UW-Cinematheque Blog Posts, Part I

Since my second semester in UW-Madison's graduate film program, I have written on average two essays per semester for our Cinematheque's blog. The essays are contingent on the Cinematheque's programming, which is consistently inspired. Even though we are only at the second week of the Spring 2018 semester, I believe the essay I just had published, on Arthur Ripley's The Chase, will be my only submission this semester (master's exams to study for!). So having written five essays so far, I will link to all of them below; this is a "Part I" entry that I will surely follow up with in future semesters.

I do this partly for my own indexing purposes, as well as to present evidence to you that, while it is less frequent, yes, I am still writing film criticism. Of the five, I like my Something Wild essay the most, but I'd like to think they all are worth your time.

• On style and narrative in Arthur Ripley's THE CHASE (1946) - screening January 28, 2018
• On the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD (1986) - screening September 30, 2017
• On the distribution history and style of Billy Woodberry's BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS (1984) - screening September 15, 2017.
• On the style and politics of Straub-Huillet's MOSES AND AARON (1975) - screening April 15, 2017.
• On the darkness and thematics of Spielberg's INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984) - screening March 12, 2017.

Last Column for The Cornell Daily Sun

Today's Cornell Daily Sun issue is the last of the semester, and considering I'm about to graduate, it's also the last chance for me to write for this paper. As luck would have it, my biweekly column coincided with this day. For sentimental purposes, I won't be copy-pasting it here, but I direct you to read my final column — the 46th, since January, 2012 — here.

Cornell's Critical History: Whitney Balliett '51

I dug into The Cornell Daily Sun archives this week to discover dozens of great clips by one Whitney Balliett '51, the long-time New Yorker critic regarded for his writing on jazz. Except when he was a Cornell student, during the late 40s and early 50s, he wrote predominantly about film. And his prose, even at such a young age, was vital, terse and precociously sharp. It rewards reading all these years later. I invite you to check out my piece, which includes plenty of vintage Balliett excerpts, here.

Pretentiousness With Purpose

I’m not saying I’m pretentious, but I can understand the misperception. All this babble on form, “being” and international art cinema, to what end? Why can’t I just enjoy movies for what they are and end a review with a thumbs up or thumbs down? Why the need for this loose syntax and suspension of decisive judgment? And why am I writing with the assumption that you’ve been following my column up to this point?

I’ll accept the last question as a potential problem of mine, but I know, from website analytics and reader emails (or lack thereof), that my audience is slim and composed mostly of friends who also have the time to ask questions of aesthetics. So if I write in an excessively familiar style, The Daily Sun Arts section will survive to see another day. Ya feel.

But the other questions are game, since shouldn’t criticism seek to clarify and not further obscure? Deconstruction, which I have been lately exposed to yet again, says no, but let’s limit our discussion here to the kind of cultural writing you’d find in newspapers, magazines and blogs, not academic journals. Is a lyrical tendency in criticism allowed, or should a critic’s prose seek to explain, determine and solve?

Accessible criticism, especially the sorts you’ll find online, has sided with the latter camp as of late. Most reviews dish out plot summary, with requisite compliments or swipes at the acting, script and image-prettiness, and perhaps end with a note about the film’s sociopolitical relevance. The pieces that ‘go long’ (as in long-form) trace a film’s symbolism and propose one-to-one meanings for choice shots, objects and character actions.

The films of Christopher Nolan and David Fincher are exhaustively analyzed along these lines, but as much as I’d like to gender this kind of discourse along ‘white male’ lines, it also thrives in popular progressive criticism. Critiques that claim to uncover a racist or sexist subconscious to mainstream films often raise good points but move so far away from the text at hand or zoom in so close on one aspect, sans context, that they overlook a perhaps resolute, invigorating ambiguity. What if a film embodies not just one stance — say, feminist or anti-feminist — but many of them at the same time? Is this not the age of dismantling binaries?

In her 1996 piece on Pulp Fiction, “Cool Cynicism,” bell hooks set the standard, to my limited knowledge at least, for how to write intersectional film criticism. She uses colloquial language to sneak in innovative theses, like when she starts a paragraph saying, “Tarantino’s films are the ultimate in sexy cover-ups of very unsexy mind-fuck.” That sentence may not make sense when you first read it, but it does if you take your time poring over it and, crucially, reading her supporting evidence.

bell hooks practices a form of criticism veering on poetry, and it is that poetic spirit, and with it an amorphous form, that separates intelligent analysis from superlative, risk-taking work. Yet isn’t poetry kind of antithetical to criticism? Poetry keeps its cards close to the chest, only admitting what it aims to say if the reader focuses, contemplates and re-reads. Which brings me to my central question today: Must a piece of criticism be read once to be appreciated, if not understood?

Methinks those who would say no would also be reluctant to revisit a film that has a reputation, in any way, as difficult. I have not had the chance to review Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice yet, but if I did I would definitely see it once more, maybe twice before attempting to unlock it. I am in the midst of an honor’s thesis on cinema, and repeated looks at certain Thai, French and Iranian selections have divulged details, be they plastic or political, that has increased my respect for these filmmakers a thousand fold. But while I hope to offer some coherent insight on these artistic subtleties, I also shy away from ascribing definitive explanations, opting for a twisty-turny style of prose that may be driving you mad on this very page.

A poetic tendency drives practically all the best critics, from bell hooks to Roger Ebert. “The world as processed by the mind, with finally only the bright bits magnetized by emotion remaining to flash against darkness,” is how Geoffrey O’Brien, a published poet in his own right, describes the sieved reality of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which is no stranger to charges of obscurantism. Manny Farber, one of the most distinct and byzantine voices in the history of film criticism, offers the following when praising the “underground films” of such old Hollywood directors as Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks 1918: “In the films of these hard-edged directors can be found the unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-worn detail which the visitor to a strange city finds springing out at every step.”

Do these quotes make sense? Not in any clean, easy sense. But they preserve something attractive and — this is most important — intrinsic to the films under scrutiny, and so testify to their merit. In her treatise On Beauty and Being Just, the endearingly esoteric critic Elaine Scarry writes, “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.” Criticism will often fail to match the beauty from which it is inspired, but it should at least keep the wheel of appreciation and close attention ever turning. There is, after all, no community when every critic aims to to have the last word.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

How So?

