Unpleasant biographical revelations have long disrupted our appreciation of beloved artists. Ezra Pound was likely a fascist and T.S. Eliot an anti-Semite; James Brown beat women and Chuck Berry videotaped them peeing — so it goes. We rationalize this by saying that, after all, the works we admire are created by human beings, with human flaws, and that the shortcomings of the artist do not detract from the art. Still, separating the two is difficult work, so it’s not all that surprising that Vanguard News Network correspondent Mark Rivers has a difficult time justifying his admiration of The Man Who Wasn’t There:

“Naturally, I’m not going to write them off just because they’re Jews… [T]he Coens are fine storytellers. In this age of Lowest-Common-Denominator crap coming from Hollywood, it’s nice to see a thought-provoking comedy once in a while, even if it is brought to us by more of those filthy Yids.”

The Vanguard News Network, a self-described confederation of “disgusted and disaffected writers driven out of academia and journalism by the Semitical Correctness that has denatured our culture” operating under the banner “No Jews. Just Right.” and apparently based out of Kirksville, Missouri, is a website of political and social commentary promoting a “White Nationalist” agenda. Recent content includes a wishful address by President Bush, admitting that he was duped into invading Irag by “the entire Jewish community in America, which so vigorously pushed the idea of waging war against Iraq via their newspapers, magazines and TV shows.”

As the review excerpted above might indicate, the movie reviews on VNN are similarly bound to the supremacist agenda. In a not unrepresentative passage from his review of AI: Artificial Intelligence, Rivers jokes: “The articulate negress in a power suit at the head of the table points out that the real ‘conundrum’ (I wonder how many bananas it took the dialogue coach to get her to pronounce it correctly?) is whether…” etc., etc. Obviously, the first and most sensible reaction to a statement such as this is outrage. But, given time, one’s righteous vigilance gives way to a certain morbid fascination.

The VNN and the movement it represents are, after all, a mustache-twirling, Snidely Whiplash embodiment of evil so far removed from one’s understanding as to be a curiosity. They’re self-made straw men: no one could invent an enemy so easy to despise, or, for that matter, to dismiss. Much of their fuming seems as motivated by a vague suspicion of their own impotence as by anything else; at the conclusion of Rivers’ review to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, he works himself into a fury culminating in what appears to be a fantasy of violence exacted by himself upon two fictional characters. We’ve gone from burning crosses to a Burn Book.

It’s also oddly (and perhaps naively?) satisfying to browse through an archive of White Nationalist movie reviews. Reading a recent review of The Notebook on VNN-affiliate Rich Brooks’s “White Alert” website, it’s difficult to avoid feeling superior to Brooks on intellectual and aesthetic grounds as well as moral. Amid praise for the film’s marginalizing of black performers, eminently [sic]-able references to actresses Gena “Rolands” and Rachel “McBride,” and a description of James Garner as having “matured and ripened like a fine wine or aged cheese,” Brooks admits that The Notebook (The Notebook!) made him cry, and concludes: “’Sweet and very tender but not saccharine’ is how I’d sum it up in seven words,” in an apparent sop to those readers that pass along his judgments by telegram and don’t wish to paraphrase.

But condescension, even putting aside the potential danger of dismissing the movement so glibly, is a response that doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the approach employed by the reviewers on VNN and White Alert. In fact, they represent a specific part of the discourse of film criticism even as they pervert almost all of its specific values.

This January, in Slate.com’s Movie Club, an annual year-in-review critical roundtable, Salon.com critic Stephanie Zacharek offered a description of the critical process very useful for our purposes: “OK, obviously, we all apply an aesthetic, if that means we have a range of sources — of people and experiences, of other movies we’ve seen or books we’ve read or music we’ve heard — that effect how we look at what’s in front of us.” Any attempt to respond to a film is bound to be largely informed by the personal, subjective context a viewer uses to relate to the film, and a piece of film criticism is the product of a negotiation between the filmmaker, the film, and the audience. The way the reviews on VNN and White Alert engage with films is an extreme example of a subjective approach, positioning them as far out on the critical spectrum as they are on the political spectrum. But radical as it is, though, their approach does warrant discussion as a part of that spectrum.

The reviewers on VNN and White Alert are certainly more transparent about the link between their ideology and their response to a film, as any discussion of a film’s aesthetics is secondary to a parsing of its racial message. The point that the highly politicized nature of their viewpoint obscures is that any reaction to a film’s aesthetic qualities is no less subjective. A consideration of a film’s aesthetic accomplishments is as bound to the artistic sensibility of a viewer as a response to its political content is bound to the viewer’s political context. Some people are predisposed to be suspicious of tear-jerkers while others willingly surrender to them — judging from his response to The Notebook, incidentally, it would appear that Brooks falls squarely into the latter camp.

An exploration of the film as it relates to one’s own, subjective context is the unavoidable nature of critical expression. A review that lauds the masculine, warlike nationalism the reviewer saw as the dominant thematic element in Troy (as Brooks does) is more similar to a review bemoaning its perceived “meathead’s understanding of sexuality” (as Zacharek does) than would initially appear. Both reactions represent the fusion of the film’s content and the reviewer’s ideological make-up. Laughable or contemptible (or, likely, both) as White Supremacist film criticism may be, it does warrant consideration as film criticism.

In another Movie Club dispatch, Zacharek asks rhetorically, “But mostly isn’t it how a critic thinks, and not necessarily what, that makes you want to read?” The primary value of the reviews on White Alert is as a demonstration of the very personal “how” of the reviewers. On the other hand, the charge most often and most accurately leveled against Roger Ebert is that he willingly and profitably reduces all the nuance of his reaction to a film down to a “what.” Whichever the direction he jerks his thumb, it’s a vulgar and insulting gesture, and represents the assumption that what people want from a critic is didacticism rather than dialogue.

One might, of course, question the feasibility of sustained dialogue with anyone whose website states, as White Alert does, that the world would be a better place if Germany had won either of the world wars, and indeed, that’s the major shortcoming of Brooks’s rigorous reliance on his own point of view. Implicit in the notion that one’s response is dictated by individual context is the idea that anyone else would have to respond any other way, and so the real failure of the VNN and White Alert reviews is their disinterest in any divergent opinions. It’s not a matter of clumsily didactic recommendations (“So run, don’t walk, to your nearest (preferably non-jewish [sic] owned) video store and rent a copy of [Jackie Brown]”, for instance) so much as their obvious belief in the superiority of their own opinions and the irrelevance of anyone else’s. A review bashing Rat

Race based upon the number of Jews involved in its production is bizarre, certainly, and morally abhorrent, but mostly it’s damningly unambiguous, convinced of its own unimpeachable finality. Worse still, the condemnation of the film, in spite of its obvious subjectivity, is less a negative response to the film than a denial of its right to exist, a judgment typically cast by our more arrogant mainstream critics (if Rex Reed is still considered relevant, that’s a list he deserves to head). Ultimately, for all their extremism, the reviews on VNN and White Alert fail for pretty conventional reasons. But that’s how I feel about their film criticism. I wonder what they have to say about mine?