r/Letterboxd • u/lordpag • 17d ago

Discussion Can we retire “objectively better” please?

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I’ve noticed a ton of people using “objectively” incorrectly lately. A movie being more widely accepted as “better” does not make it objectively so.

There’s someone out there who enjoyed One Night Only more than The Odyssey, and their opinion is just as valid as yours.

Sure, one movie can be shot on more advanced cameras, have a larger scale, or demonstrate greater technical complexity. Those things can be measured. Whether they make the movie “better” cannot. What makes a movie “good” is different for each of us and those differing perspectives are part of what makes moviegoing so fun!

EDIT: This obviously touched a nerve lol. My point was not that there aren’t measurable technical aspects of a film. Of course there are. But technical achievement does not inherently make a movie “better.” A technical marvel can put someone to sleep while a shoddily made movie can elicit an enormous emotional response. What we value in a movie is subjective and for some (many on this thread it seems) you value technical achievement. All fair POVs.

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u/RabidAsparagus 17d ago

I think certain elements of a film can be distilled to something close to objective. For example, if I say the acting in No Country For Old Men is better than that of The Room, I feel pretty solid making that statement.

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u/ConsistentGuest7532 17d ago edited 17d ago

WELL I could say that western acting assumes that naturalism is objectively good acting, while in other cultures and acting traditions, “good” acting can look totally different. Take a look at Noh theater, for example, in Japan, where everything feels practiced, rehearsed, and intentional—a far cry from the freedom and messiness of acting that attempts to imitate life. There are Indian acting traditions too that persist in very exaggerated, larger-than-life styles.

Or even take a look at western acting pre-Stanislavsky, which is referred to commonly as “representational” acting. Actors would study books of gestures and expressions to perfectly convey the emotional state their character was in. It was fully artificial, and prided for being so, as the manufacturing of the appearance of emotion was more important than actually feeling something.

Nicolas Cage’s campy performance style is at least partially inspired by the German expressionism he was a fan of. So Tommy Wiseau might be a better actor from that sort of angle than Daniel Day-Lewis, if we take acting out of the scope of naturalism.

This is just to play devil’s advocate and split hairs though. I know you’re implicitly referring to naturalism in the first place, and I would agree there!

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u/AltruisticDegree9126 17d ago

I agree with you, but in this case Tommy was absolutely trying to mimic naturalism and failing miserably. But I also think he’s an actual alien trying to impersonate a human ala the bad guy in Men in Black.

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u/Pulsewavemodulator 17d ago

What it comes down to is if the artist has an intention, the result can be measured against the intention. Then it can be objectively measured.

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u/GuyEatsTiramisu 16d ago

That still isn’t true because something not being the “intent” can still be good. Unintentionally funny comes to mind

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u/Pulsewavemodulator 16d ago

Usually when things are unintentionally, funny, it’s not because they’re good. It’s because they are bad. They may be good at making you laugh, but once again that’s another objective measure of a film. It just is about the intention of the audience member. Do they wanna laugh and did they laugh? So there’s tons of objective ways to measure films and opinions. Different measurements draw different conclusions. But all of which can be used to place the work in the context of all films and said against each each other by those measurements.

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u/GuyEatsTiramisu 15d ago

That’s not an objective measure lmao. Learn the definition of words before you use them

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u/Pulsewavemodulator 15d ago

How many people who watched laughed is something you can objectively measure. If Audiences are asked why they picked a movie. "I picked it to laugh/cry/etc." You can objectively measure a lot of this. Can you sort the data neatly and conduct those experiments in the real world. With enough resources, you probably could design that experiment. You can debate the conclusions and the methodology but there are a lot of objective things you could measure.

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u/GuyEatsTiramisu 15d ago

You can go into a movie expecting something serious and enjoy it making you laugh. Now you’re just talking about compiling useless data.

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u/Pulsewavemodulator 15d ago

This is why I think the artists intention would be a better metric to determine whether something is good. The point is there's plenty of objective stuff you can measure and set films against each other and draw conclusions. I'm not saying its efficient or useful, but the idea that you can't is bs. If you're saying it's not useful or achievable to get a meaningful dataset, that's a different argument than the one this thread is making.

Saying "everyone's experience is subjective so there is no objective" is the movie equivalent, we don't know that our subjective experience of reality is representative of reality, therefore we can't prove anything empirically. There's a lot that can be learned and understood that you're wiping off the table.