Is the Internet Hurting How We Review Books and Movies?
Maybe the binary nature of Ones and Zeros has gone to our heads
“This sucked because I thought it should have been different.”
This is what the majority of reviews I read of books and movies on the internet boil down to, and that includes reviews written by so-called critics. On review aggregator sites like RottenTomatoes and GoodReads, these reviews and comments are baked into either a star rating or a percentage grade, treating art like a school assignment. And sadly, this process has infected the way we think and talk about books and movies.
But if you ask any art teacher, they will tell you that grading a work of art is a dubious task, often informed by criteria set forth by the teacher, not the artist, so that the grade is not so much a reflection of the quality of the art but of the execution of the assigned task. In this case, imagine, for a moment, a world in which critics and reviewers handed out book and movie ideas as assignments to filmmakers and writers, expected them to make a movie to their specifications, and then graded them on their performance. Ridiculous, right? Well, this is what a lot of the reviews out there today read like.
But just so that you don’t think I'm throwing teachers under the bus, I want you to imagine another scenario, one in which the assignment is simply to make good art. And the metric of grading such a subjective assignment is whether that work of art showed growth on the part of the artist, achievement of the artwork's own internal goals, and intention regarding its contribution to the field of art that it lives in. Art education, as any good art teacher already knows by experience, is supposed to be about each student's individual growth, not meeting a universal standard. It's why the best art teachers don’t “teach to the test.”
So why, instead, do we rely on the old Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? Why do we determine the success of a work of art based on our own set of desires, as if we had assigned the task of said art to the artist ourselves? The entitlement required for such a train of thought is astounding. And it’s an unfair measurement of success.
Part of it must be the result of a crowded public forum. Commenters and reviewers are all competing for the pedestal of “Hottest Take.” And then we go to Rotten Tomatoes to see what rating is based on these hot takes. And maybe you read the headlines of the reviews underneath. But how many times have you clicked through one of the links and read the entire review? And, whereas Rotten Tomatoes separates reviewer rating and audience scores, Goodreads is all about audience scores. And if you think reviewers are fierce competitors for the Hot Take title…
How we think about art matters. It affects how we talk about it; it affects how we make it too. And it starts with thinking for ourselves. So, can you imagine if you went to a museum and under each work of art there was, instead of a description, an aggregate rating followed by a top ten list of comments and reviews? Don’t you think that would impact your opinion of the art? I once recommended a book to a friend and colleague based on their stated interests, and—I’m not joking—they pulled out their phone right then and there to check its review score on Goodreads. “Oh,” they said with surprise, “it’s got 4 out of 5 stars. I’ll add it to the list.” Besides the fact that this action was simply rude, showing that they weren’t willing to trust a friend’s recommendation on its own, it was also a symptom of the how our relationship with internet, and more specifically, aggregator review sites, has damaged our individual and interpersonal connections with art.
Critical thinking requires, first and foremost, that we think for ourselves. And when criticizing art, we show ourselves, our points of view, through the words we choose. So how do we choose words that show our love and respect for art? How do we take the task seriously? We do so by exploring what the artists themselves were trying to achieve with their work, not with what we think they should have done. We do so by seeing a book or movie as part of a body of work that exists in relation to literature or cinema or art overall. We do so by reminding ourselves that true criticism is an art form in and of itself.
So, if you love art enough to write a review, why not think like an artist?
What I'm Reading Now:
Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow