[Paracelsus]

(12-26-2018 12:54 PM)Syberpunk Wrote:  

A Christmas present from Mauler, released yesterday.
Emphasis on reviewers:

"We can love a piece of media and yet be critical of it"
My response "Well if I'm critical of a piece of media, it usually mean I don't love or like it and its NOT good mostly."

Is this the Hegelian Dialectic?

No, it's not. It's the one moment in years of misandry when Sarkeesian actually said something approaching intelligent, and if you can sit through the entire Mauler video you'll see what that point is: emotional response to a piece of MediaShit being entirely separate to whether that piece of MediaShit actually tracks logically and how it stacks up as a piece of art. The key way most people defend gumming these two together is to defensively assert "in my opinion".

The main point of Mauler's 2 and a half hour rant (I thought it fails - I'll get to why soon) is that video essayists believe that if they liked a piece of work, as in, had a positive emotional reaction to it, that this therefore means it was successful as a piece of art in an objective sense. The reason for this bootstrap levitation is because narcissists cannot stand to think that their belief about something in the world is different from the reality that actually exists.

This is utter lunacy, albeit not unexpected when you think about stuff like AnonymousBosch's long-ago reflections on how society is spiralling into a state where sensibility rules all. Indeed in passing, Gerry Spence literally bases his whole approach to trial advocacy on this fact; he hammers juries with sheer conviction and words being carriers of emotion to people, rightly pointing out that if we're not credible, if we don't tell what we think are the facts with conviction, logic isn't going to convince anyone.

As said, emotional response =/= that the art was good. I like ice cream, but that doesn't change the hard fact that it is sugary shit that is doing damage to my heart and other organs, it's bad for me. My emotional response to the taste of ice cream is quite separate from whether it is actually a nutritious food or whether it is sweet or not.

(Ironically, the idea of the "guilty pleasure" seems to me to have been the first gumming-up of the two concepts. It means there's something we ought to dislike because it's bad, but we like it anyway, i.e.e. we're made to feel guilty because our emotions do not conform to a rational, objective standard of artfulness, i.e.e.e. we are stupid enough to think the two things are related in any way, shape or form, and i.e.e.e.e. we submit to a system of elitism that generates both The Atlantic and Donald Trump's rise alike.)

Anyway: yes, we can love (<---- emotional response) a piece of MediaShit and yet be critical (<----- analyse its merit as a piece of art from a craft and technical standpoint) of the same piece of MediaShit.

Sarkeesian, however, uses the word critical as meaning "we can whip it because its politics do not match my ideology", which is still getting it wrong but in another form. Both the emotional response and criticising something for its political agenda are addressing the extent to which your feelings are affected by the film. Criticising a piece of art's politics is something entirely different from analysing its craft and its success in delivering logic and narrative. So relax, that fat Canadian bitch still hasn't learned anything yet.

As I was saying, though, I think Mauler's video comes across as mostly petty at least until he actually gets started on The Farce Awakens critique itself (30 minutes for literally the first three minutes of the film, Christ alfuckingmighty).

On one hand I get his point: he thinks that by laying the foundations of his thinking out, by setting out his assumptions and his model for assessing a film, by identifying the holes in his critics' arguments, he in classic style has given the audience a solid platform from which to proceed.

But it mostly comes across a bit Gamma: essayists bitchslapping fat twentysomething soyboys and MGTOWs over the internet, using sledgehammers to crack walnuts. The soyfats he's razzing on these videos are doing better because he's acknowledging them - Barbra Streisand Effect and all that. If Mauler thinks his arguments are strong enough to stand up on their own, he shouldn't need to launch nukes at guys with slingshots. He should just get on with the show and put up the arguments. The guy has 100,000 subscribers off the back of one critique of TLJ, if he wants to build that he'll keep on putting up quality material, not go attacking the opposition other than by a passing remark or two.

I mean, he even defends the length of his videos because dickheads with ADD complain it's longer than 10 minutes. This he should've just dealt with by a raised eyebrow and carrying on: the length is part of the fucking charm, it illustrates beautifully how fucking bad a film is if you can literally spend more than the runtime of the movie pointing out its most egregious faults and not even getting to the rest of the complaints with it. He has a nice riposte by saying "Fuckwits quote and talk about scenes in movies for longer than the scenes themselves lasted, I'm doing no different", but it's still a counterpunch he shouldn't even have felt to make. It only exposes a weakness: that he is insecure about how long and verbose his videos are, and he shouldn't be. Long focused analysis is one of the few things that's going to save the world, or at least save the Internet.