What This Blog Is About

This is an all-purpose, sprawling, loose, baggy blog about movies from a particular point-of-view.

I am a rationalist.

The Wikipedia entry on rationalism defines it as: “a method or a theory in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive.” In other words,

1.  I believe that reality exists
2.  I believe that reality is directly knowable via logic
3.  I believe that reality is not directly knowable via experience BUT that empiricism is the best way to form a practical model of how the world works.

A rationalist values reason and evidence over appeals to the inner sense. For thousands of years, the Earth’s smartest people used their intuition to understand the world and they were wrong about damn near everything. Since those primitive times, humanity has used math and logic and science to discover things about the universe that are sometimes counter-intuitive and strange. In the past, people would have dismissed these findings for not aligning with their intuitions. But nowadays we know that when our intuitions are in conflict with the evidence that it is our intuitions that are untrustworthy.

My epistemology will come up more in future posts but for this introductory message I only want to convey that I am not a relativist. This is to say that in talking about movies, I don’t think that it’s all opinion and that there’s no right and wrong. I don’t think that it’s presumptuous or arrogant to assert a certain degree of objectivity to value judgments. Nor do I think that all interpretations of a film are equally credible.

Does elitism follow necessarily from this conclusion? I don’t think so. We can recognize that right and wrong answers to questions of artistic value exist without claiming to have all the answers. Value judgments in the real world often require the juggling of millions of little variables, too many for our silly human brains to calculate reliably. There is no contradiction in saying that we can make arguments and appeal to evidence to defend our beliefs when that’s possible and just shrug our shoulders in situations so complicated we don’t even know where to begin. At any rate, my approach with this blog will not be to evaluate the quality of specific movies as much as it will be to provide a rationalist’s perspective on cinema.

Some potential uses of this blog:

- Answering common philosophical questions relating to cinema

- Exposing instances of bad populist and academic criticism

- Exposing instances of good populist and academic criticism

- Writing formal analyses of specific artists, films, and scenes

- Doing movie reviews

- Providing commentary on movie-related news stories

- Linking to content I find interesting

- Compiling lists

That sort of thing.

A meme is a unit of information that is passed from brain to brain via communication. Memes evolve and spread similar to how genotypes evolve by natural selection. Good memes are those that are likely to replicate themselves by motivating their “hosts” to pass them on to other minds.

A "_____ Meme Catapult" is what I call a source of information that open-fires a particular kind of meme at its audience. This blog is titled Rationalist Cinema Meme Catapult because it will pump rationalist ideas into the discussion about cinema and art.

I think a rationalist blog about art is worth making because it is a rarity. The methods of science, naturalistic philosophy, and “cold” rationality aren’t usually associated with the arts. Likewise, spirituality, creativity, and wonder aren’t usually associated with practitioners of the hard sciences. I’m interested in blurring the boundary between these categories, using the simple language and clear thinking of a scientist to sort through the mess of content-free writing about the great experiential treasures of the film world.

My opinion is that the vast majority of writing on cinema, from academics to journalists to critics to bloggers is devoid of substance. On this blog, I will engage with film criticism of all kinds, providing a clear and balanced assessment of the content or lack thereof in the criticism I encounter. Sometimes I’ll even do some film criticism myself!

Of course, there is a reason why writing on the arts is so wishy-washy and that’s because there is no true science for translating the entirety of complex experiences into numbers or concepts. But at least we can cut through the empty rhetoric, the overuse of academic buzzwords, and the incoherent writing that pervades in film studies and in the social sciences more generally. The first step to saying something true is saying something and in this field, just saying something at all is practically a leap into uncharted territory.

Let’s leap!