Empathy Should Be Baked Into Film Fandom… So Why Isn’t It?

Some recent events leave me wondering why we can't honor the thing at the very heart of the art form that connects us

I am deeply rattled right now by what I have always tried to believe is a community of people around the world, all connected by a common love.

I am rattled by the actions of one truly unhinged indie filmmaker who seems determined to burn his career down in public this week. I am rattled by the way the online film community mobs people for transgressions, real and otherwise. I am rattled by the way writers of color are attacked a disproportionate amount, as are women, and by the way there is no accountability for that. I am rattled by the absolute lack of responsibility anyone feels in any situation online.

Basically, I look around, and I’m not sure what the point of any of it is.

How many reviews did you read last year for the film A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood that talked about the way film spoke to the necessity for kindness in our world?

How many of those same reviewers actually practice any kind of daily kindness, especially in terms of the way they treat other people in public?

How about the readers in the comments section of those reviews? How many of them practice any kind of regular empathy or kindness as they react to various writing that they encounter?

I am disappointed in film fandom these days on every side of the fence. My own journey with the entire idea of what “fandom” means over the last 50 years is a complicated one, and not easily outlined. What I can say easily is that the reason I have always viewed film as an important part of our shared culture is that movies can transport you into other cultures, other lives, other ways of thinking, and it can do so in a way that is immersive and driven by empathy. I learned early on to think of other people and other cultures as an opportunity to grow and learn and be bigger, and I learned that from film. I’ve written before about what a powerful experience Pather Panchali was for me when I was ten or eleven years old. I was young enough to still identify with the lead character in the film, even though Apu, played so beautifully by Subir Banerjee, was born into poverty in a small village in rural Bengal at the beginning of the 20th century, and I was growing up middle-class in Florida in the ‘70s. Our experiences were completely alien… or at least, that’s what I thought until the movie pulled me in and I found myself completely caught up in all of the details of Apu’s world and his daily life. It felt real enough and well-observed enough that I could see myself in that movie, and that moment was a lightning bolt for me.

My entire life, I’ve seen art this way, as something that illuminates and explains and unifies. I have to believe that, because if that’s not what art is, then why would I spend this much time ingesting it and writing about it and sharing it with other people? For me, fandom was a promise that was made to me when I was young. I got a chance at 13 and 14 to be part of a gifted student program that allowed us to visit certain jobs and do what was essentially intern work. I did that at a radio station for a while, which I thought was fascinating, but I also did that at a PBS station in Chattanooga, and that job delighted me endlessly. As a volunteer, they put me in a different place every time, and I ended up helping out their all-purpose tech/video repair guy. He seemed wildly older to me at the time, but he was just a guy in his early 20s who recognized in me a nascent SF/horror nerd who hadn’t really been exposed to much of the genre so far. I liked what I liked, but my parents weren’t exactly curating the experience for me. They left me to my own devices for the most part, occasionally suggesting something they liked, but often baffled by the things I was drawn to.

This older guy… let’s call him Doug… was pretty much the prototypical SF/horror nerd. I have no idea what his real name was. I can’t even remember at this point. In my mind, I always picture Doug Henning, the magician. I have no idea if this guy was a stoner or not, but I remember him as having a sort of general Cheech & Chong vibe. One thing I know for sure is that he was a voracious reader, and that he was proud of his book collection. When we started talking about books every time I worked, he seemed amazed by what I did know, but doubly amazed by what I didn’t, and he finally reached a breaking point one day, telling me that he was going to have to do something about this. He had me stop by his place with my dad so that I could borrow some books, and it was one of those transformative moments for me where I realized just how serious fandom could be. This guy’s entire apartment seemed to be made of books. There were books everywhere. There were more books than I could ever imagine reading. And he told me I could borrow whatever I wanted. I ended up volunteering at that station well after the school-sponsored program ended, and over the next year and a half, Doug loaned me hundreds of books, and that generosity on his part helped lay a foundation for my broader understanding and appreciation of the history of science-fiction and horror and fantasy.

