A Critical Misfire

When the critic becomes the critiqued.

Four score and seven years ago I brought forth on this site, a new publication, conceived in boredom, and dedicated to the proposition that Disney’s Star Wars was abject filth.

I set out on what I intended to be a grand documentation of the seemingly ceaseless hurricane of drama, in-fighting, and histrionics both professional and amateur that had plagued the once august pillar of American pop culture since it had fallen into the white cartoon gloves of one Michael Mouse, which, by necessity, would require an abyssal plunge into the murky underbelly of what I’m still convinced it one of the most senselessly tumultuous fandoms that man has ever borne witness to.

As any long-time visitor to the Lake of Lerna will know, as it has been stated many a time, there is something of a cottage industry on YouTube which peddles exclusively vitriol, piss, and vinegar directed towards the output of Big Entertainment. These days, it’s known as ragebait, and mostly consists of one or several people bashing the recipient of hate du jour like it’s a pinata stuffed with a motherlode of gold coins that can be accessed with just enough tactical F-bomb deployments. Disney’s Star Wars output, always mediocre and often incendiary as it was, proved to be a lucrative vein of what these fellows would describe as woke bullshit, which, in turn, could be parlayed into a seemingly bottomless well of content from which they could draw content from.

Long time readers will also know that I have little in the way of love for these channels - while I did, for years, consume the content, as I was like so many others abhorred by what I saw being churned out by the House of Mouse. For a while, it was fun to point and laugh and ridicule these malformed, poorly-conceived abominations lurching out of Hollywood. But, as one year bled into another, and the 2010’s passed gracelessly into the dustbin of history and a new decade began, it became clear to me that the constant refrain of Go Woke, Go Broke chanted by this ever-growing cadre of rage-baiters on YouTube was little more than a hollow prayer offered to an apathetic, perhaps nonexistent deity - contrary to the prophecies of, Disney is going bankrupt, any day now!, or, Insider sources within LucasFilm have given me IRREFUTABLE PROOF that Kathleen Kennedy is about to be fired (but I won’t share that proof with you)¹, the output of slop from Disney and just about every other major player in the Entertainment industry was not growing thin. If anything, the torrent of shit leaking out of the national septic tank that is the Los Angeles Basin was increasing in its volume, and the stench wafting of it elevating from simply eye-watering to violently nauseating.

Case in point, this series was ten times more insulting than Rise of Skywalker.

The better part of a decade’s worth of collective kvetching and unbridled fury from hundreds of thousands of the internet’s angriest nerds had the ultimate power, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

There came a point in which the once humorous observations of this self-professed anti-woke collective became more wearisome than insightful; there’s only so many times one can deride this piece of refuse from Disney or that reeking turd from Ubisoft before it all blends together into a dull roar of general discontent that is neither entertaining, enlightening, or anything other than just plain boring. If you’ve seen one chubby, bearded guy and his chubby, bearded pals rail breathlessly against one of Disney’s used diapers with the Star Wars branding slapped on it, you’ve seen them all.

It’s why I never paid much attention to the sound and fury surrounding Amazon’s Rings of Power - though it rankled a fresh new crop of feathers by defiling the once pristine legacy of the inimitable J.R.R. Tolkein, and perhaps was in an exclusive tier of terrible proprietary to itself… well, what could be said about it that really couldn’t pertain to just about any installment of any major nerd culture franchise or IP over the past decade? No amount of savaging the content was going to miraculously unmake it. There are no words that could be said that could bleach the blemish it left behind on the world of Middle Earth. I’d go so far as to reckon that the sheer amount of people who watched it for the sole purpose of hating on it probably had some part to play in ensuring that it got a second season².

“Don’t make me tap the sign.”

I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating that my love affair with this style of content came to an end when I stumbled across

David V. Stewart

’s YouTube channel. While I can’t point to an exact video in which he explicitly makes this statement - probably because he’s expressed this sentiment dozens of times - Stewart said something to the effect of, This content isn’t going away, you aren’t getting these franchises back, and the best thing you can do is get over it and move on to greener pastures. More importantly, Stewart has always extolled the virtue of making your own thing instead of relying on the mass media to provide it. It’s far more rewarding, not to mention a better use of your time, to write your own story you will like instead of wasting hours of your life whinging about something you don’t.

Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for ridicule, critique, or critical analysis of these projects. Most of this very Substack is built on just that. But there’s a fine line between analyzing a bad piece of media as a piece of art and just blindly bashing on it in a profanity-laced tirade. When I wrote my articles on The Galactic Starcruiser, the Harry Potter spin-offs, or Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad game, my intention is not to simply ridicule these things, but hopefully elucidate on why they happened, why it matters that they happened, why they were bad, and generally offer more insight to the topic at hand than just jabbing my finger at it and grunting like a cro-magnon, Thing Bad! Thing Bad!

And, to be fair, there are plenty of YouTubers who have made names for themselves going into almost molecular detail, picking apart shows like Rings of Power or the later Star Wars sequels, meticulously dissecting each and every lapse in logic or idiotic mistake. They offer more insightful and educational content than the usual rage-baiter, though there is overlap between the two. YouTuber MauLerYT infamously and routinely uploads analyses of these projects that are upwards of four hours in length. In these videos, he meticulously dissects these projects down to the most minute detail with the precision of a brain surgeon with robot hands and a futuristic laser scalpel. I don’t know where he finds the time and tenacity to do it, but he does.

But, for every MauLer, there’s a gaggle of less astute minds that simply get their jollies weaving tapestries of obscenities around these media misfires that would make a certain Angry Video Game Nerd blush.

And, really… that’s fine. I guess. I get it. It’s fun to hate on things. Especially abjectly bad things. Like I’ve said many times, I’m a natural born hater who came out of the womb with a chip on my shoulder and ready to cast aspersions.

But, again, there’s a difference between insightful critique and a circle-jerk of hate.

It’s ultimately why I backed off the original Battered Wives of Fandom project. For one, I didn’t want to pigeon-hole myself into writing strictly about Star Wars content and the fandom around it. Sure, I have returned to that well several times, as it seems that LucasFilm and Disney can’t go one whole calendar month without stepping on a landmine packed with weapons-grade drama, but I’ve also walked away from it many times and abandoned half-finished drafts about this Star Wars disaster or that one because… well, I don’t really have anything to say about it besides, Thing Bad. And I don’t want to make that kind of content.

But, when it came to the fandom itself - the eponymous Battered Wives of those articles - doing research on them was difficult. Most of them are not terribly public figures. Short of slogging through hours upon hours upon endless hours of gormless live-streams, information on their personal lives and generally who they are outside of rage-baiting YouTubers was difficult. And, frankly, that’s what I was more interested in when it came to these people than anything else about them.

Who are they? Who are they really? Why are they the way that they are?

Take Dictor van Doomcock³ for example. He’s probably the most egregious example of a rage-baiter. His identity is largely unknown, so far as I’m aware, but it’s readily apparent that he’s at least over thirty-five and most likely much older. He’s spent the past several years building a platform for himself that, for the most part, is built on not just pointing and shouting, Thing Bad, with little else of substance, but lying through his Party City-tier Bionicle mask about shadowy insider sources from Disney/LucasFilm who are risking their jobs (and would be, in many cases, blatantly violating legally hazardous Non-Disclosure Agreements) to feed info to him that conveniently always aligns with his personal agenda of freeing Star Wars from the yoke of the woke.

What manic force possesses a man to put on a silly mask and trade laughless jibes with a stuffed cthulu plush, all the while spinning baselessly conspiracy theories about an internal civil war at LucasFilm and how “Based” Dave Feloni and Jon Favreau are going to usher in a new Golden Age of Star Wars once the evil harpy-witch-despot Kathleen Kennedy (many curses be upon her name!) is deposed in a Glorious Revolution?

Well, if I had to guess, there’s one important factor.

I don’t know how much Mr. Doomcock is actually making off Patreon, but given he has 911 paying members, I doubt he’s paying rent with it, but I imagine he collects a nice sum of walking-around money.

But I also have my suspicions that Mr. Doomcock is one of those critics who desperately wants to be a creative himself, but doesn’t quite have the chops to cut it as a writer, artist, or stand-up comedian. He’s created this elaborate lore around himself that includes multiple characters - all of which he voices - that just trade tepid jokes and bad puns to add a little levity to what would otherwise be a rather straightforward defenestration of the most recent Disney output. His commitment to his own internal lore and characters smacks of another aspiring creative who also found success in internet criticism, and began to use the platform and character they’d established as a self-styled “critic” into their creative raison d’etre.

