Outsider Film Criticism

Mike Stoklassa's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review

1.

Artists tend to present themselves as outsiders.

During the Renaissance, it’s been argued, a new class of “artists” wanted to distinguish their work from other kinds of skilled labor and so pioneered this clever marketing strategy. Romanticism, with its rage for subjectivity, and its cultivation of a self in loneliness and passion, intensified the concern. Various tendencies in modernism declared a problematic relationship between art and culture, forcing the artist to the edges of society, making her a murderer of normality.

Through all of this, though, art has always been legible as more or less a set of codes and conventions, which can be followed, tweaked, or disobeyed, but never simply discarded or ignored. One can choose not to follow the rules, but one can’t truly be free of them. Awareness is a kind of bondage.

In the 20th century, modernist artists like Jean Dubuffet and André Breton became fascinated by aesthetic objects made by residents in asylums. This work seemed to suggest a way out of “art” as such. Here were the truly mad; the legitimately Other; here was awesome and vivid subjectivity; a self in real loneliness with real passion; here were the actual murderers of normality, and they committed murder not out of calculation but rather out of the purified genius of their uncultivated ignorance. Dubuffet argued:
 

In our time as in other times, certain ways of expression prevail; through fashion or circumstances, certain forms of art receive attention and consideration to the exclusion of others. Ultimately, these artforms are quite wrongly regarded as the only justifiable ones, the only possible ones. Thus is hollowed out a path henceforth followed by all artists, who lose consciousness of its special character, and lose sight of many other admissible paths. 

And:

Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.

Dubuffet called these treasured objects “art brut,” or “raw art,” suggesting their essentialness in relation to the contingencies of contemporary culture. Critic Roger Cardinal called the work “outsider art,” expanding Dubuffet’s category to include all work made beyond the reach of the social and economic rules of the art-world.

As for Dubuffet’s claim that this art is “pure and authentic” in opposition to the “fashion and circumstances” of the day: this does not seem quite right to me. If one looks at some of the most striking outsider artists, what’s interesting isn’t so much that codes and conventions have been ignored entirely as that they’ve been measured strangely, internalized haphazardly, or comprehended only partially.

Jimmy Miles’ brilliantly minimalist drawings—which often show small figures isolated amid a giant blankness that stands in for sky, walls, ceiling, space— show an awareness of art history, but one refracted through a dense lens. Miles has learned certain rules of representation, but we can’t help but feel he has not learned all the rules.

Likewise, artist Henry Darger’s drawings don’t come to us ex nihilo. Darger’s most famous series concerns the Vivian Girls, seven strange nymphettes who must battle John Manley and the Glandelinians, imposing villains who would like to enslave the Vivian Girls. In terms of composition, many of Darger’s epic landscapes, congested with stunning violence and arranged with symphonic beauty, seem to make slapdash reference to Breughel or Bosch. His work as a whole strikes a disarming balance between knowingness and unknowingness, which is crystallized in the unbearably creepy but somehow beautifully sad fact that the little girls who obsessed him—who held such powerful erotic fascination for him—were rendered with little penises: he’d never seen a naked female body.

Painter Louis Wain is another illustrative outsider artist; he started on the inside. Wain was for a time a successful commercial artist selling pictures of anthropomorphized cats: perfected kitsch. As schizophrenia took over his life, the real subject of his work became projections of psychic energy: force fields of sprawling, knotted psychedelic colors. But Wain retained his nominal subject, kittens, and it’s from these kittens that the psychic energy radiates. Arranged sequentially, his work becomes an illustrated narrative of an internalized commercial culture transforming into a radically isolated personal cosmology.

It seems like these artists looked to the codes and conventions of art and took the tools most expedient in satisfying their compulsions. For Miles, the compulsion was diagramming space with an autistic removal; for Darger, creating auto-erotic landscapes charged with divine battles between good and evil; for Wain, literalizing emotional valences. The work isn’t unstudied, per se, but we could say the artists have not studied properly; their relation to art history is partial or angular. As such, their work does seem to cast, as Dubuffet suggests, an illuminating light back on all artistic activity.

2.

Film critics, too, tend to present themselves as outsiders. Now more than ever.

