High Brow, Middle Brow, Low Brow

Categories help to organize concepts into separate piles. This clarifies thinking by reducing the clutter of "stuff" into tidy "stacks" of things.

Sometimes categories are helpful and sometimes they obscure more than they illuminate.

One set of categories that is often criticized is the division of art into "High Brow," "Middle Brow," and "Low Brow."

This set of categories is commonly met with three objections:

1. It's unclear what the terms mean
2. It can be difficult to place some works that straddle the line between categories
3. Adjectives like "high" and "low" that carry elitist connotations

I like these terms, however, as I find them useful in placing a work into a general ballpark.

So here is what I make of the three criticisms.

1. It's unclear what the terms mean

So define them. Words are only as useful as are their definitions. Fortunately for you, their definitions are man-made. You can use terms in a slightly unusual way provided you define them first and your new definition isn't too confusing to be useful (which would be the case if say, I were to use the term "post-modernist" to refer to the object "table.")

Many people use the terms to refer to artistic quality, simply meaning "good," "bad," and "medium" quality art. I don't use them in this way.

I prefer to use them in a way that refers to the intentions of the artist. Was the artist trying to a profound and/or inspirational statement about life? If so, then the film probably belongs in the "high brow" category. It's trying to engage with an audience that takes art seriously as a vehicle for spirituality. Was the artist's highest goal to entertain an audience as thoroughly as possible? If so, the film is likely in a lower "class," probably in the low brow section. Was the artist making a drama for adults that pretty much regurgitates the status quo? This sounds like it belongs in the "middle brow" range. I think the middle brow class is broader than the other two and would include stylish post-modern "entertainment" movies that separate themselves from the typical Hollywood action blockbusters. I would also have the category include serious movies that are ultimately too safe to be placed in the high brow category. 

This fuzzy definition of the categories leads directly into the second criticism.

2. It can be difficult to place some works that straddle the line between categories

Yes, it can. The lines between the categories are very vague. Does Sydney Lumet make high brow movies or middle brow movies? Is Takashi Miike middle brow or low brow?

My answer is that this is a good objection but that it isn't necessary to have a clearly defined line between categories in order for the categories to become useful. There is no clearly defined line between "bald" and "not bald," yet "baldness" remains a useful concept.

It isn't necessarily to have a system for which every film can be easily classified in order for a set of categories to be useful. There still remains a good deal of films that can be classified quite unambiguously.

High Brow:

Au hasard Balthasar, Andrei Rublev, Tokyo Story, Le trou, Husbands, The Garden, Red Desert...

Middle Brow:

Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt, A Beautiful Mind, I Am Sam, The Usual Suspects, Boogie Nights, Up...

Low Brow:

Transformers, Twilight, Fast and the Furious, Cloverfield, 2012, Clerks II, Elektra, CSI, Miami Vice...

It is often very easy to sort movies into one of these three categories. One just needs to remember to take such attempts at categorization with a grain of salt. There is no a priori category of middle brow movies containing trashy Oscar bait. I've simply decided to riff off a common understanding of the term that places such movies in such a category.

But it could be the terms themselves do more harm than good by re-enforcing unwanted assumptions about art.

3. Using adjectives like "high" and "low" that carry obvious connotations is elitist

To an extent, yes. It assumes we might have good grounds to assess the contents of movies beyond personal opinion. This idea could be offensive to some but to most people it isn't impossible. Even if we think judgments of artistic value ultimately come down to personal preference, that doesn't mean that some interpretations of a work aren't more legitimate than others. It would be hard to argue, for instance, that Clerks is a film promoting communist ideology.

Notice that my categories are based primarily on intent, not on judgments of artistic quality. The categorization process relies on interpretation, rather than on elements that are usually considered to be more subjective. If a movie is placed in the high brow category, that doesn't mean it is high artistic value. It means the movie's taking a particular path toward communicating its ideas that I happen to call high brow.

Why "high" and "low" instead of "Paths 1, 2, and 3?" Because I think the goals of high brow art are loftier than the goals of low brow art. Does this entail a degree of elitist thinking? Yes, it assumes we can accurately assess a degree of legitimacy to certain aims of an artwork over others. It doesn't mean that a film in the high brow category is necessarily perceived to be better than every movie in the middle brow category, but it means that the film has loftier aims, whether it succeeds in meeting those aims or not.

The legitimacy of artistic aims is something that I think can be derived from reason and evidence. I don't think a relativistic stance is satisfying in this situation.

This opens up a can of worms that is beyond the scope of this post, however.

Epistemology deserves it's own post, or even a series of posts. This one is only a humble defence of a decent set of categories that I think gets more hate than it deserves. Often I find these categories useful when having conversations about art.

