"So What Did You Think?"--Fear and Loathing at the Movies

It’s the most dreaded conversational beginning in the English-speaking world. No one cares what you thought of Exit Ghost, or whether you liked Will and Grace. But movies...that’s different. Going with friends, or rather exiting with friends, can be an ordeal. Being a mild-mannered sort you begin by prattling meaninglessly about what restaurant to go to next, but one of your not so mild-mannered friends is not having any: “So what did you think?”

Of course the problem may have begun much earlier. You and some friends wanted to go to a movie together, but he loves car chases, she can’t stand the sight of blood, your partner thinks anything made in Europe is “obscure,” you will see anything with Nicole Kidman, whom he hates...and so on. And the worst position to be in is to be the one who has made the final suggestion, since that person will then have assumed the awesome responsibility of engaging in a communal activity which we can be certain not everyone is going to enjoy equally. If that was you, that only makes it worse when the moment of truth comes.

To be sure, there are strategies for temporary avoidance. One tack, for example, is to try to beat everybody to the punch with your own avoidance maneuver, a tentative left jab such as “she was really something, wasn’t she?” That sort of empty comment has the virtue of sounding firm while actually being doubly non-committal: “she” probably refers to Nicole Kidman, but just in case, you might have been speaking about Catherine Keener in a minor role, who everyone knows is a great actress. And furthermore you said “something,” not “great,” which still leaves a lot of room for further maneuver: maybe “something” is short for “the worst acting you’ve ever seen?”

But these are all evasions of having to deal with what will sooner or later be upon you: “So, what did you think?” I can’t tell us how to avoid this event horizon, but perhaps I can give some useful advice on how to deal with it when it appears.

This is where to begin: The purpose of going to a movie is to experience pleasure. If you want information, there are libraries and lecture halls (or perhaps documentaries, but we’re talking about fiction films–the “what did you think?” problem rarely arises with documentaries). But there are many different kinds of pleasure, and to imagine that your preferred version of it is the only real thing is to be narcissistic. What is necessary is to be (self)-aware of one’s own preferences in the world of pleasure, and aware also that your companions may have entirely different ones: or even, so open-ended is the scope of cinematic narrative, an entirely different experience. So in subsequent postings I will be annotating a helpful (I hope) though undoubtedly incomplete list, with examples, of the types of pleasure that a movie can give. Of course no movie is created to give us only a single type of pleasure (with the exception of the one genre that no male–and this means yours truly--will admit paying any attention to); the examples therefore are of films that especially incarnate or forefront a particular type of pleasure.

However, any discussion of pleasure in movie-watching has to be preceded by an important caveat. There is finally a kind of cinematic pleasure not accessible to most people, and that is the pleasure of being an expert on cinema, an insider who knows the vocabulary and standards generally accepted by other insiders. (The rules that constitute the field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase). The expert in film studies or film criticism derives pleasure from engaging in the knowledgeable activities of formal or comparative or historical analysis (auteur theory, e.g.), so that a film can always be viewed in the light of other films. Such informed viewing is itself a considerable source of pleasure, a kind of meta-pleasure in the activity of movie-watching taken as a whole.

In other words, the expert knows something that the rest of us don’t know. Sometimes this can help us in our dilemma, if we’ve gone to a movie with an expert, and the expert is the kind who takes over a stalled conversation right away without any false modesty: “Yes, that was minor Techine, but Emanuelle Beart was luminous as always, and Julien Hirsch’s cinematography once again framed the narrative perfectly.” Comments like that can be very useful, in that one can go either way with them. Maybe you thought it was a terrific movie, but that’s ok because from the sound of it even minor Techine might be “terrific.” Or conversely, you can simply say “I guess Techine isn’t my cup of tea” with a faint air of populist superiority. Of course you don’t want to utter a sentence like that in a group of cinephiles; but you probably don’t want to go to a movie with them either.

This is because the main problem in discussing movies with experts, if you’re not one yourself, is that you may tend to feel put down or excluded by their special knowledge. This feeling may be enhanced by their ability to relate every movie they’ve seen to every other movie they’ve seen, in such a way that we are all supposed to derive some kind of insight from noting the relationships. You didn’t even know there was major Techine, and all of a sudden it turns out you can be a Techine feinschmecker. The occasion of this ability is that part of the experts’ life’s work is to rank every movie in an informal but real hierarchy that is based on terms like “complexity,” “ambiguity,” formal accomplishment,” “depth,” etc. Reader alert: I implicitly do myself all the time, as when, e.g. apologizing for my immense enjoyment of say The French Connection compared to...oh, 8 1/2. Most of all, cinema professional usually, if only by implication, adopt a dualistic ranking of the types of pleasure themselves: the cerebral in at least its highest forms over the bodily in all its forms. Even Pauline Kael did that.

This is the temptation that must be resisted if we really want to enjoy movies first of all, and think about how “good” they are later; which is probably what most of us want to do if left to our own devices. So if you read (I hope) the discussions of different types of cinematic pleasure, I suggest we all try to remember that in the long run, which for some of us draws closer every minute, all cinema amounts to in life is another source of pleasure. Well, better than that: another source of immense pleasure.