A feast, especially an elaborate, outdoor one, or to show honor with a feast. Note that the word sounds identical to fate, which means that you might meet your fate at a fete which you threw to fete someone else. We will not fete the person who let these pronunciations get so close to each other.
ChampagneCheersThe AvengersFake sipsCheersTo The Dissolve
The Dissolve (2013)
★★★★★ Essential Viewing
2 YR / RUN TIME
Comedy, Drama, Documentary, Cinema Verite / GENRES
Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, Tasha Robinson, Genevieve Koski, Matt Singer, Nathan Rabin, Rachel Handler, Matt D’Angelo, Noel Murray, Sam Adams, Kate Erbland / CAST
Three days short of its second birthday, The Dissolve blew out the candles on its cake and shuttered its doors. Like many great cult things, it immediately became more known than it had been during its existence, rising to fourth place in Twitter’s trending topics list and seeing its homepage traffic spike dramatically. Instead of being greeted by staff writer Charles Bromesco’s review of “Boulevard,” visitors saw a post by The Dissolve Editor-in-Chief Keith Phipps simply titled, “The End.”
Phipps’ second sentence said it all: “Sadly, because of the various challenges inherent in launching a freestanding website in a crowded publishing environment, financial and otherwise, today is the last day we will be doing that.”
Losing The Dissolve hurts because of what it was and stood for. The Dissolve was perhaps the only site on the internet that tried to cover literally all of cinema with no studio-fed promo image posts, no clickbait lists, few and discreetly integrated ads, cheeky snark, and intelligent, insightful reviews and features. They covered mainstream movies, documentaries, animation, festivals, OLD MOVIES, and many, many things. Most sites review a couple of the new wide releases each week; The Dissolve reviewed seven to ten movies throughout the week. One of them would get a trilogy of thoughtful articles, analyzing the film—how it was made, how well done it was, what it meant about the filmmaker, what the themes are, how the themes have occurred in other similar and later work, and much more.
It was a site that, like the best teachers, show you how to think, not what to think. Dissolve writers expertly teased out themes of movies and drew connections that might not have been visible at first, all without an air of privileged elitism. To the surprise of no one, these articles are the ones we remember. Of the many, many thinkpieces about Mad Max: Fury Road, the one that has stuck with me is Genevieve Valentine’s examination of the feminine desert (as opposed to the masculine wasteland). Kate Erbland expertly used Avengers: Age of Ultron and Man of Steel to illuminate each other and examine what makes a superhero worth rooting for or caring about. Tasha Robinson took the idea of the strong female character, especially as it has been written in recent films, and examined whether the characters actually were strong or just gave the appearance of strength. This is heady stuff, and The Dissolve churned it out at a stunningly consistent rate.
This isn’t to say that they lacked for humor, though. Scott Tobias opened his review of Birdman with this zinger: “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Matt Singer’s review of Transformers: Age of Extinction is positively hilarious. And The Dissolve’s podcast always brought the laughs along with the thinking.
The loss of The Dissolve is huge for a couple reasons. For one, the best film site on the internet just went dark. No, they weren’t the only game in town. I’ll still get my reviews from Drew McWeeney at HitFix (a site that is increasingly pandering to the mainstream, to the detriment of its quality and talent roster), Film Crit Hulk at Birth.Movies.Death., and Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com. But none of them fill the void left by The Dissolve. McWeeney is refreshingly unpretentious but he isn’t as thoughtful as Dissolvers were. Professor Hulkster is not a reviewer but a critic, best when deconstructing themes and sifting through semiotics and metaphors (whenever he does post his articles). And MZS isn’t the only reviewer at RogerEbert.com; there’s a decent team but not close to the consistent quality of The Dissolve.
It’s telling that two of these people were among the legions of people expressing sadness over the end of The Dissolve. MZS wrote a terrific eulogy for the site at RogerEbert.com (seriously, when have you heard of a competing site bemoaning the loss of a competitor?) that included this prescient point:
Anybody who's tried to make a go at supporting themselves through writing or editing or other journalism-related work—criticism especially—without a side gig that's actually the "real" job, or partner or parent who pays most of the bills, can read between the lines. Staring at a blank page every day, or several times a day, and trying to fill it with words you're proud of, on deadline, with few or no mistakes, and hopefully some wit and insight and humor, is hard enough when it's the only thing you do. The days when it was the only thing writers did seem to recede a bit more by the week. It's even harder to make a go at criticism in today's digital media era, now that audiences expect creative work (music, movies and TV as well as critical writing) to be free, and advertisers still tend to equate page views with success. These factors and others guarantee that writer and editor pay will continue to hover a step or two above "exposure," and that even the most widely read outlets won't pay all that much. Most veteran freelancers will tell you that they earn half to a quarter of what they made in the 1990s, when newspapers and magazines were king. I make the same money now, not adjusted for inflation, with two journalism jobs and various freelancing gigs as I made in 1995 with one staff writing job at a daily newspaper.
That's all a long way of saying that it's a miracle that The Dissolve was able to publish so much memorable writing in such a short time span, on such a wide array of subjects, with the world allied against it, save for the people who enjoyed it and looked forward to each new post.
This is the other reason why The Dissolve going dark matters. The Dissolve *had* a following. It wasn’t a small cult site; it was backed by Pitchfork Media. The staffers were largely people that had started at the A.V. Club (which itself has taken a turn not for the better and bled talent) and thus had a built-in fanbase. They designed a solid website and cranked out new features consistently. And they still went down.
The Dissolve team wants to keep working and reviewing films together, and I really hope that happens. I’d love to say that any website should hire them and let them do what they do so well but they just had that freedom and the site went dark after two years. The chances of something like this succeeding are small, now demonstrably so. We don’t have to speculate about whether or not a site that aims for quality can exist. It cannot. The market has spoken, sadly. As MZS ended his article, “This is terrible news. Just terrible.”
But enough being a downer. We come to bury The Dissolve but also to honor it/them. There is much to honor. I suggest you start with “Essential” to see the best films that have been reviewed in the last two years. Next, I suggest Tony Zhou’s Storify links to his favorite articles from the site. Continue with more of the Exposition articles (take your time; they’re all worth ruminating over) and the other features on the site. Movie of the Week is the most popular but other favorites include One Year Later and Nathan Rabin vs. the IMDb Top 250. When you’re finished, keep tabs on The Dissolve team and follow them wherever they go. Read Matt Zoller Seitz, Film Crit Hulk, and Drew McWeeney too. Support them—and all the artistic types that are doing good, worthwhile work. They need it. (Heck, this site could use it.)
Most of all, though, follow the mantra of The Mid-Majority, another high-quality journalistic outfit that folded after a decade of sub-subsistence income: Go. Think. Remember. Those words never appeared in that order on The Dissolve’s electronic pages but they ran throughout the ethos of the site. That ethos will try to live on in the hearts of its fans, old and new. Can it endure? I certainly hope so, but we’ll have to wait for the “One Year Later” evaluation to come out…maybe even a “Forgotbusters” entry in a few years.
Best of luck, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks for a terrific two years, the memories from those years, and the tools to enjoy the next twenty.
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