Neuroaesthetics: A Summary

In my list of approaches to art criticism I neglected to mention neuroaesthetics. Neuroaesthetics is a new and still somewhat controversial approach to unraveling the mysteriousness of art. It uses neuroscience to understand the physical process of making aesthetic judgements.

The goal of neuroaesthetics is to replace our half-formed outer psychophysical understanding of the relationship between a stimulus and the psychology it provokes with an inner psychophysical understanding of the relationship between psychology and physiological properties of the brain.

Neuroaesthetics is offensive to some traditional aestheticians and art historians because it seems reductive. I doubt most fans of art, for instace, would appreciate VS Ramachandran's list of 10 universal laws of art:

1. Peak shift
2. Grouping
3. Contrast
4. Isolation
5. Perception problem solving
6. Symmetry
7. Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
8. Repetition, rhythm, and orderliness
9. Balance
10. Metaphor

There are different kinds of viewing, however, and one would expect them to involve different neural processes. For example, one study draws such a distinction between "objective and detached" viewing and "subjective and engaged" viewing.

Brown and Dissayanake offer three serious criticisms:

1. Neuroaesthetics is based on a class emotions that applies to much more than just art
2. Art appreciation and production uses more than just aesthetic emotions
3. The basic emotion theory (BET) first proposed by Darwin is oversimple

They also bring up that a neuroscientific theory of art must be able to account for all kinds of art, not just Eurocentric visual art, which is what the pioneers of the field such as Zeki and Ramachandran have focused on.

The second criticism in particular needs to be taken seriously. Art is a complex viewing experience that involves many factors: self-awareness, mood, environment, cultural context, body positioning, almost too many elements to count. Aesthetic judgements alone seem to tell us very little about how people actually engage with works of art.

They take Clore/Ortony's three-part categorization of kinds of emotions, and add a fourth group:

1. Outcomes: Emotions involved in the consequences of actions, often goal-motivated
2. Objects: Emotions involved in responses to objects (e.g. aesthetic emotions)
3. Agency: Emotions involved in making moral judgements of people
4. Social interactions: Emotions involved in self- and situation-conscious social interactions

This alternate approach to understanding emotions is less simplistic and doesn't reduce art to aesthetics.

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) seems to be a place where there is an interplay of various classes of emotions. For example, the medial OFC has been shown to play a role in making aesthetic judgments when subjects are asked to express their reaction to paintings as either "beautiful", "neutral", or "ugly." It is unclear, however, whether the activity in the OFC during aesthetic experience is primarily an aspect of perception or primarily an emotional response to the artwork.

Useful as such experiments may be as the first building blocks of a one-day fully developed understanding of the inner psychophysics of appreciating art, the correlations drawn in neuroaesthetic experiments to date are the equivalent of taking a snapshot of the view outside your window and showing it to your friend, saying: "Look at this map I made of North America."

That Ramachandran predicts a galvanic skin response will be activated by a particular technique (multiple viewpoints of faces) used by a particular group of artists (Cubists) from a particular culture (European) using a particular medium (painting) seems to tell us almost nothing about how people actually engage with art.

This is why Brown and Dissayanake propose that neuroaesthetics be replaced with "neuroartsology," a field that tries to account for all the varied neurological processes involved in the viewing of art, rather than merely aesthetic judgements. It would likely take several decades for such a field to become useful, however.

For the most part, neuroaestheticians are aware of the shortcomings of their findings and their limitations in describing art. But their field is a legitimate one - after all, there is nothing theoretically impossible about an inner psychophysics of aesthetics (or artsology) - and their experiments bring us a tiny step closer to an understanding of aesthetics that surpasses what we can do with rationality alone.

De-Idealizing the Self

Hundreds of years after Descartes and long after substance dualism has been abandoned by philosophers and scientists as a credible view of the mind-brain connection, most filmmakers still portray the self as something magical and pure.

The perpetuation of this meme probably helps to re-enforce our culture of irrationality.

Selves are dynamic, malleable things. They evolve with age, and with life experience, but are also subject to moment-to-moment fluidity. This can happen either by choice or by manipulation from the outside.

Manipulation:
Human minds are subject to all kinds of biases that lead them to irrational conclusions. One of these biases is called "priming." Priming is when random events in your environment hijack your personality for a span of a few minutes.

For example, if I ask you to pick between two concepts (say, "banana" vs "glue stick"), an encounter with a third concept will influence your decision as well as the rate at you which you recognize the strings of letters as words. A glue stick is associated with arts and crafts, so a word like "scissors" or "crayons" might do the trick. All you need is to come into contact with this word and it will subliminally hijack your upcoming decision. The site of a box of crayons lying on a desk may prime your brain to think about crayons - and all of their associations - for the next few minutes.

