The “About the Author” section of Armond White’s new critical anthology does not disappoint. In the space of four short paragraphs, White is identified as “esteemed, controversial and brilliantly independent” as well as “The Last Honest Film Critic in America”; his résumé comprises “auspicious tomes” that are “essential for anyone who loves pop culture.” These collected works, including 1995’s actually essential The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World, affirm that “White practically invented the art of music video criticism.” His Lincoln Center seminars on that topic (a few of which are still viewable on YouTube) are memorialized in language borrowed, humorously if not deliberately, from the opening of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” No less than the Misses Morkan’s annual dance, we are assured, these lectures were “always the cultural highlight of the year.”
All kidding aside—and the question of whether Armond White is kidding, even a little bit, has kept people like myself, who surely have better things to do, up nights for years now— ranks among the film-cultural highlights of late 2020, as well as an indirect bellwether of current trends in and around film-critical practice. Assuming that the book’s “Resistance Works, WDC” imprint is a label of White’s own devising, the conditions of the book’s production consolidate its author’s claims of independence while also placing him on a significant new continuum. As our pandemic year limps to a close and the economics of culture writing crumple ever further, a number of significant writers (including a few crucial film critics) have opted—for a variety of reasons, some more clearly or interestingly elucidated than others—to move their grind (or grift) to subscription-based, newsletter-style services such as Patreon or Substack. In the process, a group of unaffiliated up-and-comers and legacy media expatriates have effectively granted themselves total editorial autonomy as well as a
