This post has been updated.
Movie critics enjoy a position of privilege virtually unknown to the rest of American society: they can say what they want and write as nastily as they want, as frequently as they want (the Internet is an extraordinary goad to fiery eloquence), and no one will punish them for it. If uttered publicly in a corporate or government job, the merest hostile aside might get someone fired, or demoted, or stalled, but critics can question a movie actor or director’s competence, honor, body, hairstyle, and many other things, without fear of much more than an unpleasant note or a withdrawn screening invitation—and even those two reprimands don’t happen very often. Commentary about the arts is protected by law and by cultural tradition, and thank God for both.
Monday night, the New York Film Critics Circle, in its seventy-ninth year of existence, held an awards party at the Edison Ballroom on Forty-seventh Street. At the end of the evening, Harry Belafonte, now eighty-seven, made a moving speech in his unique hoarse tenor about the representation of blacks in the movies. Belafonte began with D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” and ended with Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” a movie that Belafonte admires very much. He then presented the award for Best Director to McQueen. At which point, as McQueen stepped to the podium, the critic Armond White, sitting with friends in the back of the room, shouted the following: “You’re an embarrassing doorman and garbage man! Fuck you. Kiss my ass.”
McQueen, standing at the opposite end of the large room, could not possibly have heard what White said. Most people in the room didn’t hear it. (I heard some of it.) But that, of course, is hardly the point. McQueen had travelled across the Atlantic to receive the award; he was the guest of the New York Film Critics Circle, and White’s remarks were all over the Internet in a couple of hours.
No one would question Armond White’s right to have as angry an opinion of “12 Years a Slave” as he likes. An intelligent man who enjoys upsetting what he takes to be liberal complacencies about culture, White, an African-American, has spent many merry hours cutting up the films (for instance) of Spike Lee. In criticizing the work of other blacks, he joins an honorable cultural tradition. The great novelist Ralph Ellison, a jazz lover, had little use for bebop, and said so in public; the critic and cultural historian Stanley Crouch once attacked Toni Morrison in The New Republic for making, as Crouch put it, victimhood a literary property. Obviously, African-Americans have the same right to attack blacks as Jews do to attack Jews, and Catholics Catholics.
In the case of “12 Years a Slave,” I thought White’s review of the movie, which appeared on the Web sites of CityArts and the New York Film Critics Circle, was largely absurd. As is so often true with this critic, he launched into accusations against the filmmaker and the audience’s motives without doing the necessary exposition to establish the body of the movie—its plot, its tone, its visual style, and narrative strategy. Instead, the review was filled with sentences like the following: “Depicting slavery as a horror show, McQueen has made the most unpleasant American movie since William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist. That’s right, 12 Years a Slave belongs to the torture porn genre with Hostel, The Human Centipede and the Saw franchise.”
No, it doesn’t belong to that genre. It’s a brutal movie, and I feel some uneasiness about it, but it’s nothing like those films. White made the comparison to shock, not to illuminate anything about “12 Years a Slave.” But no one would question Armond White’s freedom to write as badly as he wants. In shouting abuse at McQueen at an awards meeting, however, he pushes past the extraordinary liberties that critics enjoy; he becomes insulting in a way that makes those liberties seem an indulgence rather than a necessity.
Update: Late last night, Armond White presented the Hollywood Reporter with a denial:
I have since been in touch with a critic who sat near Armond White and who reported hearing the “garbage man and doorman” remark, the words Variety reported, and also “white liberal bullshit,” and that White was jeering at people loudly earlier in the evening. In any case, what matters is that artists won awards through a rather tortuous voting process and then were invited to the group’s public party as guests. Shouting abuse at them is rude beyond measure.
No one is out to “squelch” another critic. What would be the point? As I said above, we prize our freedom. None of us want to be “squelched” ourselves. But we live by certain rules so that we can enjoy our freedom as much as possible.
Photograph of Steve McQueen by Ferdaus Shamim/WireImage.
