The Real Lesson of Siskel and Ebert

A promotional photo for Siskel and Ebert. (ABC/Disney)

“The critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in someone else’s dung, otherwise he couldn’t hatch it.”  Mark Twain

Resident OT movie guy Luis Mendez recently wrote a piece about the late movie critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert called Things I Learned From Binging Siskel and Ebert.

I devoured it, because I’m a huge S&E fangirl, a thing that actually exists.  Individually they’re both great critics, but the Siskel-Ebert brain trust is,  IMVVHO, the best critic ever, bar none.  Ebert has, of course, lived on in the public consciousness thanks to becoming a beloved Internet icon, but to my recollection, Siskel was just as talented, and an excellent foil/complement to his more famous partner.  It’s too bad he’s not better remembered. I generally preferred Siskel’s opinions to Ebert’s, whom I found a bit snooty at times, so much so I shoehorned the word whom into this sentence in his honor.

I started off watching Siskel and Ebert back when they were on PBS in the 70s (did I mention I was a very strange child) and continued watching till after Siskel’s death, when Richard Roeper took over for him.  The chemistry just wasn’t the same.  I found Roeper bland, uninsightful, and arrogant, and not in the endearing snooty-old-fuddy-duddy way Ebert is.  Eventually I stopped watching the show, because the magic was gone.

Over time I came to discover that Ebert was more awesome than I’d realized, or perhaps I just grew to become more of a snooty-old-fuddy-duddy myself.  Ebert had hated a fair number of beloved movies that I also found totally overrated, like Dead Poet’s Society, Edward Scissorhands, and The Usual Suspects.  I devoured his three-part book series on “The Great Movies”, and to this day seek out his old reviews, marveling at his insight even when I disagree with him (American Beauty is obvious, divisive, stereotype-laden, misogynistic crap, Roger!)

I have read a lot of critics saying a lot of things about a lot of movies subsequent to Ebert’s death, and have even gone back and read/watched old reviews from S&E contemporaries Maltin, Shalit, Kael, and Travers, and none of them have the gift for criticism that Gene and Roger alone, let alone combined, possessed.  They were simply the best, and even when wrong (American Beauty, grr!) called to my attention elements of various films that I never would have noticed otherwise.

And that brings me to my question.  What is the purpose of the critic, anyway?  Are they, like Mark Twain implied, bottom feeders, untalented jerks who exist solely to poop on everyone’s party, sadists who get off on despising creative works everyone else loves and praising things the average person will find painfully boring and insufferable?  Or is there more to criticism than that?  Are critics leeches sucking on the underbelly of art, or are they a necessary part of the creative ecosystem?

Most people hate critics, and they hate them because they don’t understand the purpose of the critic.  Luis Mendez illustrated this fundamental misunderstanding of the critic’s role quite nicely in his piece, so with apologies, I’m gonna go full Ebert on him here.

Luis appears to believe that the job of a critic is to be a fortune teller, to foresee what the audience will like, and continue to like in the future.  Critics of the past, if they really knew their business, should have enthusiastically appreciated future fan faves and cult classics from the jump.  Any critic who doesn’t give glowing reviews to movies future audiences will enjoy, has failed in their mission.

This is an oft-made claim regarding film criticism – many critical darlings of their day will not go on to “pass the test of time” and become “classics”, and this fact somehow reveals critics to be full of crap.  It’s a widely accepted truism –  “passing the test of time” is allegedly more important a metric than recognizing a good movie at the time of its release, in the context of its creation.

I have some problems with that notion.  For one thing, even beloved and classic movies don’t always – or even usually – stand the test of time.  I just rewatched Jaws, which Luis cites as evidence that Siskel and Ebert missed the boat in terms of “best” movies of 1975* in favor of a couple forgotten arthouse films I won’t even bother to name (truly, 1975 was not the best year in film, so the relative obscurity of their choices here actually makes a fair bit of sense.)  While Jaws is an enjoyable film with a couple brilliant moments – Robert Shaw’s monologue is rightfully considered one of the best monologues in movie history – and it is inarguably both classic and influential, both my husband and I found it quite dated upon rewatch.

Status as “classic” doesn’t protect a film from the ravages of time.  Even when a movie continues to hang in there in terms of popularity, that doesn’t by default make it any less dated.  Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is a quintessential film, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, action-based blockbusters, a great movie that clearly influences filmmaking to this day (perhaps a little too much, le sigh).  Yet upon rewatch, it still comes off as a definite product of its time.  Not that that’s bad – after all, what’s wrong with being dated anyway? – just that it IS.

