Offline with Jon Favreau - How Social Media is Changing Movies — and Their Place in Society

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

Maia Wyman, or Broey Deschanel as she’s known on Youtube, joins Offline to talk about her generation of movie critics and influencers—spoiler alert, they’re not the same! Her nuanced video essays break down films, analyzing everything from the political themes of Parasite to why Barbie had to spoon-feed feminism to its audience. But for every voice like Maia’s, there are many others who don’t leverage the social web so much as indulge it. Guest host Max Fisher talks with Maia about how the internet is changing movies for better or worse, what it means for our culture, and how we see it playing out in this summer’s big releases. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

films that are able to reflect our culture back to us in ways that make us shift in our seats and make us think about morality in ways that we hadn't necessarily thought of or bring up parts of ourselves that maybe are a bit uglier but are there and like if we ignore them I think it gets it's worse I think that is such a fundamental aspect of all art forms so to not be comfortable with discomfort in movies I think is a little alarming these days. Like, I think it kind of frightens me. And I know we've been there before. It's not the first time.

But it is a little scary to be in this current moment. Hey, everyone. I'm Max Fisher sitting in for John this week with something I've been wanting to bring you for a while. The way that we talk about movies is changing. It's changing a lot. And it's changing thanks to the internet. We rate and review movies on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd. We discuss them on Twitter. And we watch videos about them on YouTube and TikTok where a new kind of movie criticism, or maybe it's fandom, reaches tens of millions of people every day. I think this is a really big deal. Movies are a big part of how we collectively process our history,

like with Oppenheimer, or think through the issues that we face as a society, like the feminism and gender relations portrayed in Barbie. They shape how we think about good and evil, heroes and villains. And that used to be guided by newspaper critics. But now it's dominated by social media, which is transforming, I believe, not just movie culture, but as a result, our culture more broadly. Mai-Yi Wyman is part of that transformation. On YouTube, she makes videos under the name Broey Deschanel. In one, she explores the political themes behind Parasite, the 2019 South Korean thriller that won Best Picture. Another looks at why audiences in the early 2010s got briefly obsessed with sleazy, sex-filled indie films like Spring Breakers, which is one of my favorites. Her essays are fun and they're smart and they reach a lot of people.

But for every voice like Mai is, there are a lot of others who don't leverage the social web so much as indulge it. Now differences within those communities are bursting into a very public debate over how the internet is shaping movies and movie cultures for better or worse. Maia and I talked about how the movies are changing with all this, what it means for our culture, and how we already see it in this summer's big releases. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. Here's Mayu Wyman. Mayu, welcome to Offline. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So there has been so much debate and reflection within online film communities in the last couple of weeks triggered by these two big articles. The first, The Guardian wrote about movie studios sidestepping critics to cultivate social media influencers, instead inviting them to special screenings where they're only allowed to praise the movies or sometimes paying them for promotion. And then the New York Times interviewed a bunch of movie TikTokers who said, and I'm paraphrasing, that they are

rejecting traditional criticism and want to promote something that is more in line with fandom instead. But these trends aren't new. They've been building for a couple of years. So what do you think it is about this moment that has struck a nerve for so many people um i think there have been you know quite a few changes in the film industry in recent years that have led to a moment where people are feeling a bit uh tense i think there's a few things that have happened um most recently as um i'm sure you know uh a.o scott who is the chief film critic at the New York Times, left the New York Times saying that essentially, citing a few reasons that have happened, one of them being fandom culture and the fact that he feels like he can't give an honest review because movies that

are being made these days are made to be critic proof and also made to incite fandoms against people, like dissenting voices essentially, was the biggest reason he gave. There's also just been a lot of trouble in the industry itself. As we know, there are strikes happening right now, which have really shed light on worsening labor conditions in the film industry. There's the crumbling of the cinema and the box office and the fact that the only movies that we're seeing in cinemas these days are very risk averse, very IP driven blockbusters, a lot of reboots, remakes, sequels, etc. And then there's the rise of streaming, which has also kind of caused an issue. It's made, you know, it is giving more money to movies to be funded, a lot of like more mid budget character driven movies, but those movies are kind of fallen

victim to algorithms and, you know, not being seen and not having a cultural event in the same way that you know a movie at the cinema would be so i think just tensions are very high right now and i think it's led to a lot of people having distrust in the movie establishment and for some reason also a distrust in film critics and then that paired with the rise of social media and a film community kind of getting a bit more heated on there also kind of giving rise to this this kind of these two specific moments that have happened yeah it's a really good point about the pressures on the industry and what's kind of ironic is that like at the same time like movies are a little bit back and barbie and oppenheimer driving so much discussion and excitement around movies feels like it has also raised the stakes and returned a sense that movies are really important.

How we talk about movies are really important. Strike, the WGA issued this guidance where they said, we don't want influencers to do promotion for movies, but it's okay for critics to do movie criticism. And then that's forced people to kind of like take sides and say, I'm an influencer, or I'm a critic. And I know that you identify as a critic. So can you talk about what for you is the line between those two things and why you identify as one and not the other? Yeah, definitely. So just to also clarify, I think I believe it was SAG-AFTRA that were the ones who said influencer, but I mean, they're all working together. But yeah, SAG-AFTRA basically put out a set of guidelines saying that non-union influencers were prohibited from promoting struck

material, basically. So that led to this kind of wider conversation. I'm in a few Discord channels and Slack channels with different people who are in kind of my circles of YouTube talking about, okay, like what does promotion mean and what does influencer mean and am I that? And there is a side of YouTube and also TikTok where people do reviews and commentary on movies and sometimes or sometimes quite often get paid to promote those

