An Abridged History of My Own Subjectivity
On all the parts of watching movies that aren't actually the movie.
Lily James, Tessa Thompson, Little Woods, NEON
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how objectivity in criticism doesn’t exist. People on the internet often like to pretend it does, usually when they seem to think telling me they don’t like my review isn’t enough. If I don’t love what they love and hate what they hate, I’m not objective. If I focus on something they wouldn’t have focused on, or acknowledge my feelings in any way, I’m not objective. I think conversations would get a lot easier if everyone began to consider that their own sense of objectivity usually starts and ends with the point on the map labeled “you are here.”
Despite knowing this, I’ve sometimes found myself cultivating the illusion of objectivity when falling into the unspoken etiquette of social media-based criticism. I’ve found myself tweeting confidently about how a movie is nuanced or frustrating or dazzling, when a more honest version of my reaction might also include the fact that I was a little distracted by a theater-goer sitting beside me on their phone, or that I had to stop to troubleshoot my advanced screener for a half an hour, or that I was simply very tired. Honestly, I think I would use Letterboxd’s star rating system more if it had an alternate button you could click that just said, “I was tired.”
The context surrounding the act of watching a movie doesn’t always have a place in film writing, and it certainly shouldn’t be the driving force behind a critic’s final opinion on a film, but I’m still endlessly curious and intrigued about that context nonetheless. When I talk to friends about movies, I like to know if a movie they loved was the first one they watched at a film festival or the fiftieth. I want to know if their roommate talked through the entire movie, or if they sat in the dark with their eyes glued to the screen. I want to know about every fun part of watching the movie that isn’t the movie itself, then I want to hear about the movie.
I love that in Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series, the late critic often wrote about when and where he first came to a text, how he approached it at the time of reassessment, and sometimes, how the distance between the two places and times informed his new perspective. As a young film fan, I also used to pore over Stephen King’s contributions to Entertainment Weekly, engaged by his quick, clever observations even as I recognized that they were a totally different type of writing about film than the bylines in the magazine’s review section. I love, for example, the time in 2009 when he listed The Road as one of his favorite films of the year, then said, “It’s actually painful to watch (at my screening I actually heard the projectionist sobbing as the film neared its end).” Can you imagine?
Although I strive to make my criticism as broadly helpful and fair to the text as possible, my thoughts on many of the films and shows I watch outside of work are and always will be influenced by the context in which I watched them, and I think it’s silly to pretend that they’re not. I doubt I’m alone in this.
In the spirit of embracing the messiness of moviegoing, I decided to jot down the first thoughts that came to mind about ten of my most distinctive TV-watching and moviegoing experiences, times when the context was as overwhelming or memorable as the text itself. I think you can learn a lot about me from them, and I’d love to hear about some of yours too.
Elliot Page, Juno, Fox Searchlight Pictures
In the meantime, here’s an abridged, chronological, and semi-random history of my own wildly subjective viewing experiences:
The Haunted Mansion (2003) - I watched this movie at a Halloween sleepover at a friend’s house in elementary school. We weren’t close friends but knew each other from team sports. In retrospect, this was the kind of friend group that probably talked about me behind my back, but I also didn’t really hang out with them enough to care. At any rate, I don’t remember anything about The Haunted Mansion, but I do remember the DVD menu screen because it played over and over and over on a nightmarish loop after everyone but me had fallen asleep. I didn’t have a DVD player at home at the time, so I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off in the dark. I eventually tearfully woke up the host’s mom to ask for her help turning off the TV, but not before I felt like that cursed Haunted Mansion DVD screen stole some irreplaceable part of my sanity. It was the closest I ever came, before or after, to calling my mom and asking her to come pick me up from a sleepover.
Juno (2007) - I watched this movie during what felt like the purest era of discovery and awe for me as a young film-lover, the year I first became cognizant enough of movies for grown-ups to pick out whatever I wanted to watch in theaters. I also think it was the first double feature I ever saw (I also watched 27 Dresses that day). I watched both movies in a little indie theater near my hometown that I was starting to think of as mine, and when I came out to the parking lot afterward, it had snowed. Someone wrote a message on a car in the snow, but I don’t remember what it said. I just remember feeling the way only a really great movie can make me feel, and realizing I wanted to feel that way as much as possible for the rest of my life.
The Walking Dead (2010-present, somehow) - I watched much of the third or fourth season of this show in my sophomore year college common room since I didn’t have cable or even a TV set. It smelled kind of weird in there, and I would sit extra close to the boxy old TV because I couldn’t turn the volume up very loud, or else the people using the room to study or cook or, in one case, carry on an intense emotional affair, would ask me to turn it down.
Reign (2013-2017) I watched the first season of this hilariously anachronistic, unreasonably sexy and stylish, deeply 2010s-core Renaissance drama during what I like to call a “CW channel fugue state.” This is something that I’ve strangely experienced a few times (see also: The Vampire Diaries, Riverdale), and it’s a phenomenon I can only describe as when a vacation or holiday haze kicks in and you and a friend start clicking things on Netflix that you would never normally give the time of day. Is Reign good? Almost certainly not. But did I love the long weekend I spent laying under a pile of blankets on a couch with my friends, eating snacks and screaming at all the characters as they made terrible decisions? Absolutely. I absolutely loved it.
