Scott Alexander wrote a review of Don’t Look Up, and then tongue-in-cheek defended it with:
Look, there’s a weird game called “movie criticism”, where you take a movie as a jumping-off point to have thoughts on Society or the Human Condition. In the real world, people watch movies because they’re funny, or they have cool action sequences, or because the lead actress is really hot. But the rules of the “movie criticism” game say you have to ignore this stuff and treat them as deep commentary. I agree this game is not as fun as, say, Civilization IV: Fall From Heaven. But I have deliberately limited the amount of time I play that game for the sake of my sanity and my career, which means I need to play other games, and the “movie criticism” game seems okay.
Which is funny because Scott is funny. But also I’m one of the people clearly skewered in this explanation. (Also my wife is playing Civ VI right now, so I guess that makes a new gender dichotomy - are you the spouse who writes to a movie blog or the spouse who plays Civ VI?)
So, really, why write abstruse analyses of movies? Is it just apophenia? Can we actually defend this from first principles? Is there anything we are *actually figuring out* or are we just having entirely subjective fun here?
Especially when we talk about themes. Someone says a movie is really about recovering from grief, or the unbearable weight of responsibility, or how we change ourselves for capitalism and -- maybe it's supported by the text but who cares. You might as well collect the first letter of each page of a novel and talk about what message can be read into that random noise.
What makes art good is a question that can't really give an objective answer to. No matter what you say, someone else can say "well I don't think that's good" and what can you say then?
What makes art powerful though? What makes it popular and impact the culture and people talk about it years from now?
... I could say "what makes money?" That somewhat is a solved problem. The advertising budget for a movie + the prior reputation of its inputs (franchise, actors, maybe director) can predict box office numbers really well. And even if MCU films for adults are only 90% formulaic, the CGI cartoon movies for kids that make half a billion dollars (Secret Life of Pets, etc) *are* 100% formulaic. So we're not talking about just money.
Sure, "cultural relevance" and psychological impact are vague quantities we can argue over, but hopefully we can agree they have *some* objective existence. If we are saying Shakespeare and Jaws and Miyazaki *mattered*, I'm not wholly incapable of defending the claim.
(We could go the entirely symbolic-social cynical route and say all of them are only widely appreciated because the existing order told them to exalt them but... I have enough dignity to not believe that. There was something *good* there that had an impact in the Real we could not ignore anymore than the Soviet politburo could ignore Chernobyl.)
We make thousands of movies every year. And dozens of them have actors and writers and directors and technical artists who can claim to be among the best on Earth. Plenty of skill and quality go into these dozens. But which ones will *stick*? Which ones will the audience love and have "long legs" as the box office analysts say and will be in memes next year and in best of lists next decade and studied by schoolchildren in a century? What will be Avatar the Last Airbender versus... James Cameron's Avatar?
So there, we have a question about objective qualities that is difficult and deep and we can look into.
Here's a follow-up: why do we watch more than one movie?
If all you want is say, witty actors and flashy swordfights and swelling music and good jokes, why haven't you just found your favorite example of this, and watched it over and over?
We do this with many of life's pleasures. The best sushi we find... we keep going back to. Porn has repeat value, for sure. You probably have a song you've listened to more than a hundred times.
But there are some forms of art where our joy declines precipitously the more we've already seen it. Videogames, books, movies. Sure there are some beloved examples we visit again every so often, but nothing ever matches the excitement of the first time we saw it.
Let's just fiat that our brains need something new for a reason we can't explain. Okay, but then how new?
If I just took the plot of Die Hard, and had actors of the same rough charisma as young(er) Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, and wrote the same style of jokes but slightly different punchlines, and shoot the action scenes again... would that satisfy our cravings? Why would it matter that critics would say it's just Die Hard again? We liked Die Hard! Why do we need new plots and new twists and new characters?
(Sometimes we don't, but more often we do? Even remakes have an entire meta-structure of how much needs to be changed for the remake to be "fresh.")
So now we have two serious questions: what makes a work "powerful", and what unites all the art we personally like even as we want it to be eternally different?
Well one theory is themes.
What is the underlying theme of a work? How much clarity does that theme have? How much does the artistry support that theme?
The great hypothesis of reviewing is that the above three questions determine a lot both about the lasting power of a work, and whether individuals who are attached to those themes will like this work?
It might be true. It might not. There's some correlation we can make, but it's loose and it never really proves causation anyway. But, for the sake of this particular form of art, let's accept it as true.
(What would Die Hard be without the subplot about his collapsing marriage and the cop who couldn't use a gun? 95% the same, or would its heart be ripped out?)
So first we can analyze the acknowledged great works on these metrics. What are there themes, and how much does the artistry support them?
From that we can ponder: what themes resonate with audiences (even the audience of I), and what film-making skills support them?
The next leap is to say: what art will be successful? Using the hypotheses we've come up with about which themes are resonant and what supports them, can we look at two movies by famous actresses and say "this one will be remembered, and this one forgotten?"
(You can even say "this movie that was forgotten just never got seen by people and if more people knew about it, then it would stick in memories and impact the culture." A not practically verifiable hypothesis, but still theoretically about something objective.)
And now the whole door is open. You argue about what theme a movie really has, for the purpose of determining if it will impact the culture, and as evidence you can say how much it resonated with you personally if you also care about that theme.
