I was with a high school friend several months ago when she told me, “I hate critics” — A horror movie she liked was getting bad reviews. Anyone who didn’t like the movie, she said, didn’t “get it.” We were in a bookstore, so I didn’t respond and pointed out the next book I recognized. I wanted to tell her that critics were most of my favorite writers. I wanted to ask her what exactly she thought I did on a publication’s Arts section. I wanted her to have a different idea of what a critic was, what one could be, why they were important and a lot of other things that people reading this probably already know. I didn’t want her to go on straightforwardly hating them, at any rate.
Lauren Oyler, most recently the author of “No Judgment,” reminded me of the portrait of the critic as a fun leech who eviscerates everything they touch, which is a more prevalent portrait than I often remember. I don’t hate Oyler. Not personally, anyway, although perhaps persona-ly. Besides her recent book, she is known — as in, this is how nearly every profile and book review I read introduces her — for writing scathing reviews of things, mostly books, that other people like. She wrote more than 5,000 words against Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror.” She didn’t love “Lady Bird” and was perplexed by how much everyone else did. The Washington Post reviewer thinks that we all secretly hate these things, and Oyler is just the one brave enough to say so. I don’t think she’s a justified cynic.
I didn’t know why I disliked her criticism at first. There is a deep-seated bitterness in her work, but that wasn’t it. Every time I got to the end of a piece — or even into the middle, sometimes only a few sentences — I felt lost. I felt stupid. I didn’t know what Oyler was trying to say. I knew something was eating away at her, and she was certainly pointing at a lot of things — there’s the way Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, “Little Women”), after losing her virginity, becomes “perceptive and intelligent in a way you’d want your daughter to be in this situation and in a way that few daughters, if any, ever are.” (Is Lady Bird too inaccurate? Or does Oyler just want to lash out at teenage girls when she gets the chance?). Tolentino’s occasionally imprecise use of the word “suddenly” is so offensive to Oyler she brings it up in the second sentence of her “Trick Mirror” review, setting the tone for many mostly irrelevant, superiority complex-fueled digressions about words she doesn’t trust Tolentino to actually know (the worst being a multi-paragraph tangent about BDSM). She takes issue with an author’s prestigious education, particularly with female authors including Tolentino and Meg Wolitzer. Every individual sentence of Oyler’s seemed to have a point. Surely they did, I thought, because she seemed so self-assured and was published in respected publications. But I couldn’t put it all together.
It is the things other people love that she is most suspicious of. The “Lady Bird” piece wasn’t born by Oyler’s own, contrary opinion about the film. Instead, she frames it by saying that what she’s “here to write about is not whether it’s good” but whether it’s as good as everyone seems to think it is. Other people liked it a little too much, so she must find pieces of it that she thinks don’t work. She says it’s a “feel-good” movie, as if before any criticisms of the story itself, she must remind us that this film’s first crime is to be widely liked. In the formation of “mutual understandings about Things That We Like, from musicians to movies to food to opinion columnists to TV shows,” she writes, “people who do not happen to like the Things That We Like” feel isolated. “Lady Bird” makes Oyler feel not like other girls in a bad way.
Let me revise that. “Suspicious” isn’t the right word. “Suspicious” makes her sound too interested. And that she is not. The first real clue to the unease I felt when reading anything from Oyler was the Cut profile. The author tries to gauge Oyler’s opinions on a laundry list of topics, from Harvard to podcasts to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, most of which Oyler responds to negatively. Then she asks for Oyler’s take on feminism. Oyler says, “Who cares?”
That’s why I don’t like her, I realized. Because she doesn’t care. It’s not just feminism. It’s the art she writes about, which is not, as far as her criticism would have you believe, interesting to her, certainly not if it’s interesting and valuable to anyone else. She doesn’t care why other people do like “Lady Bird;” the fact that they do is a reason to weakly attempt to prove why they shouldn’t, why she’s above them for being a stone wall in the face of something that made others emotional. Her criticism is the particular brand of hatred that isn’t even hatred because that requires passion — you need to care about something to hate it. “I don’t care” might be the least useful attitude a critic can have. It’s the attitude that, if widely adopted, just might cause the whole concept of criticism to collapse. In her piece about “Trick Mirror,” Oyler invents the term “hysterical criticism.” Her own criticism embodies something I will hopefully less pretentiously call critical emptying.
Oyler takes apart the things she writes about like I took apart old clocks my dad gave me as a kid, telling me I could “put them back together to see how they work” — except I never got past the disassembling. With each review, I read Oyler’s first sentences thinking she was picking something apart to find out how it worked, certainly a valuable critical pursuit. But then she kept going, taking out gears and springs, examining them for the slightest scratch and scattering them around, forgetting how they worked together and claiming something was lacking in the now barren shell that remained in front of her as if it was not her fault that it stopped ticking. Her criticism isn’t meaningful because she destroys the meaning of things while she critiques them. The cultural artifact has been, after her criticism, emptied. It doesn’t work, she writes. It’s vague. Of course it is. Things don’t work when you rip out all their organs. And this corporeal harvest is even less justified when the poor book’s or movie’s crime was that other people liked it.
