January of each year has become synonymous with worst films lists – but arguably nobody has ever made that their brand as successfully as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. In my latest Who Critiques the Critics – and accompanied with a short podcast with my own Siskel, Charlie Giggle – I thought it would be the perfect time to talk about two of the most famous movie cranks who ever lived, and how their show stacks up today.
Film criticism as entertainment has branched off into a diversity of different forms. Among the dominant breeds of critic-entertainers, there are film-essayists who craft the thoughts and feelings inspired by culture into movies in their own right. There are former filmmakers who take successful or unsuccessful movies apart to explain to aspiring artists how they might learn from those before them. There are comedians who make a living from cheekily riffing on the trials and tribulations of artists whose vision outstripped their ability. And there are still people sticking to the old text-based model, obviously.
Like all land-dwelling vertebrates, though, all of this wonderous variation can be traced back to one or two ancient progenitors, who first crawled – gasping and ungainly – onto land millions of years ago. Having evolved in a very particular set of circumstances, the first lumbering tetrapods were able to eek out a living on land as pioneers, thriving without the same competition they faced in the oceans, and eventually evolving into millions of other life forms which would colonise every continent.
The thing is, if you were to drag one of those poor, plodding creatures into the modern era, it probably wouldn’t last too long. Against the agility and invention which its initial emergence onto land enabled, it is a relic that the world has moved beyond. Looking back on the glory days of Siskel & Ebert, it’s hard not to feel something similar.
While the legend of this critical pairing is of two acerbic wits, savaging studios, producers, directors, actors, movies (and sometimes each other) – their old show doesn’t hold up very well. It often descends into moralistic lecturing, infantile name-calling, or simplistic assertions of their values as the right ones. In some ways, that can make it hard to sympathise with either of them. But they were also very much the products of their time.
In the early era of modern mass media, television presented a new space for opinion as entertainment – especially when linked to the visual arts. Siskel and Ebert where a pair of traditional print critics, who were well-positioned to exploit that opportunity – but in doing so, had to adapt to the trappings of a very particular format. Televised reviews need to be short and snappy, while the demand for ‘ratings’ (people to be targeted by sponsor-messaging) also influenced the output. Both favoured a very particular kind of criticism.
Building a case for something to be good takes time and space, it requires patience from the audience as the critic makes that case, too. While Siskel and Ebert both did this on their show, however, their surly hit-pieces would have been much more popular with their own producers – because they often revolved around inserted moralistic shorthand from the Reagan era to browbeat some films for being unwholesome, talking about how ‘stupid’ a plot or performance was, or simply finding synonyms for why something stank.
The thing is, this isn’t an entirely accurate picture of Siskel & Ebert, either. Trying to look back on their content and judge it now is about as relevant as lambasting a late Devonian vertebrate for its clunky gate, or slow movement. Outside their specific context, Siskel and Ebert’s true nature is obscured, both by the lore that has developed around their names, and by the way we store and order information in the age of the internet.
It’s maybe indicative of the way the privatised space of the internet has gradually been structured by the needs of capital, that the negative or mean-spirited aspects of any strand of culture are the ones which eventually become most prominent. As in the pre-internet days, bad reviews get people talking, they keep people on platforms for longer, and get them to expose themselves to more adverts in the process. So, the owners of the means of production – YouTube most prominently – build algorithms to help hand quick success to mean, spiteful, vapid rant/rage reviews.
It’s much easier to find Siskel and Ebert trashing some unsuspecting filmmaker than defending them, in that case. But it should not be forgotten that they championed new filmmakers who went on to be hugely influential. Scorsese, Herzog, Tarantino, and long before it was fashionable to shame the whiteness of the Oscars, they gave the Academy a bollocking for overlooking Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Roger Ebert was defending Nicolas Cage as an equal of De Niro, Nicholson and Pacino before it was cool.
This is not something that will gain as many clicks now, though, so it takes a back seat. And this contributes to a troubling feedback loop which empowers one very particular form of ‘critic-entertainer’. As Siskel and Ebert are reputationally known as good critics, when people seek them out and find their snide and grumpy stuff listed first, and that ends up reinforcing this idea that a good critic is someone who is just mean for the sake of it.
Going back to my laboured comparison to evolution, there is another creature which proliferates every corner of the internet. Just as a certain blend of environmental factors can lead every non-crab crustacean to evolve into a crab, this digital environment of toxic algorithms, mixed with the late-capitalist assertion that we must all be critics to be effective consumers, sooner or later, most content creators give in and start producing rage-bait. When they are short on new franchise releases to decry as “an atrocity”, they dumpster-dive to dredge up long-forgotten misfires, which they can label “the worst film ever”.
It’s a shame that Siskel & Ebert would be lumped in with that legacy, because as mentioned, they were still willing to put their reputations on the line to argue in favour of new talent – though, as noted by Charlie Giggle in our accompanying podcast, that may not have seemed like a risk, due to the egotistical notions of Siskel and Ebert that they were the gatekeepers to a culturally middle-class highbrow utopia. But perhaps they also show why we might be hopeful for the future.
The way that the industry has shifted so dramatically in the last 30 years shows how quickly things might change again, and how clumsy and out-of-touch we might find the rant-reviewers of today in another three decades. At the same time, Siskel and Ebert offer a cautionary tale for those same critics, because looking back at their most savage reviews from the mid-90s, it is as if none of those films ever existed. They mostly seem like a bad joke dreamt up for a throwaway Simpsons gag. In comparison, the artists who Siskel and Ebert helped (whether people remember that or not) have continued to transform their profession. In the end, if all you have are ‘worsts of 1994’, or ‘worsts of all time’, you are going to be passed by. The things that you dare to pick out and champion, that’s what your real legacy will be.