CraveOnline: You made a comment recently that was turned into a headline, and I’m not sure it needed to be, about online film critics and how we are starting to devalue the art of criticism. What I took away from that is that you seem to have a lot of respect for the medium of criticism. Would you say that’s fair?
David Cronenberg: Yeah, I mean I have a book right behind me which is a history of literary criticism. It’s sort of an academic text that I read when I was studying English at the University of Toronto, English Literature and the history of English Literature. There’s a great tradition of very highly intellectual, very learned, scholarly literary criticism. Aside from the sort of sniping, that there’s always been, of people yelling at each other and letters to the editor and stuff like that.
So there has been some, eventually, that evolved in film, and we’ve had film critics, especially amongst the French… The French New Wave of directors, they all began as film critics, like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, they were all film critics before they were filmmakers. They were really passionate, they were intelligent, they were well read, they were scholarly, and I think the attitude these days is anybody can be a film critic.
Well, that’s not really true. Anybody can have an opinion about a film, and that’s certainly true and it’s legitimate, but not everybody really needs to be read in terms of what they think in detail about a film. So I think there is a diluting of [the] highest forms of film criticism, as there is in… We’ve just seen this news anchor, Brian Williams, and the question of what’s the different between Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow and a current news anchor, you know? A part of it is the entertainment factor. It’s a matter of being an entertainer rather than being really a corrector and analyzer of news.
“I think the attitude these days is anybody can be a film critic. Well, that’s not really true.”
So the internet has really caused an upheaval in everybody’s understanding of these things, and it’s still not settled. It hasn’t been settled yet. We could go onto Rotten Tomatoes, you see that at a certain point they had to say that these are primary critics, and these are internet online critics, and these are just people who decided that they are critics. It’s a tricky one. Just by reading them you can tell who are good writers and who are not good writers.
I feel like many people thought that the internet had the potential to democratize the conversation, and yet it seems like overall the conversation has devolved about a lot of things. Art in particular, for the purposes of this conversation, but just in general everyone seems to get to write a comment and feel as though their opinion is equally valid.
Well democracy is a very tricky thing. It’s a very tricky thing. Not easy to maintain, a real democracy, as we’ve seen all over the world where suddenly people are trying to do that who have never done it before. Even in Russia, there’s not what we’d recognize as a democracy happening there, even though they like to call it something like… They call it a “managed democracy.” What the heck does that mean? Well, it means it’s not really a democracy.
But there’s a reason why in England there was a House of Commons, which would the common people, and then there would be the House of Lords, which would be the aristocrats. There was meant to be a balance between the two of them because it was understood that the mob, as they used to call it, meaning the people, could get out of hand, could get unruly, could get kind of vicious and dangerous. [Laughs.] So they needed the House of Lords to balance it.
In America you have the Senate, you have an equivalent structure. So democracy is tricky and it doesn’t mean that everybody really is equal. Everybody is equal politically, capable of voting or should be able to vote and all of that, but it doesn’t mean that everybody’s smart. It doesn’t mean that everybody’s intelligent. It doesn’t mean that everybody’s well read or has even seen a lot of movies, so it’s a tricky thing. That’s a tricky thing. It’s an interesting but a very long discussion, actually.
