Interview with A.S. Hamrah

On February 2, 2020, film critic A.S. Hamrah and I met at the bar at Nitehawk Cinema, a dine-in movie theater in Park Slope, Brooklyn that first opened as the Sanders Theater in 1928. The bar was showing Superbowl LIV while we discussed Hollywood (the Oscars were still a week away at that point), criticism, and the politics of the entertainment industry. We spoke over tater tots and a discordant soundtrack featuring J. Lo and Shakira at half-time, Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump on commercial breaks (both spent over ten million dollars each on campaign ads before Bloomberg dropped out of the race), and the constant roar of American football fans screaming all at once.

Since our conversation, Nitehawk closed its doors on March 13 in the effort to stop the rapid spread of coronavirus which has led several governments around the world to enforce strict quarantine measures, exposing some of the deep structural weaknesses in countries unprepared to take care of their most sick and vulnerable. Also, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite became the first non-English-speaking film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, which couldn’t have felt more apt considering its haunting critique of American capitalism.

Hamrah’s film criticism is bolstered by his own anti-capitalist politics and refusal to participate in the publicity schemes of blockbuster films. His collection, The Earth Dies Streaming, compiles 16 years of essays and reviews written during the Iraq War, the 2008 housing crisis, and the evolution of internet streaming. The book offers a moment to reflect on American culture and catastrophe through the eyes of a true cinephile.

A. S. Hamrah is the film critic for The Baffler. He was n+1’s film critic from 2008 through 2019, and was the editor of that magazine’s film review supplement. He also writes for a number of other publications, including Harper’s and Bookforum. He has worked as a movie theater projectionist, a semiotic brand analyst, a political pollster, a football cinematographer, a zine writer, and for the film director Raúl Ruiz. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Purchase his book from n+1 here.

In “Remember Me on This Computer,” the introductory essay to The Earth Dies Streaming, you describe your cinematic awakening attending film screenings at Wesleyan University as a kid and what you call being “inoculated against blockbuster cinema.” I was wondering if this coincided with a political awakening or if that came at a different point?

As I mention in that piece, I grew up in a small town. There were about four thousand people in my town, and it was rural. But it was next to where Wesleyan University is, which is in Middletown, Connecticut. I listened to the Wesleyan radio station all the time and my cinematic education coincided with my music education. I listened to WESU and my life was changed by punk rock. I was in eighth grade when I first heard that kind of music, and instead of a lot of people who wanted to become musicians and start bands when they heard the Minutemen or whoever, I had this immediate desire to go on the radio to play records.

…my cinematic education coincided with my music education. I listened to WESU and my life was changed by punk rock.

So when I was 16 and got a driver’s license I could go places like Wesleyan and see movies, which I started doing all the time because there were no closer movie theaters. Wesleyan showed all the films for their film classes at night and these screenings were on film and open to the public. There was just a second run movie theater in Middletown and then there were theaters about 30 miles away in Hartford and New Haven, which seemed like a lot. I saw all the movies at Wesleyan which were foreign films and art films and midnight movies. I saw many of the films of the French New Wave and the European arthouse films of the 1950s, the things that later made up the Criterion Collection, but also a lot of 1950s Hollywood films by directors like Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller, and classic films from the 1930s and ‘40s by directors like Lubitsch and Renoir. In addition, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford had a film noir series that was really comprehensive and a Fassbinder series that has a big impact on me.

I got a license to be a disc jockey when I was in high school and I got a radio show at WESU, the Wesleyan station, every Thursday night. I played records on the radio for four hours every Thursday night for two years. So those two things were going on at the same time, and there where I had a great education and an escape from my town, which was a monoculture of incuriosity. I spent a lot of time on the campus at Wesleyan. I felt like I went to college when I was in high school.

Music and cinema reinforced my anti-Reagan political ideas, which were based on my frustration with the complacency of my town.

Politically, these were the early days of Reagan. Music and cinema reinforced my anti-Reagan political ideas, which were based on my frustration with the complacency of my town. But it was strange to be involved in those things because Wesleyan students, who were older than I was and much wealthier, were kind of behind the times in a way, culturally. You think of them as kind of hip and bohemian, people who go to Oberlin or Wesleyan or Reed, some college like that. But at that time, most of them didn’t listen to good music, they just listened to classic rock and were still kind of hippies. They were kind of preppy Deadhead-type people, a lot of them. So some people there were interested in my tastes because they saw me as being more connected to listening to new music, even though I wasn’t. I knew about new music because of them, the DJs on their radio station. It was a strange cultural experience at a young age compared to most people. It was a cultural awakening that most other people in my town didn’t have.

