Fall 2023 – Week 6 in Review

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am chronicling my weekly exploits from a sun-drenched seat in a brand new apartment, having spent the last week lugging bureaus, beds, and copious electronics out from storage and into our new house. I’m still obviously in the midst of an adjustment period here; I’m not used to sleeping on the same floor where Eevee rests, meaning I’m still getting acquainted with her habit of demanding first In and then Out all throughout the morning. Nonetheless, it feels absolutely wonderful to at last have some space of my own. I frankly hadn’t realized how much day-to-day anxiety I’d been carrying around for the last several months, until I at last had a chance to slump back in my chair with full certainty that this is my space, not some room I was being briefly and conditionally granted. And of course, my viewing party has obviously seized this opportunity to get back into our regularly scheduled screenings, so I’ve got a healthy dollop of film reflections to share with you all. Let’s sit back and settle in for the Week in Review!

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No Politics: Media and Identity

We’ve been hearing a lot of it lately, at least from the more gurgly and questionable-smelling corners of the internet – a demand for “objective reviews.” Reviews that leave politics at the door, and simply give audiences an untainted appraisal of some media property. If you read my stuff at all regularly, I’m sure you can take a guess as to my thoughts on the validity of this request – given how often I stress the variability of personal experience, art experience, and critical evaluation, it should come as no surprise that I find this demand pretty misguided. But it keeps coming up, and it actually reflects on a number of more interesting elements of both how we parse media and how media is constructed, and so I figured I’d take my own shot at the topic. So let’s get down and dirty with objectivity in criticism!

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Your Taste is Bad and So Are You

“Some nights it’s just entertainment, and some other nights it’s real.”
The Hold Steady

“Your favorite anime is SHIT. SHIIIIIIIT.”
– The Internet

“Do you think that, when making an evaluation on a piece of media, you are in part making some statement about those who enjoy that media?”

That was the question that prompted this post, and it really stumped me for a long, long time. The knee-jerk reaction is “no, that’s not true – people all like different things, and they have the right to like whatever they want.” But that’s really just avoiding the question, right? Yes, people have the right to like, say, an incredibly racist fantasy about how Hitler was right. But when I say “agree to disagree” to a fan, aren’t I silently adding “you crazy racist fucker”?

Sort of. Maybe? It’s not that simple.

“It’s not that simple” was my answer at the time. “This deserves a whole essay’s worth of elaboration.” And it’s true! Both of those things are true. Our relationship with media is complex – what we like doesn’t wholly define us, but it also isn’t completely apart from who we are. It says something. It means something. But it doesn’t have to mean that much, and we don’t have to take these criticisms personally. Or maybe we should take them a little personally, and that’s actually kind of important. Maybe we should learn to think a little less of ourselves than we do.

Here’s what I think.

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