People can also be primed with concepts or ideologies. A money-primed student is less likely to help a fellow student pick up the contents of a spilled pencil case, for instance.

"Anchoring" is when a random concept, especially a number, influences your estimates of an unknown quantity. For example, if you spin a wheel that happens to land on the number 18, and then I ask you how many teeth a raccoon has, your guess is more likely to be in the vicinity of 18 due to the spinning of the wheel. Anchoring effects have been shown to occur even when the subjects of the experiments are forewarned of them.

Marketers use tricks like these all the time to prime people for buying. Priming has even been shown to impact how people vote in elections.

It might sound scary to you that your decision-making can be manipulated without your knowledge or consent. But it gets worse. Not only can your personality be influenced by priming and anchoring for a few minutes, but you can also get stuck in a mindset that continues to influence you for years.

This is what Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk call a "cached self." It's the feeling of attachment people get to their self-image, causing them to make decisions based on what is in line with how they should act given their identity. People feel an intuitive pull toward their current self-concept and will make arbitrary decisions based on how they "ought" to act, if they don't have their guards up.

The kicker is that once we perform a given action, be it sarcastically, dishonestly, unwillingly, or what have you, we are liable to adopt it into our self-image. Every action is a possible expansion of our identity, opening passageways that may be repeated and re-enforced at some later point. Just as a forced smile makes one feel happier, any random thing you say or do might hijack your self-concept for the long-term future. Often this comes in the form of the feeling that we need to commit ourselves to intellectual positions we've held in the past, to practice as we've preached, that changing our minds is embarrassing.

"Learned helplessness" is an example of individuals closing themselves to new things due to an irrational allegiance to their cached selves. This is when people have learned that they do not know how to do something (like math) and then each time somebody tries to teach them that thing, they automatically feel that math is simply beyond their ability to understand. The individual's brain has associated math with too-difficult-for-me-to-understand and the result is helplessness. This pattern has very little to do with math and a lot to do with the individual's mindset.


Conscious choice:

We do, however, in our limited way have some kind of "free will," even if our actions are constrained 
by factors outside of our control. I mean this in the sense that our behaviour can be predicted somewhat reliably based on empirical evidence. We have a "personality" or a "style" that makes us like certain things and dislike others, act certain ways but not in others.

Most people are consciously aware of their identity despite several cognitive biases preventing infallible knowledge of how they actually appear to others. Considering our self-image, we make active choices to appear a certain way. I might decide to dress a certain way so as to align myself with a particular subculture. Or to only drink Coke and never Pepsi, because that's the brand I want to support. In doing so, I'm weaving the narrative surrounding the brand name "Coke" into my own self-narrative.

Because that's what a self is. It's not a collection of atoms that can be found in the brain, it's an abstract concept referring to a mental narrative. As we consciously prune and expand our narratives, our identities, trying to become more of X and less of Y, we literally alter our selves. This process is a big part of being cool, being normal, being counter-cultural.

By combinations of intensional and accidental factors, our selves are constantly fluctuating. I think of this phenomenon as the sculpting of identities.


Sculpting Identities:

So our identities are never quite sitting still. We consciously update them so as to create a desired self-image, but also we are manipulated without our consent by external factors, some of them arbitrary. 

People, then, are sculptors of their own identities. But artists also sculpt the identities of their characters (and simultaneously use all these characters, along with other elements, to sculpt their own identity).
Part of what makes life, especially social interactions, so complicated and scary is the instability of the self. Because of how neglectful Hollywood is of this fact, it is one of my favourite themes a film can have.

Ray Carney compares Mike Leigh's approach to mental identities to the typical Hollywood approach. He concludes that in Leigh's films, the characters are depicted from the outside, the way we see other people, rather than the Hollywood way of depicting characters from the inside, the way we see ourselves. Hollywood films are worlds where characters are their intentions. There is no distinction between what a character is and what he thinks he is. The villain knows he is evil, the protagonist knows he is in love, the lawyer knows what he is fighting for. Everyone has infallible access to their own  motivations, goals, and public identity.

Hollywood characters are not only marked by holding infallible knowledge of the contents of their own minds. Their minds are also transparent to the penetration of others. Characters can communicate telepathically with each other, their inner mental states only expressed to the audience through musical cues, costume, camera angles, and other formal techniques. The character doesn't need to express his mental identity. The director will tend to that. In many cases, two characters need just make eye contact from across the room in order for their Cartesian Theatres to exchange programs.



