Read Harlan Ellison's Watching for Free Online

equipped to pontificate on a film.
     
    That's just fine, absolutely peachy keen, if one is making judgments about a movie while standing in the waiting line, or tossing it around at dinner or après -cinema; we all enjoy putting in our 2¢ on any topic we feel even remotely within our purview. But—and having voiced these opinions in print more than a fistful of times I'm aware of the inevitable charge of Elitism, to which charge I plead guilty, on grounds of common sense driven by pragmatism—it is a lot less salutary than "just fine, absolutely peachy keen" when those uninformed opinions are concretized as Film Criticism.
     
    For decades it was de rigueur on most small town (and many big city) newspapers to fob off the book reviews on anyone who would do the filthy job. A stringer who handled mostly box scores of the local high school baseball teams, would pick through a stack of review copies that had found their way to a newspaper, and select something that looked like it might be worth reading. They usually weren't even paid for the "review." That became the process for film reviewing, too. A local lady who assembled the village bulletin board listings, or who held Great Books sessions at her home, would be assigned to report on whatever the town's lone moviehouse was playing this week. Or canned material, usually based on studio handouts, would be picked up from the AP, UP or INS wires. Larger papers had a "Hollywood Correspondent" who filed interviews with stars and dealt regularly in gossip.
     
    Over time, serious film criticism began to emerge. Slowly, haltingly, and often to the bewilderment of city editors who used the material as fillers. Eventually, when a certain kind of academic began to perceive that there was Thesis Material in film criticism, a frequently infelicitous attention came to be focused on Hollywood's product. I refer here not to the serious, thoughtful, informed writings of such as James Agee, Graham Greene, Louis Delluc or Roland Barthes, but to the opportunistic scratchings of backwater Educationists (as R. Mitchell calls them) whose passion was not for the film individually or the form in toto, but merely to jump on what they cynically considered a popular culture publish-or-perish target of availability.
     
    And they passed along their parvenu perceptions to students who, because they had plonked down the price of a ticket, also felt entitled to pontificate, unfortunately employing the arcane jingoisms and semiotically-convoluted rationales they'd picked up from bloodless instructors unconsciously determined to leach every last morsel of pleasure from the act of filmgoing.
     
    Thus, justification for dumb remarks was institutionalized in American society. Not for the first time. Religion, politics, morality, literature . . . each in its turn has vibrated to the disturbances of air justified by the expression "I'm entitled to my opinion." As I point out in one of my essays, the important word informed is always missing from that bleat. In my ugly, Elitist opinion we are not all entitled to voice our opinions; we are entitled to pass along our informed opinions. As Anatole France once wrote, "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
     
    People who wouldn't have the chutzpah to venture a Solomonic medical diagnosis, or even proffer an opinion about why your car's engine is missing, have no compunctions or modesty when it comes to raving about, or trashing, a motion picture.
     
    Without having read all the drafts of the screenplay before it ever got into the hands of the production personnel, the line producer, or the director, without having been present on the set to experience the million contretemps that lobby for or against the written word's transmogrification, without understanding the skills and problems that go into the sound portrait, the color corrections, the editing, the looping and dubbing, or any of the other hundred-plus elements that