Abstract
Recent academic debates about film criticism in the digital era have mostly focused on the practice of professional critics. This chapter aims to reorient the debate on amateur critics and film fans who have been largely seen as an anonymous force that threatens the critical establishment. How, then, can we better grasp how fans disrupt existing critical practice? Drawing on the actor-network theory and ideas related to the postcritique movement, this chapter argues that the disruptive nature of fan criticism can be best captured through its affective ambiguity. While centering on one popular and controversial Czech fan critic and his film reviews, this chapter introduces the concept of mischievous criticism; a style of writing that is both hateful and playful, abusive and appreciative. Such affective ambiguity is crucial to understanding not only the provocative nature of mischievous criticism, but also its role in the circulation of hate, its approach to film evaluation and its relationship to online communities. Finally, framing film criticism in terms of its mood, style and dominant affect allows us to expand the notion of emotional labor. As this chapter suggests, such labor may also include cultivation of affectively rich, polarizing personas or inventive manipulation of language.
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Notes
- 1.
ČSFD is the most popular local film website with more then 450 thousand registered users. Its purpose and functioning is roughly comparable to IMDb, in that both sites enable mostly non-professional film fans to publicly rate films and write film reviews. At the same time, ČSFD is—in comparison with other databases like IMDb or MUBI—more socially oriented and community-driven.
- 2.
I will refer to verbal as he/him, even though we can’t be completely sure of his actual gender identity. What’s more important, however, is that verbal’s persona is performed as white, male and heterosexual (Butler 1988).
- 3.
Here, I am mostly referring to Gerald Peary’s documentary For the Love of Movies: The History of American Film Criticism (2009).
- 4.
This list is hierarchically structured according to the number of points of every user. Each point represents a single follower; a user who started following another user by placing them in their own personal list of twenty favorite users. Verbal’s standing on the list has remained the same for the whole duration of this research and writing of the chapter. However, at this point, on April 30, 2020, verbal has caught up with the user called KevSpa on the 4th place as they both have exactly 5491 points. It is likely that verbal is going to surpass KevSpa in the near future. ČSFD (n.d.).
- 5.
Translating verbal’s ramblings full of weird neologisms, distorted words and dirty puns from Czech to English was a challenge. While I tried to provide a faithful transcript whenever possible, some quotes slighly deviate from the Czech original but always in order to better capture its spirit in a different language.
- 6.
To an extent, this is a generalization. Looking at The Last Boy Scout and Lethal Weapon, for example, we find that these films “renegotiat[e] a new hegemonic masculinity without abandoning this idea completely” (Bothmann 2017, p. 214).
- 7.
On average, there are two million unique visitors each month on ČSFD (Úšela 2019).
- 8.
For regular users of the site, there is also no way to find out if someone else’s review was removed by moderators. Verbal (2011) himself only once reported that his review was deleted, described it as a violation of the freedom of speech and reposted the deleted review in his ČSFD diary.
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Pavlík, O. (2021). Fans, Fun and Homophobia: Mischievous Criticism on the Czecho-Slovak Film Database. In: Kristensen, N.N., From, U., Haastrup, H.K. (eds) Rethinking Cultural Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7474-0_4
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