We aren't baking a cake here. We aren't conducting a science experiment where were have to remove any wonky variable that might upset our results. We are talking about art, which is inherently messy by nature.
Nature is inherently messy by nature. This is why science has to be careful and systematic. I don't know why the the discussion of art should be any less careful in light of its complications.
I can appreciate the caution not to be overly deductive, to attempt to reduce everything to one definition, method, or theory. That stated, any given analysis should still be careful in staking what the assumptions, interests, processes, etc., of that analysis entail.
Talking about art is a process.
Sure.
It's about wrestling with our conceptions of what art is, what it can do, what it means to us. It is going to affect us both critically and emotionally and many many different ways.
This is all good, up to the point where you're loosely talking about "what it means to us" and affect in those many many different ways.
I don't want to put words in your mouth or assume your process, but if we hold that any and all readings are valid, plausible, and of equal value, then we're stuck in cosmic expansion of subjective responses. At a minimum, we need a means by which saying a reading is less well-warranted than another. We need a sorting mechanism. If not "right" vs. "wrong," we need a means of marking "better" vs. "worse" interpretations or we will be left with an overwhelming mass of the infinite tangle of conflicting takes.
Without a clear sense of how you filter subjectivity in this process, I don't see a way forward scholarly conversation. Again, I'm not trying to piss you off. I'm looking for bedrock. What can I treat as good in a conversation with Crumb? What counts as a defeater?
Ultimately, we talk to understand how each of us process these things that a work presents us. The actual movie is only a piece of the conversation.
Sure, but it is the focus of the conversation if we're talking about the film, if we are interpreting the film, and if we are evaluating the film.
Perhaps the source of our disagreements has to do with different questions? If we are asking different questions, then we should not expect the same answers. Myself, I want to know about the film, how it works, what it means (more or less objectively, at least in a timely sense). I look to my feelings and impressions and the feelings and impressions of others as a source of evidence (signs) from which I am trying to make inferences to the text (and its function).
You've made it clear that you're not all about your emotions and private responses to the text, but I am hoping to find out what your stance is such that I can make sense of a "good" or "warranted" reading on your view.
We, in many ways, talk about ourselves when we talk about a film we love or hate. And in doing so, we expose who we are when we discuss what made us love it or hate it.
Sure. The reason why I am doing it is because I presenting the evidence of how one (or so I condescend to be) relatively competent observer saw the film (a data point). We rub our subjectivities together in the suasive art of dialectic, seeing if we can change minds or have our minds changed. If I tell you how I feel about a film, I am vainly referring to what I think is actually there, in the film, in some way. It's my starting point (my itch), however, to persuade anyone else (or at least offer a prima facie case) I will need to find a way of scratching with something outside the itch (appeals to coherence, theory, audience response, history, interviews, etc.). I will likely fail, but to the extent that I succeed, I will have achieved (however imperfect and impermanent) an intersubjectivity. Alternatively, if someone changes my mind, I will also have entered into an intersubjectivity.
You keep seeing some kind of need to prove something with art.
Yes, absolutely. Not necessarily absolute conclusions that hold for eternity, but best warranted assertions about "better" and "worse" contextualized to the discussion at hand--at least a temporary presumption in favor of some view as a result of reasoned discourse.
That you first need an army of consensus before you trust your own feelings, or otherwise they aren't worth sharing.
A consensus is simply a source of evidence. What I am after is evidence. I'll take it where I can get it.
But I share my completely consensus divergent opinions all the time.
And that is fine as that is another species of evidence (albeit not as compelling, because everyone has an opinion).
I also have many consensus divergent opinions. Worthwhile conversations rarely emerge from beige statements like "I agree with the majority that Star Wars 1977 was a good sci-fi film." We debate controversies. We speak because we feel something needs to be said. And this means, quite often, cutting against the grain. But in so doing, I will still need evidence to make my case regarding my controversial claim. I will work from agreements that the mass of the audience (or the mass of the portion of it I am concerned with) as dialectical starting points (we're all agreed that...) to scaffold my way up to establishing my contentious claim.
