Growing Pains in Art Criticism

Yesterday, I attempted to write up a review of the first season of Netflix's "Daredevil." I say "attempted" because, after two hours, I had only two paragraphs. That's certainly less than anticipated, and it lead me to wonder why it seemed so difficult. I had watched every episode, fully intent on catching every detail and plot point. What was it that kept me from producing a review of resonable length that I felt satisfied with? Eventually, I came to a conclusion: I was attempting to review an entire season as though I was reviewing a movie. The two have totally different formats that just don't lend (at least for me) to similar reviews.

It took me breaking it down on a basic level. A film is, usually, an entire story that is told and concluded within one sitting (clearly this excludes franchise based films). This can run around a maximum of three hours, and is easily consumable. A television series, on the other hand, takes much more time to consume. For Daredevil, that would mean around thirteen hours of material to sort through, and that certainly more difficult than a mere three.

Going further, television is in the business of longform storytelling. Each episode can be seen as a chapter that is also self-contained. For example, something like "Game of Thrones", may function as a minature film during each episode, telling an entire story but functioning within the larger picture of a season. Reviewing such a thing would take my looking at the first episode and the parts within, then doing the same thing with the second but putting it in context with the first. This would go on and on until the end of the season.

Now, I've heard a variety of suggestions of how to "correctly" watch television. Some have suggested waiting until the end of a season to decide how I feel about it. That means watching up to twenty hours of material just to decide something that could be decided in the initial three. Even more, that would mean that one mindlessly consumed nearly a day's worth of material before beginning to have any sort of critical thought on it. That seems too close to "turn off your brain" media consumption for me to even begin to take that seriously (I mean, honestly, why on Earth would someone think that "turning off your brain" is an appropriate way to consume media...that kind of thinking is literally the fuel for the majority of reality television, something I will go on record as saying is garbage). Perhaps, it relates more to the reality of the majority of people that consume media not really understanding the language it uses.

At any rate, my official stance is to view a show a few episodes at a time, then review those chunks. I concidered doing one episode at a time, but I don't really have the time to review each episode in the detail I'd like to. Then again, this may change tomorrow, as I'm prone to wildly changing my mind on certain things. I chock this up to my still being a bit green when it comes to this whole "art criticism" businesss. The best thing for me to do is to keep consuming all sorts of media, write a lot, write a lot, and write a lot.

Pushing Aside Nostalgia: The Act of Criticism

I can say, with certainty, that I am only nostalgic towards one thing: Super Mario Brothers on the NES. I remember plenty of times as a a five-year-old when my cousins and I, or my parents and I, or my brother and I would get together and just dig into that game with the intent to wring everything out of it we could. We would search for every secret, get as many extra lives as we could, and even beat our own speed records. These were good times.

That being said, my fond memories attatched to that game in no way influence my feelings on the game's own merits. Don't get me wrong, I think it's an amazing game that saved the video game artform, but that's because of the work done by the game itself. I say this, because it seems we live in the Age of Nostalgia, an age of revisiting old works from one's youth and attempting to judge them not in light of itself, but in the light of our fond memories surrounding it. 

I'm more than inclined to think that any attempt at objective criticism will be hurt by the attempt of the person making the criticism trying to include their own sense of nostaligia into their final asessment.** A good example of this sort of thing is some people's reactions to the "Transformers" films. I've heard many a person say that "it's like all the toys and the cartoons, come to life!" and that, seemingly, be their only assessment of the film, as everything else they say about it ends up revolving around that initial statement. To say what they said, and to mean it, says that they ignored massive sections of the films in favor of the (rather poorly done, dramatically) action sequences. They ignored the character inconsistencies and "maturity" (sexual innuendo, tough-guy posturing, borderline R-rated violence) in favor of the identification with their childhood. 

To state a critique of anything, the best rule of thumb is to take it on its own terms. It doesn't particularly matter if some older iteration of that thing was something you loved as a kid, because this new iteration is just that: a new iteration. It's something different. I don't see any real way to give a film, or movie, or book, or whatever a fair shake if we weigh them down with our nostalgia. 

