"That’s the worst thing death does: It freezes you. Until you die, you are someone who has the potential for change, the potential for betterment, the potential to get even worse. Until you die, you are a person living in a present tense, capable of motion and not stasis. Yet all death is, is stasis. To get stuck, to not realize the daily gifts you receive just from being alive, is to be metaphorically dead. And in some ways, that’s even worse than getting gunned down in a model-train shop, or being put into a coma in a gun battle, or being knocked off your motorcycle in the middle of oncoming traffic, because nobody can help death. It’s coming for all of us. But change is growth. Growth is life. To stop improving, to get stuck in your own rut and not battle back when you must is to be dead before the gunmen get to you. And not one of us will ever see it coming."
—Emily VanDerWerff, “The Blue Comet”
Emily Vanderwerff is one of my favorite film and television critics.
One of the ways I came to film and television was through film criticism. I wanted to understand why films made me feel the way I did. I wanted to know how why worked, why they worked, what it was that made them tick. I didn't have access to film school or film classes, I only had the internet. And Emily was one of the first people I discovered.
As a teenager and throughout my early twenties, I spent hours upon hours pouring over film news and film criticism. I devoured old films and television. And the more I saw, the more I wanted to understand. One night, after starting in on HBO's seminal The Sopranos, I came across a reviewer who took every aspect I didn't understand from the pilot and explained it concisely and thoroughly. There was a poetic quality to the language that extended the meaning of what she was explaining in a way that added to it. She gave context and recaps while also digging into the thematic weight the show was hinting toward. She highlighted and broke down why a camera move or a character action was crucial for the overall narrative. It was like an entire film school in the form of an article. I was hooked.
As someone who still reads a good deal of criticism, I find that the critics I enjoy most are ones that are able to effectively tie cultural and political changes to changes in art. In that way, it makes perfect sense that Emily eventually migrated to Vox Media. While her work at AV Club tended to be more pop culture specific, her Vox work looked at pop culture in the context of modern society. No longer was it purely recaps, it was now Superhero Films as an attempt to rewrite 9/11 and How The Handmaid's Tale helped her come to terms with her identity. This was in addition to her incredible work covering studio upfronts as well as breaking down how major changes in Hollywood will affect the industry long term.
For my part, Emily's work has been a masterclass in the role of art/artist/art-form in society. She writes so clearly about the essential purpose of the work. She gives it value without ever granting it too much importance in the larger societal context. She sounds the alarm on new works, their thematic underpinnings, and why it's important right now. Even if I haven’t seen what she’s talking about, her perspective is so unique and essential that I will often still read the piece just to follow what she sees as shifts in American society (and Hollywood at-large.)
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