Over the last few months, as I've not written on here, I've actually been having some rather productive and intense conversations with folks on Discord. I have found that the way I view media, and really the way I see everything, has been questioned. Apparently, my taste in movies can be a bit strange for people. Which is fair, I'm not exactly with the crowds. I've learned a lot about how other people actually approach media (even if they deny it) and why my approach is different. By learning how others interact with media, I learned how I do it. Given that I've never really succeeded in understanding my process before this point, I'm grateful to be able to understand something so important to me. However, the conclusions this leads me aren't really what I expected.
Mean It!
The very bedrock of my approach is grounded in the Church Fathers' repeated and urgent cautionings against frivolity. Which, you know, sounds like they're saying "Don't have fun". Which is simply not human. It is my ironclad experience that translators are traitors and are only to be trusted after a thorough investigation, under the assumption that the translator is actively harming the thing they translate.
I am only occasionally wrong on this assumption. It's a unicorn level event.
When I investigated what the likely traitors meant, all linguistic experts and priests I could find on the subject broadly defined frivolity as the attitude: "This doesn't mean anything". Sobriety was a virtue, because life always does mean something. And not keeping your head inevitably leads to harm. So, whatever you do, you do it with intention. Make sure you mean it.
Someone is going to say that sounds exhausting. I will acknowledge it takes more work to mean what you do and say. I will also not claim that I'm terribly good at this. I'm terrible at it actually! But it is something I try for. Something I value. Something I prize. No matter how I fail at it, I hope to someday achieve it.
Until then, I practice on art.
My Assumptions
My first assumption is that if a movie was filmed some competency must be assumed and thus sought and appreciated. Making a movie is expensive, time consuming, and requires a large crew. You do not make a thing like that unless most of the people on it believes in it. And yes, people can be delusional, but by definition people don't work on complex projects unless they're getting something out of it. So, I look for it! What drove them?
The second thing I assume is that everyone follows the same general pattern. Plot structure is generally easy to figure out. This means that there's acts, there's a general structure, the movie is designed to tell you what it's about. So, I take very careful note of the first act. What are they setting up? What kind of story are they hinting at? Runtime is vital to my approach. How long a movie tells me generally what to expect as far as when shifts are going to happen. I've found that the shifts to different acts are pretty close to universal. This approach works well enough to where I can confidently say "Okay, we're in act two, they're going to start doing X with the information they've set up" and be reasonably accurate.
From there, the question I have is: "Did they deliver on what they said they would do in the first act?" This is a "Yes" or "No" answer. And a lot of my enjoyment of the media is based off of this question. A lot. If they manage to deliver, I'm generally going to enjoy it. I want them to pull it off. At this point I can be pretty generous. If you pulled it off, you pulled it off! Congratulations! That's more work than I can readily imagine. So, at the very least I usually appreciate some aspect of a work and really do let that sit with me.
However, if not? Well, that gets more complicated. Not necessarily difficult, or more complex. Was the execution bungled? That's more forgivable in my eyes. I do not assume people are geniuses. I assume it will be flawed. There are too many moving parts in most stuff to not have flaws and hiccups. So, that part's not going to bother me all that much. But sometimes? It's coz someone had a bad or even an evil idea on what to do with their set up. Both of those piss me off. I am generally far less forgiving of bad and malicious ideas than I am of bungled execution. Usually.
The Questions
Then, I ask myself a very important question: "Can I chew on this and find something of value in it?" If the answer is "Yes", I usually find myself blogging about the end process of that part on here. I'm still working on what this part of the process looks like. I won't pretend that I'm very good at it. But I do give it my honest shot to see if I can.
I ask myself another question: "Do I even particularly like what I've seen?" That is when my own taste comes into play. I like stories about deeply detailed and conflicted individuals rubbing against the world till they're both shredded by the experience. The epic and the personal push and poke each other until there's just broken pieces. You give me that and I'll automatically like whatever it is you're doing. If you do that in a generally fantastical way, I'm really going to enjoy that. If you throw blood into that you definitely got me. But my tastes are a distant second to me. I've found that merely liking things simply isn't that satisfying. Taking things on their own terms, asking what the object itself is, grappling with it, is far more interesting than just "Do I like it?". I find I benefit more from letting things be uncomfortable and imperfect and maybe even bad, so long as I can benefit somehow.
Then: "Can I watch it again? Do I want to?" Some stuff I have to squirm through... and then I make myself do it again. Because I think it's important that I do so.
At some point I start asking myself how this impacts what I believe. Is there anything that got cleared up? If so, what? Frequently I've found that horror clears up some aspect of the supernatural for me, usually by showing some detail that helps click certain things into place. Sometimes the answer is no, and that's perfectly fine.
