Hierarchy of Art and Rotten Tomatoes

There's what you know you know, what you know you don't know, and what you don't know you don't know. And as human beings, we all sport pretty gargantuan ignorance of our own ignorance -- what we don't know we don't know. Then there's the desire the masses possess to be cultured and have refined taste in art. Combine the two and you get a cult of high art: a group of people, without acute judgement, dismissing certain types of art as "mindless entertainment for the tasteless" and worshiping certain types of art that they deem intellectual and sophisticated enough. 

But are there really such things as high art and low art? And if they do exist, does enjoying "low art" have to be such a shameful experience that we have to label certain movies as "guilty pleasures?" 

I personally believe certain films do lend themselves to unequivocal claims of artistic superiority. For example, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal artistically belongs to a higher order than Woody Allen's Love and Death without a doubt. But I cringe at and reject the notion that a work of art can be beneath someone. Our palate for art isn't monotonous; we all need a healthy dose of low art as well as high art. (On a side note, don't you think a world without any fast foods would be a sad place? I, for one, certainly think so as someone who is responsible for half of Chipotle's revenue.)

I find the dogma that certain types of art can be beneath someone downright toxic and inimical to people's enjoyment of movies. It prevents people from watching or enjoying movies that they otherwise would have sought and had a good time with. 

Rotten Tomatoes, irrespective of their wishes, is often weaponized by the practitioners of this dogma. Now, I'm not trying to attack or demonize Rotten Tomatoes although it is inescapably flawed as a review aggregator. Kenneth Arrow (1950) proved that if an aggregation rule is transitive, weakly Paretian, and independent of irrelevant alternatives, then it is dictatorial. And Kalai and Schmeidler (1977) proved that Arrow's theorem extends to cardinal systems as well. Basically, what I'm saying is that there isn't a perfect, unbiased way to aggregate reviews. 

Rotten Tomatoes' susceptibility to abuse, however, does not lie in a pure mathematical tragedy that makes perfect aggregation impossible but in the dangers of numericalizing a film's artistic merits. Appraising a film's craft is an invaluable facet of film criticism, but quantifying a film's overall artistry carries the risk of wittingly or unwittingly enforcing a hierarchy of pleasures where pleasures derived from "low art" are ruled "guilty."

In terms of craft, Martin Scorsese belongs to the same tier as Jean-Luc Godard. And Jean-Luc Godard belongs to the same tier as Robert Bresson. It certainly is possible to group filmmakers into tiers. But going beyond classifying filmmakers into tiers is a solipsistic exercise at best. Because even just the mere act of grouping filmmakers by their caliber cannot but reflect a particular taste and philosophy.  

At least in my book, Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman belong to the very top (along with three previous auteurs I've mentioned above). But the fact is Welles and Bergman never really thought very highly of each other due to their diametrically opposed aesthetics. 

Then what allows any classification of filmmakers to have any validity and legitimacy is that it is possible to deliberately incorporate a wide set of aesthetics in appreciating a filmmaker's craft. For example, you would appreciate Michelangelo Antonioni and Alfred Hitchcock in polar opposite ways. 

This fragile "objectivity," however, gets shattered when you attempt to "score" a filmmaker's artistry. To be fair, you could argue what individual critics on Rotten tomatoes do is simply classify a film into its appropriate tier with a corresponding score. But the problem still remains that Rotten Tomatoes creates a score out of all those individual "tier-scores." 

How Rotten Tomatoes creates a score is by calculating the ratio of the critics who approved of the film to those who disapproved. So you can't even argue that what Rotten Tomatoes gives is an aggregate tier-score. If anything, the scores are a measurement of how respectable or likable a movie is.

But the methodology is irrelevant. What's relevant is how people -- and even some critics -- use Rotten Tomatoes: taking the Rotten Tomato score as a categorical statement on a film's value. Millions of moviegoers now see a Rotten Tomato score as a bona fide stamp on a film's rank in the cultural pecking order.

