Over on his blog, Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny stirred up some of the most interesting conversation I’ve seen lately in a comments thread with this piece he wrote yesterday asserting that the culture of film blogging is, at least in part, responsible for this ridiculous deluge of Batman fanboys making death threats – death threats! – against certain film critics who dared to post less-than-positive reviews of The Dark Knight Rises. I got into a back-and-forth late last night on Twitter with Matt Seitz and Devin Faraci about the issue, but given that Twitter’s not the best forum for intelligent conversation, I thought I’d expand a little on all this in a space that allows more than 140 characters at a time.

I do agree with Glenn that the bloggers who target the fanboy market are, at least in part, responsible for sparking some of the flames that occasionally get fanned out of control in that realm. If you’re a film journalist or a film blogger (and the distinction between the two is all but disappearing these days) and you’re out there on Twitter getting into heated arguments that get blown all out of proportion and spiral into name calling and what have you – you know, the general kind of pissing contests that happen almost daily in this industry – you are creating a certain perception, a “brand,” if you will, of decorum, that I do think in turn encourages the kind of vitriolic fanboy reactions that have become so commonplace they’re becoming the new normal.

Film bloggers have helped to create this space where it’s not just about journalists and other industry folks talking about what we like or don’t about movies, but equally about what we like or don’t like about each other. And Christ, I hate that. That negativity we as a community put out there not only makes it okay for commenters to be just as hateful as they see us being, it encourages it. But that’s what we want, isn’t it? After all, those anger-fueled back-and-forths of commenters lobbing grenades of mean-spiritedness wrapped in snark at each other drives the comments up, and then readers see comments spiking on a particular post, so they click to see what the big deal is, and that’s a CLICK, hey! That creates traffic numbers that in turn can be sold to advertisers!

It doesn’t matter to your traffic counter if the 497 comments on a blog post have anything to do with the actual movie you started out talking about, or if it’s turned into some playground dick-swinging contest of clashing personalities. For fuck’s sake, guys, who cares about the personal battles and bullshit? Why can’t people just stay on topic, argue about trailers and box office and a given person’s subjective opinion about a film, without it having to turn into chest-thumping machismo nonsense? Except … that it’s those personal battles and bullshit that the commenters really love, it’s what they come back for, right? When comments on sites like The Hot Blog or Hollywood Elsewhere do stick to actual discussion about a relevant topic, people bitch about how boring it is. It’s much more entertaining to watch a train wreck in progress than to read an intellectual discussion about film. Traffic is traffic, those number are what sells the ads, so who cares what’s driving those numbers up? Until you post a negative review of a fanboy movie and the shit hits the fan, and the fanboys are coming after you with death threats. Over a fucking movie.

All of us who work in this space have, in one way or another, contributed to the problem of internet assholerly among commenters, even if we started out with the best of intentions, with the idea that it was cool to be able to engage in the kind of immediate conversations with our readers that print media could never allow, like every blog was its own office watercooler around which cool conversation could happen. The difference is that if we were standing around a real watercooler talking face-to-face, I think (or geez, I certainly hope) that most of us would be politer to each other, more respectful of the fact that we’re speaking with another human being. Kinder. I’d like to think things wouldn’t deteriorate from “Man, those box office numbers for Big Tentpole Movie are gonna tank after the first weekend!” to “You’re the stupidest cunt on the entire planet” to “go fuck yourself” in the spate of 30 seconds. It’s exhausting, it’s dehumanizing. This aspect of the internet sucks.

Thing is, the problem isn’t just film bloggers, and it isn’t just fanboys, it’s this culture of internet anonymity that allows people to think it’s okay to spew hatred and negativity without the restraint that face-to-face social interaction forces us to uphold. Even when we’re posting under our own names, when we’re talking over Twitter or Facebook or in blog post comments there’s this illusion that the words we say don’t matter. Not really. That it’s okay to bully, to target people for personal attack, to make accusations, to name call. And apparently, even to make death threats.

I stopped writing for parenting sites years ago because the hormone-fueled rages of women attacking each other over parenting choices, and the need to police comments when the personal attacks got out of hand, was just awful and soul-sucking to deal with. In many ways, the fanboys and the generally vitriolic movie blog commenters have nothing on defensive, angry mommies when it comes to sheer viciousness. But take a stroll around the internet, folks. Go on any news site, pick a random story, and scroll down to the comments; the things people say to each other, and about the person the story is about, make me cringe. Lindy West regularly gets shockingly misogynistic comments on her posts on Jezebel from men attacking her for the way she looks, or just because she’s a woman and who the hell told people with vaginas they were allowed to have opinions? And the political blogs, criminy. Even on sites you would think would be completely innocuous, you see the ugly come out. The other day I happened on a blog site for a neighborhood in my town, and saw a discussion that started with someone very nicely asking folks to please take down garage sale signs once their sale is over deteriorate rapidly into insults and personal attacks. Cyberbullying among school kids has become so common we speak of it as something that’s just to be expected, not something to be abhorred. But our kids get it, at least in part, from what we adults put out there, and what we choose to tolerate as acceptable behavior, do they not?

I don’t have any answers for how to fix the way our technology has corrupted our sense of decency in interacting with each other. Hell, I’m not even sure there are any answers, other than to just attempt, as much as possible, not to allow arguments about things like movies or parenting techniques or garage sale signs to deteriorate into full-blown wars, to ignore (or even delete) non-germane comments that veer into personal attacks, and to generally just try to be as positive and kind and compassionate to each other as we’d probably all like everyone to be to us. It’s mid-July, and the battles of the Oscar film bloggers will soon be upon us. Post-Toronto, we’ll be past the summer tentpoles and the fanboy Dark Knight orgasms and death threats, and the opinions on what’s awesome and what’s not for this awards season will really kick into high gear. Passions will run high as we advocate for or against this film or that one. We can all agree that making death threats over a movie isn’t a nice thing to do. Can we maybe also agree to keep our discussions this awards season civil and relevant to the films, and not personal? To try to see the other person we’re engaging with as more than just target practice for our quick-witted barbing? To just agree to follow Wil Wheaton’s catchphrase: Don’t be a dick?

Yeah, probably not. But it’s worth hoping for.

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