After she complains about Lady Bird’s “wisdom,” Oyler inserts points almost at random amid a lot of plot summary: She dislikes the final speech, saying it was “so unapologetically corny that I couldn’t believe it.” She doesn’t like that Lady Bird goes into a church at the end, having never done so before, and thereby ignores the character’s Catholic schooling and contentious relationship with religion. But her final strike is not against the film but against the viewers who, she seems to think, were not genuinely moved but fell for it, as if the film were an exercise in manipulation. She says that Greta Gerwig’s (“Barbie”) caring treatment of her characters “doesn’t seem embarrassing, common, or obvious” to “a bunch of teenage brains trapped in adult bodies.” Because of Oyler’s authoritative tone, I finished the essay embarrassed for liking the film without being able to articulate exactly why I did.
Her review of “Trick Mirror” reads like wading through a tar pit, but it’s also one of the few where Oyler actually makes some important points. These points are lost, however, in the sludge of quotes she personally didn’t like or things that, if looked at without nuance, contradict other things Tolentino has said or done. Anything Tolentino claims to feel is something Oyler leaps to pick apart. Tolentino writes about the difficulty of writing critiques of capitalism while being part of the publishing industry, and Oyler asks why she didn’t “just not” and sell PDFs of her books online like Helen DeWitt. Hypocrisy! Oyler’s occasional valid point and her ability to persuade the reader that she is more knowledgeable than anyone she is writing to or about, even if her point itself is unclear, makes every bad argument not exactly convincing but adds to the reader’s mounting uncertainty about the truth of anything they previously thought. The piece is as much a takedown of Tolentino’s readers as it is Tolentino — “For readers hoping to optimise the process of understanding their own lives, Tolentino’s book will seem ‘productive,’” she writes in the final paragraph. Even if her good points are completely obscured and she has ripped apart valuable parts of the book alongside any weak ones, the reader leaves feeling baffled and like a shell of themself in the face of Oyler’s overwritten sneering.
Each work is truly emptied of its meaning when its audience is emptied as well — of credibility, of adulthood, of permission to enjoy what moves them.
This emptying of a piece of art until it stops working — until it becomes meaningless — terrifies me. It’s scary because I have done it. I know what it’s like to have some small misgiving about something, start analyzing it and then feel the whole thing come apart in my hands like a knitting project that the needles slipped out of. I wonder if I’m missing something or whether the work, which I might have actually liked, was only an illusion of something meaningful, an act of trickery. I wonder if I, like the critics my friend hates so much, just “don’t get it.” And then I wonder if anything anyone has created would still feel properly woven together, well-made and valuable if I applied this same type of scrutiny. If I emptied it. The answer is no. And that’s a nihilism I don’t particularly enjoy.
Having panned “Barbie,” myself, I must say some things really are empty under the surface, like a painted balloon that needs to be popped. But rather than reveal a pre-existing emptiness, Oyler’s criticism renders things empty that began full and operational. Things that had something to say. Things that might have real, rocky cores. When I read her criticism, I start to worry that there is nothing that doesn’t have at least a bubble of emptiness at its center that I could fight my way to with an analytical pickaxe. It’s an idea that makes the reading experience one of confusion. Like I said, I feel lost.
I feel lost in the way I do when I’m writing sometimes because I also know what it’s like to strand yourself in a review. I know what it’s like to have a nagging feeling about a book or movie and start writing without a concrete direction or point. I find myself descending into a cave where I knock things over in the dark, pick up pieces of meaningless dirt, examine them far too closely, then move on to the next one, hoping I have made some sort of point, even though I couldn’t tell you what it was. When I’m done writing, I’m just glad to have made it back to the surface, pockets like sandbags. Pieces I have written like this tend to be the ones that make me feel like I should stop writing altogether. I have failed at what I see as my job, which is to make some sort of sense out of something. A very specific goal, isn’t it? Well, its lack of specificity makes failing an even greater sign that I should give it up. These are also the pieces I don’t end up showing to anyone or publishing. I ask someone else to talk to me, to please help me figure out what it is I’m really feeling about something, or if I’m feeling anything valid at all.
I have felt these things, and I see them in Oyler’s writing, and in her they have manifested as hate, dismissal, Who cares? As a writer and editor, I have seen beautiful pieces written out of hate. But they are also written out of care.
I’m afraid of becoming the critic my friend hates. I’m more afraid of becoming the one who doesn’t just question things that people like but searches for faults because people like them. I am afraid of becoming someone who, as Oyler described “Normal People’s” Marianne, “is confident in little except her relative superiority.” Take a guess who I could describe that way.
Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.