In your writing, you’re interested in more than film, so it makes sense that you’ve been involved in radio as well. I was wondering why you think it is that film became your main lens into the world?

Well, that’s hard to say because even before I could go to the movies at Wesleyan or in Hartford, I was interested in cinema. I watched a lot of old movies on UHF stations. Those were the days before cable television existed where I lived. We got it pretty late. A lot of older movies were on independent television stations and we could get channel 5 and channel 11 from New York City, which are now broadcast networks like the CW, but were independent then. They didn’t come in that well at times, I’d watch The Big Sleep kind of fuzzy and with commercials and you couldn’t pause or rewind. You had to memorize the shots and the dialogue, you didn’t know when you might see it again. They showed classic Hollywood films a lot and there was a PBS station that played avant-garde and foreign films. There was a show that some odd guy had and it was half an hour-long once a week, but it was repeated at odd times throughout the week. They would show avant-garde American cinema, they would play Stan Brakhage films and Kenneth Anger films. I would be eating my breakfast before going to get the school bus and I saw a lot of movies like this. I saw Mothlight by Stan Brakhage that way and I saw The Blood of a Poet by Cocteau that way. They showed Kustom Kar Kommandos by Kenneth Anger. It was very strange to see this stuff on TV early in the morning on a weekday. No one else that I knew was interested in it and I would get on the school bus and try to tell somebody about Mothlight.  

Teachers in my public junior high and high schools would show movies sometimes for class, 16mm prints, and three of them had an enormous impact on me: Fahrenheit 451, the François Truffaut version from the ‘60s, Los Olvidados, Luis Buñuel’s film about slum kids in Mexico City, and Night and Fog, Alain Resnais’s documentary about the Nazi death camps. And I started reading books from the public library like The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris, which was a very important book for me. I read a collection called Film: An Anthology that Dan Talbot edited that had Manny Farber’s “Underground Films” in it and about 20 other pieces by other film critics and theorists. I had this book that had pieces written by film directors from all over the world, from the entire history of cinema (but no women!), that I really liked to read called Film Makers on Film Making. I became very interested in certain directors and I would try to see all their films. Raoul Walsh was one of them, and Howard Hawks. There were certain actors I liked like Humphrey Bogart or ‘30s comedians like the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. When I saw Godard’s Breathless, I had to drive with my friends to Storrs, Connecticut, when I was 16, which is where UConn is, which is kind of far from where I lived, it was about 50 miles, but I was desperate to see Breathless and they were showing it. Many people in my town never went to New Haven or Hartford, maybe to Christmas shop once a year, much less New York or Boston, which were two, two and  a half hours from my town in opposite directions.

I often return to the essay, “Jessica Biel’s Hand,” which you wrote in 2008. You begin the essay by comparing Hollywood or the entertainment industry in general to a war machine and you, as a viewer, are among the casualties. Could you expand on that metaphor and whether or not it’s relevant today?

I decided to write that piece because I noticed that no one was really writing about movies about the War on Terror and the War in Iraq as a group of films. It bothered me. Hollywood wasn’t doing a good job dealing with the war at all. I mean, this was really the moment for the anti-Vietnam war, Greatest-Generation-loving filmmakers of Hollywood to show what they were made of, and they didn’t. Not at all. So I decided to try to see every War on Terror film that had been made up to 2008 and write that piece. I saw about 40 of those films the summer I was working on that.

The manufacture of the weapons of war and the manufacture of images and text are linked in this country.

Now, even more than then, the main industries of our country are the manufacturing of weapons and the production of what is now called content. That was before streaming took off and there were fewer movie theaters, too, paradoxically. The manufacture of the weapons of war and the manufacture of images and text are linked in this country. Especially at the higher levels of production where it costs more. There’s another piece in the book about how the Pentagon approves scripts and films to be shot on their property or with their weapons and equipment. The fantastic amount of control the Pentagon has on these productions is really insidious. Hollywood accepts this, then acts like it doesn’t affect the movies they make, that they are not ideological and that entertainment is neutral and doesn’t need to be questioned or investigated, just consumed.

Is there a relationship between viewer and victim?