He didn’t have to do that. And I’m guessing I was annoying at times because I was so hungry to know more and read everything. He went out of his way to invite me into fandom, to offer me a way to expand my knowledge, and he did it simply because he saw a young fan who didn’t know half as much as he thought he did. During that same period of time, he was the first person who told me about science-fiction conventions and who told me where the best used bookstores were, and by the time I left Chattanooga and moved away, I was 100% my own fan, following my own interests, neck-deep in it and happy with my identity. I am guessing that other friends would have helped nudge me towards my interests. There was Bill, the buddy who educated me about comic books. There was Craig, the guy who taught me about the Beatles and Monty Python. I got bits and pieces from different people at different times, as we all do, but I really credit Doug for being the guy who did the heavy lifting.

During my time online, I’ve tried to be Doug. I have failed spectacularly at times, and I have certainly bought into the role of gatekeeper at times. I think it comes far more easily to me now, and there have been myriad reminders along the way that it matters. I’ve had writers and filmmakers and regular film fans all talk to me about something I wrote that meant something to them, that empowered them in their own love of film or that sent them looking for something or that reminded them of something that they forgot they loved. I’ve lost count of how many people have written me to talk about the way ‘80s All Over spoke to their fandom as they either cheered because they agreed with something or yelled at us for getting it wrong. I love that. I love that I have been able to connect with so many people on that level because when I know someone really sees a piece of art I love, that they get it and they’re getting something from it, it gives me hope. It makes me feel like we are more connected than disconnected. It makes me hope that we’re going to look at the way our culture is breaking us apart right now and address that. I think we want the connection more than we want the friction that comes from this tribal approach of “us and them” that has come to define online fandom.

That’s an important distinction, by the way. Online fandom is where I think this cancer truly took root. I don’t think everything was sunshine and rainbows forever before that. I think modern fan culture is vastly more inclusive and representational that it’s ever been, and that’s great. I love what Comic Con crowds look like now. That is the clearest, most visible change for me. When I first went to San Diego’s world-famous Comic Con, it wasn’t particularly world-famous. It was a bigger version of every regional convention I’d ever been to, and because it was close to LA, they got some cooler than normal stuff sometimes. Those crowds certainly weren’t exclusively guys, but they were weighted in a way that made me the norm, the center of things.

That’s been my experience most of my life, by the way. I’ve grown up in a culture that made my experience primary, that centered my entertainment as its primary goal. I have been the hero with a thousand faces my entire life, and, yeah, most of those faces were white. Pop culture made it really easy to feel like I was the most important consumer in the world because they kept telling me I was. Even when there were heroes who weren’t cut from that cloth, pop culture still made it clear, over and over, that the only true success was acceptance by mass white audiences.

That’s a hell of a drug. And I wonder if that’s part of what went rancid when we all ended up online. Having that taken away from you by the sudden shift to a more inclusive kind of mass entertainment must feel like loss to some people. It feels like one of the root problems. All of a sudden, we went from a shared entertainment landscape that was centered largely on white experience to creating a space where we could all express ourselves in a different, far more democratic environment. From the moment I started reading newsgroups, I was exposed to more points of view than ever before, and it was just like that Pather Panchali moment for me again. My early work as a critic… hell, all of my work as a critic… is obviously written from a particular cultural perspective. My constant struggle is to write criticism that offers context, not that asserts some sort of omniscent ownership of opinion. I’m not here to tell you what to think of a film; I can only tell you what I think of it, and then offer up some kind of context to explain how I got there. The older I get, the better I get at it (I hope), but that makes it hard to look back at stuff I wrote 20 years ago.

What helps is that, as I said, film constantly pushes me to open myself to people and perspectives that aren’t mine. And I try to read film criticism from people who aren’t starting from the same place as me, as much of it as I can. It doesn’t change my opinion at all, but it can certainly help me understand what someone else takes from a film that I don’t, and it can help me set that context in my own writing.

In a perfect world, our online film community would simply be about sharing those different perspectives. And, man, I get it. I sound simplistic when I say that. But basic simple respect and courtesy shouldn’t be some ridiculous ideal, and we traded that shit away a long time ago with talkback and comments sections and the notion that “none of this is real,” and I went down that rabbit hole before a lot of today’s writers were even reading film criticism. I had entire websites and message boards dedicated to loathing me and trying to ruin my life. They hacked my accounts. They stole from me. I survived it, but I think that’s more a function of it being the early wild west days of the Internet, when fewer people were paying attention. I can’t even describe that as bullying. It was next-level. It was concentrated hatred, weaponized and specific and destructive by design, and I went through all sorts of responses, some of them knee-jerk and ill-considered. I was not the bigger man. I was hurt and I was angry and I was confused about why I was the target of so much animosity.