In Leigh's films, this is reversed. Characters struggle to understand their own motivations and desires, and thus fail in their attempts to express themselves to others. Leigh's characters don't communicate telepathically like the cop duo in Barton Fink. They flounder. They are real people trying to communicate without the aid of magical subjectivized consciousnesses.
Hollywood films pin down characters to static motivational states: character X is mentally ill, character Y is a rebel. This flattens out all the fluctuations of the conscious self, the awkwardness, the subtle facial cues, the mid-conversation course corrections, the tensions of everyday interpersonal dynamics. 

The wonderful vibrancy of the human mind is reduced to abstract categories. Lifeless, static categories. Carney says that in ironing out the wrinkles of consciousness and replacing them with lifeless, static categories, doing replaces being.

In the "being" version of consciousness, there is no such thing as sculpting identities. People simply are their clothes, their bookshelves, their cars, their jobs. Only in the "doing" account of consciousness do we see people in the process of sculpting and being sculpted, figuring themselves out even as they express themselves.


De-stabilization in Queer Cinema:

Leigh is not the only filmmaker with a de-idealized presentation of consciousness, nor does he have the only approach to de-idealization.

Queer cinema is a category of films that reflect the collective queer consciousness in their presentation of sexuality as something that is de-centered and fluid. These films refuse to define homosexuals in terms of stereotypes and social norms, instead portraying sexual orientation as something dynamic and consisting of an element of fluidity. Sexuality is often the focus of queer films, although it is not used merely to associate characters with pre-existing categories and thus align them with the stereotypes that belong to these categories. In queer cinema, gender is deconstructed as a response to dominant essentialist sexual identities in the media. Queer filmmakers are particular concerned with avoiding or subverting normalizing depictions of homosexuals that reduce characters to the set of stereotypes that are associated with them.  There is usually a more nuanced understanding of the divisions between heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality.

As you might expect, I tend to like queer cinema for its sensitivity toward the fluidity of identity and recognition of how essentializing categories can be limiting and even lead to conflict.

Throughout his career, the queer filmmaker Derek Jarman emphasized the humiliations and horrors of social interactions in a very stylized way. Unlike Leigh, he didn't place real-seeming characters in real-seeming situations. But unlike Hollywood, he didn't idealize communication or consciousness or identity. Rather, his stylized characters tended to be tortured, tormented, conflicted in their attempts to break out of the social roles that have been prepared for them. His films are bubbling, boiling brews of politically motivated anger - but significantly, he stops just short of cynicism.

In my favourite scene of his The Garden, two men rip cotton of a gay man's suit and stick it to his forehead. They laugh hysterically throughout, delighting over the simple act of covering the gay man's face with cotton. They are primal little creatures that are difficult to empathize with. Although a vicious scene, burning with rage, we still feel very intensely the gay men’s embarrassment and the stomping on  their dignity, so even while the scene feels like a violent expression of hatred by Jarman, I sensed a kind of affirmation of the dignity of man.

Jarman is not necessarily indicative of the entirety of queer cinema, but his de-idealization of subjective consciousness and static categories of mentality in favour of a de-centered portrayal of (sexual) identity is very typical of the movement.


Korine's Creatures:

Harmony Korine is not a queer filmmaker but he is influenced by certain memes that originated in queer cinema before being circulated into the popular consciousness. His characters are comparable to Jarman's, primal and pathetic, and unable to fit in to the pre-packaged roles middle America offers them.

The characters in Korine’s films are depraved mixtures of children and animals. Often this is shown through prolonged scenes where adults behave and argue like kids. In these scenes the characters are evidence of the banality of humans and their attempts to adhere to socially constructed laws and standards of conduct. All humans are losers and freaks that fail to live up to the social standards expected of them. In fact, it is the very attempt to meet these standards and become normal or cool that reveals a character as pathetic. The only places in Korine’s films where characters truly fit in is when they let go of all thoughts of being normal and accept themselves as freaks or else choose to live in the moment, substituting a self-conscious monitoring of the self for honest, pure experience. Every attempt to conform leads to unhappiness, like the novice Buddhist clinging to his earthly desires. For Korine every moment is an end in itself. Rather than focus on telling stories in the traditional Hollywood way, he focuses on characters and moments, trying to make every scene memorable. In these moments, characters reveal themselves, for all their oddities and failures, as being perfect the way they are, simply miscast for the part that's demanded of them.


As his work consists of primarily youth anthems, Korine pays quite of a bit of attention to detail when it comes to sculpting the identities of his characters. He is known for being an impulsive filmmaker, but in the script of Gummo he pays particular attention to how people dress, what shoes they wear, what brands they associate themselves with, even pinpointing which stickers they would have on their bicycles. He understands how people use brands and accessories to sculpt their identities, or how automatisms form identities in the utter absence of a self-concept.


