Seeing the world through fan-colored glasses: Pondering a critical stance in-between

[This was provoked by about four different conversations I’ve had lately, so you may recognize yourself in this post. Thanks.]

This is a post about the place and extent of criticism; musings about where to draw certain lines; there is no ultimate rule to be determined.

I don’t have a straight story to tell, anymore. Am I acting, or reacting? What’s the happy medium?

One friend told me her honest impression of Richard Armitage in The Crucible and then told me she was worried about my possible reaction to her remarks, because she thought I was drastically over-invested in him. It puzzled me; I wonder if I give the impression that other people’s opinions of him impact me? (Or maybe it’s that I give the impression that other people’s opinions don’t impact me?) Then again, I know that the mere impulse to point things out that have different interpretations, when a fan does it, is seen by outsiders as evidence of partisanship. So if someone says something incorrect and I set him/her straight, that’s taken as evidence not of my honesty but of parti pris. I am not sure there’s any way around that.

Someone else, a fellow fan, said to me recently that she didn’t think she’d looked at anything Richard Armitage had done objectively. Me neither, I thought. By the second time I looked, I was implicated myself, and soon after, I was watching with eyes of love. Is it wrong to look that way, as long as I am honest?

I have never thought that being a fan keeps me from noticing things. It may make me think the things I notice are less important than they are to other people, I suppose. Or it may affect the categories of things I notice.

In general, I think, the way to go in reviewing a piece of work is to accept something for what it is, so I can evaluate it on its own terms — and frankly, if I know that I can’t make that initial step or initial evidence suggests it will be impossible (Fargo on television, for example), simply to stay away from it. If the stakes are so high that any disappointment would be crushing, then taking that risk is foolish. I do think some experiences of the arts are so beautiful that they do not need to be complicated with criticism (though which things those are will be will different for each of us).

I don’t think that everything Richard Armitage does falls into the category of automatic like (My dislike of Vicar of Dibley, for instance, is well known), but most things don’t fall into that category of automatic dislike either. Most things have to be evaluated. Which means: taking something seriously on its own terms. Seeing it from the perspective of what it thinks it is supposed to do, and giving my own reaction to whether it’s achieved that or not. We could get into the whole question of criticism of the form or content of a project (and I do that here, too, as with my series on The Crucible, and I did it in synergy with an analysis of acting choices, as I did for Spooks 9), but that’s generally a matter of critical observation as opposed to critical opinion-making. I try to recognize and concede, when I review something, that my opinion is not absolute. Although people seem inevitably to think that I am speaking that way, I have a hard time reading other people’s reviews that imply if you don’t agree with them, your intelligence is substandard.

I admit that I sometimes feel under fire about these things. If I’m familiar with the work and it is an adaptation of something that means something me, even if my general impression of it is positive, any indication that I don’t love every second of it is taken by some readers as snark. On the other hand, if I’m not all that critical of it, because I don’t think the work itself asks to be taken all that seriously, then I get criticized for not being critical enough, too much of a fangirl. Or, in the case of an adaptation, for not taking the original work seriously enough (even if taking the original work seriously is not a dealbreaker for me, because if it mattered that much to me, I’d avoid seeing it).

Anyway, all of this is mostly reflection for myself on how I should be writing. I think I’m particularly sensitive to the reproof that I am not critical enough because it is the job of an academic to be critical. On the other hand, I was never like that as a teacher. I always looked for the thing to praise first and valued the praiseworthy things more heavily than the things in need of correction when evaluating and grading. (And in fact, the increasing pressure not to do this — the increasing need to grade with absolute dealbreakers as it was caused not only by administrators but also by the students themselves — was one of the thing that pushed me out of instruction.)

But, I think, on the whole — becoming a fan has made me not less critical but more accepting, and possibly happier about the things I see. More empathetic (if not necessarily intellectually in agreement) with the love that people have for the things that please them. Less willing to snipe at an intense love, because I know how immoderacy has made me able to feel, has positively influenced my own life, has made me more generous. And that’s a way I like to be, when I have a chance. And a stance I intend to protect the emotional and rhetorical and electronic space for.

~ by Servetus on August 17, 2014.