Whenever I want to find the best take on the latest music, movies, or TV shows, I go to The AV Club. At least I could say that more than a decade ago. Previously owned by The Onion, it has some of the snarkiest pop culture coverage that you can ever find on the Internet. There were capsule reviews, detailed columns of artists and art, with the average news item almost layered in deep smarm that one would have confused it with The Onion’s satirical articles. Much of the content seems like a prototype of what you find on clickbait websites that has that pious pretense of intellectualism you’ll find back then. But The AV Club, at its peak, made readers in tune with what was mainstream, under-the-radar, and you can sense the passion within whatever was being written. This was before streaming services competed with movie theatres, CDs, and other physical media for pop culture supremacy.
In 2013, Pitchfork Media launched a website that would be its film equivalent: The Dissolve. Marketed as “a playground for movie lovers”, it brought into its stable The AV Club’s Chicago luminaries like Scott Tobias, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, Noel Murray, and Nathan Rabin. Their features, beyond their movie reviews, ensured that the publication is regularly read, and for that, it was one of my regular bookmarks. The Dissolve became a reliable barometer of cinema quality while The AV Club became more unbearable.
The comments sections within both publications were larger than life. Both held a higher standard for pop culture criticism, but more importantly, they maintained a well-knit community that shared not just the passion of these critics but has the whip-smart energy to talk about the movies they’re talking about. Comments sections normally get a bad rap from content creators nowadays, but these sections were a valuable aspect of what made them enduring.
This didn’t last long. The Dissolve closed its doors in July 2015 for the simple reason that it did not make any money. The staff tried their best to make the most of the situation, but Pitchfork has decided to drop them (later in the year, they were sold to Conde Nast. Last year, they merged with GQ and laid off most of their employees). This was a wake-up call for anyone interested in writing about movies or anything else.1 The economics were always stacked against intellectually stimulating writing, but this was more pronounced in the Internet age. Meanwhile, pop culture coverage has become increasingly favorable towards mainstream franchises and corporate artistry (see also: poptimism). At the same time, commentary has become more performative, to signal that there is something much more beyond the movies and the arts.
Some writers at The Dissolve’s former team, including Tobias, Phipps, and Robinson, are still together doing a podcast under the Filmspotting network called The Next Picture Show, examining a current release and tying it to an older film with similar themes. But if you want to closely read their work, you’ll have to find them elsewhere. Some of them are either in-house staffers at another pop culture website or freelancers. To find their work, you have to follow them on Twitter (or in this case, Bluesky), which means that you have to follow them and delve into their heavily left-wing politics, while they share links to their reviews of the latest releases, and retrospective columns of old viewings. Whenever they post about that topic, I thought that it was a waste of their talents, and I previously called out Scott Tobias on this Substack for contributing to this rotten culture. They are not as capable of being measured as they were for the average Rian Johnson movie.
But my expectations increased when he and Phipps launched The Reveal on the Substack platform. While it wasn’t the same as The Dissolve, it hoped to revive the spirit that website once had. They were holding conversations about the greatest films of all time, according to Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll. Tobias has rebooted his New Cult Canon column that I had once enjoyed, and more importantly, they were writing reviews together like the old days. I was optimistic that written film criticism could prosper in an avenue that was flourishing, beyond the declining wretches of Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok.
I recommended The Reveal in my newsletter. And to their credit, both were good at separating their partisanship from their social media accounts in most of their film criticism. They can detect that movies can have good intentions and courage, but what matters is whether they’ve earned their bonafides from the viewing, and if it doesn’t, it fails. Execution matters more than the message.
But then, the authors’ politics have crossed over The Reveal’s content. Both writers signed the open letter of New York Times contributors objecting to the newspaper’s coverage of transgender people, even veering towards scepticism of the evidence that puberty blockers do not work on gender-transitioning children.23 Immediately, the signs were showing that The Reveal is going to be exclusive in substance. They don’t care about the integrity of journalism, but how their chums feel about the integrity of journalism.
