[GWE] A few personal truths...

[JerryvonKramer]

Strongly resisting the urge to give a history of 150 years of literary criticism. But I'll give the briefest of Cliff Notes:

 

The approach supremebve is talking about was popular in the 1930s, roughly equivalent to this classic foundationalist text of formalist criticism:

 

 

This was also known as the Cambridge School. In the US it was known as New Criticism.

 

It fell out of favour in the late 70s, and we've had a period of about 35 years of historicism since.

 

For those interested, the book I've just written, which will be out later this year, is about exactly what that change entailed. I guess film criticism is still in its formalist phase in some places.

[Jingus]

So every movie based in and around Washington D.C. should have an extended traffic scene? Or is it OK for an FBI agent to go from Quantico to Langley like it's right around the corner? I know that isn't real, but I also know it doesn't make any real difference in the movie.

There's a difference between cutting from one place to another with the safe assumption that time passed in between; and having, let's say, a conversation between two characters where, in mid-sentence, they walk around a corner and are suddenly in a completely different part of town. The former is, of course, perfectly acceptable. The latter can seriously deflate your suspension of disbelief if you notice it. And it's the film's fault for doing that bullshit in the first place, not your fault for being knowledgeable and attentive enough to catch it.

 

 

So if a movie is perfect in every way except that the characters aren't true to their real life counterparts, you think you should judge the movie negatively because of it?

If it seriously takes you out of the movie? Yes. Like I said, it's a specific choice that the filmmakers made to write them like that. And every specific choice is a fair target for critique.

 

 

The fact that it they wrote the coach as a hard ass when I know he wasn't has more to do with me than the movie. I wasn't supposed to be writing about me, I was supposed to be writing about the movie. Bringing up something that really doesn't matter to anyone but me is not what I was assigned to do.

Everything you ever write is all about YOU. It always is. It can't not be. Every opinion we ever hold, every reaction we have to any given situation, it all involves some level of subjectivity. This idea that we should come in as a perfect tabula rasa to experience any particular piece of art is absolute horseshit. There's no way to be completely objective in our response to anything ever. We all bring our own baggage to the experience, our own biases and foreknowledge.

 

Like, I've seen a lot of horror movies. When I saw the shockingly fucking terrible remake of Prom Night, I went: "whoa, in all my years watching crappy slasher flicks, that's one of the absolute worst that I've ever seen". A nominally "scary movie" didn't scare me at all, it inflicted an unintended combination of depression and outrage, based heavily upon my previous knowledge of other works in the same genre and how much better 99% of them were than this garbage. Now, if we take some blushing virgin who's never ever seen a horror film before and show them this: they might actually find it scary. And, in that one case: hooray, the filmmakers completely achieved their goals. That doesn't change the fact that it didn't work for ME at all, and it doesn't make it my fault that their movie failed in part because I've seen so many other movies that did the exact same thing but did it in such an infinitely superior manner.

 

We cannot look at art or entertainment objectively. Ever. Period. Every single time, even if we're trying to keep the most open of spotless minds, we're still subconsciously comparing it to an entire checklist of prior knowledge.

[ohtani's jacket]

I have nothing against artistic licence unless it's wildly abused or the film is trying to make a strong political statement, but in the example of that football coach, it's a cliche that all football coaches are hard asses. Every scriptwriter's thinking "I gotta have more jeopardy, I need more conflict, there has to be more obstacles for my hero to overcome," but to me a good scriptwriter will add some twist to things and not lean too heavily on cliche. I do think when you're dealing with real life people, at least more contemporary real life people (as opposed to historical figures), you have to be more careful than whether Mel Gibson ought to be in a tartan kilt or not. The majority of the audience only care about entertainment, but it would be a different story if you knew the guy personally.

[supremebve]

Parv, your post is really informative. It wasn't a film criticism class, it was a rhetorical criticism class for people in school to be journalists. We looked at a wide variety of art, politcal speeches, literature, advertising, and news reports. The entire point of the class was to train us to be objective with how we look at the world. It really was an invaluable class for me and has guided the way I think about things ever since. I can see why it isn't for everyone, but in my eyes everything should stand on its own merits. In my eyes comparing everything to everything else minimizes the strengths and weaknesses of the piece of art I'm criticizing.

