As the late New York Times writer David Carr once said, if you're a film critic for The New York Times, "you've got a big box of lightning bolts on your desk." For sixteen years, movie critic A. O. Scott has wielded those bolts responsibly. His reviews are distinguished by a keen grasp of what makes a movie work or fail and a sharp ability to articulate it, but he's also known for his generosity: He'll give every film a chance. Whether he thinks a particular movie is a flaming wreck or a limp pile of trash, Scott's prose exudes authority without snobbery.
Scott's first nonfiction book, Better Living Through Criticism, collects his thoughts about what he's been doing for nearly two decades: evaluating the value of art and the point of it all. It is, in his words, "an examination of our inborn drive to cultivate delight."
It is also a book about thinking—about how engaging with works of art challenges the way one sees them—citing everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Hesiod in its arguments. To get an idea about how A. O. Scott learned to think like A. O. Scott, we asked him about the works of art—and not just movies—that shaped him.
Mad
One summer when Scott was 9 years old, his family subletted an apartment littered with stacks and stacks of issues of Mad.
Movie satires, he soon discovered, were "the great masterpieces of the magazine," Scott said. The thing was, he hadn't seen The Godfather, Serpico, or any of the other movies it parodied. "It was like trying to crack this code. I knew that somehow there was all this information, all these jokes that I didn't get," Scott said. "But it was like, ‘All the clues are here, this big adult world.’ ” His parents bought him a subscription.
For Scott, Mad demonstrated that satire could be a source of information as well as a form of criticism. "The whole stance of Mad is that there's a whole world out there and it's trying to fool you," Scott said. "There are these people—whether they're political leaders or Hollywood studios—who are trying to put one over us. Who are trying to put this crap in front of you and tell you how great it is. Or just lying to you."
Star Wars: A New Hope + Annie Hall
"When I think about what I do as a critic of movies, I kind of still zigzag back and forth between those," Scott said. "Between wanting that uncomplicated pleasure and also wanting something demanding, wanting the pleasure of working something out."
These two movies came out the same year, and both changed his life. Woody Allen's earlier movies—like Sleeper and Love and Death—had been in the spirit of Mad magazine; Annie Hall introduced an adult perspective on love and death and disappointment. But, like Mad, its cultural references also flew over his head. Star Wars included a universe of references as well, but that universe was pure fantasy. "It instantly took over our imaginations because it seemed so organically attached to them," Scott said.
To this day, the two movies represent the opposing desires that together drive Scott's approach to reviewing movies. One is aspirational: to attain the intellectual background and do the heavy lifting needed to appreciate a movie. The other is escapist: to allow a world of innocent fantasy and fun to pull him in.
This Year’s Model
By his teen years, Scott had traded in Mad for Rolling Stone as a cultural bible. He aspired to be a rock critic, fell in love with punk bands, and still names The Clash's London Calling as his all-time favorite album. But This Year's Model was the gateway, and anyone who's ever gone through puberty should understand the album's appeal: Costello, according to Scott, nailed "being a really smart guy and a really pissed-off guy at the same time."
All art, Scott explains in Better Living Through Criticism, has something to say. This Year's Model isn't just critical of pop music, it wants to tear it down and expose it as a hoax.
Collected Stories
Scott can't remember who handed him a copy of Paul Bowles's collected short stories when he was in his late teen years, but "there was something about the clarity of his prose and how haunting and mysterious the stories were," Scott said.
Bowles, a bisexual writer, is most famous for his novel The Sheltering Sky, written while he was living with his wife as an expatriate in Morocco, but Scott found himself reading Bowles's stories over and over again. "I still am intrigued by works of art that manage to do that, that present a kind of surface that might be simple and clear, and yet somehow imply a whole lot more going on under the surface," Scott said. "And I'm still fascinated by it. How does that happen?"
Of Grammatology
Of Grammatology, Scott says, "is like taking five tabs of acid before you've even smoked a joint. It will fuck with you."
In his first semester of college, Scott found himself in an upper-level comparative-lit class on deconstruction theory ("The advising system was terrible")—and Of Grammatology, an argument about the nature and instability of language, was the course's main text. Though Scott had no familiarity with the philosophical tradition Derrida was critiquing, he plowed through it anyway and started to engage with academic forms of criticism—in which whether a thing is good or bad is beside the point. "It taught me to mistrust certainty and to understand that no interpretation is complete," he said. "It's less a matter of true or false or right or wrong—although those things do matter—as a matter of understanding things to be provisional."
La Dolce Vita
Just as he started his film education with Mad satires of movies he hadn't seen and his philosophy education with critiques of books he hadn't read, Scott watched Woody Allen's Federico Fellini–inspired Stardust Memories before seeing any of Fellini's films. When he finally got around to watching La Dolce Vita in college, it revealed what made cinema such a unique art form: "It folds its ideas into its images," Scott said. "It's not just about the characters and the story, but there's something about the whole visual aesthetic that's expressive of the ideas about human behavior, about European society, about life in the universe."
The Player
Robert Altman had a hit-or-miss decade in the 1980s following a string of classic movies in the 1970s such as MASH and Nashville. 1992's The Player marked a career comeback: Altman rounded up one of the starriest casts in movie history for a Hollywood satire that put fictional characters alongside real actors playing themselves.
Scott watched the movie over and over again in a grand old movie theater outside of Baltimore. "It's so densely packed," he said. "You half-hear things, you miss things, you just want to keep going back and back to get more of it." Altman is simultaneously cynical about the process of making movies—Hollywood is a hermetic, strange world built on flawed people and institutions—and optimistic, and the movie got Scott thinking about his own place in the entertainment industry. "You're not on the inside, but you're also not entirely on the outside," Scott said.
The Group
Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group had been popular for decades by the time Scott read it in grad school, but he still thinks the book is "catastrophically underrated." It is, to him, one of the best American novels, if not the best, of the latter half of the twentieth century. "That book accomplishes more in what the novel can do in terms of social life and historical change and individual psychology than anything else," Scott said. "I think it's underrated on pretty much blatantly sexist grounds."
Both of Scott's parents are history professors, and in The Group Scott found a new appreciation for the art of writing history, of being able to convey historical change in a narrative.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Scott calls this one something of a cheat, as he's friends with the team who created Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He saw drafts of its songs and listened to all the albums the writers listened to—he saw the play get made, from inception to completion. But that's what makes it so important to him.
"It's completely demystified in advance. And yet it still has this power, this magic," Scott said. "There's a fear about criticism: If you know too much, if you go too deep in, if you analyze too far, you're going to ruin the experience," Scott said. "But, at least in this case, that's certainly not true."
Ratatouille
Critics show up in movies from time to time; the Pixar film about a chef who also happens to be a rat is the only one to empathize with one.
Scott spends a lot of time trying to understand artists. In making Anton Ego, the movie's food critic, an ally and counterpart to Remy the rat, director Brad Bird tried to understand the critic—and it clarified Scott's job. "The job of taking art seriously is an important and difficult one—and it also may really not amount to much," Scott said. "The critic in that movie is very important because he upholds the standards. Art needs someone to believe in it, someone to appreciate it, someone to understand it."
Ratatouille also tangles the roles of an artist and a critic. Remy starts out as a critic, in a way, trying to convince his brother and fellow rats that they don't need to take food for granted, "that you don't need to just survive or eat indiscriminately," Scott said. "But that an ordinary experience can become something beautiful and intentional."