movies by the studios or are incentivized to go to screenings and you know write a good review of the film my side of youtube which is more it falls more in the lines of film analysis we don't typically work with studios i've had a few distributors reach out and ask if i can promote an upcoming movie online but to me like youtube has a bit less of a forgiving algorithm than TikTok in the sense that it's harder for people because you need people to commit to a longer form video. It's harder to get people to commit to watching a video about a movie they haven't seen. So there's not as much incentive for me to talk about new films, which is why I often reject these requests. I also try to be a bit more independent, like I want to key my independence, which is why I think I fall more along the lines of film critic. I think I'm a film critic because I think I kind of act as an

intermediary between film scholars. So I think that's a side of film criticism. There's film journalism. So the people who write reviews for kind of like legacy publications, it doesn't always have to be the case, but people who are writing reviews, thinking of like your Pauline Kales or your Roger Ebert or Vincent Canby's or A.O. Scott's or David Ehrlich's, those types of people. And then there's like the film scholars who are writing for journals like Film Comment and Sight and Sound and Cahiers du Cinema. And I kind of consider myself a bit of an intermediary between those people and the wider public. I think that sounds really self-important, but because I'm not seen as legitimate, I have to back up a lot of what I'm saying with academic research. And I try to break

the theories of these people down and make them digestible for wider audiences. Because I don't think that these people are very accessible to us in general. Often their theories are locked behind paywalls, academic paywalls. And so I try to break those down. I think I've mostly been successful at it. I think a lot of my videos have been used in university curriculums, which has been really cool to see. It's a huge honor. Sometimes I'm not as successful at it. Sometimes people are like, what are you saying? That's gibberish. But because I'm doing that, and because a lot of my videos, I try to situate, you know, a film or TV object within its wider cultural context. I think that makes me a film critic, because to me, something that's integral to film criticism is the ability to have kind of a bit of a comprehensive

knowledge of film culture and film history. And to be able to place a film within the wider conversation of that, you're able to see, you know, what a film's innovating technically, you're able to see what kind of conversation it's having with the moment it's living in. And that's something I see as differentiating, you know, film critics from general audiences, and something I think that's extremely valuable. And of course, I think that has a lot of barriers to entry. I'm very lucky to be able to have this knowledge that did take me being able to go to school. But I don't think that's necessarily the case for everyone these days. And yeah, I think that was kind of my deciding factor for kind of announcing myself as a film critic to the public. Well, it's been so striking for me to see how hard of a dividing line there is among these communities online that talk about movies on YouTube and TikTok, which like reach these huge audiences. So I think it's really important what people in these communities think about what movie criticism means. And like reading the quotes by movie TikTokers in the New York Times piece or like watching a lot of their videos. I mean, they really trash critics as snobs and gatekeepers. And it kind of makes me

sad to see that because to me, like the great critics, like, you know, you mentioned Pauline Kael, like Roger Ebert, like those are people who did the or do the opposite of that. And to me, like the great critics, like, you know, you mentioned Pauline Kael, like Roger Ebert, like those are people who did the, or do the opposite of that. And to me, those are people who like elevate audiences and help us to better appreciate movies and to appreciate like the technical aspects of it and the history of them. Why do you think there has been such a reaction against critics? And why do you think it's so important for movie TikTokers, not just to like, do something different, but to be like, affirmatively opposed to critics like that? I think a lot of it has to do with like the infrastructure of social media, and the fact that a lot of these platforms are heralded for being these kind of democratizing

forces, which I won't say is entirely false. Like I wouldn't be where I am without them. I don't think, you know, I have, you know, a master's degree, but I highly doubt I would be considered to be like one of the film scholars writing for Film Comment, for example. I don't know if that would be the case. So I'm very lucky to have had this platform where I was able to kind of do the work myself and kind of pursue this like kind of pseudo-American dream to get to where I am. And I think because of that, there's a very big culture on social media of kind of like decrying the barriers to entry, like really talking about gatekeeping and talking about how there shouldn't be any barriers whatsoever. And I think that is kind of a

slippery slope to kind of to anti-intellectualism, which scares me a little bit. And I think that is kind of a slippery slope to kind of to anti-intellectualism, which scares me a little bit. And I think in general, I think film criticism has always been subject to criticism in this way. I think a lot of the time, you know, because film journalists, for example, are writing for journalistic bodies, a lot of people assume that their reviews are supposed to be objective, even though I don't think film criticism is ever purported to be objective, I think it's always been subjective. It's always been someone's knowledgeable opinion that you can take or leave depending on what you think. The purpose was to enrich people's understandings of a film. And I think that a lot of people see that and they say, well, who are you to be talking about this art? If you can't make this art, if you're not making

this art, why do you get to sit here and judge the hard work of others? So I think that's always been embedded within film criticism. People were having conversations about this like years back. Pauline Kael was not like a beloved figure to many people. A lot of people hated her reviews. And I see her as a bit of a hero, but it just depends on where you're coming from. So I don't think it's necessarily new, but I think social media has really exacerbated

this kind of anti-intellectual conversation. Right. Although at the same time, like, you know, I'm often very critical of social media, but it has been really cool to discover that there are a lot of people like you on these big social platforms who are really continuing and building on that tradition of criticism. So can you talk about, like, what was the first time you saw a video on YouTube, or maybe it was someplace else that for you showed you that like, oh, there's really interesting stuff happening online with this like movie criticism and cultural criticism that I'm so familiar with?