Now, with perspective, I can see exactly what people wanted to tear down, and at my worst, I have been everything people dislike about not just film critics, but online film critics. Not that it justifies any of what anyone did, but being able to look at that now that I am not terrified about what it will cost me is important. My anonymity ate at people at a certain point. It felt smug, and I get it. I took shots from behind a mask, and then I turned around and worked in the industry, frequently alongside people who didn’t realize I was the one writing those things. When I was Moriarty on Ain’t It Cool, in the early days when I was genuinely anonymous, even Harry Knowles didn’t know who I was. Our earliest relationship was largely contentious, and he even wrote about Drew McWeeny without connecting the dots. It was a kick. I enjoyed that, and I was absolutely smug about it. I remember the day I got doxxed. A friend called and told me that there was an article going up at Film Threat that was all about “exposing” us, and that part of the article was telling people all about me and who I really was.

This far down the road, none of that matters. I see at least one of the people involved on a semi-regular basis because we’re both part of the larger film community in Los Angeles. Years ago, I made peace with that, and I don’t walk around angry about it. And even that is a huge privilege on my part because I survived those articles. I survived several concentrated efforts to push me out of publishing. I have somehow carved my own path for the past 25 years, and that’s due in no small part to my identity. I was allowed to reinvent myself or to explain myself or simply to shrug something off.

That would not be the case for many of the writers working today to carve out their own space online, and I watch lots of smaller outlets come and go. I’ve got a bookmarks folder that is like an elephant’s graveyard of websites that started with huge ambition, gone now. I get it. You need support. You need people to read what you’re writing. You need to feel like you’re not shouting into the void. And it’s tough to cut through all the noise when so much of what’s out there is simply there as marketing. When you’re trying to publish something that digs deeper, something that treats film seriously, and especially when you’re publishing something that doesn’t center the mainstream experience, you are not making it easy on yourself. You’re not courting the giant ad money. You have to publish like that because you love it and because you see value in it. You have to be writing from a place of great passion because the industry is not going to reward you. I am impressed by the sheer hustle of so many of the young writers I follow or read, writing for a dozen outlets, juggling different voices and editorial hats depending on where they are, and the rules of that world seem to shift daily. It’s hard to find a place to publish that is run well, that pays honestly, that deals with writers directly.

For those who haven’t been following any of what happened over the last week, I feel like this is a moment that demands some sort of genuine response from this community. There was a film blog called Much Ado About Cinema that was edited, in part, by Dilara Elbir. I’m not going to pretend to be wildly familiar with that particular blog or the community around it. I’ve read some of the people who have published there. I follow some of them. I only became aware of what was going on as it was unfolding when a number of people who are part of my timeline began talking around it. Even now, if you try to unravel everything that went down, it’s unclear how things started, and who it was who took conversations from three or four years ago and made them public now, but the primary spark in this particular fire was a screenshot from a private conversation in which Elbir used the n-word.

By the time it was on my radar, Elbir had tried to kill herself on social media, leaving a number of videos in which she had committed visible self-harm, talking about how confused and upset and broken she was because of everything everyone was saying to her. It was a shocking and public breakdown, and at one point, even director Barry Jenkins had replied to her, urging her to reach out to someone close to her for help. It was a chaotic thing to see unfold in passing, but I didn’t feel the need to insert myself into it. I hadn’t been part of any of the chaos building up to it, and I wouldn’t have done anyone any good issuing platitudes about “kindness” at that particular moment.

Director Jason Lei Howden did not feel any hesitation about inserting himself into the situation, though, and while absolutely nothing about what went on with Dilara Elbir had to do with Howden or his new film Guns Akimbo, he watched what went down and reacted in an unhinged, hostile way, going absolutely apeshit at the writers who had resigned from Much Ado About Cinema in the day before Elbir’s breakdown. He has since claimed that his own mother’s suicide was the reason he reacted so poorly, and that she experienced online bullying leading up to her own death. That may be true. If so, I am truly sorry for what Howden and his family went through. That’s awful.

