Back in 2000, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane managed to exuberantly praise Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon while simultaneously insulting the entirety of Asian cinema and, for that matter, the very concept of half-way knowledgeable film criticism. Aside from this completely innocuous, possibly scrubbed, capsule review, there is no trace of it online.

Fortunately, we have Godfrey Cheshire’s thorough 2000 take-down of the piece in particular and Lane in general to keep that memory alive. I don’t necessarily agree with every single word — just 99% of them, including this entirely apt description of Lane:

…he’s not really a film critic but a quip-minded belletrist who happened into a lucrative gig and appears to have no inclination, now, to patch up the gaping holes in his knowledge of film. (Why learn anything about a subject that’s only there to be the object of one’s witticisms?)

Now, Lane’s back at it again, this time in the course of a pan, rather than a rave — not that it matters. In a terrifyingly snide and proudly ignorant review, he expresses this highly original thought:

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.

Thoughtful and reliably sensible liberal blogger Steve Benen of Washington Monthly, however, reports the following retort from The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer who, like me, is not interested in defending a film he hasn’t seen, but is interested in combating ill-informed idiocy against an entire medium and all of its consumers:

Not to question what is, I am certain, the vibrant and thrilling sex lives of film critics, but I’m not so sure that “film critic” is much higher than “comic book geek” on the social spectrum.

I’ve been both, and I’m here to tell you…yup. That’s about the size of it. He goes on to make this point…

Comic book nerds can count Barack Obama, Rachel Maddow and Patrick Leahy among us…. Whatever Lane’s opinions of Watchmen’s source material, comic books are the closest thing Americans have to folktales, and their content is about as close as a reflection of American cultural identity, for good or for ill, as we have. You’d think that for that reason alone, the material and its consumers would be worth at least a minimum of respect.

You’d think.

And as per Steve Benen:

As it happens, right around the time Adam was posting his defense of comic-book readers everywhere, Matt Yglesias (comic-book reader) referenced a remark by Ana Marie Cox (another comic-book reader) about Watchmen and contemporary politics, which Matt then expanded on to make a point about Cold War policy towards Russia.

Now, it strikes me that both Maddow and Cox are kind of in the business of “requesting intelligent conversation” and do, indeed, more than qualify as being members of the tribe we call “woman.”

Anyone care to ask them if they feel afraid of meeting themselves?