Just because the audience loves a movie so much it stays popular for a long time does not make it good or important.  It simply means it appeals to a wide swath of people – sometimes inexplicably.  Deeming a film “beloved classic” does not mean it is or should be a critical darling, and a cult classic even less so.  The term “classic” doesn’t even guarantee a good movie!   Plan 9 From Outer Space is inarguably a classic, but it’s also considered the worst movie ever made.  Merely having attained popular status does not mean that any given movie had any redeeming qualities in terms of artistry whatsoever (see also, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, or actually, maybe don’t see that one.)  And even if a film had an outsize impact on moviemaking in the long term, well, change isn’t always good.  A film that changes the landscape of Hollywood forever does not need to be a good movie** and movies with massive audience resonance at the time of their release*** may not even be remembered by future moviegoers.

Criticism is not a popularity contest; if it was, the job of a critic would be pointless and we’d just use box office scores to tell us if a film was good or not.  Disliking or disregarding movies at a certain point in time, even movies audiences come to appreciate later on, does not make the critics of the past blind morons.   Expecting people of the past to somehow be able to understand the long-term cultural impact of any given movie that they see not within our context, but within their own, is totally unfair.

One of the things I find odd about humans of the 21st century is their insistence on believing that they are the arbiters of all knowledge, judging previous generations as if everyone in the past should have known precisely what the future would hold and acted accordingly.  It seems a peculiar form of this modern-day superiority complex to pass judgment on Siskel and Ebert for not being able to predict that both movies and audiences would change as the world changes; that some of the qualities they (rightfully) valued would not carry the same weight in the future.  We may as well call out someone born in 1860 for not having predicted not only the invention of the car, but the mechanics of car design and the long term effects the automobile would have on the transportation industry.  How can we possibly have the expectation that people of the past – even the smartest, most highly educated of people – would be able to foresee every change that might eventually come with the passage of time?

Personally, I trust that 19th century guy or gal’s take on horses and buggies much more than my own.  I humbly bow before their greater judgment on the societal importance of carriages, the functionality of Conestoga wagons, the aesthetics of various buggy styles.  I understand and acknowledge that the people of the past knew more about horse-drawn conveyances than I do, or ever possibly could.  I would never have the temerity to argue horseflesh and buggy design with anyone from that time, let alone an actual EXPERT, pointing out “design flaws” because I read the owner’s manual of a 2021 Toyota RAV4.  It strikes me as pretty arrogant to assume that professionals in any given field –  who actually lived in the past – wouldn’t understand the cultural and artistic milieu of their own time period far better than we do.

Luis apparently feels differently, because he takes Siskel and Ebert to task for picking Straight Time and An Unmarried Woman as best films of 1978, over “classics” like Halloween, Grease, and Animal House.  But Straight Time, starring megastar Dustin Hoffman, fresh from box office successes in All the President’s Men and Marathon Man, was an extremely well-known movie at its time.  And the film was ABOUT something – a guy trying to get his life on track after getting out of prison, yet falling short.  That type of character-driven drama was ascendant in the 70s!  OF COURSE critics liked it!

Roger Ebert was so influenced by Straight Time that he came up with a rule called the “Stanton-Walsh” rule, which states that any movie that features M. Emmet Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton, however briefly, cannot be all bad.  Straight Time is the only movie that has them both.  A movie so important it led Roger Ebert to write a law of movies based at least in part upon its existence surely has to be at least the equal of a film about a homicidal maniac stalking unbelievably stupid teenagers.

I suspect that Straight Time was at least somewhat influential on the Coen Brothers because a few years later, they cast M. Emmet Walsh as the double crossing detective in their breakout movie, Blood Simple.  Walsh was a longtime bit player who came to prominence only after his turn in Straight Time, playing a crooked parole officer – not too different from the part he played in Blood Simple.  Quentin Tarantino intensively studied Straight Time in a writer’s workshop, and later cast Edward Bunker, who wrote both the script and the novel the film is based on, as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs.  If it influenced the Coens and Tarantino, Straight Time’s gotta be at least as important a movie as Animal House, even if it’s perhaps of less appeal to modern day audiences.

And An Unmarried Woman, whether it’s well known now or not, was one of the most important movies of its decade, not its year but the DECADE of the 1970s!  AUW captures a zeitgeist of a time and place and a set of people that Siskel and Ebert would absolutely have appreciated, that three silly movies about fantasy worlds that never existed populated by caricatures that have no equivalent in reality cannot.  While imperfect in its representation by modern standards, An Unmarried Woman is also a landmark, groundbreaking feminist movie, dealing with issues little discussed prior, like female sexuality and sexual violence.  If you’re excited about the Sex and the City reboot this week, be aware it probably would not have existed without An Unmarried Woman paving the way.

