Rule 1. (to kill expectation)

Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

Rule 2. (to kill projection)

Assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. Do not project your own expectations. Let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually.

Then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

Rule 3. (to kill hype)

Don’t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you’re encouraging them to go see it. Only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it hard. That’s what it’s there for.

…

Consciously or otherwise, everyone has their own series of qualifications when assessing how much they’ve enjoyed a film. There are others for whom these guidelines can be reapplied to how much they appreciate other forms of art as well. There are even those who don’t consider film a true art form, but we spit on those people.

I am the son of two fine artists; my mother a painter, my father a painter. Here is their legend: they met on the steps of the Tate Gallery in early 70s London, and it was love at first sight. The legend failed to mention, of course, that my father was actually with his ex-girlfriend on those steps at the time and my mother, who had yet to win his heart, was simply being introduced to them by a mutual friend. Later they told me when going through some difficulties of my own that, whilst it was love – a great love – it was of course not the matinée movie my brother and I had in our heads as kids.

Bearing this in mind, I want to talk about a way of thinking about film criticism that led to my friend Adam and I crafting the rules above. Adam is my age and makes music. He and I met at university in Manchester, England in 2001 and we have analyzed films together, endlessly and relentlessly, ever since. I don’t see him so often these days as he lives in London, and I in New York, but the arguments are no less heated. To make matters worse, Adam was recently staying with me for a couple of weeks in New York. In the midst of yet another discourse (as we were hopping between trains on our way to some party) I found myself restating my assumptions about how one should critically assess a film’s worth. Adam, nodding his head, jokingly called them The Rules. We laughed then, but at some point later that night I made a mental note to write something about it.

…

Three key elements cloud a person’s judgement about a film. The first is hype. The second, and somewhat a byproduct of hype, is expectation, which for the most part, leads to projection.

I found out the truth about how my parents met during a difficult time. Knowing about it and about events thereafter rescued a large part of my sanity from the jaws of god-knows-what. I could suddenly see how similarly I’d behaved to my father and how my mistakes, somehow subconsciously, were identical to his given all he’d become now. Of course it didn’t excuse what I’d done, but it calmed me hugely. For years I had had no connection to their experience – they’d had this perfect thing, married young, I had not – there was no connection.

People go about their lives telling people how they met their significant other or how they got their great job or how they made their millions, and they’ve refined these stories into what one might call legends. Every detail is exaggerated for the sake of effect. These romantic sagas are indeed legends, but are also what I like to call hype, and we create them all the time to justify and cement in some way the life changing decisions we’ve made. The things we’ve decided we’re never going to take back, and if we do, know it will hurt to do so.

It is because of hype that a lot of people are in some way afraid of art. This is not because they aren’t capable of understanding it, or because they don’t want to understand it, but because they aren’t given the chance to understand it. In fact, we are more and more these days encouraged not to. For example, you walk into some art galleries in New York and you’ll see something akin to a plank of wood leaning against a wall. As you stare at it, confused as to whether a workman left it behind on his way to the toilet or whether it’s actually an exhibit, a young gallery owner will stride over, massaging his sore nostrils, and hand you an essay explaining why this plank is art. Gone is your chance to say to yourself,

“Hey, it’s just a plank.”

It’s now something about which, due to the convoluted wording of the gallery owner’s essay, you’re clearly not equipped to make up your own mind.

If you’d grown up with my brother and I you’d have had to live through years of my parents ranting and raving about the appalling nature of art teaching at the various schools we ended up going to in England. Why is art not taught well any more? Well, my parents have their views, but  I believe it’s largely because no one is trying any more to comprehend the true financial value of an artistic eduction, and therefore assume people will struggle to employ those with that alone. This is sad because it implies that they make no connection between how things look and how people feel. In today’s “money or nothing” world, most stuff pretty much looks like shit, and that plays a part in why people are depressed, break everything around them and want to kill themselves.

So this is where advertising features in our problem. What is the one thing that thinks it’s art, but in fact simply tries to squeeze money out of people by emulating art for financial ends? That’s right, advertising, and nothing comes close to the psychological mess that is advertising actually advertising art. Nothing.

Films are ruined daily by advertising and hype is their big, blood-letting knife. I stopped buying film magazines for over 10 years the day I accidentally saw a film called Fight Club, without knowing anything about it. You might know it. What you might also know is the feeling I had that night when watching it. The feeling of experiencing something incredible for the first time without knowing a single thing about it. The purity of an idea, a story, a climax that is in every way a surprise to you is almost overwhelming. It’s narcotic. Adam and I use it like a drug. You’d think, given that obvious metaphor and the general propensity to track down “good coke,” “straight dope” or “strong-ass weed,” that other people might not choose to cut their art with anything either. You know, to keep it pure. You’d be wrong.

In fact, all joking aside, it’s actually more serious than that.

