In early July of 2008, film critic Stephanie Zacharek was having breakfast—toast, eggs, black coffee—at a bistro in Downtown Brooklyn. She was preoccupied, to some extent. She had just posted her review of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight online for Salon.com, one of the most highly anticipated movies of that summer. Needless to say, she was straightforward in her opinions about the film, so her review was pretty negative; as was the reaction from DC fans. “The things that people said…it was my first experience with people thinking they can say anything because they’re anonymous. It was sexist, misogynist, just unbelievable stuff,” Zacharek said.
It happened again in 2014 with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. And again just this year with The Batman. In fact, publications—and, as an extension, criticism—have become so connected with the broader public and close interaction is inevitable, unavoidable, and even dangerous. “We’ve moved away from being a culture of people who think about movies to one made up of people who believe that spouting a list of preferences is the same as registering an opinion,” says Zacharek. This connects to the ever-changing landscape of journalism and online writing, and why it’s tougher than ever to be a critic today.
Stephanie Zacharek was one of the first critics to make a name for herself in an online publication, with her work on Salon reaching people across the globe in ways that she didn’t fully grasp the significance of until after she left in 2010. Currently the chief film critic for TIME magazine, Zacharek has the privilege to write about films both new and old, the latest blockbusters and whatever retrospectives are playing at Film Forum or other New York theaters. Few writers are so astute in their negative criticisms without ever feeling mean-spirited or churlish, and Zacharek’s most enthusiastic reviews read like songs of movie love. And, like everything, she had a beginning.
She remembers the times when she was very little, watching Creature Feature on Saturday afternoon, Monday Night at the Movies on the TV networks, and classic black-and-white movies with her older sister. In the days before videos and VCRs—ashamed and embarrassed to say—she would stay up late with her sister, or her mom, or sometimes by herself, even, and watch old movies. It was the first time she can recall movies being important to her. When she got a little bit older, she started watching the series of foreign movies that PBS used to do, and that’s when her mind was really blown—“People actually live like this?!”—and for a long time, she watched whatever PBS offered. That was the first time she became conscious of movies as more than just entertainment.
Growing up in the boondocks of upstate Syracuse, Zacharek has become envious of people who grew up in New York or San Francisco or Boston who had access to all this culture—the culture that she saw on the big screen. She doesn’t come from a big movie-going family—although, she does remember seeing Saturday Night Fever with her mother because she had a crush on John Travolta—so she had to find movies on her own. And they stuck.
Zacharek’s mother was a secretary at Syracuse University, where they would have copies of The New Yorker in the waiting room of the administration building. She was about 12 when her mother would bring home stacks of them, and while flipping through them and reading the cartoons, she came upon the back of the papers, where the movie reviews of the legendary film critic Pauline Kael resided.
“I started reading these reviews and I immediately loved them because I felt she was obviously this incredible writer and intellectual, I never felt like she was writing above my head. What she was doing seemed very accessible and very vivid to me,” says Zarcharek about Kael. “She opened up a world, in a way. Reading her made me feel like I had all this stuff waiting for me. At some point when I was older and autonomous, I could go and see this stuff for myself. That was really important to me. But that was a reading experience, not a film-watching experience, and it kind of reinforced some of these other interests in my life that were simmering.”
Kael is regarded as one of the most influential film critics in history, even to those who don’t consider themselves “fans.” She was specific and definitive in her opinions, and she revolutionized criticism as performance. Her language was so descriptive and evocative that even though you might have been reading a review of a movie you hadn’t seen, you felt as though they were coming alive for you on the page. Zacharek talks about how some of the “Paulettes” who have since written cruel articles about Pauline Kael don’t describe the woman Zacharek got to know. Where some complain that “you couldn’t disagree with her,” Zacharek says, “So what? Grow a pair. That’s what criticism is about. You can’t ask somebody permission to allow you to disagree.”
From first seeing Kael on The Mike Douglas Show up until the time she met her for the first time, Zacharek has grown from being almost intimidated by her—never before had she seen someone so composed, so sure of themselves—to not only respecting her, but revering her. “She was very important to me, and in the time that I knew her…” She pauses. “I have to say that I have become very protective of her legacy.”