But I’d also argue that Doug Walker is playing ball in a league entirely his own. You can say a lot about the guy, but he has one thing that I think Doomcock lacks entirely - a genuine passion for storytelling. Whether or not Walker’s creative passion manifests as anything objectively good is up for debate, but regardless of the end result’s output, it cannot be said he suffers from a lack of motivation. Over the span of two decades, the guy has produced almost 300 episodes of his Nostalgia Critic series (many of which are basically hour-plus long movies unto themselves), five feature films, and a myriad of ancillary material to go along with it, entirely independently. The man, as they say, has that dog in him.

So far as I’m aware, Doomcock’s creative output amounts to weekly live-streams and his very irregular YouTube uploads.

But we’re not here to conduct a struggle session on Mr. Doomcock. Perhaps one day I’ll go more in depth on his story⁴, provided I can ever find more information about him, but there’s another YouTube figure adjacent to him in this rage-bait community that sprung up around the Star Wars sequels in the waning days of the 2010’s that, like Doug Walker, took the leap into the blood-soaked arena of artistry; just like Walker, he discovered first hand how it feels to go from the savage critic to the savagely critiqued.

This individual is a certain Will Jordan of Fife, Scotland. If you know him, you probably know him by his online nom de guerre, The Critical Drinker.

Imagine being a Scotsman and drinking Jack. You guys make better whiskey in your toilets. Do better, man.

If you’ve heard of anyone involved in this little clique of niche YouTube critics, I reckon it’d be him. He’s got enough of a following that I’ve heard his name tossed in real life around by people who are neither into super hero movies or the broader pop culture. They just like him because they think he’s funny, bitches about the woke agenda, and says crass things.

There was a time I thought the same thing. I don’t think the Critical Drinker makes content that is egregiously awful, or that his opinions are disagreeable, but his schtick - pretending to be perpetually drunk, sex addicted, dysfunctional reprobate - wore about as thin as the toilet paper in my office’s bathroom over the years. There’s only so many times I can hear This movie looks worse than that Russian hooker I banged after drinking two whole bottles of Jaegermeister or This movie’s about as funny as when I had to get my stomach pumped before it gets old, and it turns out that it wasn’t all that many.

The man is perfectly capable of delivering coherent and insightful commentary, but it’s difficult for me to digest when it’s interspersed with constant clips from British sitcoms of people saying It’s Shite and fart sound effects. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I fail to see the humor in capping every joke off with a clip of Tyrion Lannister throwing up on himself. But, hey - I’m just being an humorless fuddy-duddy who doesn’t appreciate a good fart joke.

I will come to Mister Jordan’s defense and say that I know why he does it. The jokes, the schtick, it’s all like the slice of deli meat you wrap around a pill to trick your dog into consuming it. Why do you think I try to keep these articles amusing. Humor always helps… y’know. Slide things along, you could say. Make things more engaging and easier to digest. I don’t fault Jordan for injecting some levity into his videos, but, personally… well, it’s just that his schtick doesn’t do anything for me personally, but, if you like it, more power to you.

Now, I want to stress that I don't dislike Jordan. He’s never come off as someone who does what they do for the sake of grifting spare change from perpetually irate Redditors. So far as I’m aware, he’s never done anything to suggest that he’s a person of ill-repute. In fact, I quite like watching highlights from his streams where he presents himself as Will Jordan rather than the character of the Critical Drinker; he’s well spoken, his observations astute, and his demeanor affable. I find that his thoughts, analysis, and critique are much more measured and articulate when he’s not dressing them up with hyperbolic piss-and-penis jokes. I also think that he’s head-and-shoulders more competent and intelligent than many of the others he’s adjacent to in the scene.

But what really intrigues me about Mister Jordan, what I’d say really sets him apart from the rest of the rage-bait crowd is that the man is willing to put his considerable YouTube ad revenue where his potty mouth is. A common retort I’ve seen from defenders of Disney Star Wars and similar slop is, Well, I’d like to see you do better!

And, admirably, Mister Jordan took them to task on that.

