Jerry Coyne links to an article by Bim Adewunmi in The Guardian slagging off best-of lists – such as a recent list of greatest movies issued by the British Film Institute (it gave first place to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo).
Like Jerry, I’ll paste in the objections made by Adewunmi, the reasons given for hating such lists:
• They remove originality of thought. Have you ever tried to compile a list of the best books of all time? Have you automatically written down any or all of these usual suspects – Dickens, Nabokov, Austen, or Woolf – without even realising? We’ve all done it. These authors and their many works are undoubtedly excellent, but is that the only reason they came to mind? No, they’ve been “normed” into your life. Who wants to be the lone wolf standing up in class and saying The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic is their favourite book of all time when everyone else is nodding soberly along to Madame Bovary? Break free of the tyranny of lists! PS: the Shopaholic series is a delight.
• They kill joy. We’ve all used the clapping Orson Welles gif to punctuate Tumblr posts, sure, but have you ever watched all of Citizen Kane? All my life, I’ve been told it is the best thing my eyes will ever see. I have Citizen Kane fatigue. This is what lists do – when the hype gets too much, all joy is extracted from the endeavour. For example, I’m fairly obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In previous years, I would wax lyrical about how amazing the show was, sitting people down and explaining – season by season – how layered and brilliantly conceived the show was, before pressing a box set into their hands, telling them: “Just watch it.” Inevitably, my overactive hype machine sucked all the joy from the situation. The simple pleasure of accidentally stumbling upon the magnificence was gone. The expectations are too high, the disappointment inescapable. These days, I’ve scaled back my enthusiasm. If people want to appreciate the wonder of a groundbreaking and perfectly pitched series that exquisitely explored the ideas of autonomy and feminism via a wisecracking teenager who battles supernatural beings, they will.
• They confirm your most depressing fear: you are desperately uncool. By definition, lists are exclusionary, separating the wheat from the perceived chaff. And while we all have views that might be considered a bit left field, we imagine those mark us out as cool mavericks, not social pariahs. But imagine the explicit confirmation that you’re wrong about everything – your favourite film, your most treasured book, your most beloved album. All wrong. Your very opinion: invalidated. No one wants that. The NHS couldn’t handle the strain of all the crushed egos.
Well, what do you think? I can’t take the last point very seriously, and the whole article seems to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. But is there something in any of these points?
I have to admit that I do often see movies or read books because I feel that … I should. But maybe that’s because I have some pretensions as a critic and feel the need to keep up in certain areas (and to be familiar with the acknowledged classics in those areas) partly out of fear of otherwise being charlatan. This might not affect other people, people with fewer pretensions, so much. But even if you do feel some pressure to know the classics, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. There’s something to be said for having at least some cultural consensus, however shifting and contestable, as to whatever the classics are in various art forms – isn’t there? The bit about shifting and contestable is important but all the same…
On the other hand, if I were asked exactly what should be said for this, I admit that I’d flounder around somewhat. I’d find it difficult to come up with an answer that’s both compelling and concise.
Jerry Coyne makes a good point almost in passing: “While taste is subjective, the taste of people who are regularly exposed to film and books, and think about them, tends to run along concurrent lines, and so it’s worth paying attention to their suggestions.” That sounds about right to me. But it raises an important issue for philosophers – are our measures of the “greatest” or the “best” objective in any sense?
I have a long-term interest in whether novels or plays, say, can be interpreted or evaluated objectively. What do we mean even when we make a simple claim such as that Iago is the villain of Othello? That claim sounds like an objective truth – Iago really is the villain, right? But is it really? Should we say that Iago is coded as a villain if you read or watch it in accordance with certain conventions, but that it may be open (in some sense) to people to reject those conventions? Perhaps we can’t make any sense of it without applying at least some of the conventions that we use to construe the action of plays, but perhaps it’s possible to throw out enough to interpret Othello against the usual grain, with Iago as the hero. Yes? No?
Even if that’s not possible, what if we start interpreting the play at a more abstract level – e.g. as a cautionary tale about jealousy? Don’t we need to rely on conventions that are more contestable? And if we are going to evaluate the play, won’t our evaluations depend on our interpretations, as well as on further criteria of evaluation that may not be binding on others?
What I want to say here is something along the lines that there are always institutional and subjective elements in the interpretation and evaluation of artistic works, and yet interpretation and evaluation are not merely arbitrary. There are going to be reasons why certain conventions and standards are more relevant than others, and why skilled critics, or at least those from similar backgrounds or with similar interests, are likely to converge to a great extent on the same interpretations and evaluations. If that’s right, a list produced by people who are generally regarded as competent critics in a particular field will probably contain works that will be valued by anyone who has internalised much the same conventions of interpretation and standards of evaluation. There is, however, always scope to challenge them, at least at the margins … though then again, perhaps you’re best able to do this if you actually understand them.
So, what do you think of such lists? Is there anything about them that’s objective? Are they just arbitrary? Do you, personally, find them of any value, or would you rather they all be cast into the sea?
