For a long time, I’ve been considering a series of articles on film critics and film criticism. This week, Dan Olson, of Folding Ideas fame, gave me the perfect place to start, with an excellent illustration of the vulnerability and empathy it takes to deliver meaningful cultural commentary.
Whenever we take on a new writer or contributor at Indy Film Library, one of the pieces of advice I give is to be open about why you feel the way you do about a filmmaker’s work. If there is a relevant experience from our lives that shapes how we think about a movie, we should be willing to draw on it, and talk about it. After all, whatever we think of the piece we’re watching, the filmmaker has already put their feelings on the line, so the least we owe them is to be emotional honest, and vulnerable, in response.
There are some obvious exceptions to this. You have no obligation to make yourself vulnerable to a fascist with a camera, for example – and you should not show them the mercy they would also deny you. But even beyond that caveat, I often fall short of my own advice – and I am thankful when I’m given a reminder of the need for compassion in this line of work.
Dan Olson is a person who I have long admired as taking this to the nth degree. Over the years he has philosophised on topics ranging from The Morality of Shadow of the Colossus, to the classism of Jamie Oliver’s War on Nuggets, to hyper-capitalist shill culture in his most celebrated work Line Goes Up: The Problem with NFTs. You might notice I’m dancing around defining exactly how Olson delivers these topics, and that’s partly because I don’t have an easy answer to it. Over the years, his style has evolved, from early vlogging, into long-take video essays, and latterly into intricate and stylised documentaries – all of which have premiered free-to-view on his YouTube channel, Folding Ideas.
Definitions of Olson vary – his own YouTube blurb that he is an “Alberta-based documentarian”, and while Wikipedia calls him a “video-essayist”, Google defines him as a “YouTuber” – and all of those can be true at once. But one identity I would like to that is ‘critic’. I think he does some of his best work when looking at the creations of other artists, contextualising them not only within the frame of world events, politics and economics, but in relation to himself. And that’s something that ultimately, we should all be aware of when assigning ‘value’ to any form of culture or discourse.
Folding Ideas has done this brilliantly in feature-length examinations of The Nostalgia Critic and the Wall, and An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings before. But perhaps his finest work in this niche came earlier this week with the release of I don’t know James Rolfe – an extensive examination of the so-called downfall of the long-time YouTuber better known as the Angry Video Game Nerd.
In many ways, Rolfe’s work seems to be the antithesis of Olson’s. He is – if not the originator – the most pervasive populariser of the ‘shouty video review’, swearing up a storm at increasingly ancient video games nobody has played for decades, to the amusement of a large and loyal-ish fanbase enamoured with his particular brand of crude language and B-movie inspired low-rent violence. His content rarely offers any insight into the creative process or social and economic limitations that might have led to the games being less than, or much indication into why he is just so determined to defecate on them now. At the same time, despite his initial success on the platform, after 20 years and a failed attempt to move into the world of feature film, he now finds himself trapped as a YouTuber, churning out videos in the same rut, belittling other people to make his own ends meet.
As a filmmaker who has been putting out increasingly polished content on YouTube, on first glance Olson is on a different trajectory to Rolfe. It would be so easy for him to just lay into Rolfe at random – as so many YouTube essayists do on plenty of other subjects, keen to make the most of being smarter, more talented and better produced than some seemingly random content they pulled out of the darkest corners of the internet for our amusement.
And yet. From the very onset, Olson lays his cards on the table. He might not be “the most ardent fan”, but he feels “a certain kinship” with Rolfe. Over the course of the following 76 minutes, Olson is going to examine the shortcomings in Rolfe’s filmography; his strange snobbery when it comes to being seen as a filmmaker and not a YouTuber; and – conversely – his pointed disdain for people who think about the mode of filmmaking as an art.
This is underlined by Olson touching on a segment of Rolfe’s 2022 autobiography, in which the man who would be Nerd went on a tirade about a film school exercise where he was made to watch Michael Snow’s experimental film Wavelength. The movie is a blank slate, the ultimate in ‘you bring your own meaning to it’ – something which the response you have to it says more about you then it does the movie you watched – and where “even in rejecting it, [audiences] learn something about themselves”.
It seems to have been an exercise which was lost of Rolfe, who says exactly what you would expect The Angry Video Game Nerd to say about it. In the book, and in videos since, Rolfe has described the film as “the worst film I ever saw”, a “form of torture”, bemoaned it being “about nothing”, and even criticised the quality of the film and camera-zoom on display. That critique might be fair, but it seems to come from a place of smug contempt, where Rolfe is suggesting his own process – regularly shown up as farcical throughout I don’t know James Rolfe – is superior. But what does it really say about that style if it is defined in contrast to Wavelength – a film which the director went out of his way to do nothing with?
Further up the food-chain perhaps, but critically self-aware, Olson spends several moments reflecting on his own position here. Reviewing Rolfe’s videos or his two-year-old book is not topical, it’s not a live issue that demanded comment. In the grand scheme of things, it’s just more curated crap that Folding Ideas could prod and poke at to comedic ends, if it wanted. But like someone trying to show they’re ‘better’ than Wavelength, what does trying to prove you’re smarter than The Angry Video Game Nerd say about you?
In the end, Olson seems to be openly acknowledging this, laying his own anxieties and shortcomings bare, and expanding on just where that feeling of “kinship” with Rolfe might be rooted. He might be better at it, but after almost a decade, he’s still a filmmaker on YouTube without a lot of reach beyond that realm.
In the process, he provides the kind of empathetic and insightful commentary that should be exemplary to critics on YouTube and beyond. Sneering at something might be fun, but if criticism never goes beyond that, we aren’t really engaging with something that is for better or worse supposed to be a form of communication. Only from that kind of kinship can we escape our own emotional or cultural prisons in the process, and help others to do the same. That’s the area where the best ‘criticism’ is found – and reflecting on some of my own recent reviews, I am thankful for Folding Ideas‘ timely reminder on that front.