Doing Criticism. James Chandler

Dante: So? Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require … a lot more manpower than the Imperial Army had to offer. I’ll bet they brought independent contractors in on that thing. Plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers— Dante: Not just Imperialists. Is that what you’re getting at? Randal: Exactly. To get it built quickly and quietly, they’d hire anybody that could do the job. You think the average Storm Trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing. Dante: So they bring in independent contractors. Why are you so upset? Randal: Those innocent contractors brought in are killed, casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. Look, you’re a roofer. Some juicy government contract comes your way. You got a wife and kids, the two-story in suburbia. This is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. Along come these left-wing militants who blast everything within a three-mile radius with their lasers. You didn’t ask for that; you had no personal politics. You’re just trying to scrape out a living.⁴¹

      This passage leads us deep into the world of Star Wars lore, where aficionados, in their rivalry with Star Trek aficionados, generated a feature-length film about this very conflict in critical preference: Fan Boys (2009). It is also, of course, a world of white male adolescence and a seemingly jejune obsession with trivia. Nonetheless, I propose that we take Randal’s analysis as a genuine example of doing criticism, not least for the way he supports a critical judgment with a highly particularized and, in its way, cogent account of his objects.

True, there may be something arch about the tone: the language of this conversation verges on a becoming a pastiche of academic commentary. It is also the case that the politics are those we might imagine for vaguely working-class (perhaps petty-bourgeois) young men in Leonardo, New Jersey, with their special sympathy for the figure of the “independent contractor,” the local family man struggling to stay solvent. This is a figure who stands opposed to the left-wing militants who indiscriminately destroy them, and perhaps against a left-wing Hollywood filmmaker who may not even be aware of their existence. The critique, like the judgment about which is the “better movie,” is not only grounded in an aesthetic instinct—“Something just never sat right with me”—but also supported by moral and political reasoning.

      For all its creative license, then, what seems powerful and true about the scene is that it captures a certain critical energy very much embedded in everyday life, and it does so in an environment not obviously distinguished for its cultural richness or sensitivity: the Jersey Shore. (Think of Snooki and Pauly D from the wildly popular reality television show of that title that ran from 2009 to 2012.) Yet people in the most ordinary circumstances do have arguments like this about works they care about, and the works that Dante and Randal care about are the three films in the first Star Wars trilogy. It matters some that these films were actually not so recent in 1994, having appeared between 1977 and 1983. In the lifetimes of Dante and Randal, presumably young men in their early twenties, this is no small gap in time. Randal says he has just seen Jedi again today, presumably on the VHS player in the video store. It is of course precisely the institution of video rental that provides a new “library” function for ordinary cinephiles in this period, making it possible for Randal to rescreen a film from more than a decade earlier so as to get to the bottom of a critical instinct he has about it. Dante and Randal stand at the start of an era of expanding resources that continues into the present moment, as relatively affordable film streaming services offer ready access to thousands and thousands of film and video materials.

In Clerks, conversations like the one between Dante and Randal not only reveal what they care about, as evident in the detailed references they exchange and readily recognize; such conversations also enact a kind of caring. They represent a kind of meaning making even in a cultural zone like a 1980s working-class Jersey strip mall, where such forms of care and meaning making may not be easy to come by. Judgments of the sorts they concur in here—and arguments on behalf of those judgments such as they exchange here—come to carry a certain moral weight. There is, potentially, some irony in the scene, some gentle mockery of the pedantry of the analytic commentary Dante elicits from Randal. Smith takes care to set up the scene so that the actor playing Randal, Jeff Anderson, can actually read his complicated critical analysis from an off-screen script board. But the irony is, I suggest, enabling rather than undercutting: without making these interlocutors sound vaguely academic it would be harder to make the scene work.

Then again, it might also be tempting to view this exchange, and to dismiss the film, as merely an event in American consumer culture. What makes such a dismissal awkward in this case is that the film so pointedly stages this discussion—stages itself, really—in the immediate context of American consumer culture. Like much dialogue in the film, this conversation takes place with Dante behind the counter of the convenience store, in front of a wall that is chockablock with everyday things to buy—especially products containing addictive substances like nicotine, caffeine, and sugar. And these addictive products have their role in the way that the scene plays out. For example, while the conversation with Randal is progressing, a man steps over from the coffee maker to announce himself an “independent contractor” and to volunteer an opinion about Randal’s reading of Jedi. Moreover, toward the end of the scene, Dante and Randal are so caught up in their critical discourse that they fail to notice that their friend Jay—who spends his days hanging out in front of the store with his sidekick Silent Bob (played by Kevin Smith himself)—is stuffing his mouth with Hostess Twinkies (the notoriously sugary American junk food) (Figure 1.4). Variations on the psychology of consumption are played out through several figures over the course of the film, such as the “milk lady,” always sorting through the convenience store cooler in search of the freshest gallon, and the “egg man,” who rearranges eggs there in hopes, as Dante philosophically observes, of making the perfect dozen. In these ways and by these means, Smith’s film carves out a place for a poetics of cinema in the most implausible of circumstances.

      FIGURE 1.4 Jay (Jason Mewes) sneaking a Twinkie in Clerks.

      The course of this analysis has returned us to the poetry of the refrigerator with which we began. Set against the background of such scenes of consumption, Dante and Randal’s critical discussion of George Lucas’ trilogy takes on a distinctive cast. If the milk man and the egg lady go beyond the sheer impulsive gluttony of Jay’s gorging on Twinkies to something like an exaggerated form of selectivity, Dante and Randal go beyond selectivity (“which movie did you like better?”) to a developed and articulated response. In so doing, one might say, they develop their own articulate responsiveness. Articulate responsiveness may be understood, paradoxically, as both a goal and a condition of doing criticism well. And herein lies an important if somewhat circular principle for the arguments and analysis involved in doing criticism: Criticism develops responsiveness to works that reward it, and it does so by the practice of responding to them articulately. These issues will be addressed further in Chapter 2, which looks at the mutually connected role of questions and judgments in criticism.

      1.5 Criticism between Page and Screen

I have juxtaposed