A few weeks back, filmmaker Paul Schrader dropped his latest masterpiece—and no, I’m not talking about Oh, Canada, his feature adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel, Foregone. I’m referring to his Facebook post endorsing AI as an adequate replacement for most filmmakers:
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This arrives hot on the heels of Schrader’s previous provocation—his off-the-cuff, needlessly cruel review of Joker: Folie à Deux:
It’s a really bad musical. I don’t like either of those people. I don’t like them as actors. I don’t like them as characters. I don’t like the whole thing. I mean, those are people who, if they came to your house, you’d slip out the back door.
It has become a thing for him. Over the past few years, the chronicler of broken men and urban despair has been mastering the forme d’art of our broken, despairing times: trolling.
“Trolling” is primarily an online phenomenon, but its roots stretch deep into history. Socrates dragged the Athenians with his non-stop, annoying AF questions. Benjamin Franklin roasted the British Empire using pseudonyms (avatars) to kick off drama. With Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, painter Ilya Repin captured a gleeful group of Cossacks penning an obscene, mocking letter to the Ottoman Sultan like a 19th-century Russian troll farm. All this to say: the Edge Lord is nothing new.
What is new is the democratization—and monetization—of trolling. A booming global industry has sprung up, with keyboard armies in Albania flaming on behalf of Iranian militant groups, and Nigerian “PR firms” trolling in support of a Colombian businessman accused of money laundering. Many have decried trolling as criminal or, at best, a dangerous nuisance. Paul Schrader, on the other hand, has raised it to an artform.
After disapproving of Dune: Part Two last year, Schrader clapped back, “Will Dune 3 be made by AI? And, if it is, how will we know?” After the death of beloved producer Roger Corman, he flamed, “Roger was better at hyping his rep than at making good films or supporting good filmmakers.” Dunking on the dead, Paul? Really? Would Bresson approve?
Schrader’s not the only New Hollywood-era director cashing in on the meme economy. His old pal Marty Scorsese is sliding into his daughter’s TikToks. Francis Ford Coppola is reviewing his own movies on Letterboxd. Emboldened and fresh out of fucks to give, Schrader has even dabbled in trolling’s sibling artform: shitposting.
Where criticism interprets and contextualizes, trolling dismisses, and shitposting removes context entirely.
Shitposting—the sharing of absurd, low-effort, context-free content—has a more recent lineage. In early 20th-century Switzerland, cultural and economic stagnation, dehumanizing modernity, and the rise of nationalism triggered the Dada Movement, an avant-garde artist collective that championed nihilism and absurdity. “The beginnings of Dada,” Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara recalled, “were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.” Perhaps it’s no wonder that, in the time of algorithms, AI, and Hawk Tuah, a similarly nihilistic artform (or anti-artform, you might say) designed for “maximum impact with minimum effort” has hijacked our frazzled psyches.
As a film studies student at UCLA in 1972, Paul Schrader wrote Transcendental Style in Film, an analysis of the quiet, austere works of his cinematic heroes, Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. Grasping for a common thread, he homes in on the disunity between the filmmakers’ human subjects and their environments, or as Schrader puts it, the “growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality.”
Fifty-two years later, the surface of everyday reality is anything but dull; it is the core that has cracked. Where cinema struggles for relevance in the endless stream of noise, shitposting and trolling have broken through, for better or worse. And Schrader, whether by accident or design, has found prominence in these new dark arts. “I come out on the stage determined to make people weep. Instead, they burst out laughing,” Yukio Mishima growls in Schrader’s 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Does Schrader want us to laugh, or weep?
When asked about his edge-lordy antics, Schrader grumbled: “I still have the critical impulse. I used to be a critic. Occasionally, you need to scratch it.” Far be it for me to tell Paul Schrader where to scratch. But I do question whether trolling and shitposting are genuine forms of “criticism.” Where criticism interprets and contextualizes, trolling dismisses, and shitposting removes context entirely. Criticism holds artists to higher standards, while trolling and shitposting erodes standards. Criticism sparks dialogue and reflection; trolling and shitposting snuff them out.
It begs the question: are shitposting and trolling “artforms” we want to condone, as a society? Are they artforms at all? There’s been a feisty debate on Substack in recent months about the perceived “stagnation of culture” we’ve experienced since the rise of social media. Internet culture critic Katherine Dee contends that culture isn’t stagnating, it’s “evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate. The challenge lies not in reviving what’s dead, but in developing the language to understand what already exists.”
Art forms have come and gone over centuries, but even the most mindless entertainment has offered glimpses into how we might, or might not, relate to each other.
In other words, perhaps we should let go of artforms that have outlived their use, as we once did with epistolary literature, tableaux vivants, and vaudeville, in order to embrace new forms—TikTok dancers, influencers, and yes, shitposters. Meanwhile, critic and music historian Ted Gioia has been far less welcoming to these new “art” forms, especially as they seem poised to overshadow literature, music, and cinema. He writes, “Some suffer from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where they identify with the forces holding us hostage.”
It’s true that trolling is nothing new, and that Socrates, Franklin, and Repin indulged in it gleefully. But they also gave us western philosophy, American democracy, and Russian realism, just as Schrader gave us Taxi Driver, First Reformed, and a legacy of films rich with moral inquiry. What are today’s trolls and shitposters contributing? If they are set to replace fine art, literature, and cinema entirely, where will future generations look to think critically, coexist civically, and transcend?
Art forms have come and gone over centuries, but even the most mindless entertainment has offered glimpses into how we might, or might not, relate to each other. This tradition, which stretches back at least 30,000 years, is what trolling and shitpostering threatens to disrupt—not just movies or books, but the very roots of human understanding and growth.
Dadaism fizzled out by the mid-1920s, and it’s possible that shitposting will implode in a similar fashion. Let’s try to enjoy it while it’s here, I guess, along with Paul Schrader—the master filmmaker, and the master shitposter. In a cultural landscape as fractured and meaningless as this, it’s difficult to predict when the shitposter era might end, if at all. Whether we will slip out the back door faster than Paul Schrader at a Joker 2 screening, or stick around for the LOLs, remains to be seen.