Now, according to SocialBlade, his channel could have amassed, at the highest estimate, a staggering $551.6k since he began uploading videos in 2012. Those kind of numbers are enough to make me want to give the whole YouTube game a shot, but I need to workshop my gimmick of being an time-displaced, opium-addicted Chinaman from turn-of-the-century San Francisco doing modern movie reviews a bit more before it’s ready for the big leagues.

Now, SocialBlade won’t let me see when his channel really began to take off - you need to pay to see that information, and, while I would love to know, I do not care enough to part with any of my hard-earned coin for this information, nor is it a serious enough endeavor to warrant that much effort. But I know that it had to be around the time of The Force Awakens release in 2015 - that’s when all these dudes began to strike gold.

It was also in 2012 that Jordan published the first in a series of nine novels about a man named Ryan Drake called… the Ryan Drake series. Not the most creative name, but at least it’s apropos, I suppose.

With exhilarating titles such as Shadow Conflict, Betrayal, and Downfall, you can see that Mister Jordan is applies equal zest and originality when it comes to his novel’s titles. I mean, how many books are out there titled Downfall?

This is just what I found on Wikipedia. Search Downfall on Amazon and you’ll get even more results.

Oh.

The most complex title in the entire series is this one:

I speak in jest. Mostly. The Ryan Drake novels are, according to the Amazon page for the books, spy novels in the same vein as series like the Jack Reacher series or the Jack Ryan series, which are, of course, about men named Jack Reacher and Jack Ryan, respectively, so, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's just following genre convention. Both of those series are also comprised of novels with creatively-bereft names such as The Enemy and, uh…

Huh.

Well, aside from Tom Clancy's contributions, which seem to be the defining pillars of the genre, I don't think Mister Jordan was fishing for inspiration in particularly deep waters to begin with. In the interest of fairness, I can't definitively say anything about the quality of Mister Jordan's novels. If I can't be bothered to buy a SocialBlade Silver Account to sate my curiosity about his subscriber numbers, I am most definitely not spending money on a full-length novel I am only mildly curious about and, more importantly, investing the time into reading it when I barely have the time to read novels I actually want to read. I did, however, download samples from his various novels to get a taste for what Jordan was capable of when he put pen to paper.

When I began to read, I realized after the fact that I had opened a sample from the most recent Ryan Drake novel and not the first. This is fine, since he could have improved in his abilities as a writer after nine books (as one should hope he would), but, um…

Let's just say I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Something about the CIA framing Ryan Drake, who’s a British national who works (worked?) for them at some point. He’s on the run for… reasons. From a mysterious agency. Called The Agency.

You could replace the name Ryan Drake with Jack Ryan, Jack Reacher, or Jason Borne, and you wouldn’t really know which series you’re reading.

Since I’m not a Drakehead, or really a fan of any of these series, I judged Mister Jordan’s writing more on his prose than the thematic content since I'm not plodding through nine full-length Ryan Drake novels to know what's happening when I still need to get through Wicked for that article I’ve been working on.

And the prose is… fine. It's not going to win any awards, but… yeah, it's fine. The vocabulary, the syntax, the structure, the descriptions, and the dialogue, is pretty simple and standard. It’s what I’d consider to be journeyman quality - perfectly acceptable, nothing’s really wrong with it, but nothing stands out, either. You could have told me it was written by a particularly sharp high-schooler and I’d believe it. That’s not the insult it might sound like, given that there are published authors with much bigger names that have sold more copies of a single novel than all of the Ryan Drake stories combined who can’t even write at that level.

There's nothing particularly difficult or challenging about the writing.

And, don't misunderstand me - that isn't inherently a bad thing. Being a bit plain does not equate to poor quality. I like my occasional dollop of corny slop. There’s a time and place for an airport dime novel. Like an airport. Or on the john, for some light reading when you run out of toilet paper after dropping a generational brown and have to wait for someone to come home to bring you more.

But, to be perfectly honest, this Ryan Drake stuff just isn't my thing. Spy thrillers have never been my jam, and there wasn’t anything unique that jumped out to convince me I need more Ryan Drake in my life. I can only assume if you're a fan of stories about spies named Jack or Ryan who shoot people and run from nondescript shadowy government organizations, these books are probably going to serve you well.

The reviews are glowing, but for obvious reasons, when it comes to YouTubers like Jordan who have zealous fans, I think it's best to take them lightly.