Yeah, so around like the mid 2010s, I want to say, I think YouTube, film on YouTube kind of graduated from the man yelling at camera model of criticism where you got with like channel awesome, those kind of guys graduated from that to kind of being these videos that were very rooted in like the technical language of film. So I'm thinking of people like Nerdwriter or Every Frame a Painting who made these kind of like shorter videos, extremely well made, usually people who were coming from an editing background, talking about like the technical mastery of different filmmakers and why we should know about these things and like bringing that to the public. But because I had come from a more cultural studies background, that's not something

that I don't think I could speak to that. So where my interests kind of began was with Lindsay Ellis, who I talk about all the time. Yeah, she's great. And she actually started with Channel Awesome, the man yelling at camera people, but slowly kind of paved her own way into making these videos that were situating, like what I do, situating a film or TV show within its cultural moments and kind of looking at it from that perspective. And that really inspired me. Like, I don't think I could do what I'm doing if she hadn't done it. I think she really is a pioneer of the genre. And then I think when we all started in 2020, it kind of blew up because we were all at home and had time and it was something you could do remotely. And so I think that is why me and everyone else who I started with kind of came up.

But I think Lindsay Ellis was the first of us. That makes sense. It would be during the pandemic. I feel like I know so many people who are like stuck at home and started watching a lot of movies, started watching a lot of YouTube or TikTok videos about movies and like really started to look at them differently. So it would make sense that people were doing the criticism and doing the video making would have like the same journey. I know for me, it was a video by Every Frame of Painting you mentioned is like a former, or I think actually current film editor. It was this really short, like four minute video on the Nicholas Weining-Ruffin movie Drive, where he just showed how in this one dialogue scene, the frame composition and the way the characters were shown, conveyed all of this one dialogue scene the frame composition and the way the characters were shown

conveyed all of this unconscious information about the relationships between characters the emotions i just like never thought of movies that way as if you could use composition and light and color to make you feel something and it just like had really changed how i saw movies and how i think about them and it also makes me think that there is something about this kind of new social media visual form of criticism that both builds on but is maybe a little bit different from or an additional to the kind of traditional criticism. I mean, to your mind, is this like, kind of a continuation, a straight continuation of like the Pauline Kales and Roger Ebert's or is it doing something new as well, do you think?

I think it's definitely doing something new. I think in many ways, the writer's job who don't, who aren't working with this visual medium, I find, I think might be a lot harder because they're talking about a visual product or like a visual piece of art and having to use their words to describe it. Whereas I think with the visual medium, what is so cool about it and innovative is that you can actually show people like every frame of painting is slowing down a take, you zooming in, and it really enhances your understanding of it in a way that I think is really fascinating. I also think especially people like Every Frame a Painting and Nerdwriter who are coming from these backgrounds that the general public isn't coming from and so wouldn't like inherently understand the beauty of it really like creates this like very positive very excited community

about film that might be a bit different from the more critical people like the pauline kales for example like these guys aren't really criticizing the films they're actually just enhancing our understanding of it and enhancing why we should love it, which I think like film journalists and film reviewers are perfectly capable of, but isn't necessarily always the case. But we have a lot more liberty on YouTube to be able to kind of say what we want about films, whereas there's a much more rigid structure when you're writing a review for a publication. It's a great point about creating community as a like really important

affordance of social media. Like, you know, I've probably watched 30 hours of videos just breaking down different cinematographers, which is just a thing you can do because like the internet had like allows that and like the kind of cultural criticism that you do, like can build an entire community around that. Can you talk about kind of what you when you were sitting down to make a video, what you're kind of hoping to accomplish with it? Or like, what to you is success in terms of what you want to do for your audience? I think it depends on the video. I think they typically fall in kind of two formats, like either I'm doing a video that's kind of taking a retrospective look at a film and most often redeeming that film now. I did it with Showgirls, for example, kind of talking about

the pros and cons of Showgirls, but also what Showgirls meant for the time and what it means now. And I think for those videos, I want people to reimagine a film, maybe give it a bit more meat than I think they'd be giving it if they were just watching it with friends, get them to think about it in that way in a more historical context. So with that, that's what I'm trying to do. With my more critical videos, I think I'm just trying to get people to, because I think we all have media literacy within us. I think we're all capable of being critical of a film, but trying to encourage people just to think a bit more about the films they're watching. And again, putting it in a cultural context. For example, I just made a video about Barbie, which made some people mad,

but also I think got a lot of people- Oh, we're going to get into it. We're going to get into it. But a lot of people were coming to me basically saying that it kind of changed their perspective of the film. And it's not me trying to get people to hate a film. I think everyone should be able to watch a film and be able to like it. And I'm very clear that what I'm doing is subjective. But just trying to get people to, again, take it in context and understand maybe the forces behind it and what messages they're trying to send us within the filmmaking, which is, I think, just like a tenet of media literacy.

So that's what I'm trying to do with those videos. Well, I want to talk about what effect that has, that kind of elevating of media literacy on the way that we think about movies and kind of what that means. There was a story you told me about going back to your old high school and hearing the way the kids talked about movies. Can you tell that and kind of what that maybe tells us about how audiences are changing maybe as a result, a little bit of social media? Definitely. Yeah. So I went, I was invited to go back to my high school. One of the students from my high school, of the students from my high

school which is an arts high school reached out to me and said and asked me to come and basically speak to the film students about like movies like that was the entire purpose there was nothing about any sort of like career objective it was just to chat about movies which is so awesome so I went in and we all sat in a classroom and it was it wasn't that many kids it was like a pretty small group which I think led to a bit more intimate discussion. But hearing these kids talk about movies and the language they were using and the nuance that they were applying to the movies that they talked about was mind blowing. Because when I was in high school, like I was not thinking about that kind of thing.

