There is a film I have seen, conservatively, forty times. It came out when I was eleven and I saw it first in a second-run theater in a midwestern town that does not have one any more. It has a plot hole you could drive a bus through in the second act, two performances that are frankly embarrassing, and a score doing about ninety percent of the emotional work while the script stands around. I have read the reviews. The reviews are right.
It is also, and I say this having spent my adult life writing about culture for money, the single most important piece of art in my life, and there is no sentence available to me in professional criticism that can say that without immediately converting it into a joke about myself.
That is the thing I want to complain about, and it is not really about the film.
Criticism has a vocabulary for when a work was made. We are extremely good at this — we can talk about a novel as a product of 1953, we can situate a film in the collapse of the studio system, we can explain what an audience in 1979 would have brought into the room. Whole disciplines. Beautiful work.
We have almost nothing for when you were. And I have come to think that is the larger variable.
Consider what is actually happening at eleven, or thirteen, or whenever your particular window is. You do not yet have a set of works to compare this one against, so it does not read as derivative — it reads as the first time anyone has done this, because for you it is. You have no critical vocabulary, so the thing goes in whole, unsorted, with the score and the plot hole and the embarrassing performance all fused into one object. And, crucially, you are in the middle of assembling a self, so whatever you encounter gets used as material. The film did not move me. The film got built into me, which is a different transaction, and it is not reversible by finding out later that the second act does not work.
Everyone knows this. Everyone has one. And the only socially available way to mention it is to preface it — I know it's terrible, but — which is a small act of self-betrayal that we all perform so automatically that we have stopped noticing it is a betrayal.
Now, the objection, which is a good one and which I have used on other people: this licenses defending anything. If formative-at-eleven is a category of value, then no work can be criticised, because somebody was eleven. And worse, it is indistinguishable from nostalgia, which is the least interesting thing a person can feel and is currently the operating principle of roughly the entire entertainment industry, which has noticed exactly this mechanism and is monetising it with a thoroughness that should embarrass all of us.
I grant the second half completely. The industrialisation of this feeling is genuinely grim and I have written against it. But notice that the objection assumes there is one axis — good, bad — and that formative-at-eleven is a bid to move a work up it. It is not. It is a claim that there is a second axis we have no instruments for, and that a work can be low on the first and enormous on the second, and that these are simply different facts.
We accept this everywhere else without difficulty. Nobody thinks a wedding photograph is a good photograph. Nobody argues that the house you grew up in was well designed. We understand perfectly that objects can be load-bearing in a life without being excellent, and we only get confused about it when the object happens to also be a work of art, because works of art come with a ranking apparatus attached and the apparatus wants to eat everything.
What I would like — and here is where the essay stops being about me, briefly — is for criticism to be able to say: this film is not good, and it was made for eleven-year-olds, and it did to a generation of them exactly what it set out to do, and that is a real thing that happened in the world and is worth an essay. Not a defence. A description.
I rewatched it in March with a friend's kid, who is eleven, and who has never heard of it, and who watched the whole thing without her phone, which I am told is not nothing. Afterwards she said it was pretty good and asked if there was another one.
There is another one. It is worse. I am not going to tell her that.
