A Sunday colour supplement-style pic:
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From Monday’s London Paper (or as it calls itself on the masthead, ‘thelondonpaper’):
New DVD Reviews
If…
You’ve probably never heard of Lindsay Anderson… He’s Britain’s most underrated director.Catch And Release
Hands up who’s a bit bored with Kevin Smith doing slacker cameos.
Admittedly, the If…. review does go onto to praise it to the hilt as the classic film it is, but I actually barked aloud ‘Oh REALLY!’ when I read the above sentences on the Tube.
So let’s read between the lines here. Yes, I know it’s probably a silly idea to deconstruct DVD reviews in a free local newspaper. But I’m fascinated about the culture of received opinions and media consensus, and what some now call ‘being on the same page’.
The anonymous reviewer is assuming a couple of things about the average London Paper reader. As their publication is one of the free dailies thrust aggressively into the hands of passers-by, or picked up by bored commuters when left on the seats of buses and underground trains, the readership is presumed to be pretty much anyone walking about in London.
Going by these reviews, the average Londoner:
(a) is meant to be have never heard of Lindsay Anderson.
(b) is meant to know who Kevin Smith is.
(c) is meant to respond well to the phrase ‘Hands up who’s a bit bored with…’ As opposed to feeling they’re being treated like a school pupil. Or that a gun is pointed at their head. Which may as well be the case with the newspaper’s pushy distributors on the streets, but I digress.
This kind of faux matey, playing-to-the-gallery journalism assumes everyone’s just like the reviewer, or that the reviewer assumes he knows what the reader is like. It’s as if they’re writing with a big list pinned up on the nearest wall, detailing just which names the readers are meant to have heard of. Kevin Smith, yes. Lindsay Anderson, no.
Who wrote this mighty list in the first place? Who has decreed just which names are osmotically lodged in the memories of strangers, and which ones need a little explanation?
This increasingly common style of review writing is not only unhelpful, it insults the reader’s intelligence. And it’s arguably a dangerous line of thinking.
It bullies the reader into becoming part of some homogenous crowd, where everyone is familiar with the same limited number of books, films, artists, musicians, celebrities. A fixed quota of names to have heard of. If you’re not aware of them, or if you know about anyone else at all, you are not just ‘out of touch’. You are The Other. And then it’s only a matter of time before the burning pitchforks appear.
So yes, I have heard of Lindsay Anderson, who is hardly ‘Britain’s most underrated director.’ The BFI have always had If…. in their Top 20 Critics’ Poll. But according to the London Paper, you’re not meant to have even heard of the director. Which therefore makes me ‘Other’ from their average reader.
I know who Kevin Smith is too. I like Mr Smith’s Clerks and Mr Anderson’s If…., because they’re both brilliant and original films about different types of boyishness (on one level), and are both very much products of their respective times and settings.
I also know If…. has four dots in the titular ellipsis, not three.
There’s worrying about going over readers’ heads. And there’s asking them to duck.