We’re buried much more than we were then under what I call in the book the virtual content mound, a form of electronic rubble. The regime we all live under is one in which there is a huge amount of content produced that it’s impossible to keep up with or sort through. There’s so many streaming platforms, so many ways to release things and so many film festivals now that no one can really follow all of it anymore. Some people definitely try to. That’s part of being a cinephile, this desire to know about all this stuff and process it somehow—cinephiles have twisted relationships to image production. Or they should! Part of being a cinephile I think is having a sense of threat in regard to all this stuff that’s generated by this industry, and by filmmakers all over the world. Critics who are celebrating Disney films and superhero movies are so strange to me—the unalienated. There is more and more of that. I think it’s almost psychotic to keep up with everything now that’s made in a year. There’s vast other worlds of cinema out there now that people specialize in. In the late 1960s this really began. Manny Farber talks about that in one of his pieces on the New York Film Festival. He talks about how cinema means all these different things that it didn’t used to mean, so much has been added to it. He describes “a loosening of the bowels” of cinema.

How has the role of the critic changed since then?

There’s a paradox in that critics, as a group, are very important to the marketing campaigns of films in ways they didn’t used to be, but are also not important at all to the kinds of places that used to publish serious film criticism. So you see films advertised today as being “100 percent fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, which supposedly means that every film critic thinks the film is good. Content aggregators sites have made film criticism very important to the movie exhibition wing of the industry. But if you actually look at many of the critics who are saying those things on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a roll call of shame. They’re people who cheerlead for the film industry. It has this leveling effect that makes all criticism meaningless, it becomes like a Yelp! Review of restaurants where every restaurant in the world gets 3 1/2 stars unless it’s actually making people physically sick. Everything is fine except the mutually agreed upon worst thing.

And anyone has the authority to chime in?

You have to become certified by Rotten Tomatoes. When that happened to me, they just notified me that I was now a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic. So they’re taking all my writing and turning it into part of the content mound by aggregating it with all this other content. I have no choice in the matter. I guess I could tell them I don’t want them to do that. It’s more interesting not to tell them.

I’ve noticed that their ability to rate whether a review is a good or bad review is off by about 20 percent. I purposely write stuff so Rotten Tomatoes can’t tell if it’s a good or bad review, as I explain in my book. But when I look at how they’ve rated things that I’ve written, probably 15 percent of things I liked they say are negative reviews. And 20 percent of things I’ve reviewed negatively, they say are positive. So they lack the time, or the ability, I’m not sure what it is, but they’re unable to accurately judge some of these pieces. There are pieces on Rotten Tomatoes where I’ve written about older films and they get those wrong too. I wrote something about The Magnificent Ambersons, the Orson Welles film which is one of my favorite movies. They counted it as a negative review. I wrote about how that film was cut by the studio and how they threw away the footage and because I mention those things I guess they counted it as a negative review. Someone I know asked me “Why didn’t you like The Magnificent Ambersons?” I  said, “What makes you think I don’t like The Magnificent Ambersons?” He said, “Well, I saw it on Rotten Tomatoes.” That was really shocking to me so I went and looked at that and then I contacted them and asked that it be changed to “fresh.” I normally wouldn’t bother, but in that case, I didn’t want anyone to think I didn’t like The Magnificent Ambersons! I got roped into caring how my writing was listed there.

Are the stakes higher with older films for you?

It just bothered me, it’s all just part of a system where nothing matters but received ideas that can be used in marketing. Part of the reason for that is the two previous generations of films critics retired and/or got old, and they didn’t replace themselves very well or at all. The baby boomer critics had no interest in who came after them. Pauline Kael, of course, had a lot of acolytes and had helped them. Even so, leading magazines that were great venues for film criticism dropped the ball after Kael retired. The New Yorker struggled to find someone to replace her and they never really did. Instead, they eventually found Anthony Lane. For me, pretty much only Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman kept things alive, in alt-weeklies. That period coincided with the decline of publishing and the rise of the internet. A lot of people started to write on the internet for free. That became a way into writing criticism professionally, but there had already been an erosion that was very marked.

There has been a great democratization of it also, which is both good and bad. There are many serious cinephiles writing for free. Many. But now you also get more and more dumb opinions from people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Then there are people whose analysis of films is purely political, which makes up a lot of commentary about films from people who aren’t critics, but pundits. In general, though, I think film criticism has improved in recent years in some ways. The internet has made it so more and more young people know a lot of things about cinema. If it weren’t for Wesleyan and UHF TV, I would have only known about the big movies I saw three times a year.

Every time there’s a shift in technology the way people become film fans changes. VHS and DVD changed it, the internet changed it, and streaming is changing it. When I was college-age I worked in a movie theater and the woman I lived with worked at a video store. We saw probably 20 films a week. We would just watch things constantly. Mostly in revival houses and on video. But with every shift in tech, a certain amount of older films disappears.