I want to say this is hyperbolic satire but at this point Poe’s Law is so dead and putrefied even vultures wouldn’t touch it.

This all being said, there's obviously an audience out there for this type of story, and I doubt Mister Jordan would have made it nine books in if his novels didn't scratch the itch those people wanted it to.

I'll probably never know if I could pick out a Ryan Drake adventure from a Jack Reacher escapade if the names were removed, but I will say this - originality is not the be all, end all of a story. There's some truth to the saying, Nothing's New Under the Sun. Sometimes, it’s not about doing something different so much as doing it well. Even though it isn't my cup of tea, a potboiler spy thriller with no frills and no overt political posturing might be more of what the world needs. Simple, easy, fun - honestly, Disney could take a note or two from that.

But - but - when you've built an entire career on riffing on Hollywood for being unoriginal like Mister Jordan has… well, let's just say I think you should endeavor to create titles that are longer than one or two words, and pen prose that’s got less flavor than a saltine cracker.

But, Mister Jordan can write what he pleases, and, to give credit where it's due, it's an accomplishment to publish one book, let alone nine. I sincerely mean it when I say, good for him. He has my genuine respect for his merits as both an author and an artist.

But Jordan wasn’t satisfied with just being an author. Like any spy thriller worth its salt, and their coarse, gritty protagonists played by Harrison Ford and John Krasinski, the Ryan Drake experience could not be limited to the written word.

In 2022, Jordan was approached by a Canadian filmmaker named Travis Grant who wanted to bring Ryan Drake to the silver screen. Jordan, who professes to have harbored a desire to see his Drake novels translated to film, accept the offer.

Grant would serve as the director, with Jordan penning the script and a pair of producers named Carson Manning and Max White. While both have a long history working in showbiz, Manning in particular is a well-known and well-accredited stuntman and stunts coordinator. Jordan flashed this graphic of films the two had worked on to show their bonafides.

Not every film (or game) above is a winner, but it’s still a solid resume.

The film was pitched as an old-school spy thriller that were, naturally, in the same vein as Ford’s Jack Ryan movies; a back-to-basics, no-frills, and, as a bone to his core audience, a decidedly not-woke action movie that them there Hollyweird folks just don’t make no more.

Jordan fired up a well-made Kickstarter campaign that very clearly laid out a plan, the team, the resources at their disposal, and what to expect from the final product, as well as the perfunctory rewards backers would receive from donating their precious cash to the project. Funding soared past the original goal of £20,000 up to an impressive sum of £303,000.

While enthusiasm from Jordan’s fan base was high, onlookers from outside the Drinkerverse were, as one might expect them to be, skeptical. Jordan’s detractors - of which he has many - were eagerly awaiting to see whether or not he could back up almost a decade’s worth of shit-talking with a quality film of his own. There were a lot of people hoping this project would fail, and miserably. It was to be expected; While I can’t say that Jordan is an avowed right-winger, his sympathies clearly lie somewhere near the center-right side of the political divide, and when you build a whole platform for yourself on slaughtering the sacred cows of the Progressive Left and actively pissing on everything they hold dear, one shouldn’t be surprised when they take a vested interest in seeing you fail.

It appears as if the original anticipated release of September 2023 came and went. This isn’t particularly uncommon when it comes to Kickstarter-funded projects, both professional or amateur, but Jordan’s enemies were quick to cry foul, even if his own fans were more lenient. Even their patience would begin to run thin as 2024 passed. To be fair, Jordan never reneged on the rewards he promised backers, nor did he just go radio silent while development on the film ground on, but behind-the-scenes sneak-peeks and cast and crew interviews would only satiate an audience with a monetary investment in the project for so long.

Near the end of 2023, Jordan did drop a trailer for the project. Even his own supporters and those sympathetic to him and his e-buddies in the rage-baitverse were not overly impressed. The general consensus seems to be that most thought it looked overly generic or, even worse - mid.

The saddest words of tongue or pen, are always this - it was mid.

I saw the term cringe come up more than once, too.

However, Jordan and his team did ultimately succeed in finishing the project. In October of 2024, Rogue Elements: A Ryan Drake Story, would make it’s debut, accessible only to those who backed the film.

A month later, Jordan would release the entirety of the 45-minute film to YouTube for everyone to see, free of charge.

