As a lifelong film buff who became a professional film critic in my late twenties, I’ve spent much of my life ever since trying to reconcile these two distinct and, in some respects, conflicting identities. Many of my colleagues seem to regard criticism and fandom as reverse sides of the same commercial coin—compatible and mutually reinforcing facets of the same impulses, sometimes blissfully fusing into a sincere form of advertising. (A perfect example of this in action is Andrew Sarris’ rapturous and well-informed two-part review of Resnais’ Muriel [1963], which has recently become my favourite piece of Sarris prose, thinking and feeling with equal amounts of passion.)
For me they’re periodically in conflict with one another, philosophically and aesthetically. Giving a mixed review to Gjon Mili’s Jammin’ the Blues in 1944, James Agee seems to have felt this way about his former taste as an indiscriminate jazz buff, maintaining that the short “is too full of the hot, moist, boozy breath of the unqualified jazz addict, of which I once had more than enough in my own mouth…”
Although we often overlook the religious piety and the reverence (arguably another form of addiction) that accompanied the as it developed in France in the ’50s, the degree to which suggests that the reverence that comes with fandom has a certain tinge of religiosity. Similarly, the fan base that keeps Donald Trump afloat is still strong or at least vocal enough to worry his critics.
