Life in Lists

The Comprehensiveness of the Critic.

Numbness in the fingers. That’s one of the romantic sufferings endured by a movie critic — that, or it’s arthritis and I really need to get a doctor to look at it. But many critics just put up with these woe-is-me aches in the digits because we love order. Ordering, re-ordering, re-arranging, discombobulating; whether it’s making a fine-tuned list ranking our favourite films of n director or collating every single film we’ve ever seen since age 2 and-a-half, we prefer neat, pretty order over tameless, ugly chaos.

So why do we do it? Why do I do it? I just can’t seem to help myself, or stop booting up my Macbook in order to relentlessly compose wanton scripture on the thematic associations between Captain America: Civil War and Green Room. Or Apocalypse Now and Bambi. Just for the sake of it.

Maybe it’s because I’m conflicted, perhaps even confused, about how I feel most of the time. Making my gargantuan end-of-year lists allows me to order all my thoughts and feelings into neat little boxes and bullets, so instead of blabbing on about how much of a masterpiece The Handmaiden is with much spittle and little actual insight, I can instead calmly plop it in its place when it’s time to compile my 2017 best-of.

Thing is, I’m an aware observer of how people have let Rotten Tomatoes run their own critical thinking of late. This doesn’t matter if you are in fact a critic yourself, someone who just loves movies, or Brett Ratner. If it were up to me, star ratings would be abolished. Kaput. Done. If he were still alive today, bless him, I would tape Roger Ebert’s thumbs down. The positive side of the public debate about Rotten Tomatoes has portrayed it as something to start a conversation about a film, not be the beginning and end point. I remember that meme of Chris Evans laughing hysterically while Sadffleck© stares into the distance, their respective films’ Tomatometer scores pasted above the image. Yeah, okay — I chuckled too. But who made this? Someone either:

A. thought it would be funny. It was.

Or B. truly believed that this meme was being created in order to gloat a capricious website score at another, as if it actually meant something.

And I really hope that’s not the case. So if ranking and scoring and ordering is so clearly arbitrary an activity, why do I subscribe to it so hard? The answer is, surprisingly, rather simple.

Movies make me feel in ways I never thought possible. They’ve taught me to look at the lives led by others and put myself in their shoes, if only for 90 or so minutes at a time. Cinema has inspired, enraged, and sometimes outright confuddled me — but in a way only cinema can do. The depth to which I can sink inside a great film can be staggering, and in some cases the effect is so enormous, I’m not sure I ever truly resurface from it. Film continues to stretch me emotionally in an overwhelming number of directions, and when you see as many of them as I do (an occupational hazard), I sometimes just have to spin round and round reeeeaaaally fast until I pass out.

Or I would do that, If I didn’t have the therapeutic order that making these lists gives me. The endless thought processes that clog my neurons up right proper-like mean I’m constantly reappraising my reactions to movies I love, and also the ones I hate or at least thought I did. It’s something which also evolves over time, as now and then I go back and re-order an end-of-year list just because I feel differently about a film now than I used to. That’s life, I guess. (Although life is probably not spending most of your free time in a dark room with strangers. But it’s mine.)

But far more than fancying myself as some sort of Keeper of the Texts, where I blow the dust off leathery tomes embossed with titles like Epochs VII — VIII: Ye Loveliest Cinematographs, I want my lists, my blogs, even my tweets, to inspire conversation. To get a dialogue going, one where we both learn that little extra about moviedom. It’s worked many times in the past: I remember being lambasted by a co-worker because I placed Magic Mike above Prometheus in my Best of 2012 article. I went on to explain how the former largely achieves what it sets out to do, while the latter doesn’t. Sadly, they were thinking in terms of the ‘blockbuster with the cool-ass aliens’ and the ‘one with no plot and tons of male strippers’, and not as movies on equal terms. Prhhp.

I also imagine that somehow, no matter how slipshod or ephemeral, I’m creating a canvas of my own life. (This is me at only 10% pretentiousness, just so you know. Wait ’til you see me at 20%.) I’m collecting my thoughts, my feelings, into one big messy monolith of text that constitutes an impression — an inkblot — of just what is going through my head, and stop the overbearing, euphoric madness that is cinema from exploding my brain into a thousand glittering, brittle shards.

Or is it just me?