45: Writing My Way Through It

I've been thinking all weekend about New York Times film critic A.O. Scott's exit interview with himself. He's moving back to literary criticism–his original field–and while I'm happy for him, I'm selfishly sad that we're losing a critical voice in the film world. Scott's book Better Living Through Criticism was formational in my own critical life. I read it as I was preparing to graduate from my master's degree and enter the professional world. I hadn't written anything yet (my senior thesis doesn't count). I'd been reading movie reviews for the better part of a decade, but Better Living was what made me realize that criticism wasn't just watching a movie and listing the things the reviewer liked or didn't like. For someone who grew up reading Christian movie reviews of the "counting swears and sex scenes" variety, this revelation was paradigm-shifting. I started writing about movies just a few months after reading the book. It still took me years to feel comfortable thinking of myself as a critic, but I wanted to understand the art form by writing my way through it.

One of the points Scott makes in his farewell piece is about the way he finds movies compelling: not because they manage to sum up the complexity of human life, which is one of the grandiose statements about The Movies I've been known to make, but because they're able to cultivate strong emotional reactions, despite our ability to understand the cinematic tricks at play. When a movie works for me, it's because, when the credits roll, I have a deeper understanding of the emotional landscapes of the characters I just spent time with. Most of my own critical work is dissecting how the movie manages to do it, not because I want to decode the magic trick, but because I want to understand my own reaction to the art. I love being moved by art, but I don't want to be governed by the forces of stimulus-response. Neither do I want to drain the joy out of the artform I love by explaining it. The best criticism, to my mind, imparts another way of understanding of the art through the critic's eyes.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed 65 (yes, the Adam-Driver-crash-lands-on-Earth-65-million-years-ago-and-fights-a-bunch-of-dinosaurs movie). Kevin kept up the survival theme by pairing 65 with All Is Lost, which got us into a good conversation about substance and visual storytelling.

What I'm Watching:

I don't think the dates have been announced yet, but: A24 is distributing a 4K restoration of Stop Making Sense in theaters this year! The movie was a lifeline for me in early 2020, before we realized just how bad covid was going to be. I wrote about that lifeline for Bright Wall/Dark Room about a year and a half ago.

What I'm Reading:

Because I write, and because I think about language constantly, I've been following the cultural conversation around ChatGPT and other text-based AI. This piece in Intelligencer outlines the problem as it's understood by computational linguists.