daring to give The Avengers three stars. Later in the year, Marshall Fine found himself faced with death threats for being the first reviewer to post a negative review of The Dark Knight Rises, and to ruin its “perfect” score. Rotten Tomatoes infamously had to suspend its comments section to deal with this backlash to negative reviews of The Dark Knight Rises.
A lot of this internet vitriol was channelled into death threats, frequently aimed at female critics. However, in keeping with the internet’s obsession with “objectivity”, many of these attacks were framed and structured as ad hominem attacks upon the reviewers. The more hardcore fans of the critically-maligned DC Extended Universe concocted elaborate fantasies to explain why mainstream reviewers were giving their movies low grades. The more innocuous accusations suggested a sinister and ambiguous “bias” against Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman, while more conspiratorial-minded individuals suggested that Marvel Studios (or Disney) was operating a “payola” type scheme.
This is how much an “objective” measure of a movie’s quality is worth to certain vocal segments of the internet, based on the understanding that a movie’s cultural currency is set by reference to these numbers. However, rather than accepting that these numbers are themselves arbitrary and imprecise, the result of broad generalisations and imperfect calculations of subjective measures of quality, the problem can never be the system itself. The problem is the inevitably the critics themselves, who serve to distort the “objective” value of these films as measured through these metrics.
Of course, even audience members who don’t agree this this solidified consensus can find articles and commentaries that agree with their position or support their opinion. This absurdity of this system is compounded by the click-driven culture of so-called “hot takes”, where critics and writers seek to stand out from the crowd by positioning themselves in sharp opposition to the perceived cultural opinion. The more absurd the position, the more attention it generates, the more clicks that it drives, the more infamy it stokes, the more ad revenue that it creates.
It seems that moderation is no longer possible on the internet, even in film critic circles. To look at the metrics on La La Land (92% Rotten Tomatoes, 93% MetaCritic, 8.1 on IMDb) is to see a movie that appears to be universally beloved. To step on Twitter and discuss La La Land is to be confronted with wave after wave of scorn about how terrible the movie is. There is no middle ground. The race for the Best Picture Oscar between La La Land and Moonlight became a heated battleground on social media, with any appeal to moderation lost in the ensuing chaos. It seemed unreasonable to suggest that perhaps both La La Land and Moonlight could be good films on their own terms. There was a battle being waged to define the objective
narrative of that cultural moment.
On the internet, there is little room for nuance or shading, no middle ground that can be safely occupied. Everything seems to be either the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever, until the next thing comes along. Movies like Baby Driver and mother! arrive to eat up the oxygen in film discourse, only to disappear into oblivion as another movie opens the following weekend. The internet seems to have trapped film criticism in a perpetual cycle of Ragnarok; action, reaction and oblivion, repeated ad infinitum.
24 CinÉireann / December 2017