The same can be said with updated versions of older childeren's works (looking at you again, "Transformers"). It seems some of us wish to age them up with us. As though we aren't content with them simply being works intended for children that we can enjoy as adults (I don't really see anything wrong with that), but that since we are mature then the work itself  must also be mature. That's simply not true. Pixar makes a killing off of creating works aimed towards families, as in, many different age groups. There's the superficial layers of their films and those appeal more to the children. Yet, there are deeper thematic layers for the older ones in the audience, and these things work not with posturing, but with emotional sincerity. 

You have to be willing to look at something you enjoyed as a child and say that it's not so great. If your own emotions towards the piece are stopping you from seeing the possibility of you not particularly thinking that thing is that great, then you are going about critique all wrong. There has to be an openness to reconcideration. Otherwise, you're essentially refusing to grow. 

** Of course, by "objective criticism", I mean approaching a work and judging it on it's own terms. 

The Posey Test

''All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. [...] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [...] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that [...]" -Virginia Woolfe 


The Bechdel Test first appeared in a comic strip by Allison Bechdel, entitled "Dykes to Watch Out For", as a sort of look at underrepresentation of well rounded female characters in movies. One of the characters in the strip, an unnamed woman, states that she won't watch films unless they fit the following criteria:

1. The movie has to have at least two women in it
2. These women talk to each other
3. The women talk to each other about something besides a man

Now, while this in no way guarantees that said movie will be well recieved, or even free of sexist content, it serves as a broad guideline for writers to keep in mind. Another such test was proposed by my friend Jess Posey and is respectively named, The Posey Test. It functions in a similar fashion to the Bechdel Test in that it broadly applies a few rules in order to better diversify the portrayals of women in media, in this case with comedy. 

The rules are:

1. There is at least one female character
2. That character is cast among a strong presence of male characters
3. The character's comedic moments aren't dependent on a male character for setup
4. The character serves as the sole or primary source of comedy

The idea isn't to strictly adhere to these rules, but to keep them in mind as you write. It should be noted that there are ways to not use the Bechdel Test and Posey Test and still see the kind of characters and comedy that resonate with people. For example, "Orange is the New Black" connected with many people, passes the Bechdel Test, but fails one of the conditions of the Posey Test. Does this then mean that the Posey Test is invalid? Of course not, because the rule was to be broadly applied in the first place. 

Aside from the two tests mentioned, there are a few others, like the Russo Test, the Mako Mori test, and the oh-so-hilarious Sexy Lamp test. All of these tests serve as broad guidelines for creating more rounded characters, and while they may not all guarantee that your work will connect with audiences, they will at least lead you to more emotionally realistic characters. 

An Interesting Thought on Fan Theories

So, I didn't write this. I wish I did, because It's brilliant, but that credit goes to the person who goes by the screen name ChateauArusi. It's an essay length response (which I'm usually against), but this is so well articulated that I had to share. So without further ado... (here's the link to the original article the comment was on; it's pretty swell too: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/05/21/why-the-latest-mad-max-fan-theory-is-a-crock-of-shit#comment-2037935460)

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"Time for me to share a pet theory. Not about the continuity of Mad Max, or about fanboys. But about the human impulse to take stories apart and understand them.

Because this is a very, very old impulse. It predates movies and comic books. You can find the instinct as far back as you look.

Let's take Bishop James Ussher, who is most famous for going through the Bible, carefully sequencing the events and begats, adding up all the characters' ages, and in general attempting to apply fanboy-style obsessiveness to Scripture. He wound up pinning the date of creation to exactly the year of 4004 BC. Not 4000 plus or minus, but precisely 4004.

There were two responses to this, which make perfect sense in retrospect: some people latched onto his analysis, and regarded it as authoritative; and a lot of other people rolled their eyes and/or just laughed at him. And not years later, but at the time.

There is something about narrative that tickles us very deeply in the root of our brain. We appreciate narrative not just as a collection of events, but as a sequence of events that teaches us something and illuminates the world. The more coherent that sequence, the more internally consistent it is, the more closely dependent the subsequent events are on preceding events, the more satisfying the narrative is to us.