 

Everything you ever write is all about YOU. It always is. It can't not be. Every opinion we ever hold, every reaction we have to any given situation, it all involves some level of subjectivity. This idea that we should come in as a perfect tabula rasa to experience any particular piece of art is absolute horseshit. There's no way to be completely objective in our response to anything ever. We all bring our own baggage to the experience, our own biases and foreknowledge.

Like, I've seen a lot of horror movies. When I saw the shockingly fucking terrible remake of Prom Night, I went: "whoa, in all my years watching crappy slasher flicks, that's one of the absolute worst that I've ever seen". A nominally "scary movie" didn't scare me at all, it inflicted an unintended combination of depression and outrage, based heavily upon my previous knowledge of other works in the same genre and how much better 99% of them were than this garbage. Now, if we take some blushing virgin who's never ever seen a horror film before and show them this: they might actually find it scary. And, in that one case: hooray, the filmmakers completely achieved their goals. That doesn't change the fact that it didn't work for ME at all, and it doesn't make it my fault that their movie failed in part because I've seen so many other movies that did the exact same thing but did it in such an infinitely superior manner.

We cannot look at art or entertainment objectively. Ever. Period. Every single time, even if we're trying to keep the most open of spotless minds, we're still subconsciously comparing it to an entire checklist of prior knowledge.

 

I agree that we can't ever be totally objective, but my goal is to be as objective as possible. I couldn't possibly remove all previous knowledge from my brain, but I can disregard it and try not to let it color my analysis. I honestly thought people were going to agree when I typed that original post, but I guess people have strong opinions on methods of criticism.

[JerryvonKramer]

Incidentally, Jingus's position here is akin to reader-response theory. This book for example:

 

 

This was big in about 1980. And is similarly considered outmoded by most in the academy.

 

However, what you realise if you take the long view is that over about 200 years, you see the same positions come round again and again. It oscillates back and forth between text and context, and between a tendency towards complete subjectivity or complete objectivity.

 

The answers aren't easy.

[Matt D]

The answers aren't easy.

 

Which is why you're a bastion of sympathy for everyone who tries to work his way through this difficult jungle during the GWE process.

[Jimmy Redman]

The nature of literary criticism aside, I've been finding it hard to really put into words what my personal criteria is for GWE. Or if I even have a coherent criteria, for that matter.

 

When I compare a guy whom I've grown up on and experienced their whole career, with hundreds and hundreds of performances to evaluate, to a guy that I've just discovered and have seen a handful of matches of...I feel completely comfortable ranking both guys, but a judgment on them comes from two completely different places.

 

I guess what I can boil it down to is this. When looking at a guy I ask myself, what are you capable of?

 

In a broad sense that means focusing on what I have seen, and not worrying about what I haven't. It also means focusing on the positives, on reasons why I should rank someone rather than reasons why not.

 

If I've seen someone have a dozen matches and think they're awesome, I'm not worried about seeing a hundred more matches to see just how consistent they were over a number of years. I can already see what they're capable of. And if I've seen a guy have hundreds of matches, and think they're awesome in a certain number of them, then again, I can see what they're capable of.

 

That "what" can be any number of things - their very peak performance, a laundry list of good/great matches, a certain year or run when they were awesome, a style of match they mastered, an overall package as a worker...anything. But now that I'm starting to think about a list and wonder who to rank and where to rank them, I find myself asking myself that question more than anything else. What are they really capable of?

[fxnj]

At least in my American college I was taught that there are a variety of valid ways to criticize things and the best way changes to fit the situation. Historicism was big but it wasn't taught as being infallible and the New Criticism was still common, especially for analyzing the technical aspects of poetry. I can see how New Criticism would be helpful to teach objectivity in journalism, but I think the reader-response style is better for wrestling. So much of it comes down to having that emotional connection with the wrestlers involved and we often see WWE booking based on how they think the audience on that particular night would react.

