I’ve seen enough: Taika Waititi is no longer riffing on a level that is frickin’ sublime. A quick update for those of you who don’t get your news from DiscussingFilm and/or obsessively listen to “Who? Weekly” in order to keep tabs on Rita Ora: On Saturday afternoon, writer-director Taika Waititi opened Instagram and posted — to his grid! — a less than equanimous reaction to the reviews of his new motion picture “Klara and the Sun,” which was in the process of making less money per screen during its second weekend than the average movie theater employee. It wasn’t the most embarrassing self-own of the pre-midterms weekend (that honor belongs to Michigan congresswoman Hayley Stevens, who committed political suicide on live TV with Anderson Cooper), but I’d argue that Waititi’s faux pas has more to say about how the reality distortion field of today’s media landscape has made it all too easy for highly visible people to misperceive the world around them in a crisis.
“I haven’t read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years,” the director wrote under an image celebrating the 53-point mismatch between the film’s audience and critics scores on Rotten Tomatoes. “But I do listen to the people, so this Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus became critics. The same people who also hated ‘Jojo Rabbit 😂 🤷🏽♂️.’ Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.🗑️😢🫶🏽.”
When I saw that his post had been modified, I assumed that Waititi had deleted the part where he wrote “and another thing: I’m not mad. Please don’t put in the newspaper that I got mad.” In truth, he had simply tweaked the bit where it said that “sad lost souls” like me had settled as critics. Good note! Much as fallen angels plummet from the heavens before landing in the depths of Hell to anguish for all eternity, critics don’t settle for a life of press screenings so much as we pathetically free fall into it, plummeting from the sacred highs of making “Thor: Love & Thunder” to the wretched lows of watching it. It’s that natural eye for editing that explains why “Next Goal Wins” felt like it had been cut with a soccer cleat.
Of course, I don’t take any of this too personally. (Don’t you dare fucking put in the newspaper that I got mad.) For one thing, I was actually quite tolerant of “Thor: Love & Thunder,” if only because I believe that casting Christian Bale as a guy named “Gorr the God Butcher” in and of itself makes that movie better than most of what Marvel was pumping out at the time. For another thing, I haven’t even seen “Klara and the Sun” — not because I was busy when it screened here, or because I live in one of the many countries where its release has been canceled on account of the movie’s supposed awfulness and verifiable lack of public interest, but rather because I adore the Kazuo Ishiguro novel on which it’s based, and I was convinced that hiring the director of “Jojo Rabbit” to adapt such a poignant tale of loss and brokenness would be like hiring Peter Farrelly to remake “The Remains of the Day.” Except worse, because I’ve always felt like the Merchant Ivory version of that book could have used a few gratuitous jokes about Anthony Hopkins’ swollen balls.
The truth is that the perceived quality of Waititi’s film is irrelevant to what I found interesting about his Instagram post, in much the same way as its quality is seemingly irrelevant to everything else as well. And in much the same way as the perceived quality of Waititi’s other films is irrelevant to the hissy fit he decided to throw about this one. Are “the same people who also hated ‘Jojo Rabbit’” in the room with us? Because that Oscar-winning movie is sitting at 81 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (Certified Fresh™!). OK sure, I hated it, but, as we’ve previously established, I am quite literally not “the same people” who hated “Klara and the Sun.”
On the other hand, I would very much consider myself to be among the large cohort of critics who adored Waititi’s earlier features like “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” “What We Do in the Shadows,” and “Eagle vs. Shark.” I suppose I could look up the aggregator metrics for those movies as well, but there isn’t any need — that most of the people reading this article have even heard of such modest Kiwi treasures is testament enough to the groundswell of critical support they received around the world. Perhaps, if he’d read a review in the last 15 years, Waititi might have been able to put that together for himself.
But that’s OK. As a public-facing person whose work offers considerably more fodder for mockery than praise (both by virtue of its nature, and also by that of the je ne sais quoi I bring to the job), I would never sincerely begrudge an artist for not wanting to read their own press. Especially now. Perhaps it used to be possible for celebrities to engage with such things in good faith (it was certainly easier in the days when pans were only found in newspapers, and personal attacks limited to their gossip columns), but the internet is a machine designed to make you hate yourself even more than you hate everyone else, and even our finest “anti-hate satires” have proven incapable of solving the problem.
For some folks, especially those with much greater profiles than my own, the only viable way to navigate the digital world without being fully consumed by self-loathing is to decide that all of the people who snipe at you from the sidelines aren’t really people at all. They’re more like ubiquitous wraiths — eyes looking at you from behind a painting, shadows that your subconscious might warp into an ominous shape, visions in the bog that almost lured Frodo to his death in “The Two Towers.” To let any of it in is to let all of it in, and there’s no amount of fame, money, or adulation that can fully inoculate sensitive people against the poison that seeps into their skin every time they pick up their phone (take it from me, someone who doesn’t have any of those things).
And so critics have gone from being a healthy part of the artistic ecosystem to something that artists feel like they need to be immunized against. Which isn’t to suggest that the animus between artists and critics is anything new. On the contrary, it’s as time-honored a cinematic tradition as popcorn at the movies or, say, the old trope of talented indie filmmakers who completely lose the plot once they become too successful.
If anything, that animus used to be a lot more personal, if only because it was expected that artists would know critics by name. Vincent Gallo famously called Roger Ebert a “fat pig with the physique of a slave trader” after Ebert panned “The Brown Bunny” at Cannes. Uwe Boll offered to box his biggest haters after he got sick of being a critical punching bag, and he beat the absolute shit out of all five of the people who took him up on it. Pauline Kael got so far under Clint Eastwood’s skin that he paid a psychiatrist to figure out what her problem was (the shrink naturally concluded that Kael just wanted to fuck Eastwood), while her review of “Ryan’s Daughter” caused David Lean such a crisis of confidence that he almost retired from directing altogether. And he made “Lawrence of Arabia”! (Which Kael also hated).
