Escape from Parkertraz

As Mike Mester pointed out in his post and as I briefly commented on, the whole Robert Parker phenomenon felt all too familiar coming from another luxury industry with highly educated consumers, where commercial success and prestige are goals and motivators that are entwined and tangled together in complex and sometimes baffling ways.  Indeed, the game seems to begin in earnest at the high end -- as Daniel Malter pointed out in his presentation, the inflection point where score starts to matter is 87.

I think people in the inner circle of this sort of world have inflated notions of what prestige means.  Theater is indeed a good analogy here -- there is one critic at The New York Times who is the go-to for all the most prominent shows to come out on Broadway and even worldwide each year:  Ben Brantley.  He has his own eccentric tastes, championing shows like Honeymoon in Vegas that pretty much evereyone else hated, but his own theatrically phrased praises are plastered below the marquees in Manhattan with an exhilirated sense that his opinion is the fuel of success.  And in the era of social networking, his reviews actually don't hold a lot of weight with the consumers, who our industry research shows are more concerned with recommendations from friends and other considerations.  But for producers and creatives in the industry, Brantley's review is the single most important reaction they are waiting for, because prestige is most important to them, and in their cloistered offices prestige must be equivalent to box office success, even when it's not.

Escaping Robert Parker was a pretty depressing mosey down a parallel lane, and if anything, a magnification of the critic-as-ultimate-arbiter pageant.  The film begins with a network-TV interview that aggrandizes him further with a sense of magnificence that this fellow would very likely have seen none of if he had stuck to his career origins as a lawyer.  Maybe being a lawyer helped him in knowing how to tangle and escape unscathed, since the estate bans that he's elicited from disdainful wine proprietors indicate that he has cut at their central occupations in ways that have left more than mere bitterness.  I can't say I'm an expert in where the lines between criticism, libel, and conflict of interest lie, though I certainly remark that the hefty regulation that suffocates so many stakeholders in the wine industry does not extend to the critics, who are free to champion and to trash as they please.  So it's all the more disturbing when at the beginning of the documentary a mainstream source is asking if he's the "most important critic of anything."  Well, drama sells in journalism, too.  Maybe the impetus to be a lawyer is also that same impulse to "hold people accountable" (especially for things you can't do yourself).  

Mike and I were talking about the film and both found it could have used some editing, though I reflected later and thought, giving the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt, some of it may have been intentional.  They were picking on a relative nobody in choosing downcast, perpetually single Julian to chronicle his misadventures in France, the US, and China, and part of the point may have been the relative boredom and ignominy -- Parker is inaccessible, not interviewed in the film, and barely able to be grabbed for a little chat about his lack of attention to rosé.  It stuck with me when Jules remarked that selling was actually harder than making wine -- would that be the case if there were really an efficiently sorted marketplace out there?  Or is Jules just trying to excuse his failure to create a superior wine?  Harder to know without a tasting.  And there is some hope after all, as he finally gains some recognition for quality from a French guidebook towards the end of the movie.  However, the prevailing atmosphere of his story is pretty mundane or downbeat: making notes in books, handling details with potential customers, laboring on and on for a cause that hasn't brought him real money and that seems to preclude him from having a family or even a lasting romantic relationship.  The drink may be a symbol of romance, but the life of the average winemaker is far from romantic.

Amusingly, Angelo Gaja appears in the film as well, a familiar persona from earlier in our class, remarking that everyone in Italy believes himself/herself to be Robert Parker.  I wondered if part of the dynamic here and with the resistance of French wineries to Parker might be Europeans resenting the idea of taking aesthetic direction from a New World critic.  The French and the Italians here would both prefer an older world where relationships are made more directly and people are more connected with a region and a culture.  The American seems to have reduced an ornate and rich market to a false Darwinian contest that no one knows how to win, unless of course they hire a professional Parker consultant.  Jules asks for advice from a guy attached to the big man, but the immediate response is, would you like to hire him as a consultant?

Let me be more cynical than I mean, to make a central point about Parker.  He is an entertainer, too, one too lofty to style himself as such, but for the New Yorker-reading set that peers down the nose at the sight of explicit commerce, but that simultaneously pays elevated prices for refined pleasures.  And for refinement, you at least need to pretend you're looking at something other than money, else you let on you're déclassé.   Parker offers simplicity of choice wrapped in high manners and layered phrasing -- as simple as a number, and a number that isn't the price.

I don't mean to be too snide.  Critics can serve a valuable purpose, and I consult them plenty for my favorite arts.  Still, a critic should be fair game for pointed criticism from others.