Like Jarman's work, Korine's films are radically anti-Hollywood in almost every way. In regards to characters, he de-idealizes mental identities, highlighting the difficulties of really connecting with others or of even understanding oneself. His films show the frustrating constraints of social norms and conventions, welcoming those freaks - i.e. all of us! - who simply do not fit into a typical vision of society.

Conclusion:

The self is an easily manipulated abstract concept referring to a mental narrative that is in constant flux. It is a highly complex entity that is not reducible to abstract psychological states. Great art will acknowledge this by de-idealizing consciousness and celebrating the dynamism of experience, especially in regards to social interactions. Most films don't do this and thus fail to understand one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence. Some filmmakers that avoid the trap of subjectivized, Cartesian consciousness are Mike Leigh, Derek Jarman, and Harmony Korine.

Approaches to Art Criticism

Artworks can be understood in many ways. This is one reason why people tend to speak at cross purposes when they talk about art. They just aren't using the same approach for art appreciation.

Here are some perspectives from which to analyze art.

• historical analysis
• sociological analysis
• psychological analysis
• formal analysis
• relaying the experience
• relaying your experience
• analysis of artistic quality
• interpretation

I'll go over these different approaches and offer my thoughts on which ones are most effective.

1. Historical, sociological, and psychological analyses

These are the preferred approaches of academics in film studies. They generally adopt perspectives such as poststructuralism or feminism and apply this theory to every film they encounter.

Historical analyses position works within a specific historical tradition. This could be a relevant movement in film history or simply refer to a broader era with different narrative conventions, aesthetics, and technical limitations.

Sociological analyses situate works within a particular culture. They identify the similarities between groups of works and tell of what these similarities say about the culture that produced them. Or they take a particular work and show how it is or isn't typical of the culture that produced it.

Psychological analyses can do many things. They might try to pin a fictional character down to a particular psychological state. Or they might argue that a work or group of works operate from a particular psychological perspective.

I find these approaches uninteresting because they flatten out all the complexities of the work, replacing the dynamic spirit of the great works of art with static psychological states and rigid ideological categories. This is why these theories generally only account for the weakest works of art. The great ones operate on a level of experiential complexity irreducible to abstractions and generalizations. Great art is not rigid. It is alive and present, confronting viewers with new experiences, difficult experiences, and don't recycle pre-packaged combinations of emotional punches. Works like these are not understood by decoding, by historical research, or any other method of criticism where the critic talks down to the work, wielding his power over it, showing off his ability to unlock its secrets. No, works like these ought not be decoded but to be navigated, engaged with humbly, allowing for the possibility that the work can teach you something that you don't already know. This is what it means to take art seriously: to engage with the deepest works on the deepest level, without ego, irony, or cynism.

2. Analyses of artistic quality

This is what laypeople are typically interested in when they discuss movies or music or video games. "Did you see this? How awesome was it? What do you mean you didn't like it?" The prime topic of discussion is whether the work was any good or not. In slightly more sophisticated versions of these conversations, arguments are mounted in defence of the value judgments that are made.

I am no relativist. (Not anymore.) I don't believe that judgments of the quality of art are entirely subjective. The world can be mathematically described and mental states are of the world. The map is part of the territory. There are facts of our biology that make certain elements of art appeal to us more than others. We can speak practically about art even in the absence of absolute certainty and even scientific certainty.

Nevertheless, this approach to art criticism is uninteresting because it is shallow. It doesn't get anywhere. It ends with a thumb up or a thumb down. Or a rating on 10. Who cares? Everything that works of art actually have to offer is lost in the discussion over what rating a work deserves. Also, the good-bad dichotomy can contribute to the building of an Us-vs-Them mentality and the harbouring of biases such as The Affect Heuristic (one good quality tends to make other qualities appear better than they are). In this mind state, people eschew open inquiry for one-sided cheers for certain kinds of movies or filmmakers.

3. Formal analysis & Interpretation

These two are grouped together because I think one follows from the other. In any case, some people include interpretation as part of a formal analysis.

A formal analysis is what one would expect to find on blogs and in movie reviews. Here, the critic unpacks the methods and techniques of the artist, revealing the effects that these techniques create. It describes the formal elements of the work without necessarily attempting to convey the experience of the work to the reader.

Formal analyses can be useful for aspiring filmmakers because unlike any of the approaches discussed above, they supply the reader with some insight into making movies.

After breaking down the formal elements of the film, the critic may choose to interpret what these things mean. This isn't quite like asking what a sunset means or what life means, it's an interpretation of the authors intentions. A common conflict here is between whether to interpret the artist's intentions or the work itself. I think we should generally let the work stand on its own, as there is always a gap between the artist's intentions and the ideology suggested by the work. We should remember, however, that there was an artist, that it is man-made, and that when we look at art, we are not looking at a sunset.

