Contrarianism Isn't Real

or a very insular musing on being a part of film discussion communities all my life.

If you indulge yourself in conversations with film communities on a regular basis, perhaps to the extent that I do, you will almost certainly encounter people with a fixation on the broader reception a film garners. What does everyone around me think of the film? What do my friends think of it? How do I measure this against my own reaction? Am I trying too hard for thinking this movie everyone hates is good? Or thinking this movie everyone loves is bad? An impulse forms, to scour Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, IMDb scores, Twitter reactions, whatever source they deem trustworthy, to measure something so frivolous. Seemingly gone in many viewers’ heads is the idea of engaging in an honest critical discourse, taking the film on its own terms and using your subjective value judgments to reach a conclusion. Two coalitions form, those who scorn ones with anodyne, safe opinions seemingly found out of a desire to hew as inoffensive as possible, and those who detest the supposed contrarians, who seemingly deliberately hate every beloved film and love every critically reviled one to stoke a reaction.

Of course, nuance needs to play a factor in these conversations, something often lost when Twitter and Letterboxd are the primary outlets for popular movie discourse today. While I am sure there are people on both ends of the spectrum who are deceitful in their approach, sapping themselves of the ability to honestly interrogate their own emotions surrounding a film for their own supposed gain, I find it hard to decipher such a phenomenon as being so uniquely widespread as to infect every corner of film discussion. For the former group, if one is not a professional critic, the lack of specificity in taste almost certainly just comes down to lack of exploration, which should not necessarily be scorned. If anything, it only means they have so much great cinema ahead of them. After all, film isn’t everything. It only becomes offensive if said person is, say, a professional working critic, in which case their lack of diversity in taste is contemptible. For the latter group, it more maliciously assumes a genuine level of bad faith, that someone has to be feigning their opinion, “trying so hard to be different,” a flagrant accusation of insincerity. Again, while some people grouped in there may be operating on dishonest intentions, the assumption to lump everyone in with that feels unhealthy. Quite frankly, I cannot think of a single person who would genuinely fit that criteria, not even known button-pushers and reactionaries like Armond White. I do believe he is acting in earnest; sometimes people are a little insane. It feels much simpler to take people at face value and engage with their critiques. Maybe that makes me easily deceived, but I’ll take that over an aggressive approach.

As anyone who knows me can probably guess, the latter group is the one I find myself most often grouped in. I have had the accusation levied against me countless times, for various reasons, stretching from enjoying poorly-reviewed genre films to disliking highly-acclaimed prestige bait designed to satiate faux-artistic sensibilites (something I take a great deal of pleasure in writing about). I have had people genuinely yell at me, online and offline. On Twitter, several people felt genuinely angry at me, wishing death on me, because I said City of God is a terrible film. I have had people practically yell at me for saying M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is a pretty good film (nevertheless, his worst film). Don’t even get me started on Everything Everywhere All at Once, or the films of Denis Villeneuve, or the works of Zack Snyder, or the Michael Bay Transformers films. Countless, neverending examples exist. Go ahead, keep screaming “shut the fuck up” at me, it only makes my opinions worse. On some level, it inspires some form of hope to see other people feel vociferously passionate about films I myself am passionate about, even if for differing reasons, but too often the argument seems to fall back on the assumption that I’m doing this for contrarian purposes, that I must have an ulterior motive. There must be something I gain from this surely, even though I have very little “clout” in the grand scheme of things and I’m just a woman typing bullshit online. It can’t be that I genuinely love “objectively bad” films or despise “objectively good” films.

That is something I wish to highlight, that the assumption ultimately stems from ascribing certain films a category of false objective quality. Once someone associates a work in their head as being objectively good or bad, it can’t be criticized or praised. Anyone doing so is simply wrong, attempting to shake up the status quo, heading a “reclamation project” (don’t even get me started). Of course, many of the people pushing forward this belief will not outright state that this is where their belief stems from, given the idea of objective merit in art is inherently risible, and the conception of their opponent as a dishonest actor carries much more weight. The opposition has to be false. Everyone loves this movie, and their critiques are invalid. Everyone hates this movie, their praises hold no merit.