And I think a lot of it is because this is now very available on the internet. And I think that, you know, it's done a lot for young people to be able to take what they're seeing with a grain of salt or to be able to just have an enriched reading of a film that they wouldn't usually. And I think it was just so cool to be able to see that. They were so brilliant. And they also got me excited about movies. They knew so many movies that I knew nothing about. Like, my top, we went around and set our letterbox top fours, and mine were so basic in comparison to theirs. What were they naming?

Was it like obscure Czech, like Cold War era movies? Yeah, some pretty moody Soviet filmmaking, I would say, for the most part. Really? Wow. Maybe the most niche movies you could imagine. Which I guess are things like how I would never have even heard about those movies when I was a kid. But I guess being on YouTube or on TikTok, if you're watching people who are good, you would get exposed to that. It makes me wonder if there are good movies now that might be finding more of an audience or finding more appreciation,

partly because of this kind of enriching of audiences that we're getting? I think so, definitely. I think on YouTube, for me, I don't really talk about more niche films because we're all beholden to the algorithm, which is unfortunate. So you kind of have to talk about things that are a bit more popular, but also based on what I do, I kind of have to do that anyways to talk about the cultural legacy of a movie. But there are things like Letterboxd that are driving people towards these like, really unknown films. And creating the social space around like, niche filmmaking that I think is so cool. I think Instagram is doing a great job of that, like a lot of brands on Instagram,

like Mubi, for example, who, disclaimer, I work with, but who have done a really great job on Instagram of just using the visual medium of Instagram to kind of get people into a movie that they haven't heard of before. I think Criterion's doing that with their Closet Picks series on YouTube. I think social media is a great space for people to learn about new movies in general. One of your first and biggest videos was about Parasite. And of course, Bong Joon-ho had been around for a while. So he was going to find some kind of an audience. But the way that that movie resonated, not despite but because of exactly the sorts of complexities in it and the kind of cultural layers and economic layers that you talk about in your video made me wonder if maybe that was a kind of movie that reached more people or that people had a fuller experience of due partly to channels like yours. Yeah, I think that that definitely helped. It's kind of a chicken and egg thing because I don't know how much we're influencing and how much we're influenced on YouTube. And I think that video wouldn't have blown up had Parasite not won the

Oscar. So it's kind of this like a little bit of a balancing act. But definitely, I think that it's fun to create like a cultural conversation around a movie. I think a lot of people did that with I have a video about Sofia Coppola. And I see a lot of girls on TikTok, like citing that video and then putting it kind of in conjunction it in conjunction with other soft girl movies, which has been fun. But yeah, I think just getting excited around a movie is really a facet of that. Well, so let's talk about the kind of other end of the spectrum, the folks who are mostly on TikTok, but also on a lot of other platforms who are kind of anti-critic and identify a little bit more as influencers. I hate to put you in the position of speaking for them, but just because you're very aware of it, do you have a sense for what the kind of

guiding mission or principles are generally for folks in that community? I think what a lot of them said in that movie talk article for the New York Times was that what they're trying to do is create like trying to turn movies into entertainment is what one of them said. Like not trying to tear down a movie, but instead like uplift it. A lot of them were saying that. A.O. Scott did an exit interview for The Daily where he was talking about how this like blockbuster era has really created a distance between the film critic and the whatever moviegoer. And it's but then he also talks about he also talks about how the job of a film critic is to kind of be able to say something challenging about a film but retain trust in their audience. Like he uses the example of his review of Freddy Got Fingfingered and how everyone hated that movie but he loved it and he said that in his review and people were able to be like okay i disagree but that's a really cool thing to read and it's so interesting because a lot of these movie talkers were also in

trying to distinguish themselves from a movie critic we're saying that what they do is trying to build a more intimate connection with their audience in a way that they think movie critics don't and trying to establish that trusting relationship, which I found really fascinating because they're both saying the same thing, but they're using it to differentiate themselves from one another. That is interesting. So the kind of the movie TikTokers using movies as a basis for building a community around like, we all love Marvel movies or we all love whatever, rather than as a like piece of art to hold up and to kind of study from a little bit of remove. That actually does feel like a

really significant difference in how you would look at movies and what you would take away from them. Well, I think it plays a lot into like the contentization of art, I think, on social media, turning art into content. We're all monetizing our hobbies. We're all a part of this attention economy. And I think turning art into just another piece of content. People have said that about streaming services and the way that these movies just fall into these like massive, really like busy lists instead of like being able to have their big

moment in the theater. And I think that all plays into that mindset. Oh, yeah. The way the movie and TV and YouTube and TikTok and content experience has all been flattened into the same thing because we watch all of it on our laptop while we're cooking dinner, and it's just like Netflix queued up this movie. So I'll just have it on in the background, whereas it used to be, or maybe it's just like Netflix queued up this movie. So I'll just like have it on in the background, whereas it used to be, or maybe it's starting to again become more of an event. You mentioned monetization.

Can you talk about how big of an issue do you think it is that some folks, not all of them, but some who are on TikTok and to a lesser extent YouTube, take money from studios for paid promotion of the movies they're talking about? folks, not all of them, but some who are on TikTok and to a lesser extent YouTube, take money from studios for paid promotion of the movies they're talking about? Well, I think, you know, I've been thinking a lot about how I think there's this gap that's been created online where like you have your film academics, you have your film commentators and reviewers, but then there's this gap where the film journalists haven't really gotten their place on social media in the same way.

