balding angrily

You might remember that I wrote an issue of The Dope Sheet for Filmspotting, way back when it was Adam and Sam, not Adam and Matty. You don’t know that I wrote a second Dope Sheet, hoping Adam would publish it. That didn’t happen because The Dope Sheet stopped happening. It went the way of the crows. Or magpies or whatever.

So here it is, The Dope Sheet that never was.

A Good Critic Will Eat Your Opinion for Lunch

Have you tried reading Moby Dick lately? Ooh-wee, T’Shane. That’s nappy-time you can hold in your hand.

Later on, I’ll tell you why I’m so comfortable writing that. For now, let its sophistication hit you between the eyeballs and enjoy a story that led me to it. No, no, no. The story didn’t lead me directly. That would be much too easy; this will require your patience.

In college my professor pointed to a sculpture and said, “Look how beautiful that is.” It was, in my eyes, quite ugly – all angles and rust. He followed that declaration with, “Of course there’s an objectivity when you look at art. You see something and it’s beautiful or not.” I looked at the sculpture again and thought, “Huh.”¹

A few years ago Adam said the following in response to some harsh feedback, “Well, all criticism is subjective. Anyone who says otherwise…well, that’s just foolish.” You can see how this statement doesn’t jibe with my professor’s.

Two weeks ago, Jerry responded to an argument for subjectivity in a review of a local exhibit. He said, “Well, of course there’s good and there’s bad in art. Everyone knows the difference.”

“But we see movies and we disagree,” I challenged him. “You loved Little Miss Sunshine. Me? Not so much.”

“But you’re talking about a work that’s at a higher level then say, a home video of two girls dancing to ‘Fergilicious’,” he said. “We enjoy something like that, but we agree it’s bad. It’s an amateur thing.

“Once you get to higher levels, judging goes from objective to subjective,” he continued, “it’s much harder to get everyone to agree. You start getting into how a work touches on the viewer’s past experience, as how a person can just prefer traditional design to modern design. At that level, everything gets grayer and harder to parse; there’s a criticism that requires more analysis.”²

I respect Jerry; I think he’s smart. I’m going to use his theory to work back up to that first statement. Follow along; there’s cake at the end.

Criticism is inherently subjective at higher levels, requiring finer analysis. That’s Jerry’s statement. I don’t do “earnest,” so it scares the hell out of me. Let me lay it flat and work on it a bit.

Analysis is “This thing is made of these other four things. And these four things inform each other, rub against each other like sandpaper, and give contrast to each other. And further, these four things are made of these smaller eight things. And looking at just one of these eight smaller things, one can see it as a seed or miniature of the overall big thing.”

Opinion is much different; opinion is “This thing is bad.”

Now look at the thick border between analysis and opinion. “Shaun of the Dead, an increasingly common combination of slapstick comedy, societal commentary, and horror, succeeds at none of the above.”³ That place is dangerous; it’s the area where the critic sits, an area that makes for tummy-aches. That’s the center of the rotted wood bridge through which Rudger-hunting soldiers fell in Ladyhawke. I don’t like that place; I’d rather opine.

So that’s how I got to that statement way at the very tippy-top. It’s so much easier to leave out all that cumbersome, muddy analysis. Leave the intelligent criticism to Adam and Sam.

And the part about the cake? I lied.

¹I’ve since come to love angles and rust.

²I’m paraphrasing; I don’t think Jerry has ever used “parse” in conversation.

³That’s an example only. Don’t get your nose hairs in a twist.