful person, someone out of control on drugs or madness or life itself. We may even tell others about it: You won't believe what I saw today! Or: Did you see that sky as the storm came in? So, yes, we all know that sometimes, something removes itself from the blurry din of the quotidian to announce itself as something that is so resonant that we tell other people that we saw it. Most of the time, we don't talk about the things we've seen because most of the time we go about half blind. That's not a good or bad thing. It's a matter of fact.
In taking out my phone-camera to photograph something splays the everyday event of my seeing before me. And in so doing, renders my very seeing foreign: the camera moves from my seeing from behind my eyes to the front of my eyes. As I photograph, I move my actual seeing around the world, letting it take up that view, that face, that branch from angles and proximity and freshness my eyes simply can't.
In this case, the camera is not a layer between me and the world. It's not an obstacle to living life. On the contrary, the camera removes the film my eyes, allowing me see something with startling intimacy, my lens running its lengths, shifting perspectives, first here then there, as I move about seeking the best way to see the thing. That's what taking pictures asks of us: What is the best way to see? The camera removes seeing from the realm of habit and makes it an event that seeks the best of itself. (Is best the best word? No, in that there is no absolute. I use best here in the colloquial sense.)
Such is critique: it's a mode of photography. When we critique something — a book, film, chair — we take it up, frame it, and repeat it. When we critique something, that something makes an impression on us and we, in turn, make an impression on it.
Which is why we should all be discerning when it comes to doing critique. You don't want to be so intimate with something that drains your energy, your vitality, that doesn't infuse you. Imagine reading the work of a writer you hate and spending years not just reading the work but thinking about it, letting it play across your mind and life, trying to articulate its ways of going, its sense. You'd have to dwell in something that saps you — which is masochistic.
When I taught — at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute — I only taught books, essays, films, music that I enjoyed living with and so wanted my students to enjoy living with. I never put one thing on the syllabus that I didn't think was great and capable of recreating the reader in the very act of critique. I couldn't imagine teaching an essay that I thought was terrible. Eeesh! That'd just be cruel — to me and them.
As I've said, this doesn't mean that I have to like all these texts. I once had a former MFA student ask me to write about his work for a gallery show. He invited me to his studio and said, I know you don't really like my work. But I'd like your take on it. And he was right: I didn't particularly like his work. But I thoroughly enjoyed sitting with it, digesting it, making sense of it, and finally writing my critique of it — a critique absent any thumbs up or down. Someone else might love it, love hanging it on their walls, but not be able or not want to critique it. Critique is love but not all love is critical.
Critique seeks to infuse the world with the new. Despite its reputation, critique is essentially creative. Just as a painter isn't copying the landscape but creating it anew, the critic sees the painting of the landscape anew.
And, if nothing else, critique is generous. Rather than standing back from the world, critics throw themselves into the mix. All critique is, at some point, gonzo.
No doubt, not all love and immersion in something is critique. Sometimes, we just want to be enraptured without organizing that rapture, without contemplating it, without talking about it. That's a beautiful experience — and generous with the thing at hand.
But critique does something else. It lets itself be taken up and then seeks to show both that thing and the world precisely how it is so amazing. Critique, then, not only sees the world anew: it invites the world to do so, as well.
I mean c'mon: That is a ridiculous list for one network to produce! And what makes it so striking is a conspicuous through line that shows a method at work: an unabashed, even aggressive, demand for complexity that is based in a respect for its audience and a deep understanding of the multiple and ever moving contours of life and television.
Take two programs that began life elsewhere, High Maintenance and The Leftovers. High Maintenance was a web series of short, punchy episodes that highlighted quirk and a cool set up — a guy delivering pot to funky New Yorkers. Once HBO got their hands on it, they turned it into experimental cinema, as quirk and story took a distinct backseat to affect and visual beauty. They did the same thing with The Leftovers: they started with the source material, a book, that they then blew wide open into sprawling, epic, poetic beauty and madness. As Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers, writes, "It's been an amazing experience working on the show, watching The Leftovers expand beyond the boundaries of the novel. The show's becoming increasingly rich and deep and wild over the years — it's starting to make my book feel like an acorn that's blossomed into a huge and majestic oak tree."
How often does that happen? Isn't it almost always the other way around — filmmakers take novels and reduce their complexity? Not in the hands of HBO during its great run.
Consider the programming of HBO's would-be rival, Showtime. A show like Dexter is high concept, for sure, but in execution the show runners reduce complexity as they flesh the concept out. For the most part, the characters in the show who aren't Dexter are cardboard or just plain old banal. The same goes for Showtime's Weeds — another high concept that, in execution, gets less complex. Compare it to HBO's The Wire in which every single character, regardless of how short their screen time, is an inflection point of note — a rich life.
HBO has been just such a label for television programs. They no doubt produce some crappy movies and sensationalist documentaries (it was not surprising that, for a bit, they partnered with Vice). But when it came to TV shows, they were consistently great. They invested time and money into creating shows that are astoundingly complex, that demand a lot of the audience, that are not for casual watching. Even a less financially expensive show such as Veep operates with a tone of such subtlety, multivalences, and a baseline complexity. It's never that VP Meyers is incompetent or cruel or stupid or even just ambitious even if, at times, she is all of those things. Where Veep could easily have become slapstick or the banal satire of, say, Prime's Boys, it instead dances and plays as it moves between and among humor, pathos, satire, slapstick, and insight.