I make it clear the movies I like have flaws. I explain why those flaws might add to the elements of the films that do work. Or that sometimes we have to isolate those flaws from the rest of the film and appreciate them on their own terms. Or that those flaws maybe should be discarded entirely, and are simply flaws....but the movie that surrounds them still holds up, as long as we don't get too hung up on what doesn't work.
I don't disagree. The quality of a film is a constellation of elements. It is one of the mast amazing alchemical mixtures that we find in art. So many hands, so many people, so many elements, etc. A film is a corporate accomplishment.
Like minded people, those willing to explore films in similar ways as me, understand where I am coming from and as a result of my honesty in recounting my actual experience while watching it, both critical and emotional,now can gauge whether they might find something similarly of worth there.
This is all fine. And please do not take offense to this, but this sounds more like you looking under your own hood--even if you're not trying to. I don't begrudge your right to explore your response to the text as a sort of autoethnography and I don't begrudge your response as a sort of evidence. It's just that I don't really trust it as evidence for the questions that interest me (i.e., questions about the text). Like you said, I am looking for more definitive proof.
The reality is, if you need proofs or numbers, is I have an insanely high track record of recommending movies to friends that they end up liking. Even if there is no critical consensus to back my ravings up, beyond my own ravings.
Again, that's cool. And again, I don't begrudge you any of this. I am just looking for more definitive proof.
Now how could this be possible? Maybe because we have completely open discussions about what moves us in film, because we aren't waiting for the rest of the world to confirm it has value. And because of this I know who they are, and they know who I am, and so I know what they like and they know they can trust me.
Sure, you're playing a different game. That's fine. You have intersubjective contact with people you care about (i.e., your trusted friends).
I can recommend something to them that I know the 'consensus' will think is total shit, but that the 'consensus' will not interfere with their similar love of it. Maybe my lunatic ramblings have even provided a key into how to appreciate them from a different angle. To see beauty where others only see shit.
Again, I think that the main audience is often wrong. Sub-audiences are often wrong. They are a "sign" of what is in the text, but they are not definitive/constitutive of it. That stated, those aspects of the text which a relevant portion of the audiences sees as "there" provides me a handhold of foothold with which to ascend the rock face. There are other handholds and footholds.
If, however, you want me to follow up your path up El Capitan, I need to know where the handholds and footholds are and I also need to know your general path of assent.
Something 'concrete' has a certain meaning in one film, as does an emotional response. It's all completely dependent on the film at hand. The scene at hand. The performance at hand. And how they interact with the rest of the film that surrounds it.
This is tough for me, because some generalizations are needed to establish that "X" is really in the film. If something is concretely within the film then everyone who watches the film should see it, and we should be able to compare it to similar concretizations.
Lucio Fulci is likely a bad example, but it's one I can dash off quickly, and that all I have time for.
I can only say that I've seen City of the Living Dead. Scared me when I was kid, in part, because I wasn't quite sure what the hell was going on and because he does seem to have a knack for atmosphere/tone.
Fulci is a director who clearly does things that are clearly bad, but the result of those bad decisions consistently manage to bolster what the actual concrete aim of his films are.
His most famous films are horror. They are meant to frighten and unsettle. And one way to do this is to disorient the viewer. His plots frequently hit dead end after dead end. His characters behave nonsensically.
Right, one of the cliche rules of horror movies is the "rules of the monster" (e.g., don't fall asleep, don't feed after midnight, don't bury in pet cemetery, you can kill it with fire or sunlight or holy water)--these rules are presumably there to ground the horror (making it seem real), but probably moreso to establish the suspense (like modern movies that describe
exactly what needs to happen in the 3rd act, like its a quest in a video game). From what I recollect of Fulci, he doesn't give those comforting rules, you just know that bad s**t is going to happen. As a child, it seemed to me that the fault was my end, that I was missing something, like I was trying to listen in on a conversation among adults that I didn't get, that I was as lost as the characters (i.e., the threat was plausible and real and I was falling behind in understanding). As an adult, my response is more along the lines of "What the hell was that?"