I’d like to go back to your introduction where you describe your reviews as un-blurb-able.

I wrote in the introduction that I don’t want to see my writing extracted and put onto movie posters or ads on the internet or on trailers. It’s embarrassing to me. For some films critics, that’s what they want and I don’t understand it. The first time that happened to me I was mortified. It just makes you into a publicist for the film. And you’re not getting paid for that. You’re working for them all of a sudden. In writing film criticism, one of my goals was to create a new form. And that meant doing something that opposed the way that criticism is written now, which is that it’s mostly an adjunct of publicity. I wanted to make sure the way I wrote was not something that could be used like that. When you read certain critics, it’s really shocking how they are pandering. They’re not trying hard enough not to do that, or they are unaware. You have to try hard and you have to be aware.

During this year’s awards season, I’ve been thinking about a quote from your introduction where you write:

What is now being celebrated, we’re told, is the system’s newfound commitment to inclusiveness. But there is a sharp distinction to be made between celebrating the appearance of new talent in filmmaking and celebrating the continued box office success of the blockbuster form itself. 

Is this a “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” argument?

That was written in the summer of 2018. When I wrote that I was thinking about how more and more people were talking about how it was important for them to see big franchise films represent all different types of people in our country. It was the summer of Black Panther. Hand in hand with that conversation was the idea that these huge entertainment blockbusters should also be considered for awards, they should be nominated for Oscars, they were culturally and artistically significant. It seemed at the time that everything was only going to be franchise films, that would be the entire future of narrative cinema, or Hollywood cinema, and that would just blot out everything else. It didn’t seem to occur to most critics to interrogate that form, that genre, which is inherently fascistic and, really, stupid and for children. Films like that treat the audience like children, then pretend, when they are successful at the box office, that this infantilized audience represents all film viewers everywhere.

In one year, that all kind of turned around. There were a lot of very good films this year that were not franchise films, they were original screenplays or adapted from things that weren’t just new-ish franchisable intellectual property. I think Quentin Tarantino pointed out that this was kind of a last-stand year for movies. If you look at the films that were nominated for Academy Awards this year, none of them were superhero movies, the opposite of what was being predicted and demanded by the makers of those films. Whether it’s The Irishman or Little Women or Parasite or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there were a lot of films that were quite good. Uncut Gems wasn’t nominated for any Oscars but that was a great film. A year before it came out the discourse was such that it precluded films like that from even existing, and it was depressing. 

I think that the idea that cinema and television will be the same thing is very bad for movies.

Now that the industry is consolidating even more with Disney buying Fox, they’re kind of shooting themselves in the foot. Now they’re more and more obligated to just pump out content that’s Star Wars based, TV shows and spinoffs and sequels. I think that the idea that cinema and television will be the same thing is very bad for movies. But a cycle is coming to an end with all the Marvel movies and other superhero movies and Star Wars. When I wrote that, I think it was one of the first times someone said that in print. A year later Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola started talking about how those films were bad for cinema, really pretty much announcing that they sucked. The response to those guys saying that was “Oh, they’re old, they’re out of touch. They don’t understand the greatness of Avengers: Endgame.” But I think that there’s been a breakthrough in people’s understanding that those are just money-making machines and artistically and ideologically suspect. And boring.

Would you say you’re hopeful, then, about the film industry?

It’s hard to be hopeful about any aspect of American society. But, like I said, I think the mainstream cinema was much better this year than it’s been in the past few years. People don’t become filmmakers to make superhero movies. Even the people who make those movies and take those big checks, I don’t think that was their goal in life or as artists.

Netflix is partially responsible for this change and I think that might backfire on the audience. It seems like the ultimate endgame of Netflix is to get us to never leave our houses. They want to make these important films with great directors as a way to garner attention and win awards. Once established as purveyors of important content, they will switch their focus from theatrical releases and get everyone to stream things.

Right now, they have to premiere these films in movie theaters, at least in New York and Los Angeles and some other places. And they had a great response. People wanted to see Roma in movie theaters. They printed it on 70mm film for that reason, but then didn’t know how to handle its release. People were mad that The Irishman didn’t play longer when it came out. That happened with Roma, they kept having to bring it back. Netflix just rented a theater in New York to show movies, The Paris, an important theater to the cultural history of the Upper West Side. They premiered Marriage Story there. The major theater chains will not play their films because the so-called window is too short, the window between the theatrical release and when a film goes to video on demand, streaming. So that’s great, I think that’s fantastic. I’m glad that the Regal and AMC chains won’t show those movies. The worst movie theaters in the world are chain cineplexes like AMC and Regal theaters. The whole experience is terrible. And now they make you pick your seats, which is un-American and undemocratic with a small “d” and the opposite of the way moviegoing has been for over a hundred years in this country. That’s the first step in getting rid of cashiers entirely, by the way. But this is a function of what happens when one artform, TV, is elevated. The previous ones all have to elevate and get fancier to survive.