[JerryvonKramer]

I would say there are four broad approaches to any given text, which you could categorise almost any school into:

 

1. Focus on text (formalism, see also structuralism, New Criticism, deconstruction, etc.)

2. Focus on context (historicism, see also cultural materialism, archetypal criticism, Marxism of many different stripes)

3. Focus on reader (reader-response theory)

4. Focus on author (humanism, sort of, see also psycholanalysis, sort of)

 

They aren't all necessarily exclusive and you could buddy them up in different ways. But in wrestling terms:

 

1. Focus on text = focus on matches ... this is Loss.

2. Focus on context = focus on understanding the time and the place, and the audience at the live show, etc ... Dave Meltzer is basically one of these.

3. Focus on reader = focus on your own responses to the match ... various people, Jingus has argued this on the most extreme end.

4. Focus on author = focus on the wrestlers and their input ... closest to this I've seen, I think, is maybe Dylan.

 

I thought typing them out in this way might make it clearer to think about your own approach.

 

My own BIGLAV is some attempt at a holistic approach that tries to take all of the above into account.

[supremebve]

OK, so I'm going through and watching all of Meltzer's **** matches in order, and I'm about to shit on my own argument for a second. I think All Japan matches stand on their own and can be criticized as individual matches, but they are improved through watching them with the context of everything that has come before them. I just watched 2/25/93 - Kobashi/Kikuchi vs. Patriot/Eagle and the match is good, but the way it plays out takes advantage of your expectations in a way that improves the match in my mind. Watching countless All Japan tags, you understand the structure of the matches, the hierarchy of the workers, and can't help but to expect certain things based on who is in the match. The question that comes up though is whether or not these matches should be looked at individually or like chapters in the All Japan book. I probably have as many conversations about music as I do about wrestling, and one of the things that I've always believed is that a great album is always better than a great song. If you can put together a series songs in a way that feels complete and coherent, it is more satisfying than any singular song can possibly be. I think the struggle comes when discussing something like wrestling matches that can be viewed as individual matches or a continuous storyline that all ties together in the end. How do we properly evaluate context? I think everyone here can watch Misawa vs. Kawada from 6/3/94 and enjoy it as a ingular piece of art, but what about a match like Tanahashi vs. Okada from 1/4/16? Can you properly evaluate that match without context? Is it better because of how it works with the other matches in their series or is it worse because it doesn't work without that context? These are the questions that come up when I think about how I'm thinking.

[Jingus]

3. Focus on reader = focus on your own responses to the match ... various people, Jingus has argued this on the most extreme end.

For the record, I don't think this approach works by itself in a vacuum; like you said, things need a more holistic approach overall. One flaw with going purely reader-response is that sometimes readers simply get shit wrong. I can't begin to count the number of film reviews I've seen where the reviewer had made some blatant mistake in the course of watching the movie or writing the review, where they were reporting something that simply didn't happen that way in the movie. I don't mean interpretation, I mean like the film review equivalent of those times when Gorilla Monsoon doesn't see the finish and spends the next five minutes bitching about how the referee made the wrong call.

[jdw]

 

That isn't what she was saying at all. Whether or not the events in the movie coincide with the real life events has little to do with whether or not it is a good movie. If the Godfather was based on a true story, but changed real life events to tell a better story would The Godfather turn into a bad movie? No, it would be just as good as it is now, the real life events are irrelevant.

Nah, I still say she's full of shit. She's acting like anyone who has prior knowledge of the subject should be penalized or handicapped for knowing that stuff. If you're well aware that William Wallace died long years before Isabella Of France ever stepped foot on English soil (as many people would be perfectly aware), then it seriously harms their ability to take Braveheart seriously. And that's directly the fault of the filmmakers who decided to tell a story which they knew was simply not true.

 

 

 

 

I'm pretty much in Jingus' boat. The example I tend to use over the years is Donnie Brasco, Book vs Movie.

 

If you happened to be a crime reader in the 80s, you probably came across the book Donnie Brasco. It's an easy read and one of the early strong "cop undercover in the Mafia" books.