This brings us back to how Rotten Tomatoes is complicit in the dogma that stigmatizes "low art" and the enjoyment of it. Before the age of Rotten Tomatoes, people would have enjoyed the Transformer movies without any guilt or shame. There wasn't a Rotten Tomato score to trick them into believing somehow they were less of an audience for enjoying them. Sure, Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen wasn't the most intellectual or artistic movie. But there would not have been a 19% rating attached to it. 

It is human nature to want to feel better about yourself (although most people posses a self-destructive impulse to feel bad about their life. I know I do.). And if you like watching movies, you want to feel cultured and sophisticated as a viewer. And you want someone -- preferably someone you can trust to have refined taste -- to reaffirm and validate your own taste. 

Today, people look to Rotten Tomatoes for that reaffirmation and validation. If a movie has a Rotten Tomato rating higher than 94%, it is mortal sin to not love the movie. If a movie has a higher rating than 90%, you can proudly announce that you enjoyed it. If a movie has a rating below 70% and you enjoyed it, it's best to keep it a secret. And finally, if you enjoyed a movie that had a rating lower than 40%, the cognitive dissonance becomes too unbearable that you conclude critics are either losers or conspiring against the movie. 

With a number reputed to measure the quality of a movie available at your fingertips, the caste system of movies was born. A movie is born to a certain number and that number solely defines it. A high-number movie is to be worshiped and a low-number movie is to be shunned irrespective of their "character and personality." The nuance of film review is also vanishing; a film can no longer be "enjoyable despite glaring flaws" or "admirable but not for everyone." As a result, people no longer respect their own taste and deprive themselves of invaluable entertainment that low art can bring.

Suicide Squad is one film that was severely plagued by this toxic phenomenon. I watched Suicide Squad on HBO NOW last year, and I was moderately entertained. What's not to like about a guy who can climb buildings really well? In fact, I had more fun with it than the first time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. All of this is to say, it's an enjoyable movie. 

However, its dismal Rotten Tomato score was used by many film enthusiasts to trash the film and shame people who liked it. Granted, Suicide Squad suffers from rather poor execution behind the camera. (Here's a good video breaking down the poor editing in Suicide Squad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDclQowcE9I.) Notwithstanding, no one should be shamed or ridiculed for liking a movie. It spoils a cherished memory of joy and excitement for the fans. And scorn only pushes them to become dishonest with themselves about their taste in the future. 

When you trash a movie and shame its fans, you also end up ruining the fun for people who go watch it later. Imagine how you'd feel if before going on your first date with someone, people were like "Oh that person is a total 25%. He's a flaming pile of garbage. Anyone who likes him should go live on Sesame Street and marry Oscar the grouch." You'd probably have a hard time fully enjoying yourself during the date.

The truth is people who launch these unwarranted attacks are also victims. They've fallen prey to the dogma that stigmatizes "low art." One of the most common ways people feel better about themselves is by looking down on other people. It's ugly, but also part of our nature. And unfortunately today's movie culture has made this urge express itself in the form of selfish disdain for "low art" movies and their fans. 

Of course, Rotten Tomatoes isn't really responsible for this toxic culture. But it definitely aids the "low art" haters by providing them a "justification" for their hate. When you're struggling to articulate why you think a movie is bad, it's vindicating to see that it has a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And this vindication justifies the selfish disdain for "low art" and the "uncultured." 

To be fair, critiquing a low-art film isn't necessarily bad. Substantive and well-grounded film criticism always provides tremendous value. But the criticism must only focus on what's objective: the craft of filmmaking, which I'm using very broadly here to include the writing and the acting. Otherwise, your critique is nothing but a list of things in the movie that weren't to your liking. (François Truffaut observed, "There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors.")