Chances are you have enjoyed cinema your entire life, but the fact is the you who started with Sesame Street or Shrek or It’s a Wonderful Life is not the you today. The plastic tray fastened to your high chair no longer collects drool as you watch figures move across a screen. No doubt there are times, in a theater and especially out, when the blankness of youth sounds quite appealing. But if you are reading this, then you have read and lived and thought enough to bring something — education, curiosity, self-awareness — to everything you see.

What do we do with this power? Many do little, while a bilious, often anonymous contingent make a vocation out of belittling it. Comments sections under reviews, especially those that take a less than adulatory tone toward the latest hundred-million-dollar entertainment, charge the critic with overanalyzing or worrying too much about what it “means.” “It’s just a movie,” a regular sight on these forums, is a rejoinder so immaculate in its self-pleasuring logic that it becomes deflatingly clear movie critic and commenter speak totally different languages.

While philistinism in, around and beyond the cinema runs rampant, it can too easily stand in as a straw man for an equally one-sided, and superiorly pretentious, college newspaper opinion column. (What’d I say about self-awareness?) What irks me more are the discrepancies between those of us who, by and large, espouse the same critical language. You and I may regard movies as art, judge one’s worth not (only) for its “mere spectacle” but for its ability to “get at” something deep and still disagree about a particular film. That division springs from the indeterminable calculus of personal preference, plus some more explicable aesthetic expectations.

Chief among these is the expectation that a movie needs to be about Something — and least of all Schmidt — to be good. About The State of Marriage, Russia, The American Dream. I find this a tired, limited, predetermined approach to art, and one highly susceptible to P.R. hype and groupthink. Films so readily demonstrative, if only through dialectic arguments and foregrounded symbolism, of one big idea fail to fill in the little details of human behavior that would complicate such a broad, and thus phony, thesis. And yet these films are so often celebrated for their thematic obviousness, especially when released in the same year or season as other like-minded works. The think piece model thrives on corralling disparate works under one zeitgeist-defining headline, and better when the films assert the same reductive stance, regardless of individual quirks or vitality.

Take A Most Violent Year, the new J.C. Chandor movie starring beautiful people Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. I do not expect you to have seen it, and I did not care for it so I am not here to recommend it. Isaac plays an ambitious oil entrepreneur who shuns his peers and immigrant heritage in order to, you know, be the best. As he gets there, his soul hardens to the climactic point where blood intermingles on-screen with oil in a risible metaphor for the violence of commerce. None of the scenes to that point, except for a grimy, spooky tunnel chase scene, inject the humdrum handsomeness with any personality, and the tunnel vision with which Chandor hones in on his star-spangled target makes for a redundant, lifeless film.

A Most Violent Year currently stands at a 90 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a blurb that praises its “thought-provoking heft.” The National Board of Review named it 2014’s Best Film, and I know plenty of smart critics who have praised it. I must have seen a different movie, or more likely I must hold different criteria with regards to quality. I expect a certain mystery and intricacy as a film follows its characters to the finish, and any sense that the filmmakers constructed their story in reverse, retrofitting a resounding conclusion with the steps it takes to get there, strikes me as antithetical to the mission of art, not to mention the strengths of cinema.

The only “abouts” worth fussing over in works of art have, in some way, to do with the nature of the medium itself. Ulysses is “about” consciousness, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is “about” perspective, Boyhood is “about” time. But each of these masterworks is “about” an infinite number of things as well, because a devotion to and mastery of artistic form leads to all-encompassing, endlessly reflective look at the world. Formal analysis is not an excuse to undermine the superficial pleasures of a film or flaunt a little thing only you noticed and no one else, but a method to truly evaluate greatness — to find words and reasons for what could otherwise be called magic. When a movie like A Most Violent Year, The Imitation Game or Birdman fails to say anything under close scrutiny — that is, say more than what already streamed from the mouths of its characters — it is because either the director had little grasp of the story’s complexity, did not know how to convey that complexity through cinema or both.

So much of the discourse surrounding film and television today latches on to the most obvious “abouts,” the kinds factory molded for think-piecing. High school English class, when we read The Great Gatsby and were told to identify its themes and figure out what the green light “meant,” still defines, and so limits, our expectations for moving pictures, and literature too. No one wants to stay in high school, yet our approach to film is surely stunted, not because it’s not intellectual or theoretical enough but because it likens drama, especially historical drama, to Spark Notes.

Cinema has the power to just look at people be, and in Boyhood, The Immigrant, American Sniper and Inherent Vice they can be compelling, contradictory figures at odds with the subject matter and expected politics of the film. Roger Ebert, the most mainstream film critic we’ve ever had, summed it up when he said, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” And what he surely implied is that the “how” is the fun part.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

Beyond Outrage

It goes without saying that the Sony hack — in all likelihood North Korea’s response to the Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy The Interview — and the Charlie Hebdo massacre vary in the severity of their crimes. But in both cases, strong and articulate progressive voices have countered all the calls to defend “freedom of expression” and #JeSuisCharlie’s by criticizing the content of the debateably satirical works themselves. Adrian Hong wrote a popular piece for The Atlantic titled, “North Korea: Not Funny,” while many on the left, in publications like Vox, Slate and Jacobin, criticized the content and motives of Charlie Hebdo. For The Hooded Utilitarian, Jacob Canfield said Charlie Hebdo’s “cartoons often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia.” These are well-meaning, well-informed lines of argument that raise issues we should be considering in 2015.

While in theory I should consign these critiques, I do not, because theory has no claim on comedy. While watching The Interview, I laughed a good many times, even as the critic in me groaned this has got to be Franco’s worst performance to date. While decoding the seemingly offensive cartoons via the blog Understanding Charlie Hebdo, which provides translation and context, I did not laugh, necessarily, but I understood how the caricaturists effectively put air quotes around their most egregious creations, often lampooning the perspective of their country’s serious and seriously racist National Front party. The politically engaged French citizen, knowing the context, could find these cartoons humorous, because their inherent shock value can catalyze in said person a needed second or two of reflection during his or her average, busy day.

Because if there is one thing art does that political criticisms of it too often forget, it provokes a response from the viewer — an emotional, physical, automatic response that imbues that art, no matter its quality, with an individual significance. So I may laugh at The Interview, a stupid film, and not be considered callous to the suffering of North Koreans or — worse of all! — a bad critic. It is a superficial, irresponsible movie with many many flaws, but it succeeded, for me, as passable entertainment. To judge The Interview as a failure because it does not convince its viewers to “do something to help change this odious regime and bring about human rights for North Koreans,” as Hong does, is to freight it with an Oscar-baiting importance that would induce fatal cases of eye-rolling in its target audience.

