May I have a word with you?

Dear Robert Christgau,

I have been out of the loop for a few days, so I am sorry to not have responded sooner to your excoriation of Greg Whiteley's New York Doll before now. I am especially embarrassed to leap to the poor guy's defense only a day after publishing my own positive review of his film; I would hate to come across as a half-assed NYD apologist or, far worse, some quasi-intellectual Pangloss dangerously out of my depth. Nevertheless, like so much of your work, "Paint a Vulgar Picture: Clueless documentarian charts transformation of former Dolls bassist to Latter-Day Saint" wields the types of acute laxative properties that demand immediate attention.

Now, as one of the 50-year-old Village Voice's way-top-senior-level pricks, you have likely seen and forgotten more films and bands than I will ever comprehend. I give you that much. And seeing as the New York Dolls are evidently among the contemporaries in your hyperbaric chamber's easy-listening mix, I can definitely understand you wanting to have them represented both authentically and accurately in Whiteley's film. Because I was not around in the old days of Johansen and Co. tearing shit up in the back of a bike store, I had little choice but to view the admittedly soft New York Doll in the context of the actual story at hand--that of Arthur Kane, a forgotten, otherwise anonymous "schlub on a bus" who found God (as a Mormon, natch, which really is more ironic than didactic, but I will get to that) and literally prays for his legendary, fractious band to reunite.

I mean, I am pretty sure that is the way Whiteley saw it; at least that is the impression I got after picking up the phone and asking him. I presume you could have done something similar if you took such grave offense at his film's inferior treatment of the New York Dolls' legacy; in fact, I know he would have been more than happy to discuss your grievances. (To be honest, he probably would have wanted to interview you.) Alas, this close to Halloween, your snarly critical watchdog outfit needed stretching, and so you took the easy way out:

Towering mute and motionless in his platforms and tutus, clueless and awestruck and scary and lovable and proud, [Kane] completed the chemistry of a great band. But despite helpful interviews from an honor roll of old new wavers—Iggy, Chrissie, Mick (Jones), Sir Bob—who attended Morrissey's Meltdown Festival, Whiteley is too clueless himself to do more than surround any of this, and barely hints at Kane's pre-Dolls youth. Instead he mixes some Punk 101 into the story of a failed rock-and-roll hero whose life was saved by Joseph Smith.

Ah, yes, that old "old new waver" Joseph Smith. You were getting at something here, weren't you? And here:

For someone who knows the Dolls' history, it's easy to imagine Kane both intimidated by and infatuated with the effortlessly charismatic David Johansen, who took over the band Kane had named in 1971 and dominated them till they disintegrated circa 1976—and thus to understand both his paranoid resentment of Johansen's post-Dolls stardom (which never exceeded cultdom) and his relief that Johansen loves him as warmly and sarcastically as ever (which no one else would have doubted). But that doesn't mean it'll get through to the average Punk 101 student. In the end, this is less a film about a rock and roller than a film about a Mormon.

Right. Those Mormons, always fucking with our punk iconography, rewriting our pop-culture conventions and now blinding us to the secular truths about a guy whose entire life function became working at a Mormon institution and pining for his glory days--portrayed however apocryphally by a filmmaker who only knew Kane in the first place because they shared a religion. This is a huge problem.

But do you know what is a bigger problem, Bob? When hypocritical, self-described "cultural pluralists" like you dismiss work like Whiteley's on completely disingenuous bases. For example, I am fairly certain you are not alone in your assessment that "Surely there have been filmmakers who knew less about music going into their first music documentary than Greg Whiteley, but none springs to mind." Of course you will not be the first or last name-dropping insider to say that Whiteley is too "clueless" to portray "Kane's fame [as] only an intimation of the stardom he never got near. Or that Kane was easily the least talented of the Dolls." If it were as simple as that, I would just agree to disagree, shrug it off like everything else you write and move on to the ever-shrinking quota of Voice critics I actually enjoy reading.

However, it is not as simple as that. Going into New York Doll, you wanted to hate its message. Then, when it did not have that message--when its most emphatic invocation of Mormonism was a joke about Kane's Joseph Smith-inspired stage get-up, and when Whiteley implied Kane's inflated self-image by featuring two elderly Mormon women as his sheepish "groupies"--you had to contrive one, lest some stupid Latter-Day Saint hijack any part of your special band's legacy. And in the end, winding down a review you probably had written before ever setting foot in the theater, you humiliated yourself and your publication with an even deeper ambiguity that defies your readers to determine which Mormon is worse--Kane or Whiteley? Come on, Bob--the "Dean of American Rock Critics" would not do that accidentally, would he?

At every level, Whiteley's film is absolutely about a rock and roller. The New York Dolls were the only constant in Arthur Kane's adult life, and the dream of a Dolls reunion, however quixotic, was the only dream he nurtured for thirty years (or at least the only dream he admits to; I am sorry that viewers under the age of 50 cannot afford to be as ruthlessly, selectively skeptical as you are). But the brilliance of New York Doll is not in its "fortunate" serendipity; rather, it is in crystallizing the complex relationship between Kane's dreams and his faith. And it is what it is: He spent four years as a Doll and 15 as a Mormon. All his friends are Mormons. He commutes two hours round-trip on a public bus to work for the Mormon church. And no matter how desperately you want to hyperbolize rock's defeat at Mormonism's hands, even "old new waver" Chrissie Hynde acknowledges that for Kane, there had to be "room for both."

So in light of how New York Doll ends, how could someone even as misguided as you possibly think an accurate telling of Kane's story could (or should) downplay his faith? I mean, I could not give half a shit about God, and by your own telling, you are an "atheist who grew up in a born-again church in Queens." So with at least some rationality in common, I have to wonder how you can summon such a vicious dismissal of something as unthreatening as Mormonism in the context of an independent film review. If it is dogma you are worried about, then there are far more influential Christian targets at which you might consider taking aim.

However, you do not seem to be too concerned with that; I think it is fairly obvious that you are just after the easy target. "Napoleon Dynamite it ain't," you write--as if that is a BAD thing, as if an unfavorable vulnerability-to-kitsch ratio invalidates a Mormon's secular journey. That's great, Bob. And when Kane's journey invades this alternately phony, gilded, carefully maintained critical membrane of yours, then hey--piss hot, piss far and show him whose austere aesthetic turf he is on.

Or was on, you fucking asshole.

Sincerely,

S.T. VanAirsdale