Turns out that the predictions that it would be simply mid were woefully incorrect.

I don’t have the time to give a full review, but I’m being generous when I say it’s not good. I’d hesitate to call it competent. There’s no real plot - it’s just a guy who can’t decide on an accent who looks less like a bad-ass spy and more like a car insurance salesman gunning down faceless mooks who are too dumb to take cover with a gun that has a magic endless magazine of insta-kill ammo. Every piece of dialogue is a trite cliche so stale that you could stop one of Ryan Drake’s endless supply of bullet’s with one. It’s not shot well. It’s not even lit well. Most puzzling of all is that, for a guy who made his name bitching about the bad-ass girl-boss archetype, Jordan saw fit to include on in his own film.

It’s difficult to be objective in measuring just how well received Jordan’s Ryan Drake novels really are. Whether you check on Amazon or GoodReads or any other platform, none of the installments in the series have below a rating of 4.5 stars⁵. As I mentioned earlier, Jordan’s fanbase is both large and enthusiastic. While not every one of the over 3,000 reviews on the first Ryan Drake novel’s Amazon page is glowing, and the overwhelming amount of them fall into the four or five star range, it must be taken into account that there is going to be a non-insignificant amount of reviewers who bought and loved the book only because it was written by Will Jordan. The inverse could be said the same - given how bitterly those on the opposite site of the partisan split feel about Jordan, it only makes sense that there is, again, a non-negligible amount of bad reviews that were posted because Will Jordan’s name was on the cover.

I already gave my estimation of Jordan’s writings above and I don’t need to reiterate them here. But, for the same reasons I felt compelled to read samples of his books rather than rely on reviews to form an opinion, I feared that I’d have to parse starkly conflicting reviews from diametrically opposed ideologues to try and suss out a general consensus of how the Rogue Elements was received.

That fear proved to be unfounded. I think it’s safe to say that we won’t be seeing any more Ryan Drake stories brought to life any time soon, as if there’s anything that Jordan’s detractors and fans can agree on, it’s the fact that this Rogue Elements was hot trash.

Here’s a link to the movie on YouTube; go and take a look at the comments section.

I invite you to play a fun little drinking game with me and take a shot every time you find a positive comment. Usually, I’d do the opposite and suggest that you take a shot if there was a negative comment, but if you did that, you’d be dead from alcohol poisoning before you moved the scroll-wheel of your mouse one whole rotation.

My favorite comment was in regards to the fact that the film was amended to be a proof of concept for a potential Ryan Drake television program.

Thank you, mildlyobesegot7262.

But the main refrain you’ll see in most of the comments is something along this line:

The question that everyone seems to be asking is, How did this happen? I hope I’ve made it clear that, despite my own reservations about Jordan’s writing and my apathy to the genre he dabbles in, I don’t think he’s a dummy. He’s long demonstrated a working knowledge of what makes for a good film and what doesn’t. He made a career doing just that.

But this is a catastrophic misfire on every level. Any passion Jordan has for the Ryan Drake series - which I do believe he has - does not bleed through. It feels like the very same miserably cynical corporate slop being churned out by Netflix and Amazon Studios, only lacking in the bare bones technical competency that (most) of those projects demonstrate.

One likely possibility - and this is what the few defenders of Rogue Elements, or just those willing to extend Jordan the benefit of the doubt, are drawn to - is that Jordan is not solely responsible for the film’s failures. He likely isn’t. Film is inherently a collaborative medium. Prior to Rogue Elements, the only films in Travis Grant’s filmography are very low budget, decidedly not action-genre affairs; a Clancy-esque spy thriller with lots of gun-play and kinetic energy was, I assume, far beyond the scope of his capabilities. Carson Manning and Max White have demonstrably more experience with the action genre, but they are, first and foremost, stuntmen - not storytellers. This is to say nothing of the fact that they were working with extremely limited resources and money; compared to the type of Hollywood blockbusters they’re accustomed to working with, they were operating on a budget of spare change, pocket lint, and a few Chuck E. Cheese game tokens.

While this is no doubt partially a factor in Rogue Element’s failure, I think there’s yet more to the equation. Friend of the publication, the inimitable

Librarian of Celaeno

, said the following.

