![]() It would be one thing if some publications were cutting cultural journalists, but those cultural journalists were still able to find jobs elsewhere. The larger picture can be easy to miss unless you happen to notice culture writers announcing they’ve been laid off on Twitter or are a freelancer trying to pitch to an ever-shrinking pool of outlets. And these job losses are often doled out piecemeal - a layoff here, or a position left unfilled after a departure there. ![]() Many, many more publications have cut cultural journalism either in part or in whole. The above is not intended as an exhaustive list. Similarly, the website Mic has more or less been stripped for parts. In particular, independent newspapers like the Village Voice, an important incubator of tremendous cultural writing for decades, shuttered completely, while its connected Voice Media has ceased film and TV coverage entirely as of December 31, 2018. Here is a list of places *just off the top of my head* that have laid off culture/features reporters and not rehired for them in the last 2 years:īut some publications simply ceased to publish culture writing altogether, when they weren’t going out of business entirely. In October, veteran music publication The Fader laid off its most senior employees. Club, perhaps the internet’s longest-running outlet focused solely on pop culture, took buyouts as part of an ongoing effort by the site’s corporate parent, Gizmodo Media Group, to trim costs. In July 2018, many staff members of The A.V. Buzzfeed dismissed four culture writers and editors in late 2017 (though it still employs the terrific critic Alison Willmore) and its culture-oriented podcast team in 2018. Often, these cuts have come to pass through the outright downsizing of culture-writing staffs. The twin pressures of a political situation that has a tendency to gobble up all available media oxygen and the increased centrality of review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (to the degree that movie studios routinely blame bad Rotten Tomatoes scores for their box office failures) have pushed more and more media companies to cut back on culture writing. The last two years have not been particularly great for cultural criticism and culture writing more generally. The two years since the 2016 election have been disastrous for the continued employment of cultural critics and journalists The Village Voice ceased publication in 2018 - taking with it a long legacy of great cultural journalism. But in 2018, it plays like a prophecy I missed at the time. In 2015, it played like Tarantino sticking his tongue out at you from the movie screen. It’s an apocalyptic story, even though it’s set in the Old West, about a country trapped in a cabin with itself and tilting toward murder. The Hateful Eight is just mean, and it feels like the work of someone who looked around at America and concluded that it was a land full of angry, spiteful people who would be more willing to burn their own lives to the ground than admit either their own sins or the sins of their country. It’s a nasty, ugly movie, and it’s all but impossible to tell if Tarantino is reveling in that nastiness and ugliness (which he does from time to time, as in his 2007 movie Death Proof) or depicting it so that we might reflect on our own nastiness and ugliness (which he did in his 2012 movie Django Unchained, whose core goal seems to be forcing white Americans to confront their ancestors’ role in the institution of slavery). The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino's new film, is a deeply interesting failure Filmed largely on one set, where eight characters gab and gab and gab at each other until the bloodshed begins, the nearly three-hour film is an endless series of provocations by Tarantino that toy with big dividing lines around race, class, and especially gender in America, without tipping its cap toward what it really thinks. I didn’t think much of the movie at the time. If Tarantino has ever made a movie that’s been largely forgotten, it’s The Hateful Eight.Īnd yet I can’t seem to shake it, over three years after I first saw it. The movie was one of Tarantino’s lowest earners at the box office, and it hasn’t had the long tail that many of his other films have enjoyed in the cultural conversation. There’s no real good reason for this, except that the movie, which came out in 2015 and is Quentin Tarantino’s most recent film, takes place in a kind of miserable, snow-covered hell, making it one of those non-Christmas films that still feels most appropriate to break out at the end of the year. I’ve been thinking about The Hateful Eight a lot lately.
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