But I am grateful Hong wrote that Atlantic piece. While I may disagree with the parameters he chose for critiquing a particular film, he brings a far more significant issue — the plight of innocent North Koreans — to the attention of many. For every thousand Facebook shares fueled by schadenfreude, there has got to be one person who read Hong’s story and felt a pang of profound moral outrage, worth exploring more and taking action against. That positive outcome is something only the popularity, and stupidity, of The Interview made possible. Whether Franco and Rogen respected or trashed their film’s sensitive subject matter, the media will be there, assuming its post-Twitter role as a spontaneous and widely visible corrective to the sins of popular culture.

For better or worse, this chatter only crescendos when the object of passion is a challenging, thrilling piece of bona fide art. It is for this reason that no one is talking about The Theory of Everything or The Imitation Game, with their spectacularly unearned denouements,and why we cannot stop arguing over Selma and American Sniper. Pitted by opportunists as ideological enemies, the latter two films both complicate their heroic narratives through changes of perspective (in Selma, Coretta Scott King rightly accuses her husband of something he does not fess up to) and uncomfortable pauses (as a V.A. psychiatrist questions the historically efficient sniper Chris Kyle, the camera lingers on the soldier’s face as he conclusively denies any feeling of regret). Neither film is totally devoid of sentimentality, but both provoke thought through emotion, ensuring that any moral misgivings will fester and leech.

I know there are some fine, smart people out there who will disagree with my praise for Selma and American Sniper especially, and that they could pursue more productive routes of attack than “Selma gets LBJ wrong!” or “That Chris Kyle was a liar.” That is how these things go, as they should. But it does us little good to go on about what A gets wrong about X or Y, because a great film’s politics should be difficult to reduce to binaries and viral polemic. Find a recruitment poster if you’re looking for a call to action, and go outside if you’re looking for facts. Emotion remains the only barometer of truth, so long as that emotion stubbornly resists translation.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

Labels or Love

Late in Birdman, one of this season’s surefire Oscar contenders, washed-up movie star Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton) accosts Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), the icy New York Times theater critic who has sworn to give his new play “the worst review anybody has ever read,” before even seeing it.

“Keep scribbling down your labels,” he sneers. “That’s what you do. You label things. You label people and you label art. … Nothing about technique or structure.” He plucks a daisy from a vase resting on the bar beside them and shoves it in her face. “Do you have any idea what this is? You can’t even see it if you don’t label it. The beauty and depth of this simple thing escapes you. You mistake those sounds in your head for true knowledge.”

I love this scene, and I don’t love Birdman. I don’t hate it, either — I am not eager to label it “a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption,” as Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers did, or “the nadir of Western civilization,” as Tabitha presumably might. I’m not too into the “label” thing anyway; I prefer the notes on “technique” and “structure” that Riggan laments are missing in Tabitha’s judgmental and influential prose. Ironically, I find little to say when I apply such rigor to Birdman, aside from the given “Look how much the camera moves!” bromide, but, well, that is a topic for another time.

The topic today is the job of the critic, or how the popularity of professional labelers like Tabitha distorts the public perception of that job and, in turn, of how art works. Most people assume a critic should stand in for the paying moviegoer, à la Consumer Reports, here to tell you whether a movie is good or bad so that you can make an informed decision about where you spend your money. This view of criticism has never held as much sway as it does now, with Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDb and other aggregate services pulling in tremendous traffic and ad revenue.

These websites do away with the act of reading altogether, for they quantify a movie’s value by swirling around sometimes over a hundred reviews and arriving, somehow, at a numerical grade. One four-star review holds no weight: A buzzworthy movie needs dozens, to plaster over a full-page New York Times spread and to bump its Tomatometer rating close to triple digits. Individual opinions collapse into unqualified praise or else the most fiery invective, those binary verdicts fill into a consensus and that consensus cements as some objective truth, e.g. “Look, Birdman has a 94 percent, what do you mean you don’t like it?”

The words that survive in this ecosystem are, fittingly, the loudest. Critics like Tabitha know how to pen a line to hammer home the “freshness” or “rottenness” of the work they have deigned to review. Why bother reading the full piece, when it’s all there in one conclusive sentence? Blurb-masters like the aforementioned Travers reward no critical investment, since they often repeat themselves (seriously, search Travers’ name and the phrase “sneaks up and floors you”) and pay little attention to films as texts with nuanced structures that produce dense, vital images worth unpacking. No wonder Travers loves Birdman so much: The peddler of sound and fury without substance has met his cinematic match.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Professional criticism is a business, as hilarious that may be to put to print, and businesses stay alive by appealing to as many people as they can. The majority does not want to consider films as texts, and would likely sock me in the mouth for using either of those terms, and again for putting them in the same sentence. For some, movies really are an “escape” from the troubles of the world and not an investigation of them, and I consider it a privilege to so devotedly believe in the latter.

But let’s hesitate before we so blindly eat up all the “labels” shoveled our way. Labels — whether they be adjectives, qualitative nouns (“triumph,” “train wreck”), comparisons to other works (“Interstellar is so much better than The Dark Knight Rises”) or numerical grades — can only serve as conversation-starters. For labels to consume the whole conversation is to have no conversation at all — just modifiers, without an anchor, or any involvement, in the film itself. The act of interpretation can run parallel to a firm opinion or many conflicting ones, but the act can only enliven what is there, not desecrate it. “Doing justice,” or at least attempting to, is what we like to call it, except we sometimes may watch a film so esteemed and see no justice to be done at all.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here. 

You're Liking It Wrong

‘Tis the season for best-of-year list-making to once again consume the minds of tastemakers, both actual and wannabe. For us clammy, opinionated few in the Sun arts section, that means a lot of time murmuring, alone, at a shared GoogleDoc spreadsheet, worrying why FlyLo’s “Never Catch Me” is not on every ballot and casting shade at everyone else’s taste through snarky comments and Tim & Eric GIFs.

That explains my experience, at least. Truth is, all this antagonizing comes from a playful place, not from any legitimate, swirling anger directed toward the tastes of my peers. Part of this ease stems from my acceptance, sometime over the last two years, that there is no “Best” anything, especially when decided en masse. Midway through last awards season, when movies become racehorses and cease to be seen as art, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott observed, “Criticism rests on the independence and integrity of the singular.” Words I can live by.

With the power to judge works on a personal level comes the profound yet, in this clickbaitian epoch, devalued responsibility to respect the opinions of others. I know that sounds like a cat poster, but it’s true, and it requires a few more words to unpack. So let me first backtrack and pose a new question: Is it possible to take issue with someone who likes a movie that you do but for totally different, and therefore wrong, reasons?

In short: Yes, you most certainly can, you definitely should and this should not come as a surprise to any of you. One of the more implicit and important lessons to a humanities education comes in the recognition that there are not just other people in the world but other minds, too, all equally vast and treacherous. That is humbling to admit, and crucial to remember until the day you die, but it does not mean we should keep quiet. Every person is a precious flower, yeah yeah, but growth stems from these little intellectual quarrels, when we form an argument addressed at a formidable friend or foe and secretly, unconsciously hope his or her retort is good enough to keep the volley going.

You think The Grand Budapest Hotel is just a barrel of laughs and pastel colors? I’d say you missed a great deal of sadness, fascist metaphor and meta-commentary on the iterability of storytelling. Boyhood is “relatable” and nothing more? I’d say it’s an upsetting depiction of the ways we both change and fail to change, or even retain agency, over time and how our messy lives never fit into neat narrative arcs. Non-Stop and Lucy are trash and thus worthless? Well … you should know where I stand on those two by now.

Of course, no one else shares my takes on every film. Not because mine are right or better than anyone else’s, but because they are influenced by my own subjective experience, which is something I have elaborated on a couple times this semester. I have put in the time to develop what I hope are rigorous and interesting readings of a great deal of films, yet I recognize that these readings coexist with a million different others. Just because I say something specific about, say, the tracking shots in 2001: A Space Odyssey does not cancel out, in my eyes, the validity of an opposing interpretation.

I hope others think I’m “getting at something” or that I’m “right on the money” with my piece on [insert film here], but deep down I know any supposedly perfect review could be countered by a perfectly reasonable alternative written from a different frame of reference. I still own what I believe in, and I will defend my position with fire if required, but I’m not going to lose sleep because one friend or the Tomatometer disagrees. All I have in this world is my taste, which is true only to me no matter how adamantly I believe otherwise, but I’ll do my best to sustain the illusion with a marvelous grace.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here. 

Loving and Hating, But on Whose Terms?

In all worthwhile criticism, two inclinations are always at war, and they are humility and vigilance. Too much humility precludes the ability to say anything at all, while excessive vigilance almost always reads as petty after the blood has cooled. Being discerning but fair and above all curious demands a balance, which seems feasible until you’re faced with the question: Do you judge a movie on your terms or its own?

In other words: Do you evaluate a movie for what it does do or for what, in your lowly opinion, it should do? Do you place it against the exemplary works of its own genre and judge accordingly, or do you have the right to rebuke a whole genre, a whole mode of filmmaking, for violating principles you yourself set? These are questions with answers that vary on a case-by-case basis, but like Ready to Die versus Illmatic and sexual preference, you tend to lean one way or the other.

I’ve gotten to the point where I embrace my power to set the terms of engagement. By that, I mean I don’t watch a movie now and give it a thumbs-up or down depending on how successfully and seamlessly it “does its job.” Instead, I see my job, when writing a review, to track down missed opportunities in a movie, moments of shallowness or cheapness that are often reinforced by the codes of genre and narrative. And when a movie connects, the priority is not to judge it against its generic peers but rather for the revelations it touches upon by breaking expectations, by doing what it should not do.

Let me clarify with an example. Over the weekend, I saw that other Brad Pitt World War II movie, Fury. It’s brutal, draining and unequivocally “well-done,” my friend and fellow Sun columnist, Julia Moser ’15, and I agreed. About halfway through, the battlefield carnage halts for a 20-minute interlude in an apartment that two soldiers, played by Pitt and Logan Lerman, have entered with the intent of raping the female occupants. Things complicate from there, and through facial expressions, pregnant pauses and the use of space, the scene vivisects a much less gory, but more entrenched form of male violence.

The movie surprised me there, for its commitment to exploring sexual violence at the expense of on-screen action or spectacle. That’s something not many war movies dare to do, and I give Fury credit for trying. It’s too bad the movie ends with one of those airheaded stand-offs that glorifies the valor in mowing down as many Nazis as possible. It shoots itself in the foot by obeying and so ferociously embracing the “last stand” scene intrinsic to so many war movies instead of subverting that trope in some way. The ending was “well-done,” no doubt, but far and away the stupidest part of the film.

So I reject Fury’s reality and substitute it with my own — or something like that. I don’t care for the “the acting was good, that plot twist was dumb” kind of pseudo-criticism that stays within a movie’s world and makes no effort to bridge it with our own. That line of thinking, or lack thereof, assumes that no film exploits, cash-grabs or, worst of all, panders. Lord, to think of all the pandering we’ll soon slog through with Oscar season now upon us. Time to flex that vigilance I mentioned before, for no matter how polished every Blackfish or Philomena may be, we all have the right, and distinct pleasure, to call bullshit.

This disparity between what is “well-done” and what is actually interesting to each of us, on a personal level, has been reinforced by the illusion that there is any difference between “favorite” and “best.” We lie when we say, “That is the best movie of the year,” yet we feel no personal connection to it, no urge to think it over or watch it again. “Best” most often esteems the “white elephants” in the room, Manny Farber’s term for those lumbering films with loud artistic or thematic aspirations, which are often unpleasing, unimaginative and overlong. The idea that we can objectively judge works of art, as so many gamers insist when a critic entertains a feminist reading instead of just sticking to the “gameplay,” perpetuates a borderline fascistic, anti-intellectual and above all boring culture.

Let your taste carry you, through all the cultures and all the genres. It’s really the only way to open yourself up to surprise after watching hundreds and thousands of movies. I’m guilty of not rushing to see Frances Ha last year because I anticipated just another ditzy indie comedy. When I finally saw it at Cornell Cinema, I couldn’t shake it, and my instincts urged me to keep that opinion to myself because this was, after all, just another ditzy indie comedy and not worth serious attention.

But no, Frances Ha is a masterpiece, and I have no qualms saying it because it is a judgment forged in my soul. It is in turns the funniest and saddest movie of last year, for its depiction of melancholia is all but unspoken, maybe even unrecognized by Greta Gerwig’s protagonist. I ranked it alongside heavyweights like The Act of Killing and 12 Years a Slave in my “Best of 2013” list, and if I could do it again I’d rank it higher. Frances Ha obliterates any expectations of its genre through its command of cinema and its intimate understanding of what it is to be human, and for doing all that in a way that speaks to me, it’s simply my job to meet it with awe.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

When Story Is Not Enough

“I never remember plots in movies,” Paul Thomas Anderson, director of There Will Be Blood and certified Big Deal, said before an attentive audience Sunday morning. According to Indiewire’s dispatch from the New York Film Festival, Anderson elaborated as follows: “I remember how [movies] make me feel and I remember emotions and I remember visual things that I’ve seen, but my brain can never connect the dots of how things go together.”

