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Re: a few things
Hello,
Just got back from seeing an awesome Ashley Peacock concert, in which he did
not one but *two* Over the Rhine cover songs! (Gosh, some actual on-topic
content here!) He is now also playing "When I Go", which, oddly enough, he
played after saying "enough slow stuff, let's play some rock-n-roll", or word
to that effect. Funny, he didn't seem to mean them ironically at the time.
:-)
But getting back to the discussion about movies, epistomology, and ontology...
It seems there are some things on which we agree, and some on which we don't,
and they seem to be all mish-mashed together, such that it's a little hard to
tell which is which. I think. :-)
> My point was that *everything* is subjective, and for one to label a film
> "bad" or "good" is really a matter of opinion.
Okay, yes, that is answering exactly the question I was trying to pose.
> You can hide behind the rules of form, but in the end, you still are
> subjectively judging the artwork within those limits.
So there is no such thing as an inherently bad performance? I'm not
challenging, I just want to make sure I've understood your position.
> You can say you didn't like A Clockwork Orange, but when you say that it was
> also brilliant, are you not also admitting that you liked it--
Hmmmmm... interesting point. Two responses: First, upon reflection, I was
using "like" synonymously with "enjoy", rather than "appreciate". I did
appreciate Clockwork Orange, but I did not enjoy it. "Like" is vague enough to
cover both those meanings. Second, as you indicate in your email, we haven't
really addressed the question of how the whole relates to the sum of the parts.
I mean, can I like the cinematography and yet not like the film? Does liking a
part of the film preclude not liking the whole? I think I can recognize the
brilliance of the acting, script, and art design of Clockwork Orange without
actually liking what they do with it.
> emotions. Just as one may be able to suspend disbelief during the film, one
> also could suspend emotional attachment afterwards and debate the film purely
> as an artform.
Or one could critically evaluate the nature and extent of the emotional
attachment, during or after the film. The ability of the film to affect
one's emotions is a crucial part of what makes it a good film. Titanic had
a banal and plodding script, and yet it made me cry four separate times,
the *second* time I saw it. In the theater that is. Once I saw it on a TV,
it couldn't sweep me up anymore, and I got sick of hearing "Jack! Jack!" and
"Rose! Rose!" over and over again.
> Right, but whether or not it's intellectually honest or not, is your opinion.
Wait, how can whether it's honest or not be an opinion? If I purport to
believe something I don't actually believe, isn't that dishonest, no matter
what one's opinion is? I guess it's my opinion that this is the definition of
the word "honest", but wouldn't the statement have that property, objectively,
whatever words we choose to assign to it?
> I happen to see it as emotionally dishonest to reserve judgement of good or
> bad because we don't have a commonly accepted gauge of good and bad.
> ... [saying] I cannot place the connotation "good" on a film because I can't
> prove it is good is like saying I can't love because I can't prove that I
> love.
Wait, that's not quite the right analogy to what I'm saying. My question is
whether "good" is a property of the film or a construction of the observer, not
whether or not the claim can be *proven*. I didn't say you [one] couldn't
place the label "good" on a film because it couldn't be proven to be so, I was
saying that if "good" is a subjective perception of the viewer, it is
intellectually dishonest to claim it is a property of the film. I.e., the
difference between saying "that person *is* beautiful" and "I find that person
to be beautiful". You don't have to *prove* that *you* find the film good;
that's a objective statement of a subjective perception. Either you are lying
or you are not. The tricky part is whether one is then justified to go from
"I find it good" to "it is good". That's the step I'm trying to examine.
You know whether you love or not, just as you know whether you find the film
to be good or not. You don't have to prove or defend that. It just *is*.
Since love is not a perception, it can't be projected as a property of the
other, so it doesn't fit as an analogy to what I'm talking about. "I find it
good" goes to "it is good" as "I love" goes to ... what? I don't see a way
to complete that analogy.
> I can say a film is good, because it is good to me,
But by your definition, the second clause only restates the first, rendering
the word "because" meaningless in this context. "It is good to me" does not
explain or justify "it is good", because it is the same thing. Or have I
misunderstood?
> infractions, (in a sense becoming a robot,) but is it not also true that to
> learn the rules and intentionally break them often produces a masterpiece?
Yes, absolutely. I think that is one of the most fascinating things about art,
is that to be a masterpiece, one *must* break rules, because just to follow
rules makes one mediocre. However, just breaking rules does not make a
masterpiece. My working hypothesis is that the old rules have to be supplanted
with a new set of rules for it to really work. Citizen Kane broke all kinds of
rules for how pictures should look and behave for the time, but it wasn't just
chaos, and it *certainly* wasn't sloppy or careless. It wrote the book anew.
One of my own rules is that I hate anachronisms: once a framework is set, I
don't like that to be broken. That's why Robin Williams's genie ruined the
movie of Aladdin for me. However, I didn't mind things like the Donkey
mentioning Tic-Tacs in Shrek, because that whole movie was an anachronism
from start to finish, so the individual anachronisms fit in with the new rule,
rather than just breaking out of the old one. The genie was in a different
movie from everyone else in Aladdin.
So one of the rules for good art has to allow for the possibility to break
the rules, which is a wonderfully flexible recursion. Whether it can preserve
any measure of objectivity is exactly the question I'm pondering here.
> So do I, but I don't think were discussing that here--at least that's a
> different topic than I'm addressing.
But that was exactly the topic I was addressing, which is why I didn't think I
had quite gotten my point across well. :-)
> But what if they "allow" their minds to be manipulated and agree to sustain
> that for a while until they can formulate ideas and opinions based on the
> subject matter as a whole. This is not the same thing as mindless
> neutrality. It is allowing the art itself to penetrate you and then using
> what's left (the residual emotion) to formulate your opinion.
Sounds good to me. As long as critical thinking skills remain engaged, I have
no problem with what form that takes. It's the "why do you want to *talk*
about the movie? Can't we just *enjoy* it?" (as if thinking and enjoyment are
mutually exclusive) that bothers me. And lest anyone think I'm pointing
fingers, I'm thinking of my paternal grandmother, who says this all the time.
Which is so weird, because I get my passion for discussing movies from my dad.
He must be a mutant or something. :-)
Good night,
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
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