As a female-centric counterpoint to Annie Hall, An Unmarried Woman is also an important movie in terms of filmmaking history.  A person could probably write a thesis paper on why Annie Hall is still beloved while An Unmarried Woman – despite starring Diane Keaton doppelganger Jill Clayburgh – is all but forgotten.  AUW contains perfect examples of tropes that grew to become massively popular during the 1970s – the uncannily savvy, yet virginal young daughter/confidante that’s far too aware of her parents’ sex life, the uptight, neurotic woman who finds liberation and release by having sex with the “right” guy – tropes which are still ubiquitous today.  Anyone who truly knows movies like Siskel and Ebert did, should have put An Unmarried Woman above freaking Grease, which hey, fun movie, I like it myself, but it is JUST FOR FUN.

Again, just because movies like Halloween, Animal House, and Grease are beloved to this day does not speak to their quality or even their importance per se.  These movies have stayed popular because they ask nothing of us, they don’t really mean anything, and thus can be mindlessly watched over and over again.  Remembering something does not make it great, because even influential movies can be absolutely terrible.  Something that is influential can be a BAD influence just as easily as a good one.

An example of this phenomenon is Independence Day.  In his 1990’s fave movie list, Luis mentioned his favorite movie of 1996 was Independence Day, a second-rate, uninspired, by-the-numbers, completely ridiculous popcorn film that ruined movies for many years whilst money-hungry movie studios looked around for more famous monuments to blow up.  He “faved” this movie over Fargo and Jerry Maguire, both culturally important, influential to this day, yet still crowd pleasers – no snooty arthouse films, these.

But Independence Day, while certainly influential (rather like leprosy is influential) is just NOT GOOD, and is certainly not a great film like Fargo!

During the same 1990s piece, Luis also overlooked several beloved classic fan faves himself, any one of them far better films than Independence Day.  The Fifth Element, Office Space, Groundhog Day, The Big Lebowski, The Matrix – all films that either Siskel and/or Ebert did like and recommend, even when the movies were relatively overlooked at the time of their release (exception: Siskel did not enthusiastically adore The Big Lebowski.  Since I find that film overrated myself, I can hardly take him to task for that.)  Siskel and Ebert absolutely did NOT overlook fan favorite movies.  They just didn’t.  It never happened.  To make that claim is simply untrue, a case of cherry picking data to support a hypothesis.

Now, I understand that recommending “good” movies was not truly the purpose in that series of “faves by decades” articles Luis wrote, and he was merely sharing movies he personally loved, but hey, Luis took Siskel and Ebert to task for not stanning the same films he does.  S&E were in the business of recommending good movies to people – not “this will still be popular in 20 years” movies, but GOOD MOVIES.  Surely it’s unfair to apply your criteria (your faves) to other people when they’re using a different set of criteria (good movies) unless you expect the same treatment in return. So.

With that I hereby absolve Siskel and Ebert of any wrongdoing   They were simply doing what critics are supposed to do.

This brings me to that question I left dangling there back at the start – what is the purpose of a critic?  What ARE critics supposed to do, exactly?  As I just spent far too many words establishing, the purpose of a critic is not to predict what audiences will like in the future and tailor one’s recommendations accordingly so someone doesn’t come along decades or centuries later and be all like “LOL this guy born in 1860 didn’t know how many miles to the gallon my Volkswagen Bug gets!”

Critics exist for a different purpose.  I don’t think art – and great movies ARE art – is truly subjective.  You don’t walk into the Sistine Chapel and fail to be moved no matter how big a curmudgeon you are, and you don’t sit through Casablanca as an emotionless automaton, either. Something fundamental is stirred within when an individual encounters successful art.  Movies matter, clearly, otherwise we’d not waste our time and energy debating them.   Like all endeavors of human creativity, movies have a meaning and a purpose to them far beyond mere entertainment; there is a magic to them that speaks to us on the deepest levels.  Siskel and Ebert understood this, otherwise they’d’ve been recommending lousy-but-popular popcorn flicks and they would have sworn that Jaws was, like, so totally the bestiest movie of 1975.  Sure, maybe ya like what ya like, and hate what ya hate – I do too – but there simply HAS TO BE some objectivity to artistic “good” and “bad” or we wouldn’t keep bumping into the concept.

