12 Questions for A.O. Scott

The esteemed New York Times film and literary critic on his time at Harvard, his relationship to smartphones, the best films of 2024, the fictional characters he'd love to sleep with, and more.

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I watched Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! for the first time last night, the Pedro Almodovar film from 1989. It tells the story of Ricky (Antonio Banderas), a 23-year-old released from a psychiatric facility who proceeds to kidnap a porn-star turned actress named Marina. Where’s the drama, what does Ricky want? He wants Marina to fall in love with him, for her to put the brutal abduction to the side of her mind and realize, while tied up and gagged, how much Ricky has to offer, the wondrous soul within. Sounds a bit silly but sometimes I feel like Ricky during these interviews, that I’ve actually taken my subjects hostage just so that they can see how talented I can be, so they can recognize me. This is the bizarre perversity of this interview series that I think gives it traction. It’s good I don’t try to mask it. Everyone, essentially, is holding someone captive (even if it’s just their attention) trying to show what they’ve got. A supposed interview takes place, though really I’m practicing a dance of seduction; lurid, ceremonial.

Don’t run away, a lover once told me, opaque. It was some kind of euphemism, I had no idea what she meant. Stop running away, Gordon, she wrote in the back of a book with her signature underneath. I found it more amusing to take the note at face value. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! inevitably turns into an exploration of Stockholm syndrome (for those of you who’ve never been to Europe, it’s when the kidnapped falls in love with their captor). In order for Stockholm syndrome to work with my readers, I have to be engaging, appealing. It’s really hard to Stockholm syndrome a famous person with my writing, they’re busy with lots of stuff going on, people requesting their time. But if I can convince them to engage in an interview, sucking them into this psychodrama, then they’ll certainly at least read the intro. And they’ll pay more attention to it than something they’d normally read, because not only is it about them, but they’ve also participated in it. Even if the material is garbage, the subject still might, out of vanity or fear, find a way to like it, if not love it. Then, even more perverse, I start to critique their work, their answers to my unintelligible questions. How the tables have turned. To boot, I try and get some of their audience to like me too. The reader, though, is no moron (usually). They can see what’s going on here, and it’s this depraved interplay which itself provides the entertainment, and has the possibility to sustain one’s interest.

Let’s get serious. We’re practically on a tour of the New York Times critical infrastructure. Last week I said pretty much everything I’d wanted to say about the theory of criticism in my nine thousand word disquisition on art and Dwight Garner. This interview with A.O. Scott is a continuation of those themes.

To be honest I hadn’t much fun with this one, at least not as much when compared to some of the other interviews I’ve conducted. He didn’t really humor me, Scott. And he didn’t fall in love, at least not yet. I asked him many of the same questions I asked Garner, but too often he either brushed them off as too silly or just gave a one sentence response. My interview with Richard Hell was beautifully antagonistic, but at least he played with his answers and put forth considerable effort and charm. I was disappointed when I received Scott’s replies and for a while considered not publishing it. It’s true that some of them are interesting, like his one paragraph essay about his time at Harvard, or his response about whether any metaphysical commitment is necessary for someone to lead an ethical life. Those questions were at the very beginning, and then I think afterward he got either tired or annoyed, or both, because the responses became shorter and shorter. ‘I’m not trying to be coy,’ he says at one point. ‘I’m just not in the habit of giving away critical judgments for free.’ I found it more laconic than coy, not that the two are mutually exclusive. I then ask him a question that very much calls for some theoretical insight, or perhaps the mere start of a productive, even provocative discussion —  ‘Where does wisdom come from? How can someone develop wisdom? Is the development of wisdom a natural process that can’t be contrived, or do you think there are certain behaviors one can adopt?’

‘I don’t know what wisdom is.’