You write optimistically about the fact that more theaters are opening, at least in New York, and you compare this to the growing number of independent bookstores. Is there a link between the two?

Many people hate Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but they want to buy books and read books. There’s a growing awareness that Amazon is bad for publishing, bad for the cinema, bad for its workers, bad for everyone’s life in every possible circumstance, even as more people use it to buy toiletries and groceries. Ten years ago or so, I was interviewed to be the editor of a film publication that’s published on the West Coast. Independent bookstores had already started to come back then, especially in New York. Some bookstores closed but new ones were opening. And the publisher who interviewed me told me that newsstands and bookstores did not matter to her at all because there were not going to be anymore bookstores or newsstands. Only the internet mattered. I told her that I thought bookstores were coming back and were important to people who liked the object, a magazine or a book, not just digital content, and that both could work together. And she got mad at me for saying that. She was irked that I would defend print. I think there’s a generational divide here. Many wealthy, secure baby boomers and older people like to see these things go away, for some reason. They enjoy watching them disappear. It’s perverse. 

…if you talk to people in other parts of the country and you tell them that there are movie theaters opening all over New York City, they don’t really believe it.

Maybe that makes them more money, but destruction for its own sake makes them happy.  They have a pro-apocalyptic approach to culture that other generations don’t share, and they get mad if anyone challenges their views on that. And it’s true that if you talk to people in other parts of the country and you tell them that there are movie theaters opening all over New York City, they don’t really believe it. If you go to San Francisco, they don’t believe that this is happening. They’re so tech-oriented, so digital-focused. Many theaters have closed in the Bay Area and on the West Coast. Things don’t play long in theaters there. A film that plays for two months in New York City will play for a week in the Bay Area, a film that plays for two weeks here will play there for a weekend. The Bay Area used to be a great film center in this country and it’s not anymore. In just a few short years this happened. Things are more cinephile-oriented in cities like Seattle and Portland. In California, I think they like it when a movie theater closes.

It seems in LA it’s starting to change. Things are happening because it’s important to people, people like going to the movies. MoviePass really helped in that regard. The Summer of MoviePass reminded people that they like going to the movies, not just sitting at home watching TV.

You populate The Earth Dies Streaming with other film critics, briefly describing them in the audience of a film screening as well as profiling those who were important to you in longer pieces. Is there a sense of community that’s part of your process?

I always wanted community to be important, in a sense, but I grew up in a very isolated place where there wasn’t that kind of community around the cinema. And then for many years I lived in Boston. And there were a few people who were into movies there but it wasn’t really a community. I had good friends who I saw movies with and worked with and wrote with, and some were cinephiles and some were great critics. But it wasn’t much of a cinephile town even though they have great movie theaters like the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle and the Coolidge Corner. It was not a cinephile town like New York is, so it wasn’t really possible to be part of a community in that sense. Especially in the early days of the internet. This kind of cinephile universe that exists on the internet now and has since the mid-2000’s, wasn’t around in the 1990’s.

When I came to New York in 2002, I was working in publishing and brand analysis for consumer goods and television. I had to work all the time and it wasn’t possible for me to be part of a community like that. I was also older than most people who were becoming part of that community here in New York in the early 2000s. People who were programmers and curators and young critics that wrote for The L Magazine or The Village Voice or something, and filmmakers, too. I didn’t work at Kim’s Video or in a movie theater anymore. I worked full-time and had a 60-hour work week, eventually, in television brand analysis. I was writing as much as possible and I was writing for n+1 at that point, but I was kind of isolated from other cinephiles. I also despise any kind of sucking up to older critics. I felt like when I came to New York I unexpectedly saw a lot of that. I never had a mentor figure as a critic or as a writer, that was never part of my life.

Are you interested in mentoring younger critics?

I think it’s important to encourage people and find people who are good and find ways to get them published and edit them. To make sure there’s a future for writing and criticism.

What advice do you give them?