In interpreting the work, I look for its contained ideology. Art-making is world-building. A good interpretation knows the God of built worlds.

Both of these approaches appeal to me because they teach us the language of cinema. They allow us to get a sense for what motivates artists to make the work that they do without ignoring the uniqueness of individual consciousness. This is useful both for understanding movies and for learning how to make them.

4. Relaying the experience vs Relaying your experience

Another approach to art criticism attempts to relay the experience of the film so that the reader can imagine what it feels like. This could work either in a review where the reader is trying to get a sense for whether they would like the film, but also for formal analyses where the critic is trying to explain the effects of the artist's creative decisions.

The critic could try to be as objective as possible, describing what the film is likely to feel like to over viewers. This means that the experience of the work is abstracted to the point that the description is uncontroversial.

Another approach is to write a more personal account of the experience. I felt this way, I felt that way, and it reminded me of this. This is when the experience of the film is dealt with on a concrete level, where details of the experience are brought up that may not be experienced by others. Martin Scorsese often speaks this way when he rambles on about his favourite movies. "I remember I was just a little boy in Italy, and my father took me to see the movie, and it was just amazing, and I sat in the theatre for 12 hours and watch it six times in a row, and the woman reminded me of my grandmother and of the time she baked me tortellini but got mad that I wouldn't eat any of it....." This can turn off some people as they feel like they are reading an autobiography, learning more about the critic than they are about the work. Others love this kind of analysis because it brings their favourite aspect of art to the surface.

- - - - -

So that is my account of the different ways to approach art criticism. I don't doubt that there are others.

On my blog, I'll mostly be interested in formal analysis, relaying the experience, and especially interpretation. As a rationalist and a naturalist, I believe the world is reducible to math. The worlds that artists build are equally knowable. When I watch a movie, I want to receive the artist's ideology. What is the artist trying to tell me? What does this movie teach me about life? Then I try to convey these ideas to my readers. An analysis of artistic quality would ultimately come down to an evaluation of the work's ideas as I understand them.

Concretizing Abstractions

As a rationalist I object to the belief that gut feelings are reliable tools for understanding the mechanics of the world. Human minds are prone to biases that steer them from the path of reason. Not only is this prone to happen, but it is nearly inevitable in any situation where the precision of physics or probability theory is reduced to vague intuitions.

As none of us are walking, talking quantum computers, we spend a good deal of our time using our mysterious inner sense to guide us through life. We needn’t apply this auto-pilot consciousness to our important decisions, however. We can make our philosophy honest by articulating our mysterious intuitions into precise, non-mysterious sentences.

We must remember the lesson of AI: We don’t truly understand anything unless we can program it into a computer. A full understanding of what something is requires the ability to produce an algorithm for it. Arguments are just like computer programs. Either the steps lead clearly from one simple step to the next, or they are ineffective. Those arguments that are cloaked in the mysteriousness of complex emotions are likely lacking in detail.

This is where rationalist thinking comes into tension with artistic thinking. Most supporters of high art revel in the experiential wonders of consciousness, in the subtlety and intricacy of the interplay of emotions that great art stirs inside of us, in the complexity and majesty of the universe with its currents and counter-currents of contradicting, corresponding, and non-corresponding flows and forces dancing around us, splashing violently against the rocky shores of human experience. Art to them is adventure for the spirit, wild and terrifying and wonderful.

“How stultifying it would be to reduce these wonders into cold, rigid, mathematical terms! How counter-productive, how silly, how limiting it would be to take the life out of life and replace it with a mechanical account of experience!”

It is easy to sympathize with these claims. Art is wonderful and it would be a shame to lose that, if that’s what rationalism entails. But just as reading film criticism, film history, and learning filmmaking techniques does not lessen but actually strengthens one’s appreciation of cinema, so does the collapsing of the epistemic distance between conscious experience and physical reality. Knowledge does not reduce our experience to anything. It enhances our appreciation by giving us a more thorough understanding of the underlying mechanics that create those great effects in the brain.

At any rate, my readers will find me decidedly incapable of translating the totality of experience into math – although I would if I could! But one thing we can do is transition away from the glorification of our vague intuitions by trying to articulate our feelings. In concretizing our experiential abstractions, we increase the correspondence between our internal map and the external territory. Reducing the fuzzy blur of emotions to meaningful statements of the world tidies our minds, allowing us to think more clearly and economically.