There isn't a space for film journalism. And I think a huge part of that is because like of the infrastructure of social media, the fact that it's so it relies on ad revenue. It's a little bit more difficult because a lot of people who are in the film community have these conflicts of interest. I'm lucky that I don't, but a lot of these movie talkers, most of their revenue and they make potentially are making more than most traditional film critics would be making based on just like a single promotion, depending on how popular they are, but are making money from these studios. Don't hold me to that. But I'm pretty sure based on that movie article, that's what I was getting. But they're beholden to these like corporate interests, which means that they can't speak negatively about a movie or lucidly about a film in the way that an independent person would be able to. And a lot of them are like, oh, well, you know, I always say that my video is sponsored, like it's only certain videos.

But at the end of the day, like you're still going to have to keep a corporate interest in mind, regardless if you want to continue working with them in the future. So it just creates this like really, really conflicting, you know, environment. Yeah. I think my reaction to it was less specific concern that like, because someone who makes a video I watch might have been paid to tell me that like, you know, the latest Mission Impossible is good or whatever, that more that if you are talking about movies and you think that's okay, that kind of reflects a mindset that you don't have to have a remove from the movies you're talking about and that it's acceptable to just see your position. And this is something that they do talk about quite openly, even ones who don't take money,

see your position as like hyping movies to celebrate, even though I say that loving movies, but not looking at them critically and not wanting to say when something doesn't work. And I think a huge part of loving movies is the ability to see the flaws in them. Like, I think that that is really important. I have, you know, I keep citing my own videos, but I have a video about Sex and the City, which isn't a movie, but is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. And the video is trying to reconcile this very difficult thing that the show hasn't aged well. And I think that's part of why I love it. It's so heavily flawed, and there are so many movies like that. So I think to be blindly celebrating movies without being able to have a multifaceted opinion about them doesn't necessarily mean that

you love the movie, I don't think. Well, let's talk about fandom, which is a thing that you mentioned a couple of times, and it's something that feels very of a piece with social media's influence on politics and so many other things, the idea of it sorting us into these communities where identity feels very rigid and where we don't like people who are on the outside of it. And you mentioned A.O. Scott, the New York Times film critic, and people were so shocked when he left that job because why would you give up the most coveted perch in all of movie criticism? There's this line from a piece that he wrote about why he left that I want to read you and then kind of get your reaction to. Because as you say, he cited fandom very heavily, which I was really surprised by and why reaction to. Because as you say, he cited fandom very heavily,

which I was really surprised by and why he left. He said, quote, fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity, and mob behavior. These social media hordes represent an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mindset that is harmful to the cause of art and movies. It's pretty harsh. I really feel for him. When I was reading that, I really felt for him because, you know, I think something, a privilege of print that we don't have digitally is that whenever you're releasing something, you're kind of subject to these comment sections, especially with people online. Like if we don't have a comment section, it harms our performance on the algorithm.

And with A.O. Scott, like his reviews now that are digital have these comment sections where he gets to hear people's opinions. There are people, I think he mentioned that Samuel L. Jackson kind of sent people against him on Twitter. And so I think he's just, it's a very, I don't want to dismiss his feelings because I do think it's a very like immediate reaction that he's having i don't necessarily think all fandoms are as uh authoritarian as he makes them out to me but i do think sure that the way that these major corporations have kind of managed to kind of wrap people's individual identities around these like objects to be sold like these basically these pieces of merchandise

is very scary and the fact that they can kind of mobilize people around this this like product is a bit frightening it's what they did i think with barbie in a way like barbie kind of became progress and it became feminism so if you didn't like barbie you're not a feminist and i think the same happened to a.o scott with when he criticized Avengers, for example. I think it's like there's something wrong with A.O. Scott and he doesn't believe in the movies and he's a snob because he doesn't like these overly commercial films. And I think that it's really sad, but I do think it's a bit of a generalization, I'd say. How much of that kind of rise of fandom culture around movies, how much of that do you think is top down, as you're saying, from studios? movies how much of that do you think is top down

as you're saying from studios and how much of it do you think is kind of bottom up you know we're all organizing on social media and on twitter i think it's like kind of a convergence of the two almost like they're meeting in the middle like i think these movies are really because they're kind of trying to capitalize on our nostalgia like these movies are about comic books people love comic books and there's already like a built in community to it, which is organic. I think they're kind of meeting people in the middle and then they're kind of it's like exploding when they when they meet, you know. Right. Well, so much of how we talk about movies like everything else now happens on these big, you know, algorithm driven social networks

like Twitter. And when I asked you about this before off-microphone, you said something that I actually thought was so smart, I wrote it down. You said, a lot of millennials in Gen Z have a totalizing approach to identity that is really harmful to enjoying art. Can you explain that a little bit? And maybe are there movies that you feel like have a harder time finding an audience now because of that change? I think places like TikTok or Letterboxd,

for example, just baked into their formats, kind of give way to people making these very rigid categorizations. Like Letterboxd has these like lists and TikTok has these videos that go viral because someone puts a name to something essentially. So I think and I think Gen Z has this penchant for like label making I think mainly because maybe it's a younger generation younger people want to feel like they have an identity that they can they can follow you know you're a bit more lost with that age you're having trouble defining yourself. So when there's like a name that you can put to something, it helps you understand yourself. I think that that gets a bit carried away sometimes. And what I've seen on TikTok is people kind of placing movies in these categories. And if you like these movies, you're this type of person. Like again, even with the

Sofia Coppola soft girl stuff, of course, I love being a part of those videos, but that is kind of a facet of this. One of the things I see is this trend going around of like red flag movies and, you know, basically creating these lists of like frat boy poster movies like, you know, Fight Club or like any Scorsese film. I think you used Wolf of Wall Street as an example. Borat, any Tarantino film and basically saying saying like, if any of these are your favorite movie that says something negative about you. And to me, like that just really flattens these films. Like, you know, I think Pulp Fiction got such a bad rep for so long. And of course, there are parts of it that have aged really poorly. But I went back and watched it last year. And I was like, this movie is amazing. Like, I wasn't crazy when I loved this in high school.