Note how Anderson, who I agree with, says “emotions,” and not themes, subtext or any other undercurrent that could be deemed intellectual and thus pretentious. It’s not a matter of reading into a film, at least not at first. Critics — those who write professionally and the rest of us who argue with friends over a film we just paid to see — look for meaning because we have to do something with those emotions a movie brings to the fore. Taking note of what Anderson calls “visual things” helps us comprehend those feelings, and tether them to some valuable lesson, but they stay with us longest when they are incomprehensible. 

I wrote about similar matters in my last column, “How to Read a Movie,” where I detailed a few loose rules to which I hold the films I write about. I do not wish to repeat myself, but with Anderson’s comments and David Fincher’s adaptation of Gone Girl in the air, I would like to defend my first rule, “Story is not enough,” with a few more words. Because, you see, when faced with that standard, Gone Girl does plenty right but even more wrong.

I will not spoil the movie, but let me just get it out there that, regardless of whatever grievances I am about to air, you must see it. Not only are movie people talking about it but also TV people, music people, you-say-I-get-to-see-Ben-Affleck’s-penis? people — all the peoples. For Gone Girl satisfies a basic human need, in that it tells a ridiculously engrossing murder mystery set in small-town suburbia. Gillian Flynn, who wrote the best-selling novel and adapted it to screen, leads you to one assumption before blindsiding you with its inverse, and Fincher is so precise that even those familiar with the book will be surprised by certain cuts, reveals and flashes of light, like those from media cameras refracting through glass onto Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne’s (Ben Affleck) statuesque orange cat.

Yet the movie is so, so compelling for the speed with which it serves its ever-shifting plot that I worry it overlooks qualities that would stand out with subsequent viewings, when the question is not, “Is this entertaining?” but “Is this art? Is this really a masterpiece?” While our conditions for “masterpiece” status clearly differ, one condition I hope we can agree on is that plot for plot’s sake is not ideal, for revisiting a mystery story with the answers in hand usually amounts to diminishing returns. Gone Girl does not suffer that problem, exactly, for it quite loudly and incessantly calls attention to the bloodsucking media swarming the Dunne family, the sexist construct that is the “Cool Girl” and the delusions required to marry and stay committed to another person. At one point a character rants to another about how his/her (I said no spoilers) demands condone murder, and the other character snaps, “That’s marriage.”

The movie is making a Big Point, you see. In fact, it does what critics are relentlessly accused of: overanalyzing a situation. By pushing its multiple critiques so far into the foreground, Gone Girl wants to assure us it is more than pulp, not just meaningless “airport novel” trash. It has things to say all right, but these verbal and visual stingers indicting cable news, marriage and sexism struck me, for the most part, as easy, smug and way too abstract, like the lazier bits from The Daily Show. It’s one of those things where I “get” what the movie is trying to say and then, in my head, scream, “You think I don’t know that already?!”

The indirect reason for this is that Gone Girl spends almost every waking moment issuing plot developments that the psychology of Nick and Amy Dunne never finds time to take root. Now that may sound like a pretentious thing to say, but I am convinced the great movies we return to again and again feature protagonists with tricky and boundless interiorities, snippets of which we see during largely plotless moments.

These moments do not need to be slow, though they many memorable ones are, such as Scottie’s silent stalking of Madeleine in Vertigo or Juliette Binoche’s stare into the camera in Certified Copy (the masterpiece I keep imploring you, yes YOU, to see). We can also peek into the minds of our heroes when the action gets tense, like when Gary Cooper’s conflicted marshall stalks the streets in High Noon. Just so you know I think Fincher does this beautifully in other movies, how about in The Social Network, when Mark Zuckerberg aims his genius at coding Facemash.com, in what we see, through a brilliant, exhilarating montage, to be a misogynistic reaction to an unsuccessful date.

During revealing moments such as the ones described above, these movies cease to be about a story of made-up people or hot button themes but human behavior. There is no phenomenon better suited to cinematic exposure than the way we look, move and sweat, and if the filmmaker is talented enough, those external snapshots will clue us into what lies within, which, as a viewing experience, can be quite emotional.

Gone Girl is so cynical that neither Nick nor Amy Dunne face any chance at redemption, and so Fincher keeps their interiorities, to say nothing of their moralities, out of sight. It’s a shame, because not only did I not learn much new from this slick piece of entertainment, but I left the theater without any empathetic connection to two of the most messed-up characters in recent cinema, and what the hell am I doing to deserve that?

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

How to Read a Movie

Courtesy of Nils Axen

“It’s ironic that a critic trying to establish simple ‘objective’ rules as a guide for critics who he thinks aren’t gifted enough to use taste and intelligence, ends up — where, actually, he began — with a theory based on mystical insight.”

I quote Pauline Kael to remind myself how ridiculous a column like this is. In 1963, the New Yorker film critic took on her contemporary Andrew Sarris, whose auteur theory, she claimed, reduced criticism to a game of ready-made formulas and minutiae (i.e., “Because Howard Hawks directed this, it, by default, has value and speaks to and with his other works, inspirations, obsessions, etc.”). Kael valued her visceral response to a film over any post-viewing theoretical posturing, be it astute or not.

It is wrong to praise a film that leaves you cold just because it has neat camerawork or you find in it some interesting commentary. A good movie involves you in its stakes and in its world — even a stark, “cold” movie like Caché does such a thing. I don’t think there is one movie I’d call a masterpiece that does not, at least, bring me close to tears (Okay: Hot Fuzz is an exception). Writing about a masterpiece is so tough because to attempt to translate its effect — not its story, images or sounds, but the whole package — into words is to butcher it. Most of the time, the secret to appreciating great art is to let it be its own witness.

But, by virtue of the bell curve, most movies we watch are not masterpieces. That sacred, silent response to Vertigo gets real tiresome if applied to all the movies. And the “Well, that sucked!” response does us little good, either, as easy and satisfying as it is to say. If we hope to be discerning consumers and reasonable thinkers, we can start by bringing to movies high, nuanced standards of evaluation (“That was good/bad because…”) and analysis (“That said [insert theme here] by…”).

