Criticism and Value Judgments: Three Ways to Go Wrong

Steve Sailer has some interesting things to say about movie criticism and value judgments. Big shocker: average people are much better than professional critics at predicting the movies average people will like.

I'm still rather skeptical of the public's taste, but the critics are hardly infallible either. In my opinion, there are three ways value judgment can go wrong, only one of which particularly affects the public:

1. Not being intelligent or perceptive enough.

This is the big failing of the public.

Your average Joe or average Jane aren't exactly going to favour movies that require any amount of brainpower to figure out or that rely on any degree of subtlety to make their point. I once watched Fellini's Nights of Cabiria with a good friend of mine, a university educated man with good social skills and some appreciation for the arts, and he still didn't pick up on the fact that the main character was a prostitute. Multiply that by a factor of ten with your average Joe, and you can see why so many classics aren't popular with the masses, or if they are popular are popular for the wrong reasons. Your average Joe just can't keep up. While its not that hard to tell the difference between a good action movie like Spiderman 2 and a mediocre one like Spiderman 3, that's because the genre isn't exactly the most subtle one out there; on the other hand, it is difficult to tell the difference between a good Eric Rohmer movie and a bad one: to the average person their all boring yakfests. But the average person is wrong.

2. Mistaking class markers for merit.

This is the big failing of movie critics (though they aren't always as intelligent or perceptive as they think they are, either).

Most critics don't much care about which Eric Rohmer movies are good or bad either. They are all basically good, because they are all opportunities for the critic to lord his high status over the plebians. Actual merit, or the fact that there are actually good arty yak movies and bad arty yak movies, is beside the point.

3. Emotionally overwhelming biases

This one seems to afflict the public and the professional critics about equally.

The best example I can think of is the average heterosexual male's reaction to Anthony Minghella's The English Patient. Because the film is sympathetic to a woman who cheats on her average Joe, nice guy husband with someone much more exciting, it doesn't matter how insightful or well done the film is; they just hate it.

Another example would be many people's reaction to Triumph of the Will.

Now adultery and Nazism are undoubtedly nasty things, but that does not mean that Riefensthal and Minghella do not powerfully dramatize their appeal.

There are all sorts of these religious, political, class, and sexual biases out there waiting to waylay the critic.

(Another example would be the overreaction of the non-religious to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.)

ADDITIONAL NOTE:

Most of these biases are pretty banal. Politics, yawn. What is perhaps more interesting is aesthetic bias. I'm thinking here of Michael Blowhard. Now, Michael is a really smart, perceptive guy, and his insights about art and life are often profound. But what really interests him about the arts is the in-the-moment thrill of a great performance. Its all about what turns him on, whether sexually or otherwise. For him, Son House riffing on a old blues tune or Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone tearing it up in Basic Instinct are it, and the shakiness of the underlying material be damned. For him, an idea or a work of art doesn't need to be fully thought through; as long as it teases and tantalizes, that's enough. Sensation is primary, wisdom and insight are secondary. And correspondingly, he rates works of art differently than I do. I think this goes to the heart of our disagreement over Robert Altman: I want a director to to give me his total vision of something, while Michael is content to wander with Altman from interesting tidbit to interesting tidbit always seeking that little thrill. I don't think it is possible to resolve this kind of dispute. It all depends on what you want out of a work of art. By the criteria Michael has, he is perfectly right to make the judgments he does, and, by the criteria I have, I am right to make mine. What is important is that these criteria are set out as clearly as possible. Then let the chips fall where they may.

I should say that our two different aesthetics are not totally inimicable. I like some Altman and I can appreciate a great performance by Son House too. And Michael likes an awful lot of what I like and is a (qualified) defender of greatness in the arts. I don't think any sane person would wish away these different, but often complementary, sides of the arts. But there is, at the very least, a decided difference in emphasis, which cannot, in the end, be totally resolved. Vive le difference, I guess.