Like, this is a really cool movie it's really good yeah and like Fight Club 2 is saying so much about like it's it's an anti-capitalist film its message is more important than ever but because it's because of its cultural legacy people have just kind of thrown it in the trash and that really sucks like that's disappointing because I think we should be able to have these like reparative readings of movies or like a more holistic understanding of a film again taking in its flaws and taking in what it innovated which all those movies I think are extremely innovative extremely creative very director driven and I think that's that's really cool do you think that that is because studios are so attuned to what audiences are going to respond to and not because they're, you know, I mean, even more so than ever because the ticket sales are down and their margins are shrinking. Do you think there are movies that maybe don't get made or that get changed, like different kinds of movies getting through the system now because of that kind of moralizing change in

how we talk about them. There are definitely a lot of movies from the past that are morally ambiguous in their approaches that would absolutely not get made today. I think this happens a lot in terms of like young sexuality in film. The first movie that comes to mind is one of my favorite movies, Slums of Beverly Hills. I don't know if you've seen it. Oh, yeah. I haven't, but I'm familiar with it. I know it's got like, there's like a real like movie nerd culture around it.

Yeah, it's such a cool movie. It's starring Natasha Lyonne. She's super young. It's from the 90s. Marissa Tomei. Satome. And it has this like very frank approach to underage female sexuality and puberty that is very complicated and very frank, very unafraid to say what it's saying. There's also a moment in it that would probably now be seen like in this post-MeToo era as like completely reprehensible. But when I watched it with my friends, we were all like, wow,

that's really interesting. The movie has a very empathetic approach to it. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but I know that that movie can never be made today just because I think we're in this particularly heated moment about the exploitation of young actors. That is a bit sometimes un-nuanced. And so I think that movie definitely like things like that Exotica by Adam McGowan like those kind of movies um Kids which I don't know if it should be made today but yeah I don't know if that movie should have been made I don't know I tried to watch it once yeah well like you mentioned Showgirls which is like a huge movie at the time and it's like very ambiguous in what its intentions are which is part of the point of the movie. And like, I really love Paul Verhoeven's films.

And I was going back and looking through them after we talked. And I was thinking like, you know, Basic Instinct is a huge movie. He's made like a lot of really, really, you know, RoboCop's a huge movie, like all really ambiguous, all really over the top sexual violence in a way that audiences seem to understand at the time. Was it like, that was part of the point. And his movies now, like his most recent ones, Benedetta and Elle, I thought were really, really good, but got these like really limited European releases, like nobody in the US really talked about them. And like, maybe that's just because that's what he wants to do. But it did make me think that the kinds of movies that we're getting

are probably changing. Definitely. I think Paul Verhoeven is having a lot of trouble in this current climate because he's kind of a provocateur. And I think it's very tough to be a provocateur these days, especially when Sam Levinson is the main provocateur that we're all getting, who I don't think is as adept as Paul Verhoeven at what he's doing or as politically engaged as he is as Paul Verhoeven. I also loved Benedetta and I was reading a roundtable about the movie that was about it was about sex scenes in film and it was about the sex scenes in Benedetta and they were just saying that they thought it was like really unnecessary really shoehorned in but I think what Verhoeven's doing a lot and I think I said this in my showgirls video with his naked bodies is like putting them on screen so much and making them so available

to the viewer that you're almost desensitized to it. And that's like, that's the entire point. And I think even with Benedetta, like the message of that film and the mixture between profanity and sacredness, like the bodies in that movie are contributing to that overall theme. So I loved it because I thought it was so smart and interesting and like shocking and disgusting. And I love that. You're right that we've really lost patience or interest in being provoked by art and movies now.

Why do you think that's important for us to like, in a smart way, not just in a like doing it to do it way, but like, why do you think it's important for maybe us as in a smart way not just in a like doing it to do it way but like why do you think it's important for maybe us as a culture to be provoked by art sometimes i think like a huge tenet of art is being able to have like who we are reflected back to us and have that reflection not always be very um perfect or very very um flattering and i think right films that are able to reflect our culture back to us in ways that make us shift in our seats and make us think about morality in ways that we hadn't necessarily thought of or bring up parts of ourselves that maybe are a bit uglier,

but are there. And if we ignore them, I think it gets worse. I think that is such a fundamental aspect of all art forms. So to not be comfortable with discomfort in movies, I think, is a little alarming these days. Like, I think it kind of frightens me. And I know we've been there before. It's not the first time. Like, history, you know, is cyclical. But it is a little scary to be in this current moment. moment there's one movie that i i read as we can like disagree on how we read it but i read as

trying to provoke us was oppenheimer in the kind of way that it portrayed Oppenheimer himself and the like bombings. And there's been, of course, a lot of online discourse about it that expresses a lot of anger at the film. And I think reasonable people can disagree about this, but express a lot of anger at the film for not directly portraying the bombings. And Justin Chang, as the LA Times film critic, wrote a piece basically like pushing back on the discourse. Let me read you a line from the article. Quote, we are sometimes told in matters of art and storytelling that depiction is not endorsement. We are not reminded nearly as often that a mission is not erasure.

