{"id":4477,"date":"2003-11-23T10:36:28","date_gmt":"2003-11-23T14:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/httpblogslawharvardeduceerock4\/2003\/11\/23\/the-matrix-of-"},"modified":"2007-04-23T15:26:40","modified_gmt":"2007-04-23T19:26:40","slug":"the-matrix-of-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/2003\/11\/23\/the-matrix-of-criticism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Matrix of Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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i am struggling greatly right now with the concept of film criticism…an internal battle over whether it is worthy, whether it is worthwhile, whether it is destructive…to critique, even in a positive way, is to tear apart, to unravel, to pick at, to destroy. and i’m referring to serious criticism here, not “this is a good movie”-style reviewing. i mean deep criticism, the academic kind, the intellectual kind, the kind that reveals all of the secrets in a work…the kind i have been rigorously trained to do…does this kind of criticism illuminate, or does it bleach raw? i don’t know. do artists need critics? i don’t know. should the secrets of a work stay secret? i don’t know. does it really take a poet to understand poetry? YES. but now that i have written a novel and am working on a screenplay, and have taken up drawing, the mode-switching is causing some existential trauma. to be a really good critic, to have true insight, is a powerful skill, and a dangerous one. used carelessly or inappropriately it can be enormously destructive. when you have been trained to quickly see beneath the surface of everything–films, books, people–you must also learn to tread lightly. critique with care. not only can you hurt feelings, you can also incite backlashes from those who don’t understand your powers of perception. people don’t want to know what they’re revealing about themselves. they don’t want to know that they can be read so easily. they like to think their secrets are safe, that they are the gatekeepers granting or denying access to their secrets. they don’t want to know that it’s all right there in their face, in their gesture, in their tone, in their choice of words. the well-trained critic can see it all instantly, in strangers and friends alike; the truly gifted critic is living in both the matrix and the real world at the same time, seeing lines of dripping numbers everywhere she looks. but people don’t want to know how little control they have over themselves, how much they reveal to the right reader, viewer, stranger, friend. so the critic, then, must learn to keep secrets as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

i am struggling greatly right now with the concept of film criticism…an internal battle over whether it is worthy, whether it is worthwhile, whether it is destructive…to critique, even in a positive way, is to tear apart, to unravel, to pick at, to destroy. and i’m referring to serious criticism here, not “this is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58QoK-1ad","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}