As someone labeled a contrarian, here is my truth: I just watch movies and form my own opinions. I promise you I did not, for instance, change my name to Alice because of the Resident Evil movies out of purely contrarian reasons, I did it because the work had that impact on me. This is the purpose of the artform, after all. Everyone is informed by their own lived experiences, the art they’ve absorbed, the criticism they’ve read, and some will forge different paths than others. By that same domain, I suppose that’s true of those who baselessly label someone a contrarian, though evidently it doesn’t end up producing the most thoughtful types. After spending nearly a decade online, however, this is the one conversation I am positively fucking sick of having. If I can get mean for a moment, it is almost always those who are deeply insecure about their own opinions and attempting to compensate for their own perceived lack of taste. While I cannot deny there is some perverse thrill I get out of hearing someone genuinely befuddled by my opinion, opening up the opportunity for a great discussion or friendly heated exchange, I never hold any opinions out of dishonesty; doing so would be fucking pointless. What, so I can have people with less friendly intentions yell at me? Moreover, it simply does not cohere with the countless critically acclaimed, canonical films I adore, or the amount of critically reviled works I likewise despise. For recent examples, I loved Hard Truths, The Substance, Challengers and Nickel Boys like many of you; I despised Emilia Perez, Borderlands, Red One and Joker: Folie a Deux like any other supposedly sane, rational person. If one were doing this solely for attention, surely you might figure at some point that something is not adding up?

This is so plain and obvious a point that I feel like a moron for even indulging in the argument at length, but it’s something I see brought up time and time again, often couched in varying degrees of condescension. A couple months ago, several people on Twitter could not get enough of yelling at various people who did not particularly care for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. Everyone is being so weird about him, they claim. He’s a generational talent and should protected from such brainrot, regardless of the validity of their perspective. Assume they come at this from a place of dishonest intent. You could observe the same phenomenon across countless awards season films, from Anora to The Brutalist, and you can observe it going back several years to various other critical darlings. One of the most popular Letterboxd reviews for Everything Everywhere All at Once reads: “Watch it and have fun before film Twitter tells you it’s overrated.” It has accrued over 30,000 likes, the second most popular for the movie, and has been reposted ad nauseam, from people no doubt skeptical of the intentions of anyone who dare speak ill of the butt plug hot dog fingers film (this also gets to a frustration with ascribing “film Twitter” as an anonymous mass used to express contempt with whichever cinephile frustrates them the most, but that’s another petty squabble barely worth harping on). Again, so much of this is plainly rooted in insecurity, a refusal to engage with art on a level beyond the superficial, and the fracturing of latter-day cinephilia into fan communities, those willing to lay their life on the line to protect their favorites. Stan culture permeates and destroys all, homogenizing disparate lived experiences into fandoms, teams, an illusory sense of belonging to a community. The fear of not sharing one’s opinion with a group you’ve aligned yourself with becomes tangible, the pressure to subsume into the mass supersedes all other impulses.

I am writing this as a plea, in the futile hope of changing the tenor of film communities to something founded on a genuine level of engagement that does not assume the worst in people’s intentions. While some of the phrasing used in this piece is harsh, I do so out of love for the medium and a hope to forge a future for film discourse founded on ideals less outwardly malicious. If you take anything from this and are likewise guilty of flinging around the accusation of contrarianism, all I ask is to stick with your own perspective and assume the best in other people who don’t share your view. This is obviously not call for an end to spirited discussion; in fact, it should encourage it, just through means beyond combing through people’s Letterboxd ratings to find other opinions you disagree with as a means of invalidation. Lastly, if you remain unconvinced, and you think this is a propaganda piece designed to exonerate those who have committed the egregious crime of holding opinions you don’t like, I have sorted my liked films by average rating lowest first, and my 1/2-stars by average rating highest first. Please comment with every opinion that makes you so angry you have no choice but to deem me a fraud. I am happy to reply with why I like or dislike those films, and you can further respond with other appraisals that enrage you. I’m sure it will be a rewarding conversation for both of us.