The problem he has, one that a great critic like Poe would never have had to worry about, is that while he gets what’s off with modern storytelling, he’s unfamiliar with any other kind. He’s never shown any evidence of being deeply grounded in his own culture, even when he’s aware that others are, as when he references Tolkien. Having no real background in myth or older literature or religion, the best he can do is to try to make a good version of the bad stuff he decries. He’s a bit like an amateur mortician who knows he could put better makeup on a corpse if given the chance.

The Librarian offered this insight in a Note he added to a restack of an article on Rogue Elements posted by

Alan Schmidt

. I won’t summarize or parrot his talking points here, since you should just read his article here once you finish up with this one, but suffice to say that he lays much of the blame on a sort of nostalgic cultural blindness - an inability to escape the current cultural paradigm of storytelling and tap into what makes art art. In this failing, Jordan is not alone. In fact, he’s in good company; most creators, as Schmidt deduces, whether they be amateur indie creators or professionals in the entertainment industry, are trapped in this current moment, repeating tropes of the past because it’s all that they know.

Simply put, many creatives are simply stuck in their own moment in time, and capable only of making art that feels of the current moment. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this current cultural moment and everything that defines has long passed its sell-by date. The Marvel-esque quippy one-liners, a slavish dedication to snark and sarcasm, the obsession with subverting expectations, and a near pathological need to shoe-horn modern day politics into every story, regardless of the time, setting, or even planet - these are all familiar hallmarks of the very mediocre era of the 2010’s that have aged like milk left in the July sun. Even before the end of the decade, audience’s appetites for this type of content was running thing, yet it seems as if creatives are unable to produce anything else.

Do you remember being in English and hearing the constant refrain from your peers, Why do we have to read all these dumb old books written by dead people?

Well, the American public education system is woefully ill-equipped, by and large, to impress upon students the answer to this question, but, simply put, it’s this - cultural literacy matters. To make a great story, you need to read great stories. And you need to know why they’re great. Otherwise, you won’t be standing on the shoulders of giants; you’ll simply be one of a dozen small pissants standing on a mound of dung collected by the current crop of intellectual and creative invalids in Big Entertainment. As I always say, it’s trash in, trash out. If all you watch is modern slop, and you will make is modern slop. So you need to diversify your media intake.

It’s kind of like forcing yourself to pass up a satisfying but ultimately unhealthy double-stack slathered in cheese and dripping with grease for a banana. The classics are classics for a reason, even if you may not understand it at the time. In high school, I loathed Dickens. I thought that A Tale of Two Cities was the literary equivalent of a fossilized dinosaur dropping - an antiquated relic of the Victorian age that had no bearing on the modern world. But, looking back, reading it was probably the best thing I could have ever done. The same could be said of Joyce, Hawthorne, de Tocqueville, Homer, and pretty much any of those crusty old fogies that were foisted upon in at the age of fourteen when we were wholly ill-equipped to comprehend what made them staples of literature for hundreds of years.

Again, a lack of education or even the base-line knowledge of the vaunted classics of any media, literature, cinema, or otherwise, is part of this, but Schmidt also - again correctly - raises the specter of industrialized entertainment. Here’s a quote from his piece.

One is the hyper-commodification of art, more or less content for content's sake that demands familiarity before innovation. In the case of the action thriller, it is more interested in the plot taking the expected steps than world-building or creating a unique perspective.

If you take all of these factors together, you have a recipe for disaster; a creative mired down by the very tropes and cultural baggage he rails so vociferously against, and a product that was made to tick off all the trappings of a genre that’s really one-note to begin with.

To make it abundantly clear; both the Librarian and Schmidt are absolutely correct in their assessments. But there’s one other critical factor at play here. The title of Schmidt’s article is literally Art Is Hard.

And he’s right - art is hard. Especially the art of cinema. In the days of yore, when I was still learning to fish ants out of their nests with spit-covered sticks, I aspired to be a filmmaker. What kid doesn’t? I made little amateur films with my friends; humble films shot on cheap cameras that we still go back and revisit regularly, warmly reminiscing on the days of yore, our horrible acting, and basically the cringe-inducing sincerity of it all. But my friends and I - we were convinced we were going to make a career of it. We were going to be a new generation of Lucases, Kubricks, De Palmas, and Peckinpahs. My mother, who, bless her soul, always supported by pipe-dreams as best she could, bought me a copy of Filmmaking for Dummies to foster my nascent dreams.