A.O. Scott is 57, and this is a lie. The next sentence (also the completion of his answer), goes something like: ‘I know that if you stay alive and pay attention you can become less stupid.’ And sure, this is true, in the same sense that leaves are often green and the sky is blue. But I don’t query a talented writer for them to confirm how trees can grow tall and that sex feels good. The whole thing was a little insulting. You might be thinking, Who are you to be so entitled to demand that your renowned subject puts effort into their responses? Well since I’m alive (I think) and I pay attention (I try), and regularly attempt to grasp the outer-peripheries of wisdom, I know that usually when subjects agree to an interview they put some sort of thought and energy into the back and forth. If you agree to play tennis with someone but proceed to play halfheartedly, hitting the ball back without endeavor, refusing to take the game seriously, your opponent has the right to be disappointed, if not have the feeling that you’ve wasted their afternoon. This isn’t tennis, I’m aware, but is it so simple as: I should be lucky such a respected writer agreed to pay attention to my questions and therefore shut up? Maybe, but I’m trying to hold them hostage and make them love me. In this case, I was sadly not given much to work with. Scott was too clever, he’s been through this game of trying to be kidnapped before. I’ve come to the conclusion that indifference, the opposite of love, was his tactic all along. Question: What do you miss most about New York that no longer exists here? Is there any change you appreciate? Answer: I like that the Q train goes up 2nd avenue… I like the bike lanes. What I miss is what everyone misses… the traces of things that were there before I was… The sky is blue, sex feels good, and did you know that in the summer, it often gets warm?

Let’s get serious again. I want to underline my disappointment (as previously discussed with Dwight Garner: disappointment when a work of art lacks enchantment and any form of transcendence, an element of good-faith criticism). I should let you know that I’ve probably been reading Scott longer than any other writer, aside from David Sedaris, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Dr. Seuss. Growing up, I was obsessed with films and, starting from the age of six or seven, would regularly scan through all the reviews in the New York Times. Parasocial, I felt I knew A.O. Scott well (a normal psychological step for a kidnapper), and his erudite opinions were a regular fixture at my family’s dinner table, especially on Shabbat, where we’d do a rundown of everything everybody had seen or read that week. On weekday mornings, my father would go and buy a copy of the Times from M&O on the corner of Thompson & Prince while my mother got me and my sisters ready for school, presumably so that he could avoid the bad energy. He’d always return with the paper right before we’d leave and I’d implore him to remember not to discard the arts section, especially on Fridays, when Scott’s reviews would appear. I didn’t understand half of what Scott was saying until late-adolescence, but it was very exciting that there was this guy who people trusted that could tell me, with authority, whether or not a movie was worth seeing, and that I could then decide on my own whether or not I agreed; this concept was groundbreaking, truly, and it was a kind of dialectic perspective that would end up shaping the foundation of my identity. It’s hyperbolic to say A.O. Scott was to me what Taylor Swift is to the majority of the Western world, but he was important nonetheless. In our interview, I asked him whether literature or imagery seeps deeper into the unconscious. He responded that for him it’s language. This is true for me as well, and his language was there from the very beginning.

This interview is my first real interaction with Scott. I’ve seen him before at press screenings in and around New York, but didn’t want to go and bother him, or I should say that at the time I didn’t have the confidence to go and bother him. ‘Hi, I’m Gordon! Want to fall in love with me now?’ During my junior year at Tisch, I took a class aptly titled Film Criticism, taught by Eric Kohn. This class was instrumental and formative. As part of the curriculum, we were to compose several reviews per week under deadline, and I loved the sensation of being forced to write, because it felt I was doing something vital and essential that wouldn’t have come out otherwise. Each week a different film critic came to speak for the class. A.O. Scott was on the syllabus, and this was one of the reasons I took the course in the first place. The day he was supposed to come he canceled, I think because he was sick or his wife was, but in a very twisted bad-faith way I assumed it was because he didn’t want to. We were all informed over email that morning. Instead of the talk with Scott we did something miserable, like theorize Michael Haneke. And then I think a third-rate critic like [redacted] came instead. Either way, I was incredibly dispirited. It was a day I’d been looking forward to all semester. The disappointment was similar to the feeling I had when I received these interview answers. And so there I’ve laid out my life thus far, one where the film critic A.O. Scott has constantly let me down. It’s indeed possible that we’ll one day coalesce in a more ebullient manner.

I think ‘play' is the word I’m looking for. In the intro to my novel length interview with Kirsty Allison (she really gave her answers to the questions a proper go), I discussed how the most rewarding interactions in life are those when the interlocutor plays ball, acquiescing to the eerie game of two unique personalities meeting, responding to each other’s inherently awkward gestures, relationship with language, and the very particular aspects of one another’s persona. I’ve been lucky enough to achieve that rewarding experience with Kirsty Allison, Jordan Castro, Jia Tolentino, Matthew Gasda, Rayne Fisher-Quann, KIRAC, Dwight Garner (almost), and just about everyone else I’ve thus far interviewed. With Scott, I have deep hope that our moment will soon come, and it’ll be the same amount of rewarding as that big note Etta James continuously hits in her gorgeous rendition of At Last.

