For those of you who also read The New Yorker, you’re in luck because I’m expanding my horizons today to include Manhattan’s most venerable purveyor of terrible poetry and often quite good investigative journalism. (Seriously, maybe I just don’t get poetry that’s not, like, Shakespeare’s sonnets or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but I really, really don’t see what the poetry editor of the The New Yorker is thinking. If someone understands why, for instance, this poem merited publication in the highest-circulation magazine in the US that includes supposedly high-brow poetry regularly, please comment or email me at timesnewgloaming@gmail.com.) Their short stories tend to be not very good, either. But some of their criticism is good, as is some of their commentary. All of which is why I’m a subscriber.
Anyhow, the circumstance prompting me to write this post is that I received my new The New Yorker yesterday, and as usual, I browsed through it throughout the day, reading a few shorter pieces and picking out which longer ones I would try to read before the end of the week. Near the back of the issue, I was pleased to see a piece by David Denby, The New Yorker’s “serious” film critic, extolling the virtues of the so-called “mumblecore” film movement. Mumblecore basically means movies made very cheaply with non-professional actors, generally focusing on the lives of twenty-something hipsters as they drift through aimless lives in places like Brooklyn and Boston. Denby correctly notes that mumblecore has been criticized as merely “smug portraits of a new generation of privileged white slackers.” And while I’m by no means an expert on mumblecore, I agree wholeheartedly that “[w]hen the material is emotionally raw, and the nonprofessional actors show some strength, mumblecore delivers insights that Hollywood can’t come close to.”
That said, there were a couple of glaring problems with Denby’s article, one perpetuating a common misconception about mumblecore, the other a clear misrepresentation or misstatement of fact. Denby’s first mistake is the less egregious of the two. After noting the frequently negative criticism of mumblecore, he goes on to state, “But a critic, I think, should grant a filmmaker his subject”, implying that the movies are merely portraits of “privileged white slackers.” Such is hardly the case.
While it is true that mumblecore films do tend to be set in the world of privileged hipersterdom, at their best, these films are scathingly critical of the hipster lifestyle. For instance, one of the films Denby cites favorably, Mutual Appreciation, is a relentless critique of the milieu in which it is set. Even the title is obviously mocking the film’s characters’ empty and banal professional and artistic lives. The story here centers around would-be indie rocker Alan, who comes to New York after his previous, semi-successful band the Bumblebees breaks up, in order to try to make it as a solo artist. Although he starts off the film as likable and shy, his cumulative actions throughout the film reveal his true character. Alan hits on his best friend’s girlfriend repeatedly, asks his dad for money while lying about his efforts to get a real job, plays an incredibly lame show at Northsix (which everyone assures him was great), sleeps with a college radio groupie then unceremoniously dumps her after learning he might get a record deal, immediately states his willingness to sell out when said deal is discussed with sleazy A&R guy Walter, dresses like a girl when a group of hipster chicks pressures him into it, gets drunk on other people’s booze without ever seeming to bring his own, etc., etc. And, yet, as I mentioned, if you met Alan on any given day and didn’t know any of his exploits, you’d think he was a pretty cool guy. Which is the film’s central point. Alan could be any of hundreds of people you meet everyday who seem like “alright dudes” but who are in reality selfish, shallow assholes.
So if Denby is claiming mumblecore to be mere portraits, he is missing completely their capability to critique the subjects of those portraits. But, oh well, he’s trying.
My second criticism goes to the heart of The New Yorker as an institution. Anyone who has worked in magazines knows how much the The New Yorker prides itself on its impeccable fact-checking. In fact, they recently ran a long article on how hard their fact-checkers work. The article implied that any mistakes these fact-checkers make would have been very difficult to catch. If that is the case, then, somebody slipped up big time in their checking of the Denby piece.
Denby paints the relationship between Alan and his friend’s girlfriend, Ellie, as if the main plot point in their relationship was a mere flirtation that did not proceed beyond an exchange of words, a fact he uses as an example of how mumblecore movies often revolve around the emotional minutiae of their characters’ drab lives.
When I read that part of the article, something seemed wrong to me, so I watched Mutual Appreciation again last night. (I’ve had it on my DVR for months.) What actually occurs in the film is that after their second round of flirtation, during which Ellie’s boyfriend is away at an ex’s wedding, Alan and Ellie end up lying face-to-face in bed. Ellie starts to leave, but after some urging, Alan convinces Ellie to stay for “ten minutes.” This ten minutes turns into “all night.” The next scene shows Ellie leaving Alan’s apartment in the morning. Although it is unclear exactly what happened between them during the night, and although Ellie later claims that they only had a “moment,” clearly the evening was more than just that. Alan also denies (but only after hearing that Ellie said nothing happened) that there was anything more than a “moment.” The point of these scenes is not to display the three making a big deal out of an ephemeral exchange, as Denby would have it, but to show the duplicity of Alan and Ellie, while painting boyfriend Louis as a hapless fool. And so, aptly, the film ends with a ridiculous group hug and the three friends falling into bed together.
Denby’s exact words on the scene are: “For Bujalski, however, the passing desire, the impulse not acted on, is a major dramatic event, and a good part of the rest of the movie is devoted to discussing this ineffable conversation.” Denby is saying the two never went past the mere flirtation, which is obviously wrong given the above analysis.
This error is surprising. Denby’s fact-checker should have watched all the films cited in this article, so I don’t see how this mistake was made, unless Denby hadn’t seen the film for a long time and the fact-checker did a really bad job. Since I generally liked the article, I don’t want to be overly critical on this point, but, really, New Yorker, maybe you should save some of your self-praise next time you print an article about your own inner-workings.