But what is definitely true is that he became fixated on two writers in particular and he began a focused, furious rain of harassment that went far past “uncomfortable” or any polite descriptor. Whatever the writers who quit the site did, whatever people said about Elbir’s screenshots, it was nothing compared to the way Howden reacted. It was unhinged. He’s deleted his account since then, but there are plenty of screen shots of the highlights. I don’t want to direct any kind of focused attention on those writers he attacked, because they have done their best to conduct themselves well under insane circumstances since he started attacking them, and they don’t need any more of it. They are writers with strong points of view, writers who frame their cultural criticism through their own cultural experience, which is exactly the point. There’s a term that Howden kept using to describe them, and it’s a term that has become coded, pointed language of its own in this bizarre cultural war that is being waged whether we like it or not.

When you hear older critics who are upset that they are no longer the single most courted voices in the community, they frequently grumble and complain about “Woke Film Twitter.” That word… woke. It’s become a weapon all its own. It’s like hippie was at one point. It’s a dismissive pejorative that means “someone who won’t shut up about things that I am tired of hearing about.” There are plenty of things about cancellation culture that I dislike, and I think there is a conversation to be had about what led to Elbir’s breakdown. I also think there’s a conversation to be had about a culture where any filmmaker feels comfortable losing his mind at critics for days on end, accusing them of attempted murder even after dozens and dozens of people have pointed out to him that he’s yelling at the wrong people, people who weren’t part of the thing that set him off. When discourse devolves into this kind of pulverizing attack, no matter what the context, it freaks me out, because presumably we are all here for the same underlying reason… our love of this art form that is all about creating and communicating empathy.

How do we end up with a New Zealand filmmaker about to release his film internationally screaming for days on end at a group of women because of something someone else did? How do we end up with a young woman trying to run a film blog thinking she has to kill herself because of screenshots of racist language? Why does the conversation about this art form frequently devolve into conversations about the character of the people trying to have the conversation? Isn’t the entire idea of potential character redemption baked into the DNA of this thing we love? If so, how do we understand the anger that leads to these cancellations in both directions?

I think there is legitimate cultural anger that has built up in the communities that are still struggling to find their voices in the mainstream, and that many people in those communities have learned that putting their voices together makes a difference. I also think there is zero point in white writers weighing in on what they think of what Elbir said in the first place. She said it. She needs to own it. Just as anyone who responded to her should own their words. Being responsible… truly responsible… for what you say online depends on not hiding behind the easy anonymity online affords and also acknowledging when you’ve transgressed.

Maybe there’s something when you’re young that makes you feel like the world is full of absolutes, but the older I get, the less sure I am about things. And that feels terrific. I think people are complicated, full of contradictions. I think people can do terrible things and be good people. I think people can do all the right things and be truly awful. I think the line between awful and decent is often a matter of tiny decisions. I also don’t believe I am the overall judge of anyone’s place in the larger cultural conversation. I think that’s determined by the people who decide whether or not to support a writer or a website or a movie, and again… the best thing you can do as a critic or as a cultural commentator is to provide context and information. I think spotlighting the ways we hurt each other is important, and I think leaving room for apologies and growth is equally important. I think simply saying the word “kindness” back and forth at each other while being decidedly unkind is not the solution, and I think we need to be very clear that there is a difference in the way women and non-white writers and LGBTQ+ writers are all treated. They are acceptable punching bags for online toxicity in ways that I can understand and empathize with, but that I cannot experience directly. Even when I took the very worst of what I took, I had buffers that were built in, certain benefits of the doubt afforded to me, and it happened at a time when the conversation was not pitched at the same frantic hyper-boil that it is right now.

These things matter. We may be talking about movies and writing about movies and reading about movies, but these things matter. They matter because every member of our community matters, and unless everyone’s free to be part of the conversation without feeling like they’re going to be destroyed for it, we’re not really fulfilling the promise of the thing that first got me to sign onto the internet in the mid-‘90s. We have got to figure out how to decelerate this conversation in a way that doesn’t negate the very real and legitimate anger some people feel, and without feeding into the aimless and futile anger other people feel. It’s not something any one person or any one editorial will properly spotlight or explain, and it’s certainly not something any one outlet or idea can fix. But I refuse to believe that people who were drawn together by an art form that produces Singin’ In The Rain and Ikiru and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and 2001 have got to simmer in a constant stew of resentment and fury and hatred.

