Beware the Tomatometer

Look out, critics! There's a new game in town. Individually, your voices are meaningless; mere 'opinions' on works of art, culled from world-view and experience. But together, something real, something powerful, something fruity can be created. You can create a Freshness score on the blessed Tom-a-Tometer, a number many Internet-era movie fans worship like it was Mecca or The Wailing Wall.

Before I go any further I will confess that I do use Rotten Tomatoes, even while realizing it should be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes I'll use it to browse reviews quickly; I've discovered some under-sung writers on RT that I quite like--- and sometimes I'll just try to get a feel for the consensus of the film. What is the general sentiment surrounding the latest new releases--- golden eggs or stinkers?

But this is where the dubiousness (is that a word?) of Rotten Tomatoes comes into play--- it gives the impression of the consensus when it's no more the authority on that than myself or anyone else. It gives the impression that film critics are a united force instead of individuals. (which is, admittedly, a long standing impression--- how many times do they say of a movie "The critics loved it!" or "Forget that movie, man, it was panned", as though every critic feels the same way about a film?) . It's part of the desire for everything in this world to be tied up nicely and neatly, with no acknowledgment paid to the gray area in-between. Rotten Tomatoes just gives the illusion of a 'consensus'.

But those of us who love to discuss film know that virtually all interesting discourse about film lies in that gray area. The older I get, the less interested I become in qualifying terms--- "good", "bad", "masterpiece", "garbage"--- and the more interested I become in the emotions and ideas that the work itself brings up. In other words, what I love about my favorite critics is the way they express what the experience of watching the film meant to them, as opposed to the opinion itself. Much as I love Roger Ebert, he truly is among the most eloquent writers to have written about film, didn't his and Siskel's systems of "Thumbs Up" and "Thumbs Down" really pave the way for this ADD wave of film criticism? It's simply a quick verdict so teenage boys know what to see on a Saturday night. The difference between the "Thumbs" system and the "Fresh" system was that at least Siskel & Ebert's Thumb system acknowledged its own inherent subjectivity--- part of the essence of criticism. Rotten Tomatoes eschews that notion of subjectivity in favor of a false sense of objectivity. In the world of the Tomatoes, you either like something or you don't. Degrees mean nothing.

It's ironic that, in the digital age where personal expression is literally as easy as the click of a button, a fair amount of Rotten Tomatoes' users would move towards a unification of thought. Maybe I'm just the disagreeable type--- but I hardly agree with anyone on a lot of movies, even good friends of mine. Why would I expect to agree with all major critics all the time? Why are critics expected to be spokesmen of the 'average moviegoer'? And isn't the concept of the 'average moviegoer' condescending in and of itself?

Take the RT page of Up--- and you'll see that, for the most part, the only reviews with comments threads on them are the negative ones. This isn't because Tomato-users are using it to build discourse and an exchange of ideas around a dissenting view--- it's just basically a forum with which to bash the reviewer, regardless of the strength of their arguments. Most of the cries more or less amount to "Boo! Dissenting opinion!" and little else. Some even go so far as to suggest that these snarky 'contrarians' (bastards!) be ejected from the Rotten Tomatoes system all together! How fucked up is that?

Off with their heads!

Just check out Mahnola Dargis' typically eloquent review in The New York Times, which was mostly positive, if also somewhat critical of what she deems Pixar's mechanical nature. I haven't seen Up yet, but this trite banality and smug condescension was certainly presented in Wall-E's second half, so I certainly understand where Dargis is coming from. Naturally, the comment section says things like "Up with the movie, down with the critic!", "Why do you hate children?", and so on. Because, naturally, we should hold children's films to a lower standard than we hold more 'sophisticated' films to.

Is that one of the side-effects of having communication on such a mass-level, the desire on the part of some to squash opposing view points? With the exception of Obamania, no fervor swept the country last year quite like The Dark Knight, and it inspired the most militant fanboyism I've ever seen in my life (no small feat). For what I feel is the most frightening example of this, check out the comment thread from Keith Uhlich's review from The House Next Door way back when the movie came out, where Nolan-ites descended on his website like flies on shit, saying all kinds of terrible things (from death threats to grotesque sexual imagery) because he didn't like a movie most of them hadn't even seen yet. In the case of these two reviews, the outrage had nothing to do with discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of the films themselves--- it all revolved around the utterly inconsequential number score on the tomatometer. How dare those bastard critics lower a movie's score? How dare they have an opinion? How dare they speak for themselves, and not the people?

My point with all this is that in an age where an exchange of ideas is more accessible than ever before, it also gives the herd mentality a forum with which to be that much more aggressive with their suffocation of dissent. What these people attempt to do is to shut down discourse so their shallow world-view can be the only one that is endorsed. This is willful ignorance at its worst, masquerading as populist anti-intellectualism. Of course, the trolls will never succeed in silencing those who don't agree--- the pen has always been mightier than the sword, and it always will be.