As befits someone who grew up idolizing Pauline Kael, Stephanie Zacharek doesn’t suffer geniuses gladly. Here she is on Christopher Nolan: “Even the dirt in Interstellar looks spectacularly art-directed.” And on Terrence Malick: “Watching Knight Of Cups is like seeing a guy go to a strip club and tip the dancers with Zen koans instead of singles.” She would much rather watch Channing Tatum, whom she describes, in her review of Logan Lucky, as “alive to the molecules around him.”
Observer film critic Oliver Jones describes her writing as “at once accessible, wry and evocative. She’s brilliant, with an otherworldly understanding of how to write about performance.”
Zacharek concentrates on performance much more than other critics—how they look, how they move—because it’s the thing she loves most about movies. It’s always about the faces for her, as it is the faces that she believes are the essential thing of cinema. Zacharek describes herself as old school—what with the virtual death of the moviestar in contemporary Hollywood—but her work is still able to find an audience without having a specific reader in mind.
“I just want to engage people,” she explains. “I’m not interested in writing for other critics—I see some of them jockeying for attention from their peers rather than really trying to communicate. So the central thing is to reach people and not bore them, hopefully.”
The industry has changed since Zacharek got her start in the late 90s. There are still people who are interested in reading criticism, but with the rise of technology and critics websites, it’s becoming increasingly rare for people to actually read reviews, to the extent that criticism might be losing its ability to influence the cultural conversation.
“It has already become a kind of boutique interest,” says Zacharek. “There are still people who are interested in reading it but the thing that alarms me is that writing has become so undervalued as a skill and people get paid less for it rather than more. For me to realize that young people can’t have the same opportunities I had, it breaks my heart.”
Opportunities, as she states, are even more few and far between for female film critics. Even worse, the online abuse borders on extreme oppression. Anita Sarkeesian, a cultural media critic, has long highlighted feminst ideals as a result of severe online sexsim and misogyny. In regards to her 2018 video series “Feminst Frequency,” she addressed possible responses to the online abuse women face from various venomous sources, particularly on social media.
“My concerns are that these platforms were built from the ground up by white men and tested on their families and people in their orbit who looked like them, and they never thought about how their platforms could do harm,” Sarkeesian said. “So, what happens is that when [a platform] takes off and you have millions of users, it’s putting Band-Aids on this geyser of harm and chaos on their platforms. … Can you ever fix a platform where the foundation is fundamentally flawed?”
Sometimes yes, the critic herself acknowledged. She consults with major tech companies, including those in social media, Sarkeesian said. And, “It’s fascinating to be in a space as long as I have, doing this work and [seeing] how rapidly we have come to recognize that online harassment is real.”
Zacharek is no stranger to such treatment. Exibit A:
C’est moi! pic.twitter.com/SceKMxpj2T
— Stephanie Zacharek (@szacharek) August 31, 2019
Or B:
These JOKER people are the loveliest, how heartening when a movie that hasn’t even been released yet brings out the best in humans. pic.twitter.com/IHUxp09vLC
— Stephanie Zacharek (@szacharek) September 8, 2019
In the past she has shown some of these negative comments directed towards her to her male colleagues, to which they have responded that they can’t even imagine people saying those things to them. But she is reluctant to play the victim card, and instead chooses to look at it in a different way. “It seems to me if you disagree with somebody and you don’t say so or you’re afraid to make your case, or you lose the argument every time, that’s not the other person’s fault,” says Zacharek. “But that’s not the same as saying I wouldn’t allow you to have your own opinion. Arguments need support, not just opinions, so I choose to look past those who feel the need to belittle me with no supportive argument. When you reach the point where you feel like someone is not allowing you to have your own opinion… then you have failed as a critic. It’s like the Eleanor Roosevelt thing—nobody can make you a victim without your consent.”
When asked where she hopes to see the industry in the future, Zacharek—always old school—says she hopes to get a greater feeling of nostalgia in contemporary movies, perhaps emulating those black-and-white classics she grew up watching with her older sister. “I wish more young filmmakers would rediscover and explore more classical filmmaking techniques. I don’t want every movie to be like that, but it would be nice to see them screw the camera into a tripod every once in a while.” She laughs. “See what that’s like! Just try it!”