Like Mark Twain, many believe that critics are motivated by a desire to drag down the artist, but the artist is not who a critic is actually communicating with.  The relationship is not between artist and critic, but between critic and audience.  The purpose of a critic is to serve as a translator between artist and audience, an educator to help people who do not know much about art navigate through a sea of dreck (now more than ever, because we’re drowning in terrible movies) to find the stuff that is MORE than just dreck.

In other words, how would you even know the Sistine Chapel existed if someone hadn’t gone there before you and given it two thumbs up?  Wouldn’t you just go to Alfredo’s House of Boobs down the road, because there were a lot more cars outside?

Mark Twain was wrong.  Critics – at least good critics – should not have axes to grind against artists or their work.  If anything, critics should be removed from the artist totally, lest they become corporate shills or moralistic advocates like most critics working today.   (People, I’m sorry, but Crazy Rich Asians was not a good movie, I don’t care how many “critics” say that it was.  It may be important, it may be groundbreaking, it may be a timeless crowdpleaser that people will be watching in a hundred years.  But it wasn’t good, for some very important reasons that few mainstream critics were brave enough to point out. )

Critics exist not to pump up the already overinflated ego of the artist (no offense, Mark), but to improve our understanding and appreciation of movies as both art form and cultural touchstone.

Becoming a critic the caliber of Siskel/Ebert requires a massive body of knowledge, not only of the many languages of cinema, not only the history of cinema, but of the technical underpinnings of storytelling itself – worldbuilding, plot, characterization, dialogue.  But just knowing the genre “movies” frontwards and back isn’t enough.  The best critics are students of human nature, of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literature – because these elements are present in movies and the critic exists to bring them to the audience’s attention.  In Roger Ebert’s review of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for example, he mentions that the focus of James Stewart’s obsession, Madeleine, is named after the French biscuit that in Proust, inspired memories of longing and loss.  I would have never picked up on that myself, and I know a heck of a lot of random trivia.  I needed a critic to reveal it to me, just like I needed an art expert to tell me to look out for Michelangelo’s Sistine self-portrait in the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew.

Even a smattering of science, as a part of the human cultural experience, a critic should be moderately-well-versed in.  Movies in which alien invaders are somehow magically brought down by an unlikely computer virus and explosive penetration by a pissed-off Randy Quaid are just not as “good” –  objectively – as they might have been had the sci-in-the-fi had been a tad more believable.  And the audience would still have cheered when the explosion came.

Critics exist to point these things out to you and to me.  Critics exist to explain to us reasons why movies are good and why they’re bad, to reveal secrets we missed and deeper meaning that we didn’t comprehend, and yes, even to explain flaws that we may not notice otherwise, things that left us feeling cold after a movie we really had expected to like.  They’re able to make these observations because they have studied not only movies, but the world, in a variety of ways, and they know some things that most of us, because we’re busy with our lives, don’t have the luxury of learning.  Critics are a guide to art and through art, without whom we’re lost.

That seems like hyperbole, but it isn’t, particularly where pop culture is concerned.  If the world has taught me anything the past twenty years, it’s that people who glean their understanding of the world around them from no other source than the movie screen receive a very flawed understanding of that world, because movies themselves are flawed, as all art is flawed.  We need, desperately need, a creative class that understands why An Unmarried Woman is a better and more important film than Grease, and has not only the ability, but the social standing as an expert, to communicate that completely objective truth to others.****

(Aside, while I had some fun at the expense of Luis in this piece, he is a highly knowledgeable film guy and person in general.  My statements here in no way apply to him.  Though I think he’s wrong on Siskel and Ebert, he does know movies and he’s the type of critic we need more of.  Please read his excellent review of both versions of West Side Story  in which he provides a deeper critical context to these films that others may have missed.  He manages this feat even knowing that like 70s-era Siskel and Ebert, he’s on the “wrong side of history” and WSS is popular and beloved.)

We need critics because art doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  It’s a product of its time and place, the people who made it, and the underlying reasons why they did.  A movie made in 2000’s Mongolia will have a vastly different context than a movie made in 1930’s England.  A product made by the corporations of 2020’s Hollywood will be produced by a different creative process than that of an independent studio.  The cultural context surrounding Straight Time is not the context that underlies Halloween, even though those movies were made at roughly the same time.

Audiences may…indeed, likely DON’T know why this is, and it’s the role of the critic to facilitate not only the finding of movies that both entertain and elevate, but also to explain some of that context, allowing the audience to appreciate movies on a deeper level.  You can’t do that if your “context” is to handwave away anything you don’t like not for any good reason, but simply because you don’t understand it and don’t wanna, neither, because old movies are boring and studying is for chumps, and probably sharks WOULD attack everyone if they had the chance.