 

In turn, the movie is an easy, accessible film. You got Depp, you got Pacino in the mob... easy movie. Well received, Oscar nominations.

 

But...

 

If you read the book, one of the overwhelming points that Pistone made was that he never forgot for a moment that he was a Cop, that these were Bad Guys he was dealing with, and when push came to shove, he was taking them down. He got across some of the funny wacky elements of the mob, including a lot of the basic jobber work they do to make money rather than the high end crime. But he got across over and over and over again that he wasn't tempted by the life, and that he was always thinking as a Cop.

 

With Hollywood, reality isn't good enough. We need to have "Donnie" tempted by the life, and have a moral dilemma near the end, almost fall into the wrong decision, tension, etc.

 

If you read the book, if you liked it, if you actually *got* that point that Pistone was making about *himself*, that big moment of temption late in the movie impacts what you think about the movie. Why? Because they're both "Pistone", and you kind of would like a movie where "Pistone" is the lead character (as opposed to a supporting cliched head coach) actually be True To Pistone.

 

So I've always thought Brasco is a decently well made Hollywood Movie that either doesn't get Pistone or didn't give a shit enough about the real Pistone to portray him accurately. There are plenty of cops that were tempted, and plenty of cops that crossed the line with the mob. Black Mass deal (frankly poorly) with several. I'm not going to give major props to the movie Donnie Brasco for Hollywooding it up: if they don't give a shit enough about their main character, why should I.

 

I think all sorts of movies, if no all movies, can be looked at in the same way... and in fact are: what *we* bring to the table as much as what the movie does.

[supremebve]

 

 

That isn't what she was saying at all. Whether or not the events in the movie coincide with the real life events has little to do with whether or not it is a good movie. If the Godfather was based on a true story, but changed real life events to tell a better story would The Godfather turn into a bad movie? No, it would be just as good as it is now, the real life events are irrelevant.

Nah, I still say she's full of shit. She's acting like anyone who has prior knowledge of the subject should be penalized or handicapped for knowing that stuff. If you're well aware that William Wallace died long years before Isabella Of France ever stepped foot on English soil (as many people would be perfectly aware), then it seriously harms their ability to take Braveheart seriously. And that's directly the fault of the filmmakers who decided to tell a story which they knew was simply not true.

 

 

 

 

I'm pretty much in Jingus' boat. The example I tend to use over the years is Donnie Brasco, Book vs Movie.

 

If you happened to be a crime reader in the 80s, you probably came across the book Donnie Brasco. It's an easy read and one of the early strong "cop undercover in the Mafia" books.

 

In turn, the movie is an easy, accessible film. You got Depp, you got Pacino in the mob... easy movie. Well received, Oscar nominations.

 

But...

 

If you read the book, one of the overwhelming points that Pistone made was that he never forgot for a moment that he was a Cop, that these were Bad Guys he was dealing with, and when push came to shove, he was taking them down. He got across some of the funny wacky elements of the mob, including a lot of the basic jobber work they do to make money rather than the high end crime. But he got across over and over and over again that he wasn't tempted by the life, and that he was always thinking as a Cop.

 

With Hollywood, reality isn't good enough. We need to have "Donnie" tempted by the life, and have a moral dilemma near the end, almost fall into the wrong decision, tension, etc.

 

If you read the book, if you liked it, if you actually *got* that point that Pistone was making about *himself*, that big moment of temption late in the movie impacts what you think about the movie. Why? Because they're both "Pistone", and you kind of would like a movie where "Pistone" is the lead character (as opposed to a supporting cliched head coach) actually be True To Pistone.

 

So I've always thought Brasco is a decently well made Hollywood Movie that either doesn't get Pistone or didn't give a shit enough about the real Pistone to portray him accurately. There are plenty of cops that were tempted, and plenty of cops that crossed the line with the mob. Black Mass deal (frankly poorly) with several. I'm not going to give major props to the movie Donnie Brasco for Hollywooding it up: if they don't give a shit enough about their main character, why should I.

 

I think all sorts of movies, if no all movies, can be looked at in the same way... and in fact are: what *we* bring to the table as much as what the movie does.