There is no one way to go about this. But I know my way, so how about I list it, as if it’s fact:

1. Story is not enough. The tighter and more decisive a protagonist’s arc, the less I take it seriously. Not many agree with me, and it’s an especially contentious position to take in this golden age of “quality TV,” or serialized narrative. Perhaps I’m suspicious of the possibility of true heroism, or else bored by it. Whatever the reason, I find most meticulously plotted movies to gloss over human qualities like doubt, fear and contemplation. A story needs to halt for quietude to set in, and that pause can be jolting when it arrives. The rapid-fire Grand Budapest Hotel defines itself in its plotless moments, like when Zero dutifully recites Gustave’s poetry at dinner or when a key light switches on by the dinner table to illuminate old Zero’s crying face. A film’s worldview can click through such a throwaway gesture.
2. Cherish movement. In the end, a director’s most basic job is to make a film look interesting. Sometimes, he accomplishes this by wringing a manic energy from his actors, as Mike Leigh does, or she coasts her camera over objects and bodies in a sensuous way, as in the case of Claire Denis. We are watching “moving pictures,” so there better be movement within and across frames. Movement can take its time, as it does in the little-seen 2010 western Meek’s Cutoff, where protracted dissolves morph landscapes, people and colors to hypnotizing effect. Action movies and art films alike should flow from one image to the next; if that flow breaks, it should betray a twist in the story or, better yet, a character’s psychology, not sloppy filmmaking.
3. Have fun with colors. Color cinematography may appear more “real” than black-and-white, but there is no reason filmmakers, at least fiction ones, should feel obligated to capturing doors, walls and jackets as they actually look. Two of this year’s finest thrillers, Non-Stop and A Most Wanted Man, set their moods and tell their stories through colors alone: The former’s ocean blue airplane cabin speaks to modern slickness yet brings out the disparate colors of the passengers’ skin, which fits its critique, while the latter film color codes its settings (stifling office quarters are fluorescent yellow and streets are melancholy blue) to match the perspective of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s protagonist. When a movie with the resources fails to toy with its palette, like the new Captain America, it is a letdown indeed.

I have more items in mind (“Good movies don’t need to be P.C.”; “Sometimes, ambiguity is just bullshit”; “Anything with Dwayne Johnson is automatically great”) but I sense I am running out of space. It must be reiterated that the most important evidence of a film’s quality comes from the gut. While these parameters provide a loose system for evincing one’s enthusiasm or disapproval, they still kowtow to that initial response. It can be disheartening to know that words will always fail to do justice to the most transcendent experience, but at least most of the movies out there aren’t so perfect, and therefore leave us with plenty to quarrel about.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

A Belated Introduction

I find myself in the sixth semester of writing this column, otherwise known as the sixth semester where no one knows what I’m getting at, least of all myself. I’m not one for introductions, which explains why, back in January 2012, I inaugurated this biweekly soapbox not with a “Hello” or an overview of my ideas and interests but with a piece on the divine and cinema’s attempts to depict Him/Her/It. I was proud of its title: “Oh, God.” So intellect, much serious. Wow.

I have since learned that growing up demands a bit of dumbing down. Just because I announce, “Today, I write about GOD!” or “The Kardashians and Facebook are killing America!” (my second column) does not make me a smart or challenging or worldly writer. It just makes me David Brooks — you know, smug.

It’s good to lighten up. As far as movies go, that means I temper expectations equally when seeing a holier-than-thou, Oscar-ready biopic about, say, a rodeo AIDS activist or Transformers 4. Both movies simplify, condescend and manipulate; the difference is that most critics will buy into the former, likely because of its Important subject matter, while stringing together a selection of groan-worthy puns aimed at the latter. Call a spade a spade, but if you have a raging vendetta against Michael Bay, try to think of the last time you disagreed with the Tomatometer.

Independent, self-aware, specific critical thought: That’s what I am getting at here. The enviably levelheaded film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz issued a rallying cry earlier this year with the piece, “Please, Critics, Write About The Filmmaking.” In it, he took a swipe at many of his colleagues for ignoring formal analysis in their writing; blog posts and newspaper reviews alike tend to devote more time to plot summary, box office talk or else cherry-picked sociopolitical tirades against a movie or television episode than careful attention to what makes a movie a movie (camera angles, editing patterns, mise-en-scène). It’s not that you should ignore plot, business and politics; indeed, the most valuable, responsible critics (to name just a few: Seitz, Nick Pinkerton, Tasha Robinson, Mike D’Angelo) intersect them all in vital, nuanced writing that is never just about a movie.

The best critical writing is useful, in some way. It should be entertaining, humble and even poetic, but the word I keep coming back to is “useful.” I know no greater compliment than when a friend or total stranger tells me they learned something from reading a piece of mine. I thought I was just spitting opinions here; how am I teaching anyone anything? Well, when you tether those mercurial value judgments to some notes on style, historical context and life’s Big Questions, your useless opinions begin to take on some weight — so long as you come across with humor and honesty, more human than textbook.

This is all a roundabout way to say that, for my time remaining here, I have a plan for this column. With this entry as an introduction of sorts, I plan to turn this mess of pop culture digressions and Liam Neeson appreciations into a focused, ongoing series about the act and nature of criticism. Some working titles for future columns include “How to Read a Movie,” “In Praise of the Mixed Review” and “The Wrong Way to Like Movies.” Pretty pompous headlines, I’ll admit, but one needs to appeal to the click-bait gods somehow these days. I hope to open up about the way I see things and, in the process, find the words for some personal, maybe even rigorous system of aesthetic and moral judgment. It goes without saying that I’ve yet to pin down this system myself.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about shortcomings of my writing that have thrived in this column space, among them hyperbole, preciousness and even weird bouts of anger. I aspire, now, to sanity. I’ll dig into questions that irk all art obsessives (Marrying formalist criticism with appreciation for a film’s emotional effect is a current thorn in my side) but keep in mind that, in the end, we’re all in this game of opinions together. I respect dissent and I hope you can respect those contrarian streaks of mine, too. I know that I know nothing, etc., though I hope in due time you’d be inclined to disagree.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be found at its original location here.

Life Itself Review

Link here, at The Ithaca Voice. This is more an essay on my evolving relationship with Roger's work and persona after his death than a straight-up movie review. To compare, you can read my Ebert obit written not long after April 4 last year; he's important enough a figure to merit multiple reflections, and I am sure this piece will not be the last.