Hype not only ruins the impact of the art, it undermines the very value of art itself in the first place. Every day our faces are filled with reviews, star ratings, adverts screaming “It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry,” “Critics are saying this is X’s best film in years” and “Empire Magazine calls it ‘Amazing’”. All of this, not to make you enjoy the film any more, but to simply make sure you give them some money for it, and not just money for it, but to better pay back that misused advertising budget. Of course, none of what the advertising is saying is true. None of it can be true. Much like reading a film review, it’s misguided to think that someone you don’t know, possibly wouldn’t even like and particularly someone who’s job it is to write shit like that, could dictate what would make you laugh or cry.

Here-in, hype (by its very nature) takes whatever is remotely good about something and amplifies it beyond all rational levels, thus creating our second problem, expectation.

I once got into an argument with someone at a party about a film, which I was insisting was good and he was arguing wasn’t. In the end it turned out he’d not actually seen the film but was basing his opinion on what he’d read on Rotten Tomatoes, and therefore didn’t want to see it. The fact that people allow the votes and opinions of other people they don’t know to help them decide upon a unique, personal experience such as a film, is somewhat ironic.

Advertising companies are paid to sell things. Hype for a film gets people into the cinema seat and so therefore counts as a sales tool. The main method people use to hype something these days is to give you more and more of it in fragments before you actually see it. This, with reference to my Fight Club experience and the consequent drug metaphor, of course ruins it. We’ve all been there – Trailer 1, Trailer 2, Trailer 3, The Featurette and The First 5 Minutes. Each element bandied about out of context, each leading you to subconsciously make up your own mind about certain lines of dialogue or certain dramatic moments, and thus often ruining what it’s like to experience those moments first-hand, in the context of the film.

Expectation thus also leading to projection - you projecting what you expect to see over what’s actually happening, therefore destabilizing the film’s own chances to say what it’s trying to say.

I sat through a meeting a few days ago with a film director, his producer and his marketing team working on a strategy building up to the screening of their film at a major festival. The marketing team were detailing how they have a series of mailing lists they send a film’s Facebook page to just to guarantee a certain number of ‘Likes’ on a film from the moment it’s released. You wonder for a second during these moments how the director feels about such a gesture. How he can possibly know what people feel about his film when every gauge he has is blurred somehow by all this bullshit.

Just like my parents, the legend of the film is never ever the reality of the film. Just like the New York art gallery experience, you are being told what to see when you see something – for the sake of making you feel better about the money they want you to spend on it.

Alfred Hitchcock famously banned anyone from entering the movie theater after a screening of his film Psycho had begun, back in the 60s. Of course this created what is now a legendary amount of hype around the movie, but at least his approach still kept the details of the art itself a mystery. All you knew is that the director cared about the integrity of his film, which in itself is all you should ever need to know about the film.

…

So how should you yourself approach a film, to avoid these pitfalls? You know, when it’s just you and it, in a room together, no strings. What then?

[Spoilers ahead]

Somewhere at the end of the 90s. I had just finished watching The Matrix with my father. This was a film that had never sat well with me. He’d never seen it before and I’d seen it previously in the cinema. We were watching it with some other friends and of course everyone got in a discussion about it afterwards. I argued against anyone who said they thought it was a good movie as I just couldn’t stomach the ending. I felt it made no dramatic sense. To me there was no chemistry between the lead characters Neo and Trinity, so for the film to just assume he’d come back to life because she loved him, seemed like the most trite, undeserved dramatic climax.

In response my father said something along the lines of -

“No Caspar, you’re not arguing within the context of the film. You’re projecting what you want onto the film. The film clearly stated early on that Neo, if he indeed was ‘the one’, would be able to manipulate The Matrix in some way. Therefore him dying in The Matrix but still living on in reality is entirely fair based on that assumption. Sure it might not connect with you particularly, but you can’t fault them beyond that, as they have established their own internal film logic and carried that through to its logical conclusion. Therefore Trinity’s love for Neo is actually beside the point. She just happens to be saying “I love you” when he wakes up. Coincidence yes, but where do you even start with coincidence in storytelling?”

[End of spoilers]

I really had no come-back for this at the time. What I did however have, forming in my head for future contemplation, was a set of rules for how I’d approach my assessment of art. The very same rules you see at the top of this article. Since myself and Adam’s greatest passion is film, we’ve explicitly crafted them for use in that context and they continue to serve us well. We created them so we know how to understand a film, without having to necessarily read a review, watch a trailer or pay attention to a single ad.

It’s this line of thinking that lead me to understand what the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane famously called “good trash” in the context of one of his reviews. I also now have absolutely no fear of loving and defending whole-heartedly a b-movie horror like SAW as much as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Rules make absolutely no prejudice, they allow you to love anything you want, but simply ask that you think for yourself. The Rules stop you getting confused over what you should call art and what you should not. They simply make you focus on good versus bad and help you sidestep all the hype and bullshit the advertisers and marketing types out there would have you believe will help you enjoy the experience more.

I would apply them to more examples for you, but I’m already way over my word limit here. So by all means, try them out.

See how you get on.

See you at the cinema.