If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. But if you simply can't manage to quiet your bile-spitting jowls, at least save your commentary for the Web. Safely ensconsed at the lonely end of a 28.8, your detractors will be unable to punch you in the neck, and will be forced to aim their flailing limbs at the Back button. This is what passes for maternal wisdom in the age of Mozilla.
The conventional spin on digital punditry posits a vast network that trades in cheap, barely articulate criticisms - a complaint culture with little to say and lots of drive space to say it. But a moment's reflection provides instant disabuse. There are still more paeans to Hanson than fratricide fantasies. Even on a medium specifically engineered for what my third-grade lunchlady used to alternately refer to as "lip" or "backtalk" (she professed no patience for either), there are still more fans than observers. Worse, most of them don't say a thing, nice or nasty.
It's just not healthy, and never has been. Muttering obscenities at the TV set, using the remote control as a virtual guillotine, heckling Shine at the local cineplex, coughing half-chewed Raisinets on the couple who applaud at the end of The Mirror Has Two Faces - once, these were the only readily available outlets of public outrage at the offerings of mass culture. How much better to instead settle your can on the couch, watch whatever's on, and post your crocked ruminations every night until your routine is disturbed by the unexpected entrance of a life from stage right? That's the methodology of TVHole.com, a site devoted to daily griping about "skin puppets (actors), tube hacks (writers), and geckos (network execs)." If annotating the tube rather than text seems hypertaxing, try to remember than it's at least an improvement on annotating annotations. The TVHole.com malcontents are no SWAT-team snipers - the zingers they sling don't always sing, and their viewing choices can be maddeningly arbitrary - but they often perform the criminally unappreciated feat of articulating the obvious without trying your patience. Which, come to think of it, is what TV itself does, in its better 22-minute stretches.
When it comes to typing "fire" in a crowded theatre, the most entertaining hysterics are not to be found at any independent production, but, ironically, at CNN.com. Film reviewer Paul Tatara plays the role of praying mantis in a cage full of crickets, content to eviscerate only the dim victims who wander into danger of their own volition. Tatara has a weakness for opening disquisitions on films like Air Bud (about a b-ball-dunking Lassie) and Spawn, with comparisons to the works of Bergman and Genet, which would be more disturbingly pretentious were they not employed in the pursuit of an often-flawless comic timing. Commenting on Liar, Liar, Tatara thoughtfully observes that "it's not near as aggravating as the "Ace Ventura" pictures, much in the same way that slamming a door on your hand is not as aggravating as suddenly getting your skull split open with a ball-peen hammer." Which is apropos - in a cultural landscape embarrassingly flush with hammers and willing skulls, a little screaming can be forgiven.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