Collapsing the wave function of the meanings of feelings is a hobby of mine. The other day I realized that there are two plain, ordinary people I know that give me the same impression. I find both of them funny for reasons I wasn’t articulate. So I took out a piece of paper and a pen and tried to articulate this impression, pretending I was introducing this character in a short story.

I came up with:

“X had a one-note bumbling good-naturedness and utter inability to understand irrational and sudden episodes of strong emotions in others, not for any cold, analytical penchant of his own, but out of a general clumsiness in the social skills department. Some called it innocence but X didn’t feel any more moral than the next guy. Well-meaning and mature, he had the style of a sucker. He is one of millions. One wonders if he’ll ever make it.”

Notice that this passage itself has its share of mysteriousness. One could just as easily convert the impressions the passage conjures up into a new passage, a meta-commentary that tries to concretize the blurriness of the newly evoked feelings.

Something like: 

“Playful and long-winded, the passage reduces the sprawling dynamism of X’s character into a compact essence. It begins with an elegant voice, looking backward from a disembodied, farseeing, future viewpoint, one that promptly switches to a present-tense viewpoint with limited knowledge.”

One might then try to perform a meta-meta commentary and collapse the epistemic distance in this follow-up passage. But even if one did, that would just lead to a meta-meta-meta commentary and so on. There is an infinite regress lest we become omniscient about the totality of experience and learn to communicate it in some universal language.

By this point some readers might think that what I’m proposing seems to be something that every artist already does. Well, the game is up – that’s exactly what it is! Artists collapse epistemic distances all the time, especially writers. They show us the world in a particular way, emphasizing some of its qualities and de-emphasizing others. All artworks are metaphors in this regard.

Just as artworks concretize abstractions, they also abstract aspects of the world that another model has a concrete explanation of. This is part of making sense of the world. The critic, like the artist he criticizes, is also faced with the challenge of lifting the fog of intuition by articulating gut feelings in words.

These efforts expose our biases and simplify the presentation of our ideas to others. You don’t have to be an artist for this to be helpful. Everybody wins.

Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

In my opening post I explained my use of the term "Meme Catapult" in the title of this blog.

A meme is a unit of information that is passed from brain to brain via communication. "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.

I then specifically applied the concept to rationalist memes. But there are other kinds of meme catapults. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is what I call a Hollywood Meme Catapult.

For a film to be a Hollywood Meme Catapult it needs to pump its audience with the hegemonic values that dominate Hollywood (and by extension, American, and by extension, Western) culture.

The Hobbit, although distinctive in many formal respects, is ideologically typical. It regurgitates the status quo: American Christian white straight male corporate values. These include “hope against all odds,” the Us-vs-Them mentality, blind faith, and reliance on intuitions over rationality, among others.

This post won't be structured like a typical review. Instead I'll list off a bunch of examples of Hollywood memes perpetuated by the film, introducing new (and old) jargon while I go, much of which will be re-used in future blog posts.

The Lose Yourself Cheer: The film in many ways is a raucous cheer for the belief that life's obstacles can be overcome by determination and will power. The Lose Yourself Cheer seems to be the very premise of the film. You know the one, “You can do anything you set your mind to, man.” This is similar to but distinct from the Terry Fox Cheer:

The Terry Fox Cheer: The greatest heroes are those who overcome the odds through perseverance. The Hobbit is a typical story of the underdog accomplishing the impossible. It's easy to understand the popularity of such memes. They feed egos and make people feel important. This is exactly the kind of thinking that perpetuates biases and irrational thinking, however. Cheers and prayers accomplish little, but they can work to enforce and re-enforce ideas and power dynamics.

Invincibility Stars: Have you ever read Harry Potter and noticed all the lethal jets of green light that “whiz past Harry’s ear” or “missed him by two inches”? In the moment, do you ever remark to yourself that there’s no way Harry can die here because there’s still two books left in the series? Emphasizing how near death Harry is in all of his near-death situations is an ineffective way of building tension because we all know Harry can’t possible die in this chapter. We’re just waiting to see how he manages to get out of yet another sticky situation. It’s as if he caught a star in a Nintendo game: he’s invincible for this part of the story. In The Hobbit, everybody with a name has an Invincibility Star. We aren’t worried for their lives even when their situation seems hopeless because we know some deux ex machina will save them in the nick of time.

Deus Ex Machina: This is an Ancient Greek term for when some improbable occurrence steers the plot in the playwright’s favoured direction wihout there being any plausible chain of events leading up to this occurrence. In The Hobbit, the most obvious example of a Deus Ex Machina is the Eagles. They come out of nowhere to rescue the company from a hopeless situation. Gandalf also serves this role in many scenes, always re-appearing just in time to save the situation. The dwarves do not seem to be on a predictable journey from A to B to C. Instead they are on a crash course, full of surprises and disasters and divine intervention.

