Sat 14 Aug 2010
Hating The Audience
Posted by Brian Moore under culture, media
[4] Comments
I randomly stumbled across this critique of reviews for the latest Michael Cera movie. I don’t really care about the movie itself, since I haven’t seen it, but this jumped out at me:
NPR’s Linda Holmes dissected reviews from the film’s harshest critics and discovered something interesting: negative critics don’t hate the film per se, they hate its target audience. Scott Pilgrim, you see, is a tale in which Michael Cera must defeat his love interest’s seven evil ex-boyfriends. It’s loaded with geeky gamer jokes and comic fanboy humor. Is it right for critics to denounce a film based on the audience it caters to?
Now that is something that exists far beyond movie reviews: disliking something because we don’t like those who already like it. I’d actually go so far as to say that this mechanism, more than any other, drives our political beliefs — and it makes sense that it would. Our brains are finely tuned mechanisms; but they are not tuned for the goal of analyzing policies for their pros and cons. What they are really good at is social politics — determining who is on our side and who isn’t, and furthermore, figuring out which beliefs or ideas represent them or us.
In the debate over ending birthright citizenship, Will Wilkinson describes the same thing:
Part of it, I’m afraid, is just knee-jerk opposition to policies their political enemies favor. Of course, the fact that bad people with bad motives support a policy does not mean it is therefore bad policy.
Now, I’d like to believe that I’m above all that, and my opposition to Will’s idea of ending BC is based solely on my reasoned, objective analysis of the situation, but I’m not sure I can justify that. After all, I certainly have paid the idea a lot more attention since Will proposed it, because I respect his motivations (and on a basic tribal level, consider him “on my side”) a lot more than most of the other people who have proposed the idea. I’m still opposed to it, but I’ve softened my opposition to “I don’t think it would achieve very much, and would be more difficult than alternatives that I consider to be superior.” I would not have granted that to the average proponent of the idea.
Actually, I’ve never had much faith in movie reviewers, so this sort of thing strikes me as an improvement:
After referring to the first part of the movie as a “dork-pandering assault,” The Boston Phoenix reviewer goes on to say that Michael Cera’s performance is “irritating” in part because of “the non-stop Pavlovian laugh track provided by the audience at the screening I attended.”
I’m now pretty sure I want to see that movie. If the reviewer had actually tried to assess the thing on its merits, the useful information content would probably have gone down as he rationalised away the fact that he didn’t get it by talking about how unfunny it was.
Yeah, he essentially says “man it was so annoying because the rest of the audience enjoyed it so much!”
Maybe this is the start of a whole new revolution in movie reviewing. Describe the audience, make value judgements, rank accordingly:
“The country club set were horrified. Most of the people who did enjoy it were wearing T-Shirts with writing on them. On the other hand, there was a well-turned out young couple who seemed to be enjoying themselves. 3/10 – not one to talk about at work. Unless you’re in IT.”
I’m not sure how well this would translate to politics.
Well, not to betray my nerdy nature, but video game reviews often do exactly this. They’ll say that “if you like X, you will like this game.” I think movie reviews often do this implicitly by category — no matter how good the newest romantic comedy is, I’m probably not going to enjoy seeing it.
I think the way it translates into politics is largely negative — people try to associate their opponents with people no one likes, or un associate themselves. So you see Republicans trying to associate Democrats with Pelosi, or Democrats associating R’s with Bush. Also, people like Rand Paul saying “well, I’m not really a libertarian” — since they have a well known “crazy fringe” reputation.
But like you said, I don’t know how to overcome this. Though Will’s previous assertion that people should admit to using pot, so we can get over the negative stereotype of lazy useless pothead in his mom’s basement certainly fits into this.