I've Been Rethinking Critiquing Themes

I think the trickiest thing about critiquing themes and ideas in movies is the fact that they're, for the most part, inherently subjective. What's more, you can dig as deep as you want into talking about them without actually doing very much, spinning the wheels of your brain while those who are none the wiser look on, drooling at your perceived intellect. I also think that criticism of themes has today been turned into something it was never meant to be: a graceless political bashing iron, where any movie that aligns with your notions of the world is a scathing critique or an exercise in empathy, and where every movie that disagrees with them is thematically shallow or irresponsible, maybe even dangerous. For the longest time, I had held off commenting on a movie's themes because, one, I couldn't find anything measurable about them to grab onto, and two, too many have used them as infuriatingly shallow cultural observations for too long. However, I've been thinking lately, and I believe I may have finally found an angle to come at themes and ideas from.

What if instead of praising or criticizing a movie because of its worldview, I praised or criticized it because of how well it conveyed such a worldview?

I get that on some level, this is still a subjective criterion, but have you ever been watching a movie and, without warning, felt tears well up in your eyes? I doubt it was because of the cinematography, the pacing, or even the acting. Roger Ebert, whom I've talked about often on this website, once referred to movies as an empathy machine. Addressing themes in his reviews was a regular cog in the machine of Ebert's writing, and that fact always bothered me. I would always think to myself, he's the most acclaimed movie critic of all time, and he had no problem addressing themes and ideas in his movie reviews. What am I doing wrong? Still, I realize even now that it wasn't entirely wrong to avoid critiquing themes. I'm going to pick on the news and culture site Vox for a little bit because they've made themselves an easy target. I have a love-hate relationship with AI, but at least it nicely laid out all the problems I had with this particular news source on the front page of Google, proving that it's not just me and that I'm not just crazy, all alone in my concerns. Vox always tends to filter its reviews not through the lens of traditional film craft, but rather through the lens of social and political themes. In short, liberal movies are good to them, and conservative movies are bad, and Vox almost always reaches for addressing problematic themes to justify such a worldview.

Don't you see the problem with this? Who's to say that a movie is poorly made for something as benign as its worldview? What if the cinematography, the acting, and the pacing of this problematic movie are all top-of-the-line? Either positively or negatively reviewing themes can be a narrow-minded approach if you're walking into a movie with your mind already made up about it - even if you can't find a single element of the craft to critique, no problem at all! Just go in circles about its themes instead and do enough mental gymnastics to justify giving the movie a bad review. Nevertheless, I'd be remiss if I didn't address the other side of this issue, made up of movies that clearly put a lot of thought into the bigger ideas they explore. Consider Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, and its multifaceted exploration of grief. Or maybe The Dark Knight, and its brash challenges to ethics that we take for granted. I don't think it's unfair to contend that these movies wouldn't be as impactful as they are if it weren't for their respective examinations of their deep and complex themes. I've come to think there's a good way and a bad way to analyze a movie's themes as far as academic criticism is concerned, and unfortunately, I'd only been exposed to the bad way growing up, this pernicious habit of grading a movie based on how well it aligns with your preexisting views of the world.

Now, this raises a new issue for me. If I'm going to address the themes of a given movie in my writing, I want to ensure that I'm doing it right. Currently, I'm still unsure of how exactly I'm supposed to integrate something complex, such as ideas, into something concrete, like a final score of one through ten. I'm hoping that, as I write down my thoughts, a solution will come to me. Empathy. Back to that idea. Isn't empathy ultimately something that arises from the core of your being? Feelings aren't measurable, and yet they're a wholly undeniable fact of life. Just because you can't measure them with a statistic doesn't make them fake or false. I understand that a certain movie will affect the emotions of one person differently than it will another person, and I attribute this to the fact that certain themes resonate more deeply with some people than they do with others. This is why many men love Band of Brothers, while most women would gravitate more towards Pride and Prejudice. Still, perhaps there's something to be said about how well these respective shows portray their themes?

I've heard it said that good movies make statements, while great movies ask questions - I suppose this could also apply to TV shows. I've found that no matter how much you apply yourself to learning about the craft of film, you never quite lose that immeasurable wonder, even if you may not feel it in your soul as often or as soundly as you once did. I suppose I wanted everything about my movie critiques to be measurable, but I'm learning more and more that the intangible qualities of a movie - specifically the ways in which it appeals to our emotions and beliefs as a collective - are what keep me coming back for more. Now, there is also something to be said about how a really well-made movie doesn't necessarily have to contain a deeper theme, but I've come to believe that it's simply that much more satisfying to watch when it does.

If I'm going to comment on a movie's themes, I want to ensure that I'm doing it correctly. I don't want to dismiss a measurably well-made movie simply because of a theme I disagree with, nor do I want to go the opposite way and praise a technically poor movie merely because it champions ideas that I find attractive. I think that's a shallow way of viewing cinema, and I believe it's also one of the biggest reasons we suddenly have a don't trust the critics cultural movement on our hands. Movies and even themes themselves are much more than the bottom line of what we agree or don't agree with. I used to think that journalists who consistently used themes in movies to comment positively on their own beliefs were imagining too much, but now, after writing this, I realize that they were actually imagining too little. And we know that men suffer more from imagining too little than too much.

Ideas are what allow us to fly among the stars in our own imagination, but we've instead used them as an irresistible bait to drag us back down to the petty squabbling of Earth. That's a problem not with theme criticism itself, but rather with how we've insisted on using it. I will never, could never, dismiss a movie simply because of an idea I take issue with. Nevertheless, is it too out of the realm of possibility that a discussion about an idea, a theme, could be used to feed not familiar infighting, but rather childlike and elegant imagination?

John 4:46-53