Google Audience Reviews are Bad. I'm Against Removing Them.

One of the biggest misconceptions about movie critics is that we evaluate films emotionlessly. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Movies have always been vessels for human emotion, and we, as critics of all stripes, have committed ourselves to what is fundamentally little more than the study of why movies make us feel the way they do. However, emotional connection to a movie is only one piece of a bigger puzzle, and it's no secret that, just as a pencil sketch can be well-drawn or poorly drawn, a movie can be well-made or poorly made. It could be said that proper film criticism is where the head and the heart meet in a dance of artistry and skill.

That said, there has been a movement in recent years to delegitimize the critical consensus surrounding some and even all movies, and I will admit that we have brought a portion of this backlash on ourselves through our failure to explain our methodology properly. Nevertheless, the Google audience review feature, which used to be prominently displayed whenever you searched for any movie online, could have been summed up as 'How Not to Review a Movie 101'. It was a cesspool of shallow ad hominem attacks on writers, directors, and even actors, irrelevant nitpicks about the logic or plausibility of varying plot points, blatantly political affirmations or condemnations with little or no relevance to the movie's quality, and wholly emotional tirades lacking any supportive substance. Still, the audience eventually prompted a response from Google, which led to the once-spotlit feature being slowly phased out of search results. And as much as the audience and I tend to part ways on contentious movies, I couldn't disagree with this move any more than I already do.

George R.R. Martin once wrote that if you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, and that you only fear what he has to say. I, for one, do not fear the ire of the audience and have many a time happily explained some of my more contentious positions in ways that have made people who disagree with me go, Okay, I can see that. I am a stickler for healthy debate, the kind where you can hopefully prove your point while also learning to empathize with your opponent's point of view. And by removing the audience review feature from their homepage, Google has taken away the audience's biggest microphone. How am I and others like me supposed to either grow as people or peel back the curtain on what film criticism actually is if Google won't let me even hear what the audience has to say?

I know what some of you are thinking by now: why don't you check Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb? I am aware that both sites have a crowdsourcing feature that allows audience members to leave reviews, and I am thankful for it. However, clicking on those sites requires a specific intent, something most people searching for a particular movie do not have. Call it a conspiracy, but I believe Google has done just enough by removing the front-page feature to both muffle the audience's voice and prevent them from complaining too loudly. I think that way because that's what I would do, and I believe it's only fair for the audience's perspective to be displayed just as prominently as that of the critics.

On some level, I understand that critics don't get many chances to explain their methodology to potential readers, beyond writing the occasional library book that no one will read, anyway. There is a strong incentive when writing a review to avoid spoilers, so reviewers don't often get to delve into how they do things at a level that would make sense to those who haven't been trained the same way. The internet only exacerbates hyperbole, and that's how I don't understand how they view movies can turn into their reasoning must be arbitrary so easily. And so, power was given to the Google audience review feature, and many gravitated toward it rather than the critical consensus, as it aligned more with the everyman's taste. Pour the oil of a culture war on the fire, and the eventual erasure of virtually an entire perspective becomes something of an inevitability.

Censorship isn't just the silencing of your opposition: it's also an emotional bid to pretend the problem doesn't exist. We critics cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend that the noise, no matter how un-academic it can get, isn't really there. Conversation is already a dying commodity in our world, and if I want to prove my view of a movie correct, I would like to talk to someone who disagrees and have a dialogue. Of course, I would hope to come out on top in the debate, but I would also hope to drop a rock in the shoe of whoever's listening, a rock that might cause a potential audience to see things in a way that's changed my life and given me an appreciation of movies that I didn't know was possible. Whatever your view on the critic-audience divide, I hope I've helped you see that silencing an opponent's voice is wrong, no matter the baggage that may weigh down their perspective.

The critics and the media are not going to mend the rift between them and the audience by pretending that it doesn't exist. They, we will mend it by explaining our methodology more thoroughly, by inviting people who think otherwise to ask questions about what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. That is how we will make it make sense to people. I understand that the internet brings out the worst parts of us as the human race, that it allows us to be absolute jerks to each other without the awkward real-world consequences of black eyes and chipped teeth. However, censorship will only make the already-whistling kettle boil over.

If we as critics want to prove that the academic way we view movies is the correct one, we must at least give those who usually object to our stance a chance to argue otherwise. Freedom to say precisely what is on one's mind is a fundamental tenet of debate, and one I will always fight to defend, no matter the context. Author Frank Sonnenberg once wrote, "You don't win a debate by suppressing discussion; you win it with a better argument." There was once a time when I thought that was obvious to everyone.

Acts 17:1-9