John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001) is not a great film. For one thing, it’s more of a movie—there are guns and special effects and pretty ladies and it takes place on Mars—than what we like to call cinema. It’s not even a great movie, as it came out a few weeks after September 11, and its procolonization message fails to reflect the cultural zeitgeist of those tumultuous times.
So I want to talk about the state of criticism.
A moment most critics could not survive.
Don’t critics tend to believe they hold untrammeled opinions, unbeholden to the outside forces of, say, corporate entertainment?
Oh. Yes. Well that’s a very complicated question. I don’t really know the answer to that. I don’t really hang out with that many film critics. [Laughs.] Only one or two, really. But I think people overidentify with the system, regardless of their thoughts about the history of cinema.
Well, film criticism, for most of its practitioners, is not a profession anymore. It’s done in one’s free time, or is an amateur endeavor. The dwindling number of professional critics are people who work for—not even alt newspapers, alt weeklies, but daily papers. And a lot of those people are not film buffs or cinephiles. They fell into it because they were interested in it, but they don’t have the obsessive enthusiasm of either cinephiles or buffs. So it’s different now, because there are fewer and fewer people who do it and make a living at it, and more people who do it as a sideline. That’s diluted its power.