Sadly, the mean-spirited criticism leveled by these "low art" haters rarely displays any level of discipline or knowledge. As they have very limited understanding of filmmaking, their knowledge of their own ignorance -- what they know they don't know -- is quite minimal as well. And naturally, this leads them to vastly underestimate the potential scope of what they don't know they don't know. What you get is a group of viewers mistaking their subjective dislike for a movie as an objective appraisal of the movie's quality.

So, on one hand you have this cult of high art where people disparage films and movie-goers that they deem lowly and uncultured. And on the other, you have the Rotten Tomato ratings that often embolden the cult of high art in its crusade against "low art." 

But I must give credit where it's due. As much as I have been faulting Rotten Tomato ratings in this post, I believe Rotten Tomatoes serves a vital function in the film community; it protects consumers from movies that don't deserve the consumers' time or money. And its method of aggregating reviews in binary terms is a really clever solution to the fact that each critic's rating of a film exists in different units. 

Also, a great number of critics featured on Rotten Tomatoes do present nuanced reviews. It's just that all the nuance gets lost as the reviews get reduced to a single number. 

Lastly, it's not even remotely Rotten Tomatoes' fault that the cult of high art came into being. The cult has always existed. It's just that Rotten Tomato scores are often weaponized by the members of the cult of high art to attack "low art" films and demean their fans. These members also do not hesitate to attack movies with high Rotten Tomato ratings. Wonder Woman comes to mind as a prime example. I mean it's not a masterpiece but it's also solid entertainment. The cult of high art has no business berating people who loved the movie.

To recap, while there do exist orders of artistry to films, all pleasures derived from them should be treated with respect. The elitist view that certain movies are beneath someone is downright toxic and has no place in today's pop culture. I simply wish that Rotten Tomatoes would caution movie-goers against taking their ratings as absolute quantitative verdicts on the movies. Shouldn't a movie, first and foremost, entertain? Orson Welles certainly thought so. Who cares if a movie has a low Rotten Tomato score as long as it's fun unless you're a filmmaker, a film critic, or a tax attorney? We all die sooner or later. Let's not discriminate one pleasure against another. 

P.S. I argued a few paragraphs above that film criticism must only take aim at the craft of filmmaking and that scoring a filmmaker's artistry cannot be but biased. Let me expand on those points to avoid any misunderstanding. 

First, as much as I believe a film critique should strictly be an exercise in the objective, I also believe a film review is free to be an exercise in the subjective as well as the objective. To me, a film critique must first identify the filmmaker's vision and then assess the craftsmanship that went into realizing that vision. In other words, a film critique would be something akin to -- albeit much more elaborated than -- the blog posts I wrote on Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom and Woody Allen's Annie Hall. 

A film review, on the other hand, should convey the emotional experience of the reviewer all the while commenting on the film's quality. It deals with both the subjective and the objective. In other words, it has to be both entertaining and insightful while a film critique only has to be the latter. Of course, a film review does not require as thorough an exploration of the film's craft. 

For example, a good film review of A Ghost Story by David Lowry would note that the film was shot in a 1.33 aspect ratio (the ratio of the height of the frame to its width; your phone would be a reversed 1.78) and that the cinematography felt very intimate. A good film critique would go a bit further and explain smaller aspect ratios tend to feel more personal by nature because they feel more enclosed. Conversely, higher aspect ratios can be more immersive. (Please note this is a gross oversimplification. And 1.33 and 2.35 can feel equally intimate if used the right way. But each aspect ratio does have its inherent characteristics. You can often see Paul Thomas Anderson manipulating the frames in his films to exploit those characteristics.) 

The other point I want to be clear on is that while we should shy away from quantifying the craft of a film, the same doesn't necessarily go for our subjective experience with it. When you put a number on how fulfilling a movie was on a personal level, all you're doing is gauging your emotional and intellectual response to the movie. It no longer becomes a solipsistic exercise but rather an introspective one. For example, although I would never attempt to quantify Roberto Rossellini's artistry in Journey to Italy, I'd have no qualms about giving my experience with it a 3.5 out of 5.