Colin Marshall

No good

I hereby refrain from applying the words good or bad to any work. Specifically, I mean the usages of these words not in the moral sense — I've not yet made the long, icky slide into relativism — but in the qualitative one. I have come to terms with the fact that sentences like "That movie is good" or "The book was bad" convey next to no information, and, worse, what information they do convey isn't quite what they appear to; the claims pretend to be about a qualitity of a subject, but they're actually a binary categorization of one's own feelings. "That movie is good" means "I experience an pleasing reaction to that movie"; "The book was bad" means "I experienced a displeasing reaction to the book." The meanings of these statements don't quite align with the words used, and even once translated they're not worth saying.

"Hey now," you might object, "you're the one always wasting so many words documenting your reactions to stuff!" And so I am. But bear in mind: I'm not arguing that all criticism isn't worth the effort it takes to express; I'm arguing that simply slapping the good or bad labels — or, worse, the ehh or blah or meh ones — is the folly. Criticism is most enjoyable, to my mind, when it documents the subjective mind-object transaction with as much clarity as possible. I couldn't care less whether I agree or disagree with a critic; how intelligently and precisely they express their reaction is all. It just so happens that I've noticed that the likes of Wesley Morris, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, to name four shining examples from the film reviewverse, well... they ain't throwin' around the goods and the bads, if you know what I mean. Examples:

• An unthinking me, reacting to Old Joy: "Good!"
• Dargis reacting to Old Joy: "A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year."
• An unthinking me, reacting to Let the Right One In: "Good!"
• Morris reacting to Let the Right One In: "The beauty resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love."
• An unthinking me, reacting to Silent Light: "Good!"
• Hoberman reacting to Silent Light: "Everything in this relatively chaste production is monumentally deliberate, from the human interactions to the stolidly bucolic representation of Mennonite domesticity to the extraordinary, wide-screen landscape shots that bracket the action with four or five minutes of pantheist ecstasy."

Stark, huh?

In yet another desperate bid to uphold my duty as a human being to communicate effectively, I thus update the list of descriptors not to use I originally posted back in November: joining (in)authentic, boring, depressing, disturbing, pretentious, pointless and soulful/less are good and bad. (But it's worth noting that, with some thought, I've realized how a work can be depressing. Though this is perhaps another few posts' worth of material, it all comes down to the creator-audience relationship: if you, experiencing a work, find that you're being talked down to or held in low intellectual esteem, that's depressing.)

Most people are great

Perhaps thanks to my interest in improving my writing and speaking abilities, I'm sometimes assumed to be a grammar, spelling and/or usage wonk, someone who goes around insufferably correcting split infinitives, whos for whoms and grocer's apostrophes. Turns out I can't stand those sub-Lynne Truss types, who I feel miss the forest for the trees; I do bear a major beef, however, with those who use words without regard to their meanings. This is actually more common as it sounds; some seem even to repudiate the notion of meaning in their speech, taking a degree of offense to the suggestion that words don't mean whatever the user wants them to. (Shades of Humpty Dumpty and his linguistic bribery.)

Many words, terms and phrases get debased this way, and I make an effort to excise from my speech whichever ones I realize are beyond help. The most obvious example is great. Were I to cast my vote for the least meaningful word in the English language, great would be the no-brainer choice. Maybe the situation's different in other Anglophone countries, but here in the States, great is pretty much a red-headed stepchild. The amount of abuse it endures, even at the hands of those otherwise mindful about communication, is astonishing when you listen for it. "That floral centerpiece is just great!" "Is still think that Transformers movie was pretty great." "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be great." Really? Out of all the qualities these things could possess, greatness is the one you identify? (This sort of thing isn't limited to one word, either; amazing is similarly thrown around by art wonks, though it's a bit more of a euphemism to describe a work without much articulable merit but which the describer nonetheless fears dismissing or even refraining from expressing an opinion on. An eccentric blue-haired slam poet who melts toy soldiers in a frying pan during his performance is already thin gruel, but if I hear a pack of nervous poseurs whip out amazing and apply it to him, I'll keep my distance and then some.)

I will also henceforth refrain from making statements about "most people." I've written before about wrongheaded invocation of supposedly "average people," but claims about "most people" actually seem to be much more common, more exaggerated, and thus more pernicious. In practice, I hear "most people" used to not to mean "the majority of humanity" but "a construction to whom I feel superior." The weird part is that I hardly ever see anyone call bullshit on this. Bold claims like "Most people just want Costco hot dogs," "Most people are depressed" or "Most people are sheep willingly led to their cultural and intellectual graves by the unholy alliance of the media and the military-industrial complex" do not receive empiricism's smackdowns — as they deserve — but solemn right-on-man-right-on nods. (And don't even get me started on the worst "most people" claims I personally hear, which tend to take the form "Colin, maybe you x, but most people not x," which, as I have demonstrated over and over again, furthers the morally and intellectually bankrupt dogma of Colin Exceptionalism.)