For the last time, let’s get serious. I’ll give you now some background information. Originally from Massachusetts, A.O. Scott began his career at the New York Review of Books before stints writing for Newsday and Slate (under Tony Scott). In the early aughts he landed at the Times, where he served as chief film critic from 2004-2023. He still works at the Times, where he writes literary and social criticism. In addition, he’s taught at Wesleyan University and has published a wonderful book, Better Living Through Criticism, and was the finalist in 2010 for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. There you have the background information; the aforementioned interview can be found below. I hope you enjoy it more than I did, and it’s possible you might come to the conclusion, considering his answer to my last question (what’s your critique of this interview?), that I’ve been the one to blame all along. A failed operation, perhaps.

Before I began writing this morning, I felt really sick, cold, congested, etc. And now, I feel much better. When I interviewed Rob Doyle he replied to the question of why he writes with the answer, ‘so that I don’t kill myself.’

I’m starting to understand what he meant.

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GG: Do you miss reviewing films, the grind, all that? If so, what specifically do you miss? What are you happy to no longer endure? What did you think you’d be happy to no longer endure but have ended up missing?

A.O. I am happy not to have to manufacture an opinion about every movie I see, and I’m also happy not to have to leave the house after a day of writing to ride the subway to sit in a screening room. There’s a particular loneliness to that routine that wore me down over time. But there is that moment, whatever the movie, when the lights go down and the thing is about to start and you can’t help but feel hopeful about what’s going to happen. I do miss that. 

Literature or imagery - what seeps deeper into the unconscious? Why and how? 

I can’t speak for anyone else’s unconscious, but language hooks itself into my brain more tenaciously than pictures. I tend to forget what I’ve seen and remember what I’ve read.

August Comte says humans are spiritual animals, that this is the human impulse, to be religious and spiritual and express it through ritual and dogma. How would you define your own sense of morality? Moreover, how can someone build a sense of morality that doesn’t stem from monotheism, or for that matter, from any structured religion? Is that possible? Further, can morality be something that’s individual, or is it always counterposed against a sense of the collective?

I don’t think any kind of metaphysical commitment is necessary to lead an ethical life. There is certainly no historical evidence to support that idea. The most profoundly moral people I’ve ever known were probably my maternal grandparents, who were die-hard atheists. They were also secular Jews, and as such inheritors of a long tradition that you could argue is rooted in monotheism, though I’d contend that it arises more from the norms and customs of the tribe over many centuries of wandering and suffering. “Love your neighbor as yourself” doesn’t need God’s law to back it up.

Is there anything you learned at Harvard that you wouldn’t have been able to learn somewhere else? Do you think there’s any true benefit, anymore, to an Ivy League education? 

Like a lot of people in middle age, I find myself preoccupied with what I didn’t learn—the classes I was too ignorant to take; the books I should have read; the languages I wish I had studied. I’m grateful for the education I did receive, though I’m not sure that it was any better than what I would have gotten elsewhere. The stratification of American higher education—the hoarding of prestige and opportunity in a very few institutions—is grotesque and harmful, and there are days when I think the whole system should be levelled. But one thing about Harvard that makes me a little sentimental—apart from the beauty of Cambridge in autumn and the fact that I met my wife there—is the libraries. My real education was getting lost in the Widener stacks, listening to recordings of T.S. Eliot in the poetry room at Lamont, carefully handling the rarities in Houghton, staying up all night in Hilles during reading period.

In an otherwise positive review of Blake Butler’s Molly, Dwight Garner wrote that, as a consequence of some trying and lengthy pages of self-help verbiage, he wouldn’t mind sending Butler up on a Ferris wheel and stranding him there for an hour or two… the punitive critic at work. What are some other forms of punishment that writers should endure for the sin of cliché? Who in history deserves it most?

There should be a swear jar for cliches, with the proceeds going to support the publication of experimental poetry. I would certainly contribute my share.

