Keeping Score and Movies

How do we keep getting this wrong

The furore over “Furiosa” and its taking or otherwise at the weekend box office is a familiar and unpleasant noise, like Uncle Malcolm farting after a Sunday roast. “The Fall Guy” has also fallen to the gleeful reporting of its apparently poor performance. People who love cinema seem to love only one thing more and that’s pronouncing its imminent demise. Ultimately, when the dust has settled, it’ll turn out that the films actually did okay. Studio accounting is opaque and - believe it or not - they quite like proclaiming their own films financial disasters so that the tax man and anyone with points won’t come knocking for their respective slices of the pie too quickly. So why do we always go in for this rumpus at the beginning of blockbuster season?

One of the reasons is to do with the way cinema is slippery and we want to make it sticky.

Responding to art is difficult. Art is responding to life and that’s difficult too. So we’re responding to art that’s responding to life and life itself is another thing altogether, which - by the way - we’re all trying to live. And we all go to art for different things. The response we feel is emotional, visceral and intellectual. We might go for entertainment, or to be challenged politically, or philosophically. We might want to be comforted; distracted, or learn uncomfortable truths. And each one of us approaches with a different life experience and set of values.

So how can we talk about films in a way which makes sense? And which even means we’re talking about the same thing?

One answer is you can’t. Everything is subjective; no one opinion is more right than someone else’s. But that’s a bit defeatist. After all, part of the joy of cinema is talking about it, arguing about the relative merits of certain films.

So here we begin to use numbers. We begin to use Rotten Tomatoes scores, Box Office Mojo figures, star ratings and we write listicles with titles like “Top 50 Holocaust movies Ranked Best to Worst”. Instead of the wispiness that comes with a subjective response with multiple factors and a million nuances, we slice our experience into definable and gradable pieces. We nail things down. We lose something, sure. We all know that these scores, rankings and what have you are the beginning rather than the end of the discussion, but they satisfy our urge for at least an illusion of objective certainty.

Each number or ranking has a different meaning. The Box Office numbers are supposed to tell us what ‘the people’ want. So the failure of a film to have a big opening is proof that wokery is destroying cinema, for instance. Or that superhero fatigue has finally hit. “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” topping the Sight and Sound Greatest Movies of All Time list signals the reappraisal of female voices in cinema by the die-hard cinephiles. Rankings are almost always there to provoke reaction.

This whole way of looking at things is obviously wrong. A film can make a boatload of money and have very little long term cultural impact. In 1975 the number one film was “The Towering Inferno.” “The Godfather Part 2” was number 6 two places behind “Earthquake.” “Chinatown” didn’t even make the top ten. Then of course there are the films which were flops or disappointments, booed during their festival premieres, and yet have become classics. “2001 a Space Odyssey” had a premiere so horrific it sent Kubrick into a black depression and back to the editing table. “Blade Runner” was greeted with incomprehension from a public (and studio) who wanted to see Han Solo as a detective. “Wild at Heart” was booed at its Cannes premiere. Before we get carried away, it’s important to note not every heretic is Galileo. “Southland Tales” remains a piece of shit.

Just my opinion of course. But fortunately a correct one.

The human brain doesn’t deal well with uncertainty. We want to know: was it a win, a loss or a draw? A success or a failure? Fresh or rotten? A hit or a flop? But art is exactly about creating and maintaining uncertainty. It’s ethical duty is to call our ethical certainty into question. It is (like poetry) multivalent, with competing, contradictory truths. Can you imagine poetry getting the same treatment? “Disappointing opening weekend despite 5 star reviews for Eliot’s The Wasteland.”

None of this would really matter, but of course Eliot just needed some ink and a notepad for his poem - and he probably stole those from the bank he worked in, the tight bastard. But George Miller is going to need $170 million at least to fund his next film “Mad Max: The Wasteland” and the studio heads are not going to be fobbed off with my tosh about multivalence and vaporous uncertainty of artistic response. They’re going to want a return on their money two to three times the sum of the budget and that seems increasingly unlikely.

Numbers, rankings, scores will always be wrong and we all know this. We feel in our hearts that a star ranking isn’t just an approximation, it’s a lie. But ultimately it is also something that is necessary as long as business follows show the way that Sunday Roast with Uncle Malcolm is always followed by ... well, you know.