But viewers, of course, according to people online, cannot be trusted to know any history or muster any empathy on their own. And if anything unites those who criticize Oppenheimer on representational grounds, it's their reflexive assumption of the audience's stupidity. Anything that isn't explicitly shown on screen is denigrated as a dodge or an oversight rather than a carefully considered decision. So I like Oppenheimer. I agreed with Justin Chang's read on it and about what the discourse got wrong about it. But what do you think? teach you something in a very almost lazy way um i think speaking directly to what he's saying about the fact that there's very little trust in audiences i think social media plays into this a lot because there's such an outrage machine built like on there as well so i think you know even i think the example of barbie is the first that comes to mind but just that one of my main

criticisms of barbie or the issues i took with it was that I've often defended Greta Gerwig on the basis that I think that she doesn't speak to universal girlhood. I think there's a lot of pressure for women filmmakers to do that and that her films haven't really tried to do that before. And that's what's gotten them criticized. But that's what I think makes them great. And with Barbie, it was like it felt like the movie was operating on a tell don't show model. Like the film was telling us everything I needed to say, because if it didn't get that all out of

the way, it would have caused a great deal of backlash. And it already did. Like people are expecting their movies to tell them these like sociopolitical messages that I don't think need to be told. I think that they can just be like sewn into the plot and sewn into the story. But I don't, I think a lot of filmmakers are scared. They don't want people to hate their films because of it. And I do think that comes with a distrust in audiences. But I do also think that audiences haven't necessarily made it very easy on filmmakers either.

But yeah, I prefer movies that show don't tell. So I agree. There was this Paul Schrader quote recently. And Paul Schrader, of course, is a director and writer who's most famous for writing Taxi Driver, but has also directed a bunch of movies like First Reformed. It's one of my favorites. American Gigolo. Yes. Oh, my God.

Talk about going Verhoeven mode um he it is in his typical like cranky facebook dad fashion he said uh quote there was a period when film criticism blossomed but that was because audiences wanted better films and this does get to like i'm really of two minds of whether the changes that we are seeing and what what the culture wants from movies how much that's driven by what people want changing because of the times and how much it is driven by the kind of afford because of the times and how much it is driven by the kind of affordances of social media and what they promote and don't promote in studios chasing one or the other. Yeah, I don't think social media, I think it's a microcosm of the world at large. And I don't think that the world represents what's happening on social media

necessarily. And so I think that there are so many people who want to see morally complicated films, I think, that people are going out to see them. I think there's so many films getting made that are like that. But because the studios are so risk averse, they're making these films that are very safe. And so I think, I think that's the problem. I don't think that people themselves have changed all that much. Like, I don't think they're that different from the 60s. I just think that the financial models of the industry were completely different back then and allowed for more complicated filming. Of course, there was also a cultural moment happening at the time. There was a civil rights movement happening. There was the sexual revolution. It changed what people were, maybe their threshold for what they were willing to see,

but I don't think placing it all in audiences is necessarily fair. Yeah. And it does seem to your point that studios are, the movies that we are getting from studios now tend to be more aimed at flattering our pre-existing beliefs and flattering our pre-existing identity that we bring into studio rather than challenging or provoking us. Are there other examples of movies? Barbie is, I think, both a really good case of what you're talking about, but is also like, I felt was such a good movie on its own that it's hard for me to worry too much about that trend. But are there movies that you think are maybe not as good that studios are giving us to try to chase this kind of change in the movie culture?

Totally. I think I'm more sensitive to movies made by women because I'm like, I just want them to be like complicated or like whatever. But yeah, I think there was this recent trend of those like class allegory movies like Triangle of Sadness and The Menu kind of came out around the same time. I love triangle of sadness because i think that it was a fun movie i thought it was technically very well made i thought it was so cool and it was doing really new things thought it was really well acted um but there were parts of it like there's this like 30 minute scene of woody harrelson and this guy sitting sitting around talking about how woody harrelson's an american socialist and this guy's a Russian capitalist and it was like oh like oh stop telling me what the theme of the movie is but I was able to let that slide but

then by the time the menu came out my tolerance was so much lower and I know a lot of people loved that movie but to me when when the defense of a movie is oh you just didn't get it is what I'm like no I don't think it's a good movie. And I think the menu for me was just so smug. I don't think it did a very good job of making its rich characters reprehensible enough or even rich enough to deserve like the just desserts they call it in the film. So by the end of it, I was like, what was the point of making this? If not to teach us a lesson, then what was the point? I think it was just to shock us. But I didn't even find it shocking because I didn't really like the technical elements either. So I think that's a movie that's really, really trying to like spoon feed people a message that we're kind of wanting toification, cable TVification, or like cable newsification of movies to try to make them like succeed by making audiences feel really good about their politics. When you made

your video about Barbie that you mentioned, kind of like criticizing it on those grounds, were you wary of the response that you were going to get? Because Barbie does have, you know, a pretty real fandom around it. Yeah, I started the video for, I think, a full 10 minutes discussing the backlash I got just by insinuating I'd say something negative about Barbie. That then sparked a backlash from people saying, how dare you use your fan base in that way and put them on display like that, which is its own conversation. But yeah, I was very worried before I posted it. I was very scared. And then that made me even more angry because I was like, I should be able to have a negative opinion. And I think this is a frustration a lot of the traditional film critics have in general, that I should be able