Political film critics present themselves as lone warriors in a profession filled with hermetic formalists. Formalists think they’re heroically traditional writers engaged in mighty battle with trendy identitarians. Academic film writers see their work in opposition to the more visible and risibly mundane work of journalist critics. Journalist critics think journalism is an effort at genuine engagement in the face of incorrigibly recondite academics, who are enviably and pathetically immune to both market forces and any desire to be interesting. Avant-gardists and aesthetes think they’re in a losing war with Kool-Aid drinking populists and, perhaps most confusingly, populists seem to believe that, while they voice widely held opinions, they, the populists, are, within film criticism itself, outsiders bravely fighting the raging tide of elitists in an effort to bestow dignity on the common. If one listens to the self-presentation of film critics today, one never wants for lonely stands against groupthink and banality.

We could say that each subculture within film criticism thinks itself the “pure and authentic” genre in opposition to the “fashion and circumstances” of the day. And yet, as all these critics would freely admit, every genre of film criticism consists mostly of recognizable codes and conventions.

It would be useful if there were some kind of “outsider film criticism.” Not amateur criticism, which seems to account for a sizable portion of the internet as a whole; not some kind of radical or experimental criticism, which isn’t hard to come by; and not some kind of oppositional film criticism, which is legion. What I mean is film criticism that seems to have internalized the rules of criticism in a partial or angular way. Perhaps this could shed some kind of light on the practice that would be illuminating.

3.

The compilation film—a kind of documentary composed mostly of found footage—has always provided a shortcut to an authoritative voice. The bar for professionalism is low compared to the fiction film or talking-head documentary; one simply needs access to pre-recorded footage and a way to create a voice-over track. Many of the masterpieces of 20th century weirdness are compilation films. How Should We Then Live: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, a counter-Enlightenment Christian tract narrated by Francis A. Shaeffer, is a classic of the genre. It offers an entire, and entirely eccentric, history of Western culture, from Ancient Rome to the present. The focal points of the film are unerringly strange; Shaeffer, for example, is at multiple points fixated on painter Paul Gaugin, whose Orientalism he sees, somewhat ironically, as a key pivot in the West’s self-defeating turn toward multiculturalism. The film, along with the book on which it was based, was formative for conservative politician Michelle Bachmann.

The advent of YouTube, in tandem with the increased ease of file sharing and home editing software, lowered the bar to professionalism across all film genres, but the compilation film benefitted more than most: access to pre-recorded footage and a way to create a voice-over track are now within reach for many. The compilation film is now the triumphant spectacle in the land of makeshift authority. The key series of films in this development was Loose Change, an iterative group of 9/11 conspiracy theory movies that gained massive traction on the Internet. As a college student in the mid-00s, one could hardly get stoned at a house party without someone bringing up arguments from these movies. One was tempted, sometimes, to avoid house parties entirely.

4.

With the rapid spread of compilation films in the mid-00s, the culture witnessed the development of various subgenres. One specific subgenre consisted of illustrated analyses of movies themselves. This sort of online video essay bares only faint resemblance to the rambling, discursive essay films of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Chris Marker; and is similarly distant from essay movies by Thom Andersen and Adam Curtis, which weave together huge amounts of information to make large claims about culture. The kind of video essay I have in mind is more narrowly film criticism.

Expanding on formal ideas latent in DVD extras and clip-show lectures, the film criticism video essay was pioneered by, among others, critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who made compelling featurettes for websites like Moving Image Source and The L Magazine before founding the IndieWire blog PressPlay, which specializes in the genre.

Film criticism on the page has always had an audience dilemma. There is a kind of shot-by-shot nitpickery with massive appeal to movie-nerds sitting at home wearing out the rewind and fast-forward buttons. And yet rendering this kind of close formal analysis in prose usually requires an abstract, specialized language. Many of the insights proposed by critics like David Bordwell have a potential audience much larger than the audience for the actual books themselves, which present a necessarily stylized, academic prose. The kinds of obsessive video-essays made by the defiantly nerdy Seitz, with a foot both in academia and the rental store, go a long way toward solving this audience dilemma. Analyzing the visual language of action movies becomes a matter of watching various scenes from action movies: a much friendlier proposition than a 600-page book.

5.

The metastasis of the compilation film and the development of a sub-genre of film criticism within the form led, perhaps inevitably, to what I see as a bona-fide “outsider film criticism.” One can now find on YouTube feverish formal analyses of movies informed by the rules of mainstream film criticism but never seeming to understand, or at least obey, them entirely.

