The Elusive Mr. Manning
by Eriq Garner

As word filtered through the grapevine this month that a Sony marketing executive had taken it upon himself to invent the pseudonym "David Manning" (based on the name of a friend), the newspaper The Ridgefield Press (based on the name of a small newspaper in Connecticut) and a few choice blurbs ("This Year's Hottest New Star" and "Another Winner!" based on Joel Siegel's critical eye), many industry critics labeled this latest gambit of public relations chutzpah as one more piece of evidence that something is askew in Hollywood.

Sony has penalized two employees with a month's suspension without pay. Whether or not they are the guiltiest parties is highly suspect, though one was only in his position for the last two Manning-quoted movies, and not the first two. But what many folks neglected to mention was that "Manning" was also tapping into a critically neglected form of literature, which, considering its territory and lineage, is quite an ironic thing. This genre? The "inauthentic review."

The "inauthentic review" has three subgenres — marketing, art, and prank; though which of the three Sony's maligned genius had in mind is up for debate. Because Sony isn't releasing the executive's name, and no one in the press has talked with this person, their intentions remain a mystery.

Most everyone believes that "Mr. Manning's" purpose was to hype the two Sony films, A Knight's Tale and The Animal, which were the object of said praise, evidenced by "Mr. Manning's" paycheck. Considering this, we all assume that the Sony employee was maybe taking their job just a wee bit too seriously.

But doesn't anyone find it odd that in this culture of readily available blurb whores and the universal miscontextualized quotation that the Sony Marketeer would have to resort to these means? And isn't it strange that this person, who probably sorts through more film criticism than even the most ardent cinephile, could not come up with anything more ebullient to say than "Another Winner"? ("Another Winner," after all, being code for anything but.)

If this was marketing, then it wouldn't even be the first instance of using artifice for promotional purposes. The practice goes at least as far back as the original Marxists of the 19th century. According to the book, "Handbook of the Communication Guerilla," Karl Marx and his disciples were deeply disappointed when the 1859 publication of his "Concerning the Critique of Political Economy" failed to capture any sort of buzz. To ensure Marx's next book, "Das Kapital," didn't die the same silent death, Friedrich Engels and his cohorts took to the media, arranging in July 1868 at least 15 fake book reviews under various pseudonyms.

Now it is too early to tell whether The Animal will strike a blow for bestiality the way "Das Kapital" struck a blow for class equality, but this Marxist exercise in media theory did raise an important point: In order to engage in any sort of cultural discourse, one has to use its grammar. For Engels, taking to the "bourgeois press" to denounce its essence showed a certain marketing savvy on his part.

Sony's "Mr. Manning" guise isn't even the first use of the fake film review. In a recent example, director Robert Rodriguez decided 1996's From Dusk to Dawn needed extra juice to carry it on its way. Rodriguez edited his own bootleg trailer, filled with fake reviews, and then gently filtered these video tapes onto the black market. Nevertheless, From Dusk to Dawn was a mild bomb at the box office.

More successfully, a few years later a young British writer by the name of Freya North wrote a book called "Chloe," about a woman who gives up her job and her boyfriend to fulfill her late godmother's will. North tried for years to get the thing published before deciding to borrow the names of important book reviewers to write reviews of her own book, making sure the reviews were somewhat mixed before sending them off to the publishers. North, still in her 20s at the time, got a six-figure book contract and a bestseller as a result of her whimsy.

Today the use of the inauthentic review as a marketing tool is as omnipresent on the Internet as fast food is in your typical suburban neighborhood. The practice is somewhat controversial, judging by the metacritical debates that go on in the oddest of places — from erotic review sites to mountain bicycle aficionado boards. The practice is so widespread that a research firm, the Gartner Group, has written a letter to our president, implying legislation might be in order.

I'll let Congress decide whether this is a moral issue worth tackling, but I will suggest that if marketing was "Mr. Manning's" purpose, then he or she did not do nearly as good a job as Engels or North did, nor as creative as Rodriguez. But lest anyone accuse Hollywood of not being creative, there are still two other possibilities for what "This Year's Hottest New Star" might signify.

Was "Mr. Manning's" exercise a form of art, a postmodern critique on the banalities of the blurb? If this Sony employee, after all, wanted to finish thier task even before finishing his morning coffee, he or she could have very easily gone to rottentomatoes.com, a compilation of film reviews from even the most obscure of sources, clicked on "A Knight's Tale," and he or she would have found no fewer than 52 glowing blurbs, all of which would have made better fodder than that one from the "Ridgefield Press." But instead, "David" took the risky route, as evidenced by the "investigation" that Sony now says they are conducting into the matter. So what's the deal?

If this was art for art's sake, then it would have followed in the grand tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem. Borges, after all, concocted books and myths ("An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," for example) as jumping-off points toward building archetypes and philosophies that run deep and embedded in the threads of humanity. The Polish writer, Lem, a huge fan of Borges, went one better, using the book review itself as a literary genre.

His book, "A Perfect Vacuum," is a collection of fake book reviews, all so deliciously teasing and crammed with ideas that one wishes he had all the time in the world to write both the review and the book. But, for Lem, as he says in the introduction — itself a mock review of "A Perfect Vacuum" — "Literature to date has told us of fictitious characters. We shall go further: We shall depict fictitious books. Here is a chance to regain creative liberty, and at the same time to wed two opposing spirits — that of the belletrist and that of the critic."

For Lem and other students of poststructural theory, a completed book is the domain of the reader — Only he or she can now ascribe meaning to these (decontextualized) words. Only by assuming the role of the critic, the writer/reviewer can regain the author's intent.

The Sony employee made up the quotation, but unlike Borges and Lem, not the work commented upon. Nevertheless, by wearing the clothes of the emperor, like Borges and Lem, Sony's employee did mess around with the idea of which roles are played by whom.

Or perhaps "Mr. Manning's" cause needn't be so erudite. Perhaps he or she just wanted to have a bit of fun, parody a convention taken oh so seriously in Hollywood. One only has to turn to today's grand forum of satire, Amazon.com, to see this type of thing happening. Most famously, last year, Dave Eggers held a contest on McSweeney's calling for readers to post their best fake review on Amazon.com of his book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But even this year, in April, an Amazon.com reviewer, working under the names "Linus Torvalds" and "Bill Gates," put up fake reviews of Linux 7.0. Notified of the situation, Amazon declined to remove the posts, calling them "inoffensive."

To say "David Manning" was simply working out of a misplaced duty towards his or her work, all in all, seems too simple an answer. The question in my mind — the one no one has asked so far — is whether this individual's maneuver was designed as a postmodern act of art, perhaps intended to guarantee even more coverage of the two movies, or a prank, a rebellious motion calculated to expose the transparencies of marketing movies in today's culture. It's the question that Sony should be asking "David Manning." (Then again, perhaps they already know.) For the rest of us, we'll just have to live with the few extra minutes we've spent thinking about "The Animal," but consoled by the notion that blurbs might have just lost their remaining shred of credibility.

E-mail Eriq Garner at eriqgardner at yahoo dot com.