 

I think the difference is that I don't think my personal feelings about the content is as important as the content. What you are saying is not invalid, it is just that I don't think it has anything to do with whether or not what made it to the screen was good or not. The biggest strength and weaknesses with visual mediums like TV and movies is there isn't much room for nuance. I've never seen a single adaptation of a book that could be considered good if you base your criticism on the book. There is just so much more subtle detail you can put on a page than you can on a screen. My sister and I had a conversation recently about how she will either see the movie or read the book, but never both. She says no matter what one of them will end up disappointing her. I'm the exact opposite. If I watch a movie and find out it was based on a book, I immediately add it to my Amazon Wishlist. I know they will be different, and I don't mind that they're different. One is a movie and one is a book and they should be judged for what they are, not what I want them to be.

[Jingus]

I've never seen a single adaptation of a book that could be considered good if you base your criticism on the book.

I have, quite a few of them. There's plenty of movies which I'd say were actually better than the book: Blade Runner, The Godfather, Jaws, The Sweet Hereafter, and some others I'm blanking on. And really, I'd argue that making changes to a fictional source is way less problematic than making changes to genuine history involving real people.

[JerryvonKramer]

Jingus, on "genuine history", I'd consider reading Hayden White's Metahistory.

 

You seem to be assuming some positivist notion of a stable truth for history, and this surprises me given how heavily you lean on subjectivity elsewhere. History is as subjective as any other branch of the humanities. There is no objective history.

 

As evidence on this very board, I'd point to the infamous debate between myself and jdw in which he point-blank refused to accept the wider economy or oil as a contributing factor to the decline of Mid-South despite a lot of primary sources pointing to that as a factor. In jdw's version of that history, the decline was only caused by booking and fans turning from the product. In my version, there were multiple factors, including those outside of Watts's control.

 

Who can say whose was the one true version? That is why history is not straightforwardly objective.

[Jingus]

There's a certain amount of history that we can pretty safely agree on. George III was indeed a king of England, and the American revolution happened on his watch. Nobody but the craziest of conspiracy theorists deny stuff like that. Going back to the Braveheart example, we're pretty sure that Princess Isabelle didn't actually arrive in England until three years after William Wallace died. If you know that fact, it makes the movie's earnest sincerity about those people's romance into something pretty laughable.

 

Of course there's always going to be mistakes, omissions, misinterpretations, and outright lies in many historical records, for a wide variety of different reasons. (I'm currently reading James Hayward's book about contemporary popular myths during World War I which were at the time reported as fact, so believe me, I know what you're getting at.) But saying "there is no objective history" is, well, it's just wrong. History books will record that President Obama was first inaugurated in Washington DC on January 20th, 2009. I know for a fact that's objectively true, because I watched it happen live on television, and countless thousands of other people witnessed it happen live in person. We know for sure that's true. That's as objective as you can possibly get, outside of the realm of pure science or abstract mathematics.

[JerryvonKramer]

Okay. I'd go along with that probably.

 

On your wider point on adaptations of history ... what about times when the fiction account is more compelling than the actual history?

 

One might think of Shakespeare's Richard III, or indeed of any of Shakespeare's plays based on historical events, and they give us works of literature that are powerful in their own right. That might get at "truths" important to us as human beings, but which have nothing to do with the real people they depict.

 

Strikes me as a bit myopic, not to mention trivial, to dismiss Shakespeare on the grounds that he got a few details wrong a long the way. And he definitely did. For example, he treats Edmund Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March and his grandson the 5th Earl of March as the same person.

 

Doesn't stop Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 being masterpieces.

[MoS]

Jingus, this is off-topic, but what book is that? World War 1 and the propaganda around it fascinates me; it is never discussed as much as WW2, but in many ways, it was the more miserable, more terrible war.

[JerryvonKramer]

Also, off-topic, but a great book for that sort of thing, specifically in terms of how the aftermath of WW2 has been presented, is Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

 

Might be a good follow-up to the one Jingus mentions.