I know we’re better than this. And not in a “both sides are very fine people” way. I know that the people who genuinely understand what it is that film gives us are going to own this space in a way that the people who just want to use film as one more thing to argue apart never will. I believe that. I believe that we can grow past the “everything’s a billboard to sell you something Disney owns” phase of the Internet, and we can grow past the “my team is better than your team and if you don’t think so, I’ll probably say something racist” phase of the Internet, and we absolutely have to evolve past the “If you don’t like the thing I like the same way I do, I am going to threaten to rape you” phase of the Internet. That stuff is loud because the people who feel that way want to be loud because they want to drive us apart and they want us to be afraid and they want us to feel like we can’t ever connect, and they’re wrong. They’re wrong, because when I watch film, I feel like the world is smaller, and everyone’s bound by the same wants and needs and loves, and I feel like we are all responsible for each other. Even when we fuck up. Maybe even especially when we fuck up. And I feel like so many people are making films and sending these same messages of empathy out in the world, these cinematic messages in bottles, whether cast adrift in cinemas or on VOD or somewhere in the vast ocean of streaming options, that it does matter. It does get through. And the good film writing, and the good film conversation, it’s the same way. I see people get lifted up by other people in that film community, and I’ve seen people build lives because of the support they had. There is good that can be done with these tools we have and in the name of this thing we love.

We give power to the worst in this community when we give them oxygen and attention, and I understand first-hand how hard it can be to turn the other cheek when someone is threatening the thing you’ve built. For people who have found community they never had offline, just telling them to “turn off the computer” isn’t an option, and it shouldn’t be their responsibility to run or to shut down just because someone attacks them. Jason Lei Howden had spent a good deal of time building up goodwill for his work. Deathgasm was generally well-received on a small scale, and Guns Akimbo was building up a solid head of steam, critically speaking. At this point, nothing anyone writes is going to matter to him because he’s so soured from this entire experience, and his behavior since the first flurry of bad behavior hasn’t helped. No matter what he thought he was doing, when I think of him now, I am always going to think of that poor confused girl hurting herself and posting those videos, and I am always going to think of the racist language he used to supposedly right some wrong, and how over-the-top his fury was. When I say that I can’t give this guy any support at this point, it’s not because I’m afraid that someone’s going to cancel me if I don’t fall in line. I say it because I am disgusted that he thinks the way to address any of this was by escalating the situation. There’s no formal board of review to go to with complaints like this, but I can tell you that his approach was pretty much the opposite of “handling things.”

Social media is an undeniably new animal, a thing that has changed the dynamics of our culture in ways that I do not think we fully understand. Every choice you make is scrutinized. Everything you do can be thrown back at you as if you did it with malice in your heart, no matter what your intent. For writers who are just starting out, it’s a truly terrifying time. Anger seems to land harder and faster than ever before. I like to tell myself that I only use social media to help sell my work, but that’s not true. I can’t fully pull apart my relationship to it. I think that it feeds back into that idea that brought me online in the first place, the sense of wanting to connect to people. That’s what brought me to movies. It’s what keeps me here. It’s what I try to pass along in everything I write. You are my customers, yes, once I get you to buy something I’ve written or I get you to subscribe to my newsletter, but more than that… you are film fans, and my lifelong journey as a film fan has been to connect. Sitting in a theater watching the attack on the Death Star in 1977 or during the truck chase in Raiders in ’81 or listening to people sob in the darkness when E.T. died in ’82, I felt connected. I felt like I was sharing something, like we were all plugged in together, and I loved that. When I talk to someone who has read something of mine that they liked or they’ve watched something and some moment spoke to them, that is perhaps the best feeling. I feel like I’ve done my job right.

I won’t be supporting Howden’s film, and I respect the decision made by Roger Ebert.com regarding the situation. I feel bad for the people whose work in the film is very good, including both Daniel Radcliffe and Samara Weaving. I think the film will end up finding an audience on video, because it is entertaining, and because most people will never know about any of this. But I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I have an elephant’s memory for the people who behave in a way that runs counter to the basic empathy I think is required for this job, and it’ll be a long goddamn time before I am able to approach Howden’s work again. It’s up to each of us, writing or reading, to ask ourselves what it is we get from this, and what it is we want to contribute to it.

It’s easy to write about and talk about kindness and empathy.

But it’s clear that it is anything but easy in actual practice.

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Image courtesy MGM/UA Home Video