A key work in the development of this genre is Mike Stoklasa's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review. I don’t think Stoklasa’s essay is actually a work of outsider film criticism in and of itself. Stoklasa is too canny; his goal is to illustrate why The Phantom Menace fails horribly according to general Hollywood storytelling principles. Stoklasa has a mastery of those principles. His arguments, while protracted, are expertly drawn. An example:

You see, in most movies the audience needs a character to connect with. Typically this character is something called a protagonist. When you’re in a weird movie with like aliens and monsters and weirdos, the audience really needs someone who’s like a normal person, like them, to guide them through the story. Now this of course doesn’t apply to every movie, but it works best in the sci-fi, super-hero, action, and fantasy genres.

 
Stoklasa goes on to list some examples, before continuing:

This is all of course completely applicable to the ordinal Star Wars film and the character of Luke Skywalker… I want you to tell me who the main character of The Pantom Menace was. I can tell you it’s not the Jedi: they’re just on some boring mission that they never really care about. Plus they’re fucking boring themselves… It wasn’t Queen Amidala, because she was just some foreign queen who the movie was not really about specifically either. You might be thinking that it’s Anakin, because he was like a slave and saved the day at the end by accidentally blowing up the starship. But the audience doesn’t meet Anakin until 45 minutes into the movie. And then the things that are happening around him are pretty much out of his control or understanding.

 
And so on. Stoklasa’s anatomization of the movie’s flaws is funny, even if inevitably his own film retains some of those flaws, like boringness. More interesting, though, is the way Stoklasa frames his critique. He invents a character to narrate, with an exaggerated, nasally voice, stylized speech patterns with lots of “likes” and “reallys,” and, also, an intermittently elaborated back-story: he is a sociopathic rapist and murderer. The movie’s commentary is occasionally interrupted by glimpses of the narrator’s life: things like hiding and storing his female victims.

Stoklasa, I think, is self-consciously parodying the figure of the outsider film critic. By 2009, the year Stoklasa released his review, this figure already had a definitive shape in YouTube consciousness. Stoklasa decided to make his narrator perhaps the ultimate alienated outsider: a serial killer. One of the jokes, I think, is that, absent economic incentives, spending your free time analyzing movies is insane. Perhaps the suggestion, though, goes further than that. Perhaps film criticism is, regardless of context, a form of madness.  

6.

Jay Weidner’s Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick might stand for me as the ultimate masterpiece, thus far, of outsider film criticism. Many of the arguments in Weidner’s opus are hard to summarize, but the overall narrative he sketches is not.

Weidner tells how, when Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove, he was denied access to shoot inside a B-52 Bomber. It was suspected the finished film might be subversive, and the government didn’t want to assist.

Never having seen the actual inside of a B-52, Kubrick was forced to simulate one, piecing together an idea of what the interior might look like from cubistic snapshots taken from strange angles inside various planes. Government officials who saw the movie were impressed by how convincing Kubrick’s set was; blown away, in fact. NASA had been plotting to fake a moon landing for a while and, on the basis of his resourceful and convincing recreation of the B-52, decided Kubrick would be the man to do it.

After receiving the phone call that would change his life, Kubrick was left with few options. He already knew too much; if he refused to fake the moon landing, surely he would be killed for reasons of national security. So Kubrick made a deal: he would stage the moon landing for NASA and, in return, would be allowed the means to create the movie he’d always dreamed of, the spectacularly expensive 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Much time is spent in Weidner’s film illustrating how the main technical achievement of the opening sequence of 2001—front-screen projection—was simultaneously used for great effect in the famous footage of Neil  Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr landing on the moon.

But the most fascinating part of Weidner’s movie comes in the latter half, when he gets around to analyzing Kubrick’s later movies. Kubrick, it turns out, was tortured by the big lie he’d gotten over on the world. He wanted to confess, but would most certainly risk death or worse in doing so. His solution was to riddle his oeuvre with allegories of his transgression. But he couldn’t be obvious about it; he had to get the information out there, but covertly. To save his soul the entire story must be told; to save his life it must be told in a way that could never be entirely understood, at least during his lifetime. Perhaps in the future, someone, a lone genius perhaps, might come along to crack the secret code of his cinema; to enact the confession he could not make, and rescue him from whatever purgatory he landed in.