We are existing in a world – starting, I’d say, with the Star Wars prequels – where everyone decided that they were actually critics and had just as much right to have an opinion, man, than a guy or gal who has studied not only film, but the vastness of human experience, for their entire lives.  In some cases, this belief is entirely justified, because experts are often way up their own asses and most modern “critics” are little more than employees for movie studios who know jack about anything beyond what they’ve been paid to say.  There are a lot of smart and knowledgeable amateur critics in the world who actually do know movies inside and out.

But in a lot of cases, people are hanging a shingle as “critics” who don’t deserve to be, because while they may like movies and even call themselves film buffs, they don’t know movies, or much else, for that matter.  My son, a student of film, often jokes about the many bloggers and YouTubers – some of them fairly successful – who call themselves critics, writing glowing reviews of popular modern movies while admitting, sometimes even admitting proudly, that they’ve never seen masterpieces of film like The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Chinatown.  These “reviews” gushingly adore things that the Powers-That-Be have deemed popular, vehemently loathe movies that it’s currently popular to dump on, or express simple-minded sentiments like “Too much talking, not enough blowing shit up.”

This is not criticism.  It’s a hollow facade of what criticism is supposed to be.

The thing ~I~ learned from binging Siskel and Ebert is this – we need Siskel and Ebert.  If I had a giant Batsignal featuring a thumbs up sign in lieu of a bat, I’d totally use it to call them back to us.  We need critics, not corporate lackey dudebros who think the only stuff that is good is what is popular and the only stuff that is bad is that which it’s popular to hate.  We need those guys and gals who have taken the time to immerse themselves in art, to understand it in the deepest of ways, and have not only the ability, but the courage to help us understand it, too.  Even when that art may not be understood by other people, even when it’s not well-loved or well remembered, especially then, we need people to advocate on the behalf of that art.

Popular things don’t need advocacy.  We need critics to bring to audiences forgotten things, overlooked things, movies slowly slipping into the cracks of film history.  Because if we only focus on the stuff that’s popular in the here and now, we will lose what mattered to people in the then and there.

*Now, Luis has previously mentioned Jaws is his fave movie of 1975, so it’s perhaps understandable he goes to bat for it here.  But Siskel and Ebert should have named Jaws the BEST movie of 1975?  Really?  In the context of the 70s, the era which many film lovers agree produced the finest films ever made?  Are we really retroactively expecting two professional movie critics, guys who cut their teeth on Bergman and Fellini, to have chosen a movie starring an animatronic shark as the BEST movie of 1975 – the height of character-driven dramas?  REALLY?

**Ebert mused that The Wiz flopping spectacularly sent the unfortunate message to Hollywood that high-budget movies with black casts would always fail to find favor at the box office, and decided upon that basis to stop making them.  As Ebert put it, Hollywood didn’t need but one failed movie to justify their belief that big budget movies starring black actors were destined to fail.  The truth was simply that The Wiz, of course, just isn’t that good a movie, and it came at a point in time (the late 70’s) in which people’s appetite for optimistic messages and musical theater was not sky high.  If Ebert’s assertion is true, The Wiz definitely changed movies…for the worse.

***A completely forgotten movie from 1970 called Joe (starring Peter Boyle)  had an outsized cultural influence.  Joe was the direct inspiration for Archie Bunker.  The trope of the racist, hateful, bitter, stupid, blue collar boob has subsequently been reinvented in the forms of Homer Simpson, Al Bundy, and Peter Griffin, with Peter Boyle himself recreating the archetype first in Taxi Driver a few years later, and eventually in a kinder, gentler form on Everybody Loves Raymond.  Additionally, this movie (despite being a satirical critique) was at least in part the impetus for the vigilante flicks that became popular later in the decade, from Dirty Harry (1971) to Death Wish (1974), and even led to the creation of the comic book vigilante The Punisher in 1974.  Gene Siskel gave Joe 3 and a half stars out of four.

****And hey, it wasn’t because John Travolta did pelvic thrusts in Grease and offended the delicate sensibilities of a bookworm that drinks tea with their pinky out.  It wasn’t because movies with songs in them are dumb and snooty critics hate them.  After all, Gene Siskel’s favorite movie ever was Saturday Night Fever, and Ebert too gave that film four stars.  Some movies are objectively, inarguably better than others when you’re judging them by criteria other than “I liked this movie when I was 11 and I like it now.”