"I have to write some short reviews for various films (a couple of paragraphs each), and I'm having problems with the films I like the most from the list. I think the problem is that even though I like them I recognise that they may not be for everyone. Any advice?"
Asked by Anonymous
Repeat this with me, anon:
Good criticism is not about objectivity.
In fact, there’s no such thing as objective criticism. A lot of criticism–especially short-form criticism–is couched in the language of objectivity, but that’s just smoke and mirrors.
So: Good criticism is about being able to break down your own, subjective reactions to a film–and to predict an audience’s, or part of an audience’s–and connect those things to craft. It’s about a trained eye, but it’s also about the personal, referential, and aesthetic perspective you bring as a critic.
It sounds like you’re already a lot of the way there. The last bit you wrote–”even though I like them I recognise that they may not be for everyone”–isn’t a problem, anon: it’s the crux of your content. Why do you like them? Why do you think they may not be for everybody? BOOM. There’s your review.
To be honest, it’s the people arguing that reviews should be objective who confuse me. I’ve always seen the format as a subjective, opinion-based thing.
As a rule, what those people generally mean is “I think reviews should all reflect my personal opinion, and I fail to recognize my own subjectivity.”
I tend to think it’s largely a symptom of a culture which tells the dominant social class(es) that their perspective, in all of its glorious biases, is the objective one. But it’s also a symptom of a culture that tells us to value objectivity and tells us that subjectivity is somehow flawed, that subjectivity is a sign of emotion and other things we are (wrongly) told to perceive as human “failings.”
The people who most often sing the praises of objectivity are people who have been told their entire life that their own view holds primacy and is the objective one, and is that much better because they haven’t arrived at it from a place of emotion.
The demand is also, so often that media be criticized based on its technical and stylistic merits without looking at its social merits, and consider social criticism to be suspect on grounds of “subjectivity,” while not acknowledging that even technical or stylistic criticism has a deal of subjectivity to it: I know, for example, that my own critical perception favors quick, punchy, action-oriented text over long, detailed descriptions in large part because my dyslexia makes me impatient with writing that doesn’t use words as economically as possible. I know there are people who find the opposite, and that’s very okay, too.
Within that, there’s also a failure to realize that some technical and stylistic elements are socially influenced and/or are at the mercy of our own social influences.
But this is all, in a sense, another way of not only silencing social criticism but also preventing us from looking at the way our individual perspectives inform the way we see media.
I think maybe my best/most amusing anecdote about this is, though, about the time @allofthefeelings was verbally accosted by a man demanding she rank all the movies in a series on an “objective” scale rather than by what was important to her (how well she felt each movie reflected feminist values). Another man next to her, clearly sensing her discomfort, jumped in and started ranking them himself, on a scale based on what he felt was the quality of the script, direction, and editorial, without any social opinions coming into play. The first man immediately disagreed that his first choice couldn’t be the objective best, because he disagreed with its political message.