The most compelling section of Weidner’s crazed movie, and the one with the most sustained arguments, is a reading of The Shining as a retelling of the entire NASA ordeal. Weidner’s claims are elaborate. First, Kubrick split his personality in two: Jack, who represents Kubrick the Hollywood striver struggling for success, and Jack’s son Danny, who represents Kubrick the pure creative genius, the artist as child, with a creativity unbound by worldly desires. The cabin they go to is America. It is haunted by American history, with America’s past encoded in the old, well-dressed figures on the wall. Jack’s decision to go to the cabin represents Kubrick’s decision to fake the moon landing. Just as Jack worries that without this isolation he will be unable to write his masterpiece, Kubrick worried that without NASA’s money he would be unable to make 2001. But the cabin, America, drives Jack mad, just as it unleashes in Danny a set of primal visions, which are both premonitions of the terrible guilt Kubrick felt in the wake of the fake moon landing and visions of Kubrick’s later films themselves, 2001 and The Shining included.

This is a maniacally weird hermeneutics, erupting out of nonsense history. And yet I think it’s compelling, in a way; I’d even say some of it’s right. I think Kubrick really did split his personality in two in the figures of Jack and Danny. I think the film really is about his struggles as an artist. I think the cabin really is America, or, more specifically, a classic metonym for America: Hollywood. Jack’s struggles and their relation to Danny’s visions really are about the tragic compromises Kubrick felt himself enthrall to: not faking the moon landing, I would argue, but becoming successful as a popular artist meeting the demands of the market.

But Kubrick’s film—with its overdetermined nests of symbolism, both dense and abstract—lends itself to many readings. The Shining, in fact, has developed a rich legacy within outsider film criticism. There is even a meta-documentary, Room 247 by Rodney Ascher, that investigates theories about The Shining. Weidner is featured in it.

One of the most charmingly bizarre theories about The Shining is developed in Rob Ager’s The Shining: Kubrick's Gold Story, which argues that the movie is really about the gold standard and fiat monetary systems.

Ager has a website that contains not just his essay films but his critical writings on cinema as well. Some of these are not really essays with arguments, but more like lists of symbols and covert gestures. In an essay on E.T., Ager asserts:

The sun and moon are particularly important symbols in E.T.

·       Shots of Elliot exploring the garden at night prominently feature the moon.

·       Elliot’s magical flying bike rides show him passing the sun and the moon, blown up to giant proportions.

·       The sun is very intentionally used as a backdrop when the children walk the streets in their Halloween costumes, and again as the government scientists and authorities approach the house.

What the sun and moon are symbols of remains unclear. What is important first and foremost seems to be proving that the film has symbols; that there is another, deeper reality hidden inside; and that the critic has accessed it and is reporting back. Like Ager’s writing, his films, along with Weidner’s, have a repeating motif: the insistence on an eerie significance in everything that can never be entirely explained. These critics find symmetries—elegant repetitions and variations—and often seem to think this is enough. It is not only that many of their claims seem objectively insane to many people but that they can’t always fit their discourse into what most of us would recognize as a proper argument.

7.

Paranoia is a form of desperate meaning making. What the paranoid person can’t seem to stand is the arbitrariness of much of reality. And so everything must be knit into larger patterns of meaning: often either the heaving perturbations of history or the divine truth of a deeper, mystical reality. A headache—the ultimate and ultimately meaningless personal annoyance—becomes a transmission from CIA double agents working for a Soviet Atlantis. A rash becomes a message from the spirit-realm.

Paranoids delight us sometimes because when we seem them we can feel assured that we ourselves are not so deluded in the way we construct meaning from experience. And yet just as often paranoids scare us because, of course, maybe we actually are that deluded and don’t know it.

In the 1930s, Salvador Dali, infatuated with insanity, proposed a “paranoiac-critical method” that could make ingenious connections between things; connections not allowed within the strict bounds of rationality. But all critical methods are, in some sense, paranoiac-critical methods. The two patterns used by paranoids to inject significance into events—political conspiracies and mystical capital ‘t’ Truth—correspond, I think, to our two major critical models. Political criticism, indeed, tries to knit movies into the heaving perturbations of history. Humanistic criticism claims, I think, that great movies tap into an order that’s mystical, at least in some way, in its continuity through time: the human condition.

I do think outsider film criticism of the kind practiced by Weidner and Ager casts a light back on the practice as a whole: it’s illuminating, and not entirely flattering. I wouldn’t write film criticism if I didn’t think it does, occasionally or theoretically, engage in important work. But I can’t pretend that when I write about a movie that’s gotten lodged in my brain, when I contextualize that film in terms of politics or psychological resonance, I can’t pretend I’m not, whatever else I might be doing, saying that my headache is a machination of history and my rash a message from the spirit-realm.