Us-vs-Them Mentality: A popular phrase for the drawing of a divisive line between two groups, resulting in biased in-group support and out-group hostility. This is seen in many places in real life: with nationalism, sports fandom, wars, religions, politics, entertainment. It's all very Team Edward vs Team Jacob. The ways in which the Us-vs-Them mentality is problematic are well-documented in the media. They divide people instead of bringing them together. They provide an emotional basis for being hostile to others. Take the case of the sports fan that despises a group of human beings on the basis that as children their fathers bonded with them over a different team's sports games, a factor that is usually based on the city they were born in. This mentality holds people accountable for variables that are out of their control. It hijacks the primal lust for adrenaline, heroics, camaraderie, and competition, applying it to situations where it has no place. Sports fandom shouldn't be about laughing at the misery of others, it should a communal appreciation of entertainment and athleticism. Politics shouldn't be about sides, it should be about creating a good society for everyone. Philosophy shouldn't be about "winning" arguments or apologizing for an ideology, it should be an open form of inquiry. And so on.

The Us-vs-Them mentality also essentializes identities, implying that certain arbitrary personality, historical, racial, ethnic, religious, or stylistic traits are enough to tell us whether someone is worthy of moral condemnation. It says that everybody on one side of the line is good and everybody on the other side of the line is bad. In real life this is rarely the case. When our mental maps do not accurately correspond to the territory they represent, then they are in need of tweaking. In the case of The Hobbit, the Us-vs-Them mentality is explicitly tied to race but this is a problem Jackson inherited from the source material and is not to blame for. The meme, however, is still catapulted into the public consciousness by the film.

Super Epic Awesomeness: Most critics and ordinary movie watchers don’t get excited about great movies, they get excited for Super Epic Awesome movies that are dramatic, sensational, smart, quick, and flashy.

There isn’t just a conflict… the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

There isn’t just a villain… he is the most evil and powerful being in the world.

The characters don’t just get stranded in a burning tree… it is a tree at the very edge of a cliff… that is snapping bit by bit so that any moment the characters fall.
The Eagles don’t just save the characters… they snatch them out of the tree a second before it collapses.

And so on. The predicament is always elaborate and over-the-top, the solution always an improbable turn of events in the 11^th hour. Everything is MAXIMUM or JUMBO or EXTREME like at the supermarket.

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I felt the strongest scene of the film to be the adaptation of the chapter "Riddles in the Dark."

During that scene there was a definite air of self-awareness, the script playing to the fact that Gollum, despite being completely new to Bilbo was well-known to the audience and, in fact, a fan favourite. The game of riddles was one of the only scenes in the movie where Jackson took his time, allowing real suspense to build. Despite Bilbo’s Invincibility Star, there was tension brewing in the dark beneath the Misty Mountains.

The film is ideologically simple-minded but this is a Hollywood film after all. It isn't necessarily trying to be a philosophical or artistic masterwork. It might just be trying to entertain, or to push technical boundaries.

I think it did both of those things. It certainly entertained me even if only because of how ridiculous it was. And the effects were impressive for those that care about such things.

Personally, I found the movie to be overproduced. This is the technical companion to Super Epic Awesomeness. Every blockbuster desires to have the highest possible resolution, the most mystifying special effects, the most awesome explosions and monsters. I’m not too into the hyper-fresh, state-of-the-art equipment look, even in films without such a huge reliance on CGI. It doesn’t bother me for movies to just look and feel and operate like real life.

The use of CGI in almost every shot makes The Hobbit an interesting example of the place of cinema in a post-digital media world. In What Is Cinema, Lev Manovich argues that cinema is now a subgenre of animation or painting because of how digital media allow filmmakers to construct images from scratch, to manufacture them rather than capture them. He holds that the emergence of digital media radically changes the ontological status of the moving image. The Hobbit would work as a very interesting case study for this kind of analysis, as it uses CGI throughout, even in scenes without magic or explosions, for instance to enlarge the size of hobbit feet.

All of these elements combine to make The Hobbit a highly dramatic, bombastic, and on the whole, quite ridiculous story of the few improbably escaping the snares of the evil, time and time again, propelled onward by divine intervention toward a yet more daunting challenge. The needle on God’s Bayesian compass whirls out of control with every step of the epic journey where the laws of probability are substituted for the choice feel-good values of the Hollywood religion: blind faith, hope against all odds, Us-vs-Them mentalities, sensationalism, and the surrendering of rationality and autonomy to the belief in benevolent supervision. Ultimately, the characters pull through because of crucial differences between Middle-Earth and our world. One gets the sense that the Company’s Invincibility Stars extend through the next installment as well.