the electric internet

I get annoyed whenever anyone slaps a label on something and then presumes that the label itself says all that needs to be said. Whenever a critic or a potential audience member sniffs about “dad rock” or “chick lit” or “one for the fanboys,” it raises my hackles. If you’d rather not engage with what a piece of art actually is—as in, what it expresses and how well it expresses it—then fine. But don’t presume some kind of superiority because of that choice. One of the biggest fallacies in the way we talk about art is this idea that somehow personal taste equates to quality: That each of us miraculously only enjoys movies and music that are the best of their respective medium, and ergo, any movies and music we don’t enjoy must be terrible. It’s a standard we generally only apply to art (well, and politics). If we dislike salmon, we don’t presume salmon itself to be bad; we just understand we don’t have a taste for it, and we’re generally willing to acknowledge that if prepared properly, we might even be capable of enjoying the occasional piece of salmon. It’s not that degrees of “good” and “bad” don’t exist, but ultimately our taste in art isn’t so different from our taste in food, in that it’s personal, and—if we’re being honest with ourselves—fairly malleable.

If you are immune to such writing, you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse’s favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone, and analysis is useless.

While critics, fans, and websites engage in these regular, never-as-important-as-they-seem skirmishes over whether this or that five-figure-selling band is “overrated,” the music keeps piling up, waiting for a calmer moment when it can be properly assessed. Believe me, I know. I’ve been reviewing records professionally since 1990, and when I look back at the albums and bands I was sure were vital back in my 20s—and the albums I either ignored entirely or publicly trashed, largely because they were popular—I cringe a little. (But just a little. Being spectacularly wrong about music is an important part of growing up.)

It’s not just music, either. Movies frequently arrive so pre-judged that critics and viewers alike are reduced to choosing between joining the brigade or becoming conscientious objectors. But that “Are you in or are you out?” debate has very little relevance, long-term. Aside from troll-y “most overrated movies of all time” lists, the enduring discussions we have about movies are more about their themes, their aesthetics, and how they captured their cultural moment, not about whether they “deserve” to be called “great.” Consider 2007, when two of the best American movies of the ’00s were released: No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. The buzz on both was high before they were released, and throughout the end of ’07 and into early ’08, much ink was spilled about which of the two—if either—was really a new American classic, and which of the two was better. Who cares about these questions now? Both movies are so rich, powerful, and entertaining that they’ve easily outlasted the immediate attempts to pigeonhole, position, or nitpick them. Going back and reading the handful of negative reviews of those two movies is like reading pans of Of Mice And Men or The Great Gatsby.

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout [Steve Jobs’] career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before. Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.

What does a film festival offer us? Maybe the ideal goal of a film festival is to offer us the exact opposite of what distributors do. In the world of the “general release”, cinema-going can be a fairly narcissistic affair. We bring our wallets along, are confronted by several films, all different genres, and we make a choice, thus affirming our individuality. We don’t just go to see The Tree of Life. We are also saying ‘I am a person who chooses to see The Tree of Life’.

To put it another way, going to the movies can be like visiting those online dating sites where the goal is not to date other people but to date yourself. This is why you have to include in your dating profile all your interests, all the music you like, what kind of books you read, all in the name of “compatibility”. And when the time inevitably comes and you realise the person you meet is not yourself, the romance falls apart.

Of course, real love is not strictly related to compatibility in this sense. Love doesn’t happen when you find your “other half”. (“You complete me,” says Tom Cruise to Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire and she concurs only to prove that she’s some kind of sociopath.) It happens when you are ready to open yourself to a person’s radical Otherness, to love that which is beyond you. I’m saying all this only to articulate what my ideal of a film festival experience is – the chance to be confronted by something that isn’t “you” and be taken by it. The multiplex is where we go to look in the mirror. A film festival is where we go to fall in love.