This is contradictory but I wouldn’t encourage people to become writers. But people are going to do that. So if people are serious about it, they should do it well, but it is not a good life. It’s a hard life. I’ve been working pretty much only as a writer since about 2016 when I quit my job. And it’s not possible to live in New York that way for very long. You can’t make enough money. I have low-ish rent because I’ve lived in the same place since 2003. If something happens and I have to move, my rent would double overnight and I don’t know what I’d do. It’s likely that will happen.

It’s also debilitating to live here because the amount of rich people you meet in New York who don’t have to struggle to pay rent is a real downer. It’s wearing to be around people like that so much.  But I couldn’t just move somewhere else and do what I do. This is a function of the wealth gap and the complete destruction of career paths for people in most of the country. It used to be that you could live in other cities if you wanted to be a writer or a film critic. Maybe you didn’t want to move to New York or Los Angeles. You could live in other parts of the country and have a career as a writer and work professionally as a film critic and make a living. The kind of blight that has decimated people’s ability to make a living in those parts of the country forces everyone into the same places, which are now very expensive to live in. This is purely a function of predatory capitalism and the wealth gap that has opened up because of it. The way that venture capital and conglomerates and individual multimillionaires purchase media properties and then completely ruin them is disgusting and evil and has been met with little resistance. Because, like I was saying, baby boomers like it when these things happen. They like it if a newspaper closes or a magazine goes out of business. They like it when people in their town can’t make a living as a writer. That is something they enjoy. Somehow it’s enriching them for this to happen. And it proves something to them, which is that everyone should want to live like they do and think like they do. It’s the same as my small town growing up, but way more capitalized.

I was foolish and lived in Boston and other places for far too long. I came to New York City to work on some films a long time ago and I should have stayed, but I went back to Boston. That was a mistake. I thought because of the internet – this was the 1990’s and I wrote for a website for a dollar a word and by writing two pieces a month and I could afford to live, because there was rent control. Then in Boston they got rid of rent control and the internet bubble burst. All of a sudden I had no income and my rent doubled. I went back to being a movie theater projectionist.

I moved to New York because I was offered a job as a book editor. I wish I had moved here sooner, and I wish I had understood that the internet was a giant lie, even bigger than we thought it was, that people were not going to be able to live where they wanted to live and write just because we were all connected by this information superhighway. It was bullshit, we were skeptical about it, but our skepticism was constantly characterized as retrograde. But because of the internet for the first time in my life, and for a very short time, I was making a living writing and I didn’t have to work in movie theaters. That ended and I had to move to New York and it’s been great, but now it’s becoming untenable.

Your book covers writing from over fifteen years of criticism, and you’ve organized it in reverse chronological order. Could you speak a little more about that process and what it’s like to see writing from 2008 bound with writing from 2016, for example?

I wanted the book to be in anti-chronological order, that was important to me. And anything I’d written before 2002, around the time I came to New York, I didn’t consider worthy of republishing, even though there’s ten years of writing there, what I wrote for zines and the internet. For this book, the process was I gathered everything I’d written in that 16 year period, which is probably more than twice as much as what’s in the book. I went through it and picked out the things I thought were worthy of considering and I gave those to one of my editors at n+1. He narrowed it down to what’s in the book. It’s a long book, it’s 475 pages.

If you look at the book, there isn’t a piece from each year between 2002 and 2018 because there were some years when I was working so much in my job. It was sad for me to realize that there were whole years in which I didn’t write anything, or nothing I thought was worthy of collecting in a book. I don’t think any major publisher would have published this book. The book is exactly how I wanted it to be; it has the pieces I wanted in it, it has that cover designed by Rachel Ossip, which I love, it has an index. 

. . . when tyranny meets banality, we have to change things.

I think that our approach to that has been vindicated because the book was well-reviewed, and it sold more than n+1 thought it would, and it continues to sell. In publishing they say no one reads film books unless they’re big biographies of celebrity actors or classic directors. The publishing industry stopped publishing collections of film criticism. I think my book was the first collection of film criticism reviewed in the New York Times in quite a long time. Publishers think no one wants to read books like that. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don’t create space for people to write interesting film criticism, they don’t pay people enough to write it, so they’ve made it impossible. If they were doing it properly, there would be a lot more stuff that’s interesting and publishable in collections that people would want to read. They have entrenched notions about what sells and what people buy. Again, they want it to be that way. They want to deny people what they like and force other things on them—that’s entertainment. As I wrote in my book, when tyranny meets banality, we have to change things.

Riley Mang is LAR’s Editor-at-Large. Find more of her work here.