Look at a movie like Hot Fuzz, where there is barely a wasted shot or line of dialogue. We find that insanely satisfying, because of how beautifully constructed, how tight, it is. No matter how deep we dig, we find consistency and cross-reference. And we love it.

But some of us, as observed in the article, take it to an extreme. Every movie, every television show, every novel and short story and serially published penny dreadful, has continuity errors. Some of their creators made, and make, mistakes. Some were sloppy. And some didn't care at all to maintain tight quality control over the sequence of events.

Look at how many people have devoted so many hours to figuring out the continuity of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Where, exactly, did Watson get shot? Was he shot only once, inconsistently described, or was he shot twice, and each time it comes up, he simply fails to mention the other one? Either way, why?

The obvious answer is that Doyle didn't care overmuch. It's an author's error, insofar as a gap in the verisimilitude of the story can be said to be an "error" at all. It's a work of fiction. You either enjoy it or you don't. Most people enjoy Sherlock Holmes just fine, and ignore this and a hundred other little inconsistencies. For a minority of people, working out how to reconcile these inconsistencies is an additional source of enjoyment. And for a small minority, the existence of these inconsistencies ruins the experience. It must be perfect, or it didn't happen.

Which is the key to my pet theory: the idea that all of this "happened."

It's fiction. Obviously it didn't really "happen" in any sense of objective reality. But there is something about storytelling, about narrative, that allows us to imaginethat something happened. And it is exactly that act of imagination that triggers something fundamental in our brains, and provides insight into the way we see the world.

Look at a non-fiction newspaper article. What do we call it? A "story." We use a word that we normally think of as applying to a fictional vignette to describe a piece of factual reportage. Then, on consideration, we realize that we tell each other stories all the time. Here's the story of how I got thrown out of college. Here's the story about how I got drunk and felt up my own mom in Mexico. Seriously, it's a true story. And then think about that phrase, "true story." We say that when we promise that the story we are telling "actually, really, happened, no foolin'." And that causes us to engage on an even deeper level.

Consider this fact: Every single religion in the world encodes its teachings in the form of narrative. Jesus's lessons aren't just a list of things you should do; they are delivered in the context of a speech he gave standing on a hill. Buddha doesn't tell us to beware of our limited perspective; he tells us a story about five blind men fondling various parts of an elephant. The Islamic imam doesn't just tell you that using profanity is bad, he tells you the story of Mahmoud walking down the street and meeting an old woman with a potty mouth.

Personally, I think that narrative — a structured series of events, with a beginning state, subsequent development, and resulting outcome — is the oldest form of human technology. It is a tool, just like a flint for starting fires, or a net for catching fish. It is a mental tool, but it is a necessary prerequisite for physical tools. Start with this black shiny rock. Hit it like this, and like this. Observe how it breaks off in flakes. Touch a flake. Note the sharp edge. Keep striking the main rock. The result: a large sharp axehead for hunting, and several small stone blades for cleaning the animal and scraping its hide afterward. Without the first-then-finally conceptual structure, you don't even bother start hitting the rock except by accident.

Narrative is planning. Narrative is illumination. Narrative is meaning.

The fanboys who are trying to "make sense" of the overall Mad Max story are, obviously, doing it wrong. They are reading the type of story incorrectly. It is mythology, a loose storytelling tradition that is intended to teach lessons and offer insight into life and existence, much more than it is journalism.

But even mythology has been subject to this impulse. There are hundreds and hundreds of years of musings about the "proper" order in which Hercules performed his Twelve Labors. It doesn't matter at all. But people still do it, because for some reason, it's important to them.

My point is that, yes, the attempt to rationalize the continuity of Mad Max is futile, and more importantly it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the kind of narrative being laid out. But it is also shortsighted and damagingly smug to simply dismiss that impulse to rationalize as being some sort of modern phenomenon, a man-child dysfunction born of comic-book obsession by people on the spectrum. It's not. It's a very old and very human need to try to make our stories make sense. And the more meaningful we find those stories, the more deeply we need those stories to hold together, because that makes them more "real" and therefore more meaningful.

End of pet theory."