In a film like City of the Living Dead, he actually appears to forget to inform his audience precisely what the threat is (beyond vague mentions of the end of the world) or what anyone is supposed to do to stop it. These are not deliberate decisions by the director necessarily. They are pretty clearly blind spots in his creative abilities. But there effect is to leave those watching completely stranded and confused, never able to predict where the menace is coming from or what it might do to them. And it doesn't give us an avenue to root for our characters to stop any of it from happening. We are helpless, which is a good thing for a horror film to instill in us.
Sure, when I was 12, this was a source of terror.
We should note that you are referring to properties of the text that I think most people would agree are "there." Moreover, your interpretation of how this works has a plausibility and coherence to it that we might test.
And, to hit the easy button, I happen to agree with you, which means that you've already got a handhold/foothold (relative to our conversation we have a local intersubjectivity), thus you can work from what you've said so far as this is in our mutual commitment store.
If we disagreed, however, we would likely be in a pickle. If, for example, I felt that City of the Living Dead is perfectly linear and explains everything to the audience, we would have to go back to the text to look for features. We might look to critical responses to see how other eyes saw it. We might consider certain known rules of story-telling which give standards of coherence/clarity. That is, if we disagreed, we would need to look for evidence.
In the final scene of City of the Living Dead (spoilers, even though literally nothing actually happens), we are treated to the scene of Christopher George, after surviving a horrible night, leaving a tomb he spent much of the film fighting for his life in. He is just beginning to walk through a cemetary in the day light. The menace appears to be behind him. Then, in the final seconds, we see a child running towards him. A child we have only briefly seen in one scene of the film. We know nothing about who he is or what has happened to him since his brief moment on camera. He was a seemingly completely insignificant character. Barely more than an extra. And Christopher George's response to seeing this child running towards him, a child he doesn't know, a child the audience barely knows, is for him to start screaming hysterically. Then the film stops. No explanation.
Yep, it was a weird ending. Sort of "F*** it! THE END!!
This, by any definition is a terrible scene. It's pretty clear Fulci should need to let us in on who this kid is for the scene to play out as he intended. Maybe he's supposed to be some kind of evil reincarnation, or an omen of something terrible to come. Who the **** knows. But the effect of just ending the film at this baffling moment, after watching a film where nothing else has made sense and the audience has finally got themselves a seemingly peaceful daylight scene to let their guard down a bit, we are thrown one last monumental bit of confusion. It's almost hysterical in its seemingly benign and unfrightening randomness, but as a result of this, somehow, it becomes all the more unsettling because we can't figure out what has just happened. I consistently think about what it means and there are no clear answers. Fulcis failure has left me forever hanging in nightmarish disorientation.
OK.
Now, would these kinds of audience **** you's be nearly as effective if Fulci also wasn't (concretely) an extraordinarily accomplished visual artist who knows how to generate images that linger? No. These displays of his obvious talent are what ground us in some kind of cinematically understood reality, while the actual horrid plotting of the movie is the x factor element that allows us to move into a sort of dreamy nightmarish place that exists between logic and total nonsense.
OK.
So in this case, I can talk about the obvious failure of giving his characters no proper motivations or his narrative of having no discernable arc, and how the effect of this feeds his hallucinatory imagery. His talents gain our trust, and his non talents make us scramble to piece these disconnected images together, while they are all just coming apart in our hands.
OK.
Now I have a few more examples as well, but I'm not going to get into them because I need to track if you have any idea of what I'm getting at here. Otherwise, I'm just putting words down on a page for absolutely no reason.
No, I think I'm tracking it.
On to the next step?