[Pssst: My Amazon page]
I’m forever grateful to such lists.
At age 14 or 15 I picked up a list at the public library of the 100 greatest novels of all time.
I had no idea at the time of what great literature is but I began to read the books on the list.
Some I found impossible to read and some I enjoyed. Some of them, for example, the Good Earth by Pearl Buck, would probably be on no one’s list today. Some of them, for example, Orwell’s Animal Farm, might still be there.
Still, the list gave me a start in reading serious literature.
I imagine that a similar list might help a young person about what movies to begin seeing.
Criticisms of such lists overlook the fact that many young people have not been raised in circles where great literature or films are discussed and go to schools where reading is a chore, not a pleasure, as I did.
No one is born with good or serious tastes in literature, and one develops taste by reading, generally books recommended by others.
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My 2¢:
It’s ridiculous to compare To Kill a Mockingbird with Absalom, Absalom in order to say which is ‘the better book’. Any book (yes, even 50 Shades of Grey) works on a variety of levels, and to reduce that variety to a one-dimensional, kind of letter-grade evaluation to me only shows that you don’t appreciate the variety, i.e. don’t know very much about books. Same thing for movies, obviously.
Plus, those lazy kinds of evaluation neither get anybody engaged with your thinking or the book/movie nor do they explain anything about how books/movies work, what kinds of different things there are to appreciate about them, and how one can learn to see things things—or to see them differently.
So, +1 for the sea.
@swallerstein: What you describe are really not so much Top 10 lists but rather examples of Must Watch/Read categories—which wouldn’t even have to pretend to be exhaustive, of course. But they’d still suffer from the defects I detailed above.
I appreciate the usefulness of Must Read/Watch lists, but I’d much rather read about that sort of thing in a format like The Browser’s Five Books. That at least tells you quite a bit about why you would want to read this or that book.
Iago is your basic brilliant but unpolished and erratic PhD from Hicksville State who, after several successful years as a VAP, loses out when the slot goes tenure-track to the latest slick but conventional cookie from Leiter University.
I do sometimes find such lists useful in that they can inform me of some movie/game/book/whatever that might be very good. I’ve given some once ignored works a shot based on such lists and sometimes I have been rewarded. Other times, I have been punished.
I tend to proportion my confidence in the list to the competence and taste of the list maker while tempering it with what I know about subjectivity.
I’m reluctant to make lists myself, because I find that what I like can shift around, although I do have a fairly consistent top group (this is analogous to the finish places of good runners over various races-they tend to shift a bit from week to week).
I also think expert compiled lists contrast interestingly with user or publicly compiled lists. List compiled by experts may have some sort of professional analysis that is relevant but a list created by my peers of “The Top 50 Albums of the 21st Century,” say, tells you something completely different.
One aspect of such matters is that standards can be arbitrary while still being objectively applied. For example (as the Olympic Games are currently taking place), the standards of something like the triple jump are entirely arbitrary, but their application is objective.
I think maybe we are missing the real point of list articles which is that they are an easy way to fill up space in a newspaper or magazine. This is why they are so popular around Christmas time, when the staff are mostly on holiday and there isn’t much serious to write about anyway. They can be written well in advance of publication and largely recycled from similar previous articles.
This is not to say that all book list articles are worthless. An article with a named author who acknowledges their subjectivity and explains their reasons for choosing the books in an interesting manner is perfectly OK. Near the other end of the spectrum are those anonymous lists that aspire/pretend to objectivity by naming all the usual suspects in pretty much the usual order. There is no value in that. Even worse, are the lists where the readers themselves are expected to nominate or vote for the entries. Either the voters are given a shortlist of the usual suspects to pick from, which probably won’t have their actual favourite books on it at all, or they will be given a free choice, in which people with broad tastes will pretty much fail to register because they will all vote for something different while those who only know the usual suspects will vote for those and they will win. This is the ultimate in lazy journalism. Everybody can go off on holiday except one poor sap who has to count all the votes and write up the resulting mess.
As for Sight&Sound’s poll:
“[W]e approached more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles, and received (in time for the deadline) precisely 846 top-ten lists that between them mention a total of 2,045 different films.
As a qualification of what ‘greatest’ means, our invitation letter stated, ‘We leave that open to your interpretation. You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.’”
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/greatest-films-all-time-2012
The crucial meta-aesthetic question is whether there any objective or at least intersubjective criteria for aesthetic goodness or greatness. For example, a motion picture is a complex work of art, and so there is more than one aesthetic aspect to consider:
1. narrative design (screenplay/story)
2. photographic design (picture design)
3. scenic design (set design)
4. performance of the actors/actresses
The thing I most often take from those lists is how much more I need to read. I do prefer lists that are more specific, like saying 100 best novels of ALL TIME is a bit far fetched, but saying 100 best novels written before XXXX date. Or narrowing the list down by genre or whatever qualifier. Whatever your reason, I don’t think these lists should be ignored…
READ ALL THE THINGS
Sam
http://sronicker.blogspot.jp/