The Long Take: The Rotten Tomatoes Syndrome
Audience-critic disparities are nothing new. But aggregators enhance a new tribalism.
Whether you like it or not, the mantra of the audience versus the critic is always going to be a piece of drama within the arts. The audience, being mildly normal and anodyne goes against the snobby tastemaker has been a running theme in this newsletter and the reason I often write about it is that it makes for some interesting things to say about taste. I’m not immune to calling out various critics for acting like a charlatan on social media when they talk about a group of plebs they invent, while I rant about strawmen, so if you think I’m a hypocrite, please call me out on it.
This brings us to aggregators, like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, who are perceived to be the purveyors of taste. Keith Phipps bemoaned that The Woman King, a movie about the all-female warrior unit that saved the kingdom of Dahomey, got lower user scores on Metacritic, despite being a critical and commercial success. Phipps dreads that this would set or continue a precedent in which movies, mainly with surface-level progressive themes and featuring women, will suffer under the hand of trolls who haven’t seen the film and downvote it by a proxied coordinated campaign.
The Woman King has been controversial, because of its perceived historical inaccuracy and already it got a boycott from the ADOS crowd. You see, the kingdom of Dahomey had slaves, sold them to the Atlantic trade and got rich at the expense of selling them off. For some people, particularly if you’re 1619 Project architect Nikole Hannah-Jones, this felt like an expectation that the film would have fallen below. Whereas others have gleefully tasted the tears of the backlash because the movie isn’t meeting the shallow yet high standards its perceived target audience had set up. Does the film really need to eschew accuracy to chase a trend that complements the critic’s politics? Here’s what Dominic Sandbrook wrote for Unherd:
Does all this matter? Maybe not. To repeat: all historical films turn fact into fiction. If you go to Hollywood for your history, that’s your problem, not theirs. Addressing her critics in Variety, Viola Davis insisted that a movie is just, well, a movie. “If we just told a history lesson, which we very well could have, that would be a documentary,” she said bluntly. “Unfortunately, people wouldn’t be in the theaters.” As for John Boyega, he fell back on the kind of impenetrable gibberish for which actors have long been admired across the world. “Art can live in a moral or immoral space and could sometimes just be about shining a light on human nature, history, and the reality of that conflict,” he said gnomically. “So, for me, including that just shows that there is a way in which we can embrace stories that accept the fact that humanity is not perfect, while also being entertaining and something you can learn from.
However, I would like to turn my attention to the aggregators, because I feel like they are tearing a lot of people apart. Critics like to think that a lower user score is an indication of bigotry within the internet, a refusal to genuinely engage with art. This means that they want Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic to stamp out bots or any possibility of a coordinated review bomb. Meanwhile, defenders of these disparities like to think that these critics, ironically enough, cannot take any more criticism. I often come back to this paragraph from Aaron Sibarium when he pushed back against an esoteric subject of conservatism, because it pretty much steelman the whole idea:
What’s being opposed today, in other words, is a discourse endemic to elite circles but anathema almost everywhere else. Call it Rotten Tomatoes syndrome: a condition where bien pensant preferences diverge systematically and quantifiably from those of the people (compare critic and audience reactions to Joker, The Last Jedi, and Dave Chappelle), so that there is a structural-but-sustainable conflict between the producers and consumers of culture, litigated through political proxy wars that show no signs of cooling down.
But the other side of the argument isn’t immune from being dishonest. Tim Pool, a former gadfly for Vice News before moving into a long venture of churnalism, thought that Ad Astra, directed by James Gray and starring Brad Pitt as a sad-sack astronaut, doesn’t deserve the 82 per cent rating. Ad Astra has been praised for being a tender and critical reflection of masculinity, so it isn’t surprising that Pool would have a negative reaction against the writers liking the movie for that very reason, Calling out groupthink among critics, is all fine and good. The problem with this position is that it verges on being a mirror of the critics; namely that they are pretending to like a movie to keep their jobs and that it is disingenuous for the normie reader that Pool likes to think he represents.
Rotten Tomatoes collect reviews. They don’t tell you how much it is liked by critics, because that is the role of Metacritic. We don’t know every individual opinion of each score which usually overwhelms the number of reviews being represented. Nor do we know that any of these are actually authentic. I remember when there was a flawed study, assessing the authenticity of The Last Jedi’s critics, a fraction of it happen to be Russian bots, and outlets like IndieWire shared that detail as an affirmation of their opinions. Coincidentally enough, Tim Pool commented on the coverage by rambling about not being allowed to watch movies anymore, dressing it up like a conspiracy over what should be a simple conflict of interest.
But the discrepancy isn’t always politically driven. When The Green Knight came out, critics bemoaned the fact that it has a rather low Rotten Tomatoes score from users, so therefore it must be good. By this very logic, every A24 movie must be good. Many movies have proven this mantra. But this ‘ought to’ position is often bonkers, because it distils an irrational tribalism, as a way to engage with art, in which you and your readers are convinced they are on the right side of history when it’s treated with hamfisted abjure.
Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic is a hobby horse for performative outrage because it is still significant in showing what movies certain people like. These aggregators don’t prove that there is genuine evidence that is driving the gap between the critics and the audience, so much as it’s an artificial divide to weaponise decent people in hating each other with pre-conceived culture wars surrounding movies that bluntly line up to a preconceived narrative. These scores aren’t reliable, and the most reliable person to show you what movies you need to watch is you. Because I came away thinking that Ad Astra was too toothless in its execution. I thought that The Green Knight was an admirable film, but as an adaptation of the Gawain poem, it leaves a lot more to be desired (I recommend checking out Eric Rohmer’s Perceval, which takes it from a refreshing yet grounded angle). The Last Jedi had amazing ideas, but the execution is quite poor and people would have to accept that some people will possess a similar opinion. That kind of independent thinking is what’s sorely needed on the Internet, rather than the story that you need to keep you awake at night. And no amount of regulation that will spot potential bad faith can prevent it.