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In print | Published September 1, 2011

A first column should, I’m told, grab the reader’s attention and hold it fast as its perfect marriage of content and style induces a gravitational field of wow — unfortunately however, this summer’s lineup does not allow for such a column.

The past couple months’ film fodder has been predictably, well, poor. I could tell you that Viola Davis shines in a totally toothless civil rights movie (“The Help”), that Rob Brydon’s Al Pacino impression is embarrassing while his Woody Allen is inspired (“The Trip”), or that children’s animation has reached calamitous new lows (“The Smurfs”). But none of this really screams out, “This is a snazzy first column, read me again, please!”

Additionally, I wasn’t entirely sure what this year’s column should be about – film reviews are fun, but I didn’t want to write about just any movie, y’know? I decided on a whim that this column should cover the current cinema, yes, but should more broadly address film thought, film culture, and other such nonsense.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that — panicked — I went trolling for inspiration on the web, looking for gossip and Oscar buzz (no it’s not too early), film reviews, even showtimes. As I often do when I’ve got box office on the brain, I also checked Rottentomatoes.com.

In the interest of fuller disclosure, I should tell you that Rottentomatoes is, um, evil and that for the past 7 years I’ve checked it routinely, maybe semi-religiously. Mind-numbing, systematizing, corporate and codifying, it’s like the Imperius Curse of film criticism.

Maybe (just maybe) I’m exaggerating — at the very least I’d serendipitously stumbled upon this column’s rather self-aware subject. For those who don’t know, Rottentomatoes is a “review aggregator” (thus spake Wikipedia) that systematically collects and organizes online film criticism; blogs are getting increasingly popular, but mostly it’s still conventional print newspapers.

So you’ll read reviews by A. O. Scott, Roger Ebert, even troglodytes like Robert Butler from the Kansas City Star (my hometown). These reviews are deemed “rotten” or “fresh,” and each film on the site gets a score, the quotient of the fresh reviews over the sum of both: “The Godfather” is sitting at 100%, while Tommy Wiseau’s brilliant “The Room” is pulling 36%, and “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” has a whopping, ahem, 0%. What, you ask, is wrong with being told whether or not you want to see a movie?

Sure it’s a tad stupefying to reduce a vast quantity of criticism down to a percentile — but after all, we’re talking $10-15 dollars spent at the modern cinema. Personally, that’s more money than I wish to spend on a lousy movie. Also, we’re accustomed to being told what we want to consume — if I were really going to tear into the mighty Tomatometer, as it’s been absurdly dubbed, then I’d have to hit up consumerist faddishness in general, and I just don’t have the space or energy for that. Let me not stoop to hypocrisy: I use Rottentomatoes all the time — it kept me from seeing “Cars 2” in theaters, introduced me to Almodovar and has won me several bets (I’m not proud).

Here’s the problem with Rottentomatoes: it privileges universality over nuance, it vilifies critical outliers, and it creates a weird-ass version of cinephilia, one that gives me the heeby-jeebies. Let’s start with the universality problem. “Toy Story” holds 100% on Rottentomatoes — as do “Jaws,” “Chinatown” and the aforementioned “Godfather.”

The thing is, these films are so canonical, so petrified, so “excellent” — that they require no advocacy. A movie holding a very high rating on Rottentomatoes is, on a certain level, holistically unchallenging. It intelligently proffers to critics something they wish to see, masked behind layers of production values or international edginess (“3 Weeks, 4 Months and 2 Days” — 98%).

These are safe movies, movies you can adulate at cocktail parties and in classrooms with impunity. The beautiful irony is that they are considered “challenging,” a fraught and nonsensical designation that usually just means “sad” or “intellectual.” Think about it — a truly challenging film desperately needs spokespeople.

Which brings us to the question of contrariness. Anyone who reads Rottentomatoes regularly knows who Armond White is — a critic for the New York Press, he hates Pixar, pretentiousness and especially Oscar bait. He seeks to challenge comfortably popular films, particularly those whose political aspirations he deems hypocritical, forced, or false (his review of Van Sant’s “Milk” is paradigmatic in this regard).

Love him or hate him, Armond White is a proud and playful contrarian. Those who write user comments hate him. Unlike most critics on Rottentomatoes, White is regularly read, and pretty much every one of his reviews gets comments. His scathing review of “The Dark Knight” got, count ‘em, 322 acidic little posts — and he is absolutely, universally loathed. Here’s a sample: “I knew this douche would do this. He does it every time. LoL. The real losers here … the New York Press for wasting their money on this scum bag.”

The comments get more extreme, hateful, profane — and less nuanced (if you can believe it). People hate what White does — to the beloved Tomatometer. The cinephilia that Rottentomatoes engenders — and it certainly caters to obnoxiously self-identified “cinephiles,” one of the biggest communities of them on the Internet — is fetishistic and assimilationist, paying high reverence … to a number.

No user comment I’ve read has questioned the legitimacy of the Tomatometer, or has advocated a critically panned movie without heavy doses of shame and self-deprecation. The tragic cyber-paradox: by amassing and numerating popular opinion and dissent, Rottentomatoes makes preference a commodity — makes it opinionless.

Nolan is a senior. You can reach him at ngear1@swarthmore.edu.

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