I read it. I read it cover to cover. And by the end -

Gaffing? Sound production? Grips? Fuckin’ craft services? You’re telling me I don’t just need some fucker to set up the lights (because it turns out cameras really need very specific lighting to work properly) but also that I gotta feed the dickhead, too?

I abandoned those aspirations mighty quick because that book taught me that, yes - filmmaking is hard. Very hard, even. And expensive, to boot. And, well… say what you want about me quitting so easily, but, in the immortal words of Bobby Hill -

I should have stuck with it, though. I could have saved Star Wars. I could have been a contender.

I’m not going to claim that Jordan knows nothing about the extensive and esoteric nitty-gritty technicalities that go into making a film. I know that the people around him certainly had to. But I have a feeling that, by the time the beleaguered and extended shooting of Rogue Elements wrapped, they all had graduate degrees from the University of Hard Knocks’ Film School. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that Jordan found out very quickly just how hard it is to make a film of even passable quality - especially on a shoe-string budget. Given the director’s resume, I imagine he discovered that an action-heavy spy thriller was much more intensive to direct than a short drama film.

Whatever the case may be, the end result is the same - Jordan’s inaugural effort into the world of cinema, and Ryan Drake’s, was an abject failure. As mentioned above, his detractors have wasted no time dog-piling on him, using the film’s abjectly poor quality as a cudgel to beat him down, shouting, Look at you! Look at you! You criticize movies for a living, but you can’t make a good one yourself!

And, to be fair, that’s criticism he probably needs to hear, if only so he stops, thinks, and considers very hard the next offer he gets from a random Canadian filmmaker that extends him the offer of translating future novels to a visual medium. If such an opportunity arises.

Which I hope it does.

I hope I’ve made it clear that, for as much as I’ve clowned on him, I don’t hate Jordan as a man. His creative chops are… questionable, but he doesn’t seem like a bad guy. And, as I also said, the fact he’s published nine novels and a movie - even if it’s bad - well, that’s more movies than any of us are gonna put out.

For now.

NEON DREAMS - coming this summer.

Art is hard. Like watching Angus Young shred for forty-five minutes straight in a solo, or watching Cale Brown do the exact same dance five times in different positions in different outfits near perfectly -

It always looks easy to the outsider. And it’s easy to critique an amateur who preforms poorly. But, when it comes to art, I think it’s important to remember that the fact that the artist in question, regardless of whether or not their project was good, still did it. The act of doing, greatly, poorly, tepidly, it doesn’t matter - there’s merit to the fact they simply did.

For years, Jordan was demanded by detractors to prove that he could better. He tried. He failed. But he still tried.

When I think of Will Jordan, when I think of Rogue Element’s failure, I think of quote by the late, great Bullmoose, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1910, before an audience in the vaunted Sorbonne⁶, Roosevelt would give a speech titled Citizenship of the Republic. Though most of the speech has fallen into obscurity, one stirring passage has lived on - The Man in the Arena. Naval recruits are encouraged to memorize the passage before graduation. LeBron James has the name stitched into the shoes he wears on the court. Richard Nixon quoted it in both his victory and resignation speeches. It is, in my opinion, one of the greatest orations ever delivered by an American president. And it goes a little something like this -

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

In my opinion, despite his shortcomings, Will Jordan should be proud. For it is not the critic who counts, and his face is now marred by dust and sweat and blood.

Will Jordan. Doug Walker. Fuck, even Doomcock, with his dumbass skits… technically, they count. I suppose. All the amateur creators posting their passion projects on the internet, whether you hate them or love them - they did.

Well?

1. But I might if you join my Patreon!

2. Like most projects of a similar caliber, I believe that Rings of Power has a second season planned from the word go, but having the streaming numbers and ratings juiced by hate-watchers probably didn’t help.

3. Get it? DICK-tor van Doom-COCK! Are you laughing yet?

4. Honestly, I’ve always harbored a perverse desire to interview him, so, Mr. Doomcock, if you’re reading this… hit me up. Let’s do lunch. I know I’ve been rather uncharitable but I’d genuinely love to let you tell your side of the story.

5. What’s a guy gotta do to get that last .5 of a star, huh?

6. Also known as the University of Paris, which is the university in France.