I’m perhaps not the most likely person to pen an article under a film section heading. The rather simple and obvious reason being I rarely watch films. I enjoy them, but I fall so far from the category of ‘film-buff’ that I preface most conversions even broadly in danger of meandering onto films with the disclaimer that I possess very little knowledge on this matter. I do enjoy, however, skimming film reviews. Perhaps this enjoyment is simply a vestige of my identity as an English student, but more often than not I find it interesting to unpack how films and their contents are both digested, and related to imagined readers. 

 

Take Charlie Kaufman’s latest, I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), a self-proclaimed “psychological horror film” released in selected cinemas in late August, that premiered on Netflix in early September. My flatmate and I curled up last weekend, and with its trailer in my mind from previous non-committal scrolls of the Netflix homepage, we decided to settle down to what we thought would be a Kaufman-esque exploration of familiar themes set to a lucid, dreamscape world. For this part we were correct. Its two hour runtime constructs a loose and exploratory framework of ageing, intimacy, and interpersonal relationships. Each one holds space to probe the others, and so they peer into each other, jarringly. It’s a wild two hours, to be sure. 

 

As the credits rolled up the screen, I instinctively reached for my phone to find an article that might dig into the themes that the film so carefully constructs and deconstructs. Google’s autofill diagnosed a trend in film reviews that I find at once interesting, and dismaying – ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things explained’, my phone flashed at me. Review after review tried to tie the disparate threads of this film into a reasonable ‘that’ll do’ DIY structure, using its precursor, Iain Reid’s novel of the same name, as a working template. This disappointed me. I recognise the all too human desire for narrative and order in the world, but I found myself wondering if the enjoyment found in a film – your mind can chew upon it a while, testing out a thought or hypothesis here, expanding a concept there – evaporates under the burden of needing an answer. 

 

With its lack of a formalised hierarchy, the internet has flattened the world of the film review. On the internet, everyone can be a critic. While this does not mean that everyone should be, this point I shall frame as irrelevant or it threatens to overshadow my own attempts at this article. This is a world that champions individual opinion – on the condition that the opinion does not overlap with a topic feasted upon by trolls. Films too are much more accessible online. While these factors sketch a utopia of sorts for the viewer/film relationship, the consideration of other forces at work reveals this utopic vision is built on shaky ground. The film aggregate Rotten Tomatoes has, in its surprisingly not-so-short life (it launched in 1998 as the brainchild of three Berkeley undergraduates) become a case study for the warring digitized realm of consumer content. The website sifts through the array of online film reviews, and places them into three categories on the ‘Tomatometer’ – Rotten, Fresh, Certified Fresh – correlating to what percentage of each film’s reviews are marked ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The individual touches each reviewer leaves on his publication are ruthlessly devoured by big data. Sliced down to a lean percentage, a review loses its specific contexts and pointers of reference, and is instead spliced to  form a cold, conglomerate number. 

Jeff Voris, a Vice President at Rotten Tomatoes, explains in an email exchange with a Vox journalist that their goal “is to serve fans by giving them useful tools and one-stop access to critic reviews, user ratings, and entertainment news to help with their entertainment viewing decisions”. True – this is the service that the website provides, a goal anchored by the weight an individual holds to exercise their own decision. It does, however, disregard another side to the story. In 2016 Rotten Tomatoes was acquired by Fandango Media, an American ticketing company that makes its profits off pre-viewing ticket purchase, and is increasingly subsuming ‘media information’ corporations – in all the vagueness of that descriptor –under its umbrella. The weight the individual holds is shifted from sitting squarely with the viewer, and finds itself instead in the framing of the viewer as a potential consumer. In a newspaper you’d recognise the name cropping up regularly, but Fandango’s actions reveal a monopoly of the market that the average viewer is unaware of. The film review industry still alive and kicking? Its corpse is at worst animated enough to be successfully puppeteered by behemoth organisations. 

 

Please excuse the drama in the previous sentence – film reviews do hold their own in areas other than corporate takeovers. Reviews are alive and kicking in their very identity as a way to hash out thoughts. The act of critiquing enables you to work through views you maybe didn’t even realise you had. I’ve found I can follow the trail of my own thoughts to unforeseen conclusions, which is always a curious experience. As a template, a review constructs a plane of safe critical engagement with the creative processes. It functions, I suppose, perhaps as a middle man between the film industry and the public, and creates a (hopefully healthy) reparte between the two. For this to work, film reviews must be respected – not necessarily revered necessarily – but should be held in a regard, so that the opinions levied by critics are seen to hold a value in and of themselves. In the case of a review calling for a film to ‘do better’, this is paramount. 

 

There is also something at once disarmingly new and comforting about reading a review where another person’s take of the film world you yourself digested and constructed comes into view. Noticing someone else’s thoughts reminds you that the film exists both as separate from you, and is wholly dependent on your individual experience to exist in the way it did specifically for you. If written well, a review can tread the line between calcifying your interpretation when thrown into coexistence with another’s interpretation, and leaving you open to further discussion – with a capacity to roll ideas around in your mind in ways you hadn’t thought to appreciate before (at least, I presume, is the case with a ‘good’ film). In theory, I suppose, reviews pay heed to this distinction, and do not so much desire to flatten the critical field into a singular reading that I might have naively presumed was the case when I first began to think about this. 

 

I am aware I have reached no conclusion in this article. Reviews neatly parcel up the relationship between the viewer and the content. It’s a forged and necessary space where thoughts are more than allowed, where individual opinions hold their own weight. Maybe the ‘explained’ appendaged onto my initial Google search was less indicative of a generational interpretative laziness, and more indicative of a desire for a deeper engagement with a confusing film. Or maybe I should try to curtail my recent habit of mansplaining everything that crosses my mind, and actually go to the cinema every once in a while before I decide to write an article about films. Food for thought, perhaps. 

 

Clare Maunder is the Alt. Editor.