And then there was the straight up financial investment. During its first few seasons, an episode of Game of Thrones averaged six million dollars; in the final season, that average was 15 million. And while there are plenty of possible critiques of the show, the fact is Game of Thrones remains not only outrageously beautiful but, as was the HBO imperative, the show is downright labyrinthine in its plot as it presents a wealth of characters rife with complexity.
But all that is gone now. HBO has changed its model, phasing out HBO proper and launching HBO Max in its stead. This is a new business model. The HBO of old was a premier cable add on that had a small rotation of hit movies alongside its ever growing and startling original catalogue. You got HBO to watch The Sopranos or Curb or Game of Thrones. Not anymore. HBO Max is designed to compete with all the other streaming services, leveraging its Warner Brothers catalogue (WB owns HBO) so now rather than just HBO's unique shows, you get a back catalogue of all kinds of things — including the forever addictively vapid Friends.
That could be great — HBO's TV with Warner's movies. But that's not what HBO Max offers. We've witnessed a fundamental shift in business model and hence production. The once great label no longer seeks to create unique programs with long shelf lives that watchers will pay for. Now it's incentivized to create quick and easy programs while buying up popular shows from elsewhere to keep its audience paying that monthly subscription.
Look at what Netflix creates — nicely produced shows with moments of grace, such as Sex Education or The End of the Fucking World, but that are fundamentally driven to distract people from their miserable lives. Those shows are driven by plot: you don't watch for the characters or insight into life but to find out what happens next, an effective yet easy and finally unsavory tactic. Because once you know what happened, its value is gone. It's disposable TV.
Like the other streaming services, HBO Max has launched several original series. They are, to say the least, a disappointment. Take two such shows, Search Party and The Flight Attendant. Neither is terrible. In fact, at times both show glimmers of intelligence and some respect for its audience (especially the early seasons of Search Party as it behaves like a very dark satire and send up of millennials as every character is horrible). But the fact is these shows are throwaways. They are driven by narrative cliffhangers, not by the strength of their characters, acting, writing, production, or intelligence. They seem created for the binge generation as each episode leaves you wanting to know what happens next (or not, I suppose). So rather than spending huge amounts of money to create compelling, sophisticated programs, HBO Max creates disposable programs that people will binge and promptly forget.
This is not just my opinion (although it is also my opinion). I am sure no one at HBO Max believes that The Flight Attendant is great TV that will live on for generations the way The Sopranos, The Wire, or Curb Your Enthusiasm have. I'd say their hearts just aren't in it anymore but it's more than that: they had a heart transplant. And this new heart has one goal: quick, easy, disposable TV that will keep subscribers watching as they scroll Instagram.
As Terrence McKenna argues, television is a powerful drug: "Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation." What McKenna doesn't recognize is what Marshall McLuhan did: an artist operating in a medium has the power to expose and shift the very environment of life, the very terms in which we live. That's what the HBO of old did — created shows that didn't let us go blindly into the abyss. That challenged who we are and what we believe. By refusing to offer reductive exposition, shows like The Sopranos and The Wire incorporate the audience into their very fabric. We, the audience, are a site that holds the complexity.
But this new wave of disposable TV — that may have better production than the sitcoms of old and may enjoy more frank discussions of sex — functions as a drug to calm the masses amid the increasing madness of the day. We all work so much that, come the end of the day, we just want to watch easy TV — and all the better if it compels us to watch the next one, leaving us hanging and wanting more so it feels like we're living — when, in fact, it's a kind of living death. Which is one reason zombies have become such a popular subject: we are becoming-zombie in the very act of watching these programs (and yet AMC's wildly popular zombie vehicle, The Walking Dead, is actually anti-zombie as it proliferates complexity and beauty, waking us up from the dead as we watch; indeed, AMC has been a notable label as it's produced the brilliant Mad Men, the at times sharp Breaking Bad, the smarter Better Call Saul, among others).
I admit that I use TV as just such a drug. I watch mediocre programs that engage me just enough but still let me space out, text my friends, do some online shopping. Deadwood does not let you do that. Nor does The Leftovers or The Wire. Tune out for a bit and you've missed it all — not just because you've missed plot points but because you've missed Ian McShane's impossibly subtle shift in timbre as he utters a seemingly simple please to Trixie that reveals the intricacies of their relationship. In other hands, Ian McShane's Swearengen would just be evil rather than a distinctive mode of frontier ethicist and world builder. In any case, the HBO of old rarely offered exposition. To watch those shows, you had to be engaged. And, in todays frantic world, we often just want to tune out, not tune in.
And so I find HBO's surrender to the will of disposable TV, and its entire business model, upsetting. The shift in logos says it all. The old logo and slogan promised something different, a rupture and reinvention of the very medium itself. The new one just throws colored glitter in our faces.
You're shopping for a chair. As you browse the aisles, you note the variety — from backless computer chairs to high bar stools to plush ...