Allegory of the Man Cave

The boy loves music. He does not have the words to describe this love, nor does he know many words at all. He just listens to what his parents play in the car, at home, on the patio. He plays some of these songs, by ear, on the family’s grand piano, takes music lessons and learns the alto saxophone. He grows up and curates his own playlists, filled with songs his family and friends cannot stand. He loves this music and likes that he does not have to justify this love with words, even now. To him, music just is.

Meanwhile, he watches movies. He loved Star Wars as a kid because, sheesh, how can you not. He enters high school with a curiosity to catch up with the rest, so he looks to the IMDb Top 250. He checks out Platoon, Fight Club, Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator — guy flicks. He cannot believe how much blood and guts he sees. He knows these are not horror movies, where such cheap “splatter” is expected. He is watching serious stuff, with real carnage and no discernible continuity errors.

He lets himself be taken away by the experience of these movies, with their breathless battle scenes, plot twists and Hans Zimmer soundtracks. He declares a movie to be the best ever made if it gives him uncountable goose bumps by the end. He finishes watching a movie and knows, like that, whether he loves it or hates it — especially if he hates it. He hates movies that bore him or do not “make sense.” He hates movies that do not show their violence in slow motion, limbs-flying glory. He also plays a lot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare around this time, by the way.

He goes to college. He realizes how wrong he was, though not before falling asleep during a few silent films. Okay, he realizes how wrong he was and still sleeps through some silent films since he always manages to watch them at like three in the afternoon in a stuffy room with comfy chairs and always insists he does not need coffee, since his love of cinema will valiantly get him, sans chemicals, through the classics.

But he loves the classics. He loves the purity of this kind of storytelling, which treats plot as a means to engage with themes and not the other way around. He picks up on some radical ideas, on religion, suicide, sex and so on, these filmmakers subtly and persistently floated without bucking the strict censorship codes of their time. He takes notice of how Hitchcock moved his camera or how Kurosawa arranged characters within a frame or how Murnau laid images on top of one another. He does not just “take in” a movie but searches, while watching it, for a system of form, theme and inter-textual reference to tie everything together. He often fails to unite all these strands when transcribing an argument to print, but at least he feels this whole mental process has gotten easier.

He cannot watch the movies he once loved without jamming them through this intellectual crucible. He concludes, with arrogant certainty, that some of these movies, like American History X, are jejune, melodramatic slogs. He is relieved to see Total Recall again and discover a deliberate, gleeful deconstruction of action movie tropes. He is incredibly happy to report that Non-Stop, the latest Liam Neeson anti-AARP advertisement, is not only badass but also an intelligent and measured commentary on post-9/11 security. He knows, now, that some of this entry-level cinema is genius and much of it is overrated crap. He takes comfort in that.

He enjoys what once bored him. He would rather sit through a four-hour documentary about University of California Berkeley than that new Spider-Man movie, though he cannot and will not resist the chance to spin stupid jokes out of the latter. He appreciates the artists out there who see things that provoke them and probe back, whether through documentary or fiction modes. He watches Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and wraps his head around the fact that perhaps the greatest movie he has ever seen was made for less than Simon Pegg’s Star Trek Into Darkness salary. He cherishes the original, coherent philosophy behind such a film. He esteems, above all else, how filmic the work ultimately is, unable to be replicated in another medium or summarized in a Wikipedia article.

He demands more and forgives easier, like when a film meets those demands only halfway. He believes that effort, effort to elevate thought and raise questions, is what makes the world a progressive and livable place. He sees this as the highest function of film, due to its narrative, humans-telling-stories nature. He continues to love music, all this time, without devising some elaborate theoretical framework in which to place it. He needs some time off, when he can just close his eyes and see something beautiful for what it is.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Nymphomaniac Review

Nymphomaniac

Directed by Lars von Trier

Released in 2014

I don’t know. I mean, what else I have seen by Lars von Trier (Melancholia, Dancer in the Dark) has also left me slack-jawed by the end. The Dane has a knack for translating his cruel, starless worldview into undeniably arresting cinema, both celestial and psychological in scope. But this is just something else. It’s not the inherent pornography of these images that leaves me at an impasse — take “Desire & Cinema” with Prof. Ellis Hanson, English, and your tolerance of, even appreciation for explicit art will grow and make you forever wiser. No, Von Trier attacks something close to home, for me at least: the act of criticism itself.

Nymphomaniac: Volumes I and II, a four-hour sexual bildungsroman split in half to facilitate distribution and, in reality, make two times the money, straddles two different modes: Backwards-looking narrative and contemporary criticism of said narrative. The storyteller is Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), an intellectual, Stephen Dedalus-type, finds bloodied and incapacitated in an alleyway by his local convenience store. The alley’s vertical, recursive walls echo F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionism — that is, until von Trier rotates his camera some 270 degrees like Gaspar Noé and blasts Rammstein’s “Führe Mich” on the soundtrack. It is the first instance of bathos that totally undermines whatever impression you had been forming in your head to that point, and it sure ain’t the last.

Seligman brings Joe to his humble apartment, where he offers her tea and she tells him her life story. Her story starts at the beginning, with a now famous line, “I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old.” Joe narrates with as little emotion as you probably just read that sentence, so the word “irony” is applicable here, there, everywhere. Played by Stacy Martin in teenage flashbacks and Gainsbourg for most of the latter half, Joe covers a life’s worth, and then some, over four hours: Discovering beauty in nature with her father (Christian Slater, with a poor British accent); losing her virginity to an excitable older boy, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf, same); competing with her friend, while wearing “fuck-me-now” attire, in screwing a train’s worth of men, all for a bag of chocolate sweets; provoking the wrath of Uma Thurman (just phenomenal), playing the dumped wife of one of Joe’s most gullible partners; marrying Jerôme and giving birth to a child whom she does not love; searching for her lost orgasm through routine visits to a sadomasochist (Jamie Bell, sort of incredible here); dabbling in “debt collection,” a.k.a. organized crime run by a typically wraithlike Willem Dafoe; and, naturally, a lot more. 

The tone of the first volume is one of high comedy, where von Trier superimposes numbers and throws in split screen effects to alleviate awkwardness. The second volume, as the later plot summary only hints at, darkens and loses its voice as a result. The sex, meanwhile, is just there. You see close to everything, and sometimes actually everything, but von Trier does not bathe the intercourse in titillating lights or shroud it in I’m-Making-A-Statement darkness. It’s just sex. Moving on.