[supremebve]

Yeah, but those things can still be untrue. How many times have you heard someone say, "there aren't any black people in this movie, because there weren't any black people in this historical place." For this argument let's say there is a movie based on a Roman Legion, and it is starring 56 white dudes(I've never seen a black person portraying a Roman in a movie). I was watching some show where they excavated burial grounds after some huge Roman battle, did DNA testing, and found out that one in four of the Roman soldiers was sub Saharan African. Is it possible for that movie to be good with that information, or is it automatically bad? We know that it doesn't reflect reality, but what if it turns out that everything else about it is perfect?

[Jingus]

It's not like historical inaccuracy (which is a sliding scale anyway) is an automatic on-off switch, a black-or-white dealbreaker. Brian De Palma's The Untouchables isn't any less of a masterpiece because it makes such a terrible hash of documented historical events (spoiler: in real life, Frank Nitti was not a trigger-happy assassin who was thrown off a rooftop by Eliot Ness). It's just one of many, many pieces of preconceived bias that you can carry in with you, when you watch a movie for the first time. If you despise slasher-horror movies in general, there's little I can say to make you enjoy Twitch of the Death Nerve, no matter how brilliant I thought it was. Meanwhile, if you're a hardcore fan of Roman imperial history, you're equally unlikely to make it all the way through Gladiator without having a series of minor strokes about how blatantly that film told historians to go fuck themselves.

 

For me: if the movie's good enough in other ways, little details like that won't bother me so much. The submarine flick U-571 was deeply fictionalized (right down to misidentifying the nation which first grabbed one of the Nazi's Enigma code machines), but it's still a tightly-constructed thriller which does its job just fine as a piece of genre fiction. Meanwhile, connected to the same specific subject of defeating Enigma: The Imitation Game is a dull, preachy, predictable, self-important, self-indulgent piece of awards-bait nonsense which also completely botches a huge number of historical details. I'm much more likely to be forgiving of the former than the latter.

 

Jingus, this is off-topic, but what book is that? World War 1 and the propaganda around it fascinates me; it is never discussed as much as WW2, but in many ways, it was the more miserable, more terrible war.

Myths and Legends of the First World War by James Hayward. Used copies going cheap. The entire first chapter is about the (mostly groundless) English paranoid obsession with German spies and saboteurs in the early parts of the war. Including such delightful stories as "a car full of British officials, trying to detect possible German radio signals, are arrested three times in three different towns within a 24-hour period on suspicion of being German spies" and "that one time that Churchill got so drunk, he became convinced that a nearby mansion was sending secret Morse code by flashing a searchlight; upon dragging half the Admiralty's top brass with him on a drunken midnight raid, they discovered the house's searchlight didn't even work". Same author also wrote a sequel book about WWII myths, if you're interested.

[Loss]

I'm only bumping this thread to say that the responses -- particularly from JvK in post #34 -- have been really helpful for me in sorting out the differences in our schools of thought. That might actually be my favorite criteria post from the whole project.

[Jimmy Redman]

I would say there are four broad approaches to any given text, which you could categorise almost any school into:

 

1. Focus on text (formalism, see also structuralism, New Criticism, deconstruction, etc.)

2. Focus on context (historicism, see also cultural materialism, archetypal criticism, Marxism of many different stripes)

3. Focus on reader (reader-response theory)

4. Focus on author (humanism, sort of, see also psycholanalysis, sort of)

 

They aren't all necessarily exclusive and you could buddy them up in different ways. But in wrestling terms:

 

1. Focus on text = focus on matches ... this is Loss.

2. Focus on context = focus on understanding the time and the place, and the audience at the live show, etc ... Dave Meltzer is basically one of these.

3. Focus on reader = focus on your own responses to the match ... various people, Jingus has argued this on the most extreme end.

4. Focus on author = focus on the wrestlers and their input ... closest to this I've seen, I think, is maybe Dylan.

 

I thought typing them out in this way might make it clearer to think about your own approach.

 

My own BIGLAV is some attempt at a holistic approach that tries to take all of the above into account.

 

To quote the post Loss mentioned, I think it's good food for thought.

 

I think Matt D is the best example of No. 4. I feel like I am very much a No. 3.