Brooklyn (2015) - Sometimes it feels like movies come to you just when you need them, and Brookyln was one such film. I saw it on a whim, unsure if I’d like it, but I ended up wholly swept up in the Saoirse Ronan-led romance. More importantly, though, I watched it in California on what turned out to be the day I decided to keep living there after graduating college, rather than moving back to my family in Washington state as promised. I knew I had to make the decision that day, but I was terrified, so I went to see a movie instead. I didn’t realize it was a movie all about leaving home. By the time the credits rolled, I was a mess, but I was also more sure than ever that I already was home.
Raw (2016) - I watched Julia Ducournau’s solo feature directorial debut on a first date. It was with a guy who I hit it off with on a dating app, but in person, we couldn’t have had worse chemistry or a more lackluster conversation. By the time our pre-movie Starbucks meet-up was over, I was starting to wonder what misguided moment of confidence drove us to pick this bloody, sexual, shocking coming-of-age cannibalism film as our date movie, but by then it was far too late. The movie was painfully awkward to watch together, and when he leaned in to kiss me after the date, I thought too hard about how he could bite me, and basically ducked and rolled out of his car. Also, it was pouring rain out and I had to resist the urge to jump back into his car seconds later when a random gutter rat ran directly under my car. Needless to say, we did not have a second date.
In the Fade (2017) - The only thing I remember about this German film starring Diane Kruger, aside from the bleak ending, is how uniquely miserable I was when I watched it. I was in an old, extremely cold San Francisco theater with wildly uncomfortable chairs. I’ve been all over that city, but I swear that theater was like the Bermuda Triangle: I never found it again. Due to some egregious scheduling mistake, I also spent the whole movie both extremely hungry and extremely in need of a bathroom. Finally, the only people in the theater besides myself and a friend were a group of older ladies who reacted to every single moment of the film as if they had quite simply never seen another movie in their lives.
Little Woods (2018) - I watched Nia DaCosta’s thriller about a pair of sisters (played by Tessa Thompson and Lily James) who attempt to cross a border to seek out a safe abortion at the Mill Valley Film Festival on the day of Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation to the Supreme Court. It was another time when I went into a movie blind, with no idea what it would entail or how prescient it would end up becoming. If my memory serves me, the screening’s audience was almost entirely women. The feeling in the theater is impossible to describe, but if I had to call it something, it would be a collective premonition. We felt the heaviness and power of the film, but we also sat in dread over a moment that wouldn’t come for four more years, one that was all but assured from that day forward.
Love Island (2015-present) - Once, when my dad was in the hospital and I thought he might not make it, my anxiety was running me ragged and I got really paranoid that anything I watched would be the last thing I saw before I heard bad news about him. I decided the only solution was to put on something I would never normally watch, something that wouldn’t even have reason to cross my mind in the future. My thought process was that if everything went terribly wrong, I could easily forget about the title in question, rather than being painfully reminded of it often, as I would with something I actually liked. I chose the UK version of the trashy dating show Love Island and marathoned about eight episodes of it when I couldn’t sleep. My dad made it out of the hospital, and I haven’t watched more since.
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - Some movies live and die by the crowd you see them with, and I think this is probably one of them. I don’t really want to see it again, because no rewatch will ever live up to the feeling of watching it in a packed theater. I don’t think I’ve ever heard and seen so many grown men scream in excitement like that, and I couldn’t stop smiling as I watched the movie’s well-guarded surprises hit the audience in wave after wave of genuine, unadulterated joy. At some points, it felt less like a movie and more like a concert or a playoff game. It also turned out to be the last movie I got to watch before omicron pushed the residents of Los Angeles back into our homes, which for me meant a nearly unbearable six weeks spent alone in my new studio apartment after I’d finished spending two years as a public-facing essential worker. I got back to the movies eventually, and in the meantime, at least I could cherish the memory of a couple hundred people absolutely losing their shit about the three Peter Parkers.
Do you have a moviegoing or TV-watching experience that’s been overshadowed by its memorable context? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks again for reading.
I, too, saw No Way Home in a packed theatre and nothing will ever top that experience. There's something about seeing a movie like that with a crowd that is just so into everything that's happening - a true collective experience you cannot replicate in your home.
One of my favourite movie viewing experiences in a theatre was seeing one of my favourite movies - Jupiter Ascending - in an almost empty screening, very late at night, with my very best friend. The movie, objectively not very good but really very fun, was secondary to spending two hours sitting next to my friend in the dark hollering with laughter at everything that happened on that screen. I think about that every time I watch JA, which is more often than I likely should.
Outside of a theatre, I have vivid memories of the first time I watched Children of Men at home, alone, while my partner was at work soon after it had released for home viewing. I had put the movie on knowing nothing about it except that Clive Owen was in it. It has since become a movie I revisit at least once a year, and every time I finish it, I come out of the experience briefly shattered by the continuing prescience of the story and the gorgeous filmmaking that combine to make that movie one of the most quietly devastating films I've ever seen.