Later, Tobias expressed reluctance in being published on Substack, objecting to their lax content moderation policies. And then they signed an open letter, inspired by Jonathan M Katz’s inflammatory article saying that Substack platforms Nazis as well.4 How do they express their objections? By saying it’s complicated.
Do Tobias and Phipps believe that deplatforming works if they think the most extreme people are tangential to their tent? Why does it matter that morally bankrupt assholes like Darryl Cooper or Patrick Casey share the same platform as them (or I, for that matter)? They were never honest about it. Eventually, The Reveal has now migrated into Ghost, a platform that is more open-sourced and, ironically, more laissez-faire in content moderation than Substack could ever have hoped for.5
Tobias’s and Phipps’s stance on the issue of content moderation, compared to their past positions, is not complicated. It’s a gross distortion of the truth, where they participate in an unnecessary backlash to virtue signal to their audience, but it also betrays their duties as a film critic, which is to be more open-minded when art encounters ugliness. You know that scene in The Social Network, where the fictional Mark Zuckerberg tells his attorney that the Winklevoss Twins sued him, because “things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to for them?” That’s what happened here, but in this case, Tobias and Phipps acted like children because they presumed that the most extreme people were playing with their toys when they weren’t. They just happen to be in the same daycare centre.
What happened with The Reveal is indicative of a larger problem that I’ve seen with commentators, all across the board, but especially within those interested in pop culture discussions, where cocooning is pretty much an inevitable path in creating content. Individual branding makes for an immediate experience between them and the observer.
Pop culture criticism has never been more ideologically diverse than when The Dissolve was around. On YouTube, you’ll find people like Broey Deschanel, Sarah Z, Maggie Mae Fish, and Jack Saint reviewing or talking about old or new releases from an anti-fascist lens, while the anti-woke side is represented by The Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Mauler, and The Quartering, among thousands of others.
In the past, there were a few critics like Kyle Smith, John Podhoretz, Ross Douthat, and Armond White writing about movies in the back pages of politically charged magazines and newspapers. Now, that brand has exploded. I sometimes object to The Critical Drinker’s approach to reviewing movies6, but understand why he got popular in the first place. These camps operate on complementing expectations on their platforms. For anything that glorifies intersectionality to the user’s face, he’ll counter-balance that with a middle finger and get thousands of subscribers out of that, and vice-versa.
Traditional criticism, especially in the written word, cannot emulate or compete with the breadth of video essays and discussion livestreams, where franchises are sometimes frequent targets, sprinkled with biting critiques of corporate liberalism, while carrying a specific lens personal to the creator. For them, art is a gateway to committing to a shallow cause, because according to them (very particularly, the left side of politics), “art is political”, “the personal is political”. Mega-blockbusters are favored because that’s the trendiest thing to talk about, but they can be weaponized for their self-effacing pleasures. Meanwhile, filmmakers and their mid-budget projects, according to a passionate community, are the hidden, revelatory secrets that should not just distract us from the sins of modern life, but revel in them. Same outcome, different tactics.
There’s a term called ‘‘audience capture,” which implies that a creator has become worse because they are now catering to a terrible part of their audience. This does have a grain of truth to it, especially when one’s ability to weigh the pros and cons of certain topics is outmatched by the flashy desire to drive views, clicks, and metrics, leading them to become cynical and insincere in the principles they once represented. However, there’s also “criticism capture”, which, as the sports journalist Ethan Strauss describes, is the creator’s vulnerability to criticism that results in unforced errors, leading to the decline of their content.
An example of “criticism capture” is when the YouTube personality iDubbbz apologized for his fans saying the n-word towards another creator, before he surrounds himself with D-list left-wing livestreamers, then capitalizing on their popularity by bringing back his most popular series Content Cop, and turn it from an teenage edgelord drama bait, into a lecture about “empathy”7. Except for one has-been internet plagiarist, no one liked the video; iDubbbz’s fans turned their backs on him, and his detractors had more than enough schadenfreude to distract them through the day.