to have a negative opinion about the movie without you feeling like you can't like the movie, as an audience member and as the public. And I hate having to say so many times in my video, you can like this movie. I didn't like this movie. This is why I didn't like it. It's like, I think people should be able to hear criticism without feeling like I'm attacking them personally. So I was very scared about that. And I know people love Barbie and I understand why they like it. Like, totally, I get it. I just didn't like it personally. But yeah, I was scared. We are definitely all, I mean, you know, YouTube podcasters, when I wrote for newspapers for years, we are all getting more and more beholden to our audiences. And sometimes I hear that described as

like, because of the particulars of like how social media platforms like our audiences. And sometimes I hear that described as like, because of the particulars of like how social media platforms like YouTube work. And it does seem like that heightens it. But it was true too, of a subscription newspaper where audiences just expect so much more of you catering to them and telling them what they want to hear. And they get so much angrier now, if you don't get that. I have to assume that studios are getting sensitive to that and are trying to chase that. And we've talked a lot about like what that means for movie culture, but I think we both operate from the assumption that like what movie culture is and what movies are really matters for the broader culture because that's so much of how we think about

the issues that are dealt with in movies. So like, ultimately, what do you see as the kind of mistakes or consequences, maybe beyond just movies for all of this? I think movies are integral to our culture and have been ever since they were invented at the turn of the 20th century. I think that they function as time capsules. We can use them to kind of look back. They're kind of like archiving our history. We can go back to them and understand what was happening at a given time. If you look at Reagan era films, you're like, yep, that's a Reagan era film. Fatal Attraction, for example, if you're looking at a Bush era film, like Transformers, you're like, that's a Bushajira film, you're getting it. And it's like, I think that they're so fascinating for that reason. And

I think that, again, they help us understand who we are as human beings. I think they help us understand more broadly the human condition, which I think is a huge statement to make, but why else would we make art? And they're just a celebration of human creativity. I recently watched Decision to Leave by Park Chan-wook. And I was so invigorated by it. It's not one of, to me, his best films. But I was so excited by what he was doing. And I was like, why is no one in the US doing this? His camera work is so cool. And it just made me so excited about life. I think anytime I consume art, I'm more excited about life. I think anytime I consume art, I'm like more excited about life. I want to do more of it. And something that A.O. Scott was talking about was that people have kind of are starting to forget because that

watching movies and the consumption of film has become so part of just like regular life that we're forgetting that it's this really cool activity and pastime. I forget that I can just go to the movies on a Tuesday, take myself to the movies and change my day and maybe my day gets better because of it. And I think that that's something we're losing with cinema. I don't think it's a death of movies. I do think it's a death of cinema that's happening right now. And I hope that it can be saved, not to be too whatever alarmist about it, but I do think I'm seeing a pretty negative trend with, you know, theaters.

I hope that we can save them. And I think, yeah, I think overall we're just losing. I'm scared that we're losing this kind of cultural event around film. And I think that that's, I think that that's scary. And I think that we're seeing an over commercialization of film.

I'm seeing kind of like a corporate takeover because of how financially precarious the industry is right now. And I think that's really detrimental. I think it's scary that is the end. I do think that, again, history operates on a pendulum. And I think that there's so many cool movies being made right now that just aren't being seen. I think the main issue is just distribution and exhibition and making money. And if we can just figure that out, we'll be okay. But yeah, I'm a little bit sad. I'm hopeful though. Well, let me ask you about one of the biggest, most seminal moments in kind of movie culture and movie criticism to ask if you think something like this could happen now. And to be clear, I'm not trying to lead you to know, because I think it's possible the answer could be yes, but you would know better than I would, which is Pauline Kael's

1967 review of Bonnie and Clyde. And just to give people some context on why this was really important, in the 60s, Hollywood was really stagnant. It was really conservative, both in the sense of not wanting to change and having very conservative politics in its movies, which was why a lot of what was exciting in movies at that time was happening in European cinemas and in French film because Hollywood was so resistant to change and was so resistant to speaking to young audiences. Pauline Kael really championed this movie that was getting not a lot of attention,

Bonnie and Clyde, this Warren Beatty movie that was violent, full of sex. It was shot in really weird ways with this extremely long New Yorker article about why it was important and people should love it and studios should love it. And like really elevated it to audiences and then for studios to kind of pay attention to this kind of movie making in a way that like really changed how people thought about movies and changed movies. And I think arguably changed the broader culture as a result because it helped to like open up Hollywood to change. So can something

like that happen still today, do you think? I think it can. I think, you know, that movie talk article referenced, and it's not something I agreed with, referenced that every new generation of film critics looks back at the old one and says, oh, they're snobby. And like Pauline Kael had done it. So these movie talkers are doing the same thing. And I think the difference is that when Pauline Kael was coming out and Roger Ebert and all these people, they were bringing attention to why movies should break the rules and why breaking the rules actually expands movies as a medium and expands the art form and enhances it. I think that that can definitely happen again. I think that that just takes valuing film critics, like whatever form they come in, but allowing people, giving them the space to challenge our ideas of a film, not just agree with what the film is saying, but actually challenge them.

I think that's what we need. And I don't think that we should diminish the role of the film critic. I don't think that film criticism is dead. I think that it will persist, but I think it just takes us valuing the role of the film critic. And I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about everyone in every form of film criticism. I think just allowing that. I'm like, please let me keep my job. Well, it seems like there's at least an audience enough for it to keep it going. But I'm excited to see what the future brings for movies and for movie criticism. Maya, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Rachel Gajewski, who film

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