I’m not so bold as to presume that I — or any of my contemporaries — have a pen worthy of Kael’s poison or place in the public sphere, but the contrast is telling all the same. Instead of headline-making beefs that stand the test of time, today’s critics might be the subject of a petulant DM or a horde-summoning quote tweet. A prominent action director used to get drunk and send me crude messages about my wife via Instagram, but I think he’s sober now. Ron Perlman once called me a “cunt” on social media because I shat on some Christmas movie he made about furries, but I’d be shocked if he remembered that. Or really if he remembered “Pottersville” at all. I had a funny back-and-forth with a good-natured David Ayer after I trashed his Netflix debacle “Bright”; his promise to put my review on his fridge suggested a much less formal riff on Ridley Scott’s decision to frame Kael’s “Blade Runner” pan and hang it in his office. These days, film critics typically only get put on blast by name, at scale, when they make a major sociopolitical misstep of some kind, such as by arguing that a cartoon about red pandas somehow limits its scope by spotlighting Toronto’s immigrant community, or by fixating on the sexual possibilities that could be explored as a form of Mrs. Incredible’s superpowers. (Pixar movies are just irresistible rakes for critics to step on, I guess).
Today’s filmmakers and stars are certainly still aware of their alleged shooters (bracing for another “Dune” situation, Timothée Chalamet asked me to be kind to “Marty Supreme,” though I’m generally a fan, and he had nothing to fear in that case), but most publicly shared pushback is aimed at “the critics” writ large, if only so we can be reduced to cynical strawmen who exist in contrast to “the fans.” The marketing campaign for “Gotti” argued that critics “put out the hit” on the New York mob classic, and then asked people who they trusted more: themselves or “a troll behind a keyboard.” Ignoring the fact that this troll was behind his keyboard in a fucking tuxedo because that movie premiered as an unofficial selection at Cannes, the poptimistic notion that “real people love things” has become a go-to gameplan for an era where reality is easier to warp than it is to reckon with. In an ironic example of life imitating art, “Digger” recently adopted a similar approach.
I suspect that the systemic diminishment of arts criticism is both a cause and a symptom of this ever-worsening phenomenon. There was a time in this country when arts criticism was valued as a worthwhile pursuit unto itself, as opposed to a wonky and unreliable component of the promotional apparatus. The likes of Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer were regular fixtures on late night TV and panel shows; they were as famous as any of the people they wrote about, and when artists pushed back against their critics, it was seen as a debate between equals.
Because of that standing, the brightest minds of their generation were able to thrive as public intellectuals, and even invited to leverage their success into lucrative Hollywood careers of their own (as Vidal and Mailer both did before the resulting feud between them led to Mailer headbutting Vidal in the green room of “The Dick Cavett Show”). Today, the Vidals, Baldwins, and Mailers of the world would never belittle themselves by reviewing “Klara and the Sun” for $150, only for their work to be subsumed into a content aggregator that reduced it to a number in a larger set of numbers. In lieu of meaningful financial and intellectual compensation, any thinkers of such caliber today might understandably find arts criticism unworthy of their time and/or just share it to their Letterboxd for free.
That brings us to the reason why Waititi’s post was so excruciatingly tone-deaf, even though he’s hardly the first director to try the “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong!” defense. The hierarchy of power in the discourse universe has grown as wildly lop-sided as the hierarchy of power in every other arena of public life. Even the most high-profile of critics are barely scraping by, while anyone successful enough to make news with a “the critics put out the hit” post is likely to be a millionaire several times over.
You’d have to be completely disconnected from reality not to recognize how gauche and myopic it is to call journalists of any kind “obsolete” for speaking truth to power and/or product, but I suppose that’s a side effect of spending 15 years in an ecosystem designed to protect itself at all costs. It’s an ecosystem supported by influencer screenings, celebrity interview podcasts, and so many other quality-laundering tactics that it feels like a desperate and radical act when a star like Tom Cruise dares to sit down with a real magazine writer. Only in an ecosystem like that could someone sharp and humane enough to direct “Boy” and the funny parts of “Thor: Ragnarok” become convinced that everyone who hated “Klara and the Sun” did so out of resentment for their own shortcomings. Only in an ecosystem like that could someone that sharp make a movie like “Klara and the Sun” at all. (Which is not to specifically denigrate the actual “Klara and the Sun,” which again I have not seen.)
Of course, it’s not Waititi’s fault that he’s a product of his time, and in light of Aaron Sorkin’s considerably more sensible and self-effacing response to the reviews for “The Social Reckoning,” it’s worth considering whether his relative grace has something to do with the fact that he first came to success during an earlier iteration of Hollywood, where perspective was easier to come by. Whatever the case, we’re all trying our best to protect ourselves in the face of a world where imitated humanity is of limitless value, and actual humanity is an Achilles’ heel — a world in which one of the great modern authors might be moved to write a fairy tale-like story that questions the distance that has grown between people as a result of our efforts to create external vessels for our souls.
Reading Waititi’s tactless Instagram post back for what I pray is the last time, I’m reminded of a resonant line from Ishiguro’s novel, a line that unsurprisingly failed to make it into Waititi’s adaptation: “What was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom.” Perhaps, in some abstract way, Waititi’s Instagram post captured the essence of “Klara and the Sun” better than his film ever could.
