Doing Criticism. James Chandler

of the sort offered in John Cusack’s character’s top ten rankings in High Fidelity (2000).³⁵ Many films feature critical commentary, sometimes extended and quasi-academic commentary. Think of Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway, with Chazz Palminteri playing the sophisticated gangster-critic who gives detailed technical advice to the John Cusack character about his screenplay.³⁶ In Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 film High Art, a Brooklyn woman trained in “critical theory” delivers a critical analysis on her upstairs neighbor’s photograph and invokes Roland Barthes’ account of the “punctum.”³⁷ The figure of the critic has been fully embodied in the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Stranger than Fiction (2006), where Emma Thompson plays an author trying to kill off a character (played by Will Farrell) who doesn’t want to die, and also in Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s complex film Adaptation (2002), when the Kaufman character (Nicolas Cage) seeks advice from a screenwriting guru played by Brian Cox.³⁸

It also seems clear enough, for example, that the films of Quentin Tarantino and a television series like The Sopranos would not be what they are without their characters’ explicit and recurring acts of critical commentary on objects in a contemporary cultural scene in which these works themselves have come to gain a place of iconic centrality. Consider how often characters in Tarantino’s films or David Chase’s episodes become preoccupied with critical reflection on objects and events in contemporary culture: the bank robbers at the start of Reservoir Dogs (1992) discussing a Madonna song or Tony Soprano commenting on American war films.³⁹ Sometimes the chain of reference can be extensive, as I suggest in Chapter 3, running through several works for the screen, and it can even involve cinematographic techniques that likewise, on another level, offer pointed commentary on prior works. There is such a sequence that runs from Jon Favreau’s appearance on The Sopranos back to his film Swingers (1996) and from there to the opening of Reservoir Dogs and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).⁴⁰

One measure of how criticism has migrated to the screen can be found in the television series that Spike Lee has recently adapted from his own first commercial film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986). In the television series launched in 2017, as in the original film, Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise) is an African American artist with several lovers. Also set in Brooklyn, now gentrified, the series is more topically relevant than the film was: characters discuss the election of Donald Trump when it happens, for example. It is also far more discursive about matters of criticism. Nola discusses the influence of Chicago painter Kerry James Marshall on her work. She is a film buff and often frames situations by way of cinematic references, annoyed when a friend or a lover cannot keep up with her. In direct address to the camera, she likens her own story to that of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), a film narrated by multiple narrators in a way that doesn’t quite add up. Literary arts also come into play. Early in season 1, Nola and one of her lovers have a meeting of minds over a book of poetry, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. In the three decades or more between Spike Lee’s film and his series, clearly, the relationship of criticism and the screen has changed and, as I discuss in this book’s final chapter, he is an artist who helped to change it. Indeed, already in his 1995 film Clockers, discussed at some length in Chapter 6, we find an opening sequence in which young drug dealers in the Brooklyn projects discuss the merits of various rappers, in some cases according to the criterion of whether they are “hard” enough ever to have killed someone.

      I turn now to look in some detail at a particularly telling example of how the function of criticism can be internalized in a screen narrative, the pioneering 1994 independent film Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith, now something of a cult classic, but noted chiefly in its moment for having won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival after being made on an absurdly small budget of less than $27,000. Like “This Is Just to Say,” this film gives us a moment of critical reflection in a world of everyday consumption. It is not exactly Williams’ kitchen this time but a site just as ordinary—and also, as it happens, in New Jersey.

      1.4 Criticism in the Convenience Store

What could be more ordinary, after all, than the location in which Clerks was shot, a convenience store in the working-class community of Leonardo, some thirty miles south of Williams’ Rutherford on the Garden State Parkway? The convenience store is located in a small strip mall, next door to a video rental store—a fleeting commercial institution of that era. Both stores are staffed by young working-class men: Dante in the convenience store and his friend Randal in the video store. At one point in this “day in the life,” Randal wanders into the convenience store and prompts a discussion with his friend about the relative merits of the second and third installments of the original Star Wars trilogy. (In 1994, only three Star Wars films had been produced.) It turns out that they agree that The Empire Strikes Back is superior to Return of the Jedi (a “blasphemy,” as they acknowledge, against a presumed critical orthodoxy). Dante directs attention to how the two films end, suggesting that Empire is superior because its seemingly tragic conclusion is true to the tragic turn of the world. Randal doesn’t disagree but has his own more detailed analysis to add, along different lines (Figure 1.3):

      FIGURE 1.3 Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) discussing Star Wars in Clerks. Source: Clerks (1994). Directed by Kevin Smith. Produced by View Askew Productions/Miramax.

Randal:	There was something else going on in Jedi. I never noticed it ‘til today.
Dante:	They build another Death Star, right?
Randal:	Yeah. The first one was completed and fully operational before the rebels destroyed it.
Dante:	Luke blew it up. Give credit where credit’s due.
Randal:	The second one was still being built when they blew it up.
Dante:	Compliments of Lando Calrissian [the villain played by Billy Dee Williams]
Randal:	Something just never sat right with me that second time around. I could never put my finger on it, but something just wasn’t right.
Dante:	And you figured it out.
Randal:	The first Death Star was manned by the Imperial Army. The only people on board were Storm Troopers, dignitaries, Imperialists.
Dante:	Basically.
Randal:	So when they blew it up, no problem. Evil’s punished.
Dante:	And the second time around?
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