Any healthy, thriving literary/arts scene has rivalries, and I think these rivalries are integral for the production of art that’s any good, any worthwhile. Who are your rivals and why? What would say to this rival if you’d really want to get under their skin? Further, what, in your opinion, makes your work stronger, more vital, more necessary, than the work of your rival? Is it Wesley Morris? He’s so good. 

Wesley is my friend. Anyway I reject the premise of the question. Art and criticism may depend on competition, but beefs are a distraction. 

Is there a fictional or non-fictional character from a book, play, or film that you’d love to sleep with? If so, who and why? If not, how come?

Talking about characters in movies means talking about actors, so I’m going to skip that part. In literature: Clytemnestra; Beatrice in the Divine Comedy; Kate in the Taming of the Shrew; Eve in Paradise Lost; Queequeg; Isabel Archer; Hester Prynne AND Arthur Dimmesdale; Leopold AND Molly Bloom.

What’s the most artful sex scene from a book or film you’ve ever encountered? What made this scene art, not porn? (Please avoid the ‘you know it when you see it’ answer.)

In a book, Mary McCarthy’s “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” which brings extraordinary critical intelligence and social insight into a casual encounter. Andrew Haigh’s movie “Weekend” also deals with a fling, and locates the profound emotional, almost philosophical currents passing between the two characters. 

What do you miss most about New York that no longer exists here? Is there any change you appreciate? 

I like that the Q train goes up 2^nd avenue, and I like the bike lanes. What I miss is what everyone misses: the traces of things that were there before I was, that make me feel young and belated, rather than old and out of it.

In art and in life, what’s something fake, pure simulacrum, that often passes as real, genuine? What’s something real, genuine, that people fall incorrectly consider to be fake?

Almost all popular music depends on the manufacture of authenticity, of realness; I love it when the artifice is convincing, and also when it’s not. 

How has your relationship with your smartphone changed the way you write? How has it changed the way you see the world, interact with world? 

Because of the way other people read on their smartphones, my paragraphs need to be shorter, my headlines more literal and my pieces more succinct. A few years ago I removed all work-related apps from my phone, and every game except Candy Crush. The addiction turns out not to be to any particular content on the phone, but to the physical action of looking at it. When I’m at home, I try to forget where it is. When I’m out with people, I try to keep it in my pocket. It shocks me how difficult that can be. 

What were some of your favorite films of 2023 and 2024 so far? What did you like about them? 

Alice Rohrwacher’s “Chimera” and Marco Bellocchio’s “Kidnapped.” Those are two of my favorite filmmakers from my favorite national cinema; I love being in their company.

When you write, who are you speaking to? What is it that drives the need for self-expression? Is this something an artist should know about themselves?

I don’t think you can generalize. I do think most artists know or have some idea of their audience. Sometimes that audience is themselves, or God, or some highly specific person; sometimes it’s a coterie of like-minded people, sometimes it’s the masses or posterity. Sometimes you write to solve a problem in your own head, sometimes to persuade readers, sometimes just to goof around with language. I have one particular friend, whose mind and sensibility I admire above all others, and whenever I think I’ve written a sentence he would approve of I feel good about my work.

How can someone escape or transcend the feelings of loneliness and isolation? Is it possible?

Love and friendship, of course. But most reliably: reading. Writers are the best companions, though not always in real life.

Who are a couple of artists/actors/writers that we are oversaturated with and should go away for a while? How come? 

It’s hard enough to get work done without people telling you to stop doing it. It’s not necessary for anyone to go away: just stop paying attention to what annoys you. That’s worked for me and [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted]. I’m not trying to be coy. I’m just not in the habit of giving away critical judgments for free.

Where does wisdom come from? How can someone develop wisdom? Is the development of wisdom a natural process that can’t be contrived, or do you think there are certain behaviors one can adopt? 

I don’t know what wisdom is. I know that if you stay alive and pay attention you can become less stupid. 

Fuck, Marry, Kill: Andre Bazin, Pauline Kael, Anthony Lane? Please explain. What do you think Janet Maslin would write about your choices? How would Francois Truffaut then go about adapting it into a film? How, then, do you think Manohla Dargis would critique this film? 

I would never do any of those things with or to any film critic. This question lacks imagination. Susan Sontag: all three. 

How would you define a dignified life? 

Membership in a labor union. Citizenship in a democracy. 

What’s your critique of this interview?

You embed an awful lot of your own assumptions in the questions. Dumber questions might elicit more interesting and surprising answers. 

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