Throughout Joe’s retelling, Seligman interjects to draw analogies from the literature, music and history he loves. We are supposed to laugh at the extremity and banality of his similes, which range from prowling as fly-fishing and polygamous sex as a Bach fugue. Seligman does not know what to do with Joe and her insatiable sexuality but see her as another great text, to be studied and compared with. He does what a critic is supposed to do, except he extrapolates a bit too much, drawing connections too far removed from Joe’s experience, with which he cannot relate. Seligman hits gold now and then, like when he rebukes Joe’s self-labeling as a sinner when she also proudly disavows religion; in turn, Joe resolves, through minute, Tarantino-esque dialogue, his elitist thought process regarding how one clips their fingernails. Seligman does not judge her and even praises how she has, her entire life, retained her agency — which is true, in that no matter how much you dislike Joe by the end of this film, you must admire von Trier’s unorthodox commitment to female empowerment and, it must be said, some broad tenets of feminism.

Except at the end, when von Trier blows off the head of his own movie. I will not spoil it, but I will say it is outrageously cynical. It negates the film’s thematic momentum in its embrace of nihilism. It is too much. Or, perhaps, von Trier wants to remind us that the world of Nymphomaniac is still a text, and to take anything that is said, through Joe’s narration, her flashbacks, Seligman’s analogies or the very composition of the projected image, as a vehicle not for spoon-fed lessons but some higher, figurative truth.

What that truth is, I have no clue. Is von Trier just raising a middle finger to the critics — many of whom championed his work, of course — under some guise of deconstructionism, settling on a thesis along the lines of that immortal quote from The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons”? Given the way Joe ruins families and seeks out black men for sex, only to call them “Negros,” this throwing-hands-up-in-the-air tactic may be the most fitting way to critique Nymphomaniac. In that, these characters are above critique. Not a very comforting verdict, in my view, but clearly von Trier believes it. His films, and especially this one, must only, truly make sense to him. God help him.

Final Verdict:

I don't know. Let's say 2.5 Stars out of 5 — right down the middle.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

More Than a Feeling

William Blake's illustrations to Milton's
"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (1816-1820)

So last week, the College Board announced big changes for the SATs, an awful and borderline anti-intellectual institution most of us — in college and beyond — survived and have since tried to forget. Who cares, right? Well, unfortunately, I do, because, effective in 2016, the College Board will no longer require students to write an essay. If you shoved any of my SAT essays (I took the test thrice) into my face today, I would hurl expletives, and maybe my lunch, back at you, because I’m sure they were platitudinous, benign and boring. But, goddammit, did I ace them. Removing the essay component in the SAT puts our academic priorities in all the wrong places, away from the written word, the value of a good argument and the process of creation.

I swear I’m not going to spend this whole column talking about SATs — I’ll get to movies shortly — but humor me for a little while as I reminiscence on that time of so much undue stress. On test day, a Saturday, I woke up around 6:15a.m., stood outside in the cold and waited on a slow-moving line just to flash my pass and student I.D. to some underpaid teacher. It was a miserable migraine of a so-called academic experience, yet the mood shifted once the SAT actually started.

I had 25 minutes to fill two pages with the best points, vocabulary and gerunds I could muster. There was no guessing, process of elimination or wasted seconds. You had to just go at it, and that’s what I did. Some impotent, probably underpaid knockoff of the Muse that Milton invoked so religiously in his poetry visited me in that high school classroom, for the thrill of besting my peers and the crunch of time inspired some … I wouldn’t call it literature, but it was some pretty good bullshit. And what surprised me, reading it over before the proctor called time, was how I packed all this ephemera into a discernible structure, with a shape to my argument and, most crucially, some evidence backing it up.

The rest of my SAT experience sucked, of course, but I value its essay component for reminding me what I excelled at, and how writing mattered as much as a doing a bunch of math problems. The College Board only introduced the writing section, — and the 800 points that came with it — in 2005. Whatever its motivations then, the dismissal of SAT writing now pushes the narrative that the humanities are on their way out — that numbers and filled-in circles equip prospective patrons of higher education better than an inspired, never-before-seen arrangement of words. This is a big problem in academia right now, one The Sun will dedicate a “Dialogue” to tomorrow in Ives Hall.

The delusion governing this administrative decision-making, in favor of STEM fields and against the liberal arts, is that the latter is not “practical” or even “rigorous.” This world needs more problem-solvers and fewer manchilds pouring their feelings onto a page or piece of canvas. While the belittling of art bothers me, I take issue with the fundamental dichotomy being drawn. The worst English essay abandons “practicality” just as the laziest scientific paper tosses out the scientific method. A misguided student may ignore form, coherence and citations when writing about To Kill a Mockingbird, and instead lapse into solipsism, asserting how touched he or she was by the book and why that emotional response is so precious. 1000-plus words later, the reader of this essay learns nothing and wonders how someone forced through the crucible of college essays and SAT writing could so thoroughly forget the lessons they were supposed to learn.

Art should never be devoid of feeling, but those evaluating it must keep that side of themselves in check. University humanities education focuses more on critical and analytical engagement with texts, whether they be books, paintings, films or songs, than the process of creating them. Whereas the former requires schooling and immersion in a medium’s theory and history, the latter depends on shakier, unteachable tenants like vision, originality and, again, the Muse. Great criticism is an art on its own, for the author tests and engages with those three things during the act of writing. But in order for an analysis to carry absolutely any import, a critic must follow some form and move past his or her initial emotional reaction: Okay, you like this movie. Now, what evidence can you share?

That word “form” matters. Even the most perplexing film, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., hits you at a rational, analytical and thematic level. Part of the thrill of watching that movie depends on an ineffable engagement with it, yet I know it is truly great because I detect a rigorously constructed chassis of ideas and storylines underneath all the superficial and beautiful obfuscation. If I can glean order from a surrealist nightmare such as Mulholland Dr., what can I learn, and subsequently teach, from the crisis in Ukraine or our ongoing economic imbroglio? I’m not sure, since I have not invested much time investigating those issues and am content sticking with the arts, thank you very much.

But the point is that criticism, when done right, is inherently constructive. The act itself, of putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, constructs ideas, as if from whole cloth. Of course, we borrow and steal thoughts and turns of phrase more than we even know, but the balanced critic has come to terms with this. And when I use the word “critic,” I don’t mean the professional pundits who write for newspapers. Someone who just finished an SAT essay may find the cogs in his brain whirring at a most unusual brisk speed, surprised that such a stupid exam with such a stupid prompt can inspire such elevated, almost automatic thought. He continues to think; he continues to write; he wonders how to channel an awakened passion for good.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.