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.)