The Reveal isn’t captured by an audience. After all, it’s business as usual to gather an interested crowd. But they made this decision because they are drawn in by their audience’s major ick; people who they think are extremist weirdos, through six degrees of separation. If they stayed in Substack, they are “part of the problem” as one would condescend. They want to nip it in the bud, even though it would be more than eighteen months after the original article.
Weird dissidents with their niche beliefs are a feature of Substack, and if the algorithm of the app indicates, there won’t be a shortage coming soon. Some are interesting, dull; sometimes I feel indifferent about them. But they have a platform, and like the fictional Zuckerberg attests, they couldn’t have the power to do anything about it, except leave. That’s why, when people migrate to a platform whose user base is even more insane than X could ever be, the outsiders correctly see them as emotional micro-managers, like they were when they were populating it.
Here’s more of The Reveal’s justification:
And yet in the time since, there’s been too much evidence of Substack’s complicity in platforming far-right extremism. We have heard from many cinephiles who refuse to subscribe to The Reveal due to its Substack connection, and we have witnessed many examples of writers and friends who have felt marginalized or attacked due to the company’s editorial priorities and policies. The bottom line: Substack has made its choices. We have now made ours.
The irony is that a day after The Reveal left Substack, the platform’s founders have demonstrated it will continue to defend the free speech of everybody. Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie went into the defense of Alistair Kitchen, a user who got deported back to Melbourne, Australia, after he wrote about the Columbia University pro-Palestine protests. Would they defend him if he were a Ghost user or a MAGA supporter? Who knows and who even cares? They defended him because they believe in an open platform and have spent blood, sweat, and tears not to contradict this mission. For Tobias, Phipps, and their followers, it wouldn’t be enough because free speech moderation is way too complicated. They also don’t have the courage to mention who was being marginalized from a lack of content moderation.
Tobias and Phipps are free to make their decision, and if they want to leave out of fear, I won’t stop them from doing so by returning to Substack, being very critical about it, and believing it’s an unforced error. But it has validated my overall feelings about film culture, which, as I’ve written before, has become more siloed and less literate. Siloed conversations make for dishonest art and commentary, and The Reveal, while they do not embellish this in writing, are controlled by an intensely focused community. If the two men did not sign up for the shenanigans at Substack in the first place, I certainly did not become interested in The Reveal or The Dissolve or The AV Club for reasons other than the fact that we all watch and talk about movies. If it doesn’t work out, what was this journey all about?
It was realizing that the soul of film criticism has been hollowed out, and the people who represent it are vain themselves. It’s often a stereotype that critics, who do this for a professional living, are bitter and envious of artists who dare to create, when in reality, they are just normal people going about their lives carrying that same passion. But the cliche is proven time and time again, and now it’s from those who want to think they’re immune to misinformation, when they have willingly spread it. To any discerning reader, that would be a breach of their trust.
Pitchfork now runs the occasional film review here and there. Here’s the latest example as of writing this.
The open letter was so misleading that The New York Times told them that they stood by their coverage.
Such signees include Film Twitter luminaries like Glenn Kenny, Noel Murray, Teo Bugbee, Kyle Turner, Monica Castillo, Jason Bailey, Ashley Clark, Jourdain Searles, and Siddhant Adlakha.
For a more detailed takedown on how egregiously destructive that takedown was, and how everyone at The Reveal was willingly misled, the uber-liberal savior Jesse Singal has one for you.
You know who is also on Ghost and is very popular? Quillette, which has some of the best film writing you can find on the Internet. I’m sure such folks would be very comfortable sharing the same platform with them.
Among my objections, he lambasted the Barbie movie for being woke, feminist garbage, made a video about the Amazon Prime show The Boys, without watching the series, and his conceptions about the problems with Hollywood do require more meat than bones than Rachel Zegler being morally objectionable.
This whole video is about an ongoing feud between Ethan Klein and Hasan Piker, which would be an entirely different essay. Needless to say, iDubbbz sided with the guy who says “America deserved 9/11” and the rest is history.