"Overhyped"

[MmzHrrdb]

Who rates movies just on the experience? Movies should be rated as movies and on how they work and succeed as movies, not rated on how loud the people sitting behind you in the theatre were talking.

And if there are people behind you talking, how are you going to "fairly" rate the movie? Your experience has been tainted. You probably missed some dialogue. Whoops, guess you'll have to start all over again at a different theater. Oh but wait... now doing THAT is going to influence your feelings. Now you're annoyed and a little bored with having to see the first part of the movie again.

Again, movies don't exist in a vacuum. Everything that happens before, during, and after your viewing affects your experience of it. What you choose to filter out when reviewing a movie may seem adequate to you but substandard to someone else. Oh, you paused the movie to take a bathroom break? Well, now I think your review is shit because you didn't watch it and evaluate it the way I want you to.

It's your right to discount a review that takes hype into account, but if that hype sours someone else's experience, it's his right to mention it. Unless you're a professional journalist whose published opinion can make or break a film (and to my knowledge, none of these exist anymore, if they ever did), then no one gets hurt by it.

[AFlickering]

exactly. all these pretensions towards objectivity are just that; pretensions. hell, even if you could have some kind of unmediated experience with a film and experience its undiluted essence, you'd still probably react to it differently than anyone else.

[djross]

The statement that audiences need to learn a way of approaching movies which resists hype does not amount to a "pretension to objectivity." The issue is not objectivity. The argument that hype should be resisted does not imply a belief in some kind of pure context-free viewing. It is of course correct to say that the sum of one's experiences contributes to the experience of watching a movie. But that does not mean that all experiences are equal, or that they cannot be discerned, distinguished, or judged.

When one experiences the hype surrounding a movie, one is undergoing a particular type of experience, one created for you by a marketing department, whose specific goal is to create expectations and desires. And, fundamentally, this marketing machine cares very little whether those expectations are met, or those desires satisfied, by the product you in the end receive: once you have purchased your ticket, their job is over. Furthermore, their goal is to create the same expectations and the same desires for all individuals exposed to their marketing. This may in the end be an unachievable goal, but to the extent that audiences are herded in one direction, this is tantamount to a loss of analytical power (since I only have an analysis insofar as my analysis is different from yours).

Allowing oneself to be seduced by hype is not a matter of giving up your objectivity in favour of subjectivity. Rather, it is a matter of permitting your expectations and desires to be more or less dictated by an apparatus specifically designed to do so, and for specific (short-term) commercial ends. Retaining or creating for oneself a critical apparatus is only possible so long as one does not make the mistake of confusing the inevitability of "context" with the inevitability of "hype."

[MmzHrrdb]

I don't think anyone is terribly let down when a film doesn't live up to the promises made by the marketing department. When people talk about a movie being "overhyped", they're usually referring to hype generated by their peers, or by the general reviewer consensus. And this does figure into cultural context.

In my case, I make some effort to avoid allowing hype to influence my assessment. But if a film receives praise at a level significantly higher than I would give it, I might make a comment about it.

[MmzHrrdb]

The statement that audiences need to learn a way of approaching movies which resists hype does not amount to a "pretension to objectivity." The issue is not objectivity. The argument that hype should be resisted does not imply a belief in some kind of pure context-free viewing. It is of course correct to say that the sum of one's experiences contributes to the experience of watching a movie. But that does not mean that all experiences are equal, or that they cannot be discerned, distinguished, or judged.

When one experiences the hype surrounding a movie, one is undergoing a particular type of experience, one created for you by a marketing department, whose specific goal is to create expectations and desires. And, fundamentally, this marketing machine cares very little whether those expectations are met, or those desires satisfied, by the product you in the end receive: once you have purchased your ticket, their job is over. Furthermore, their goal is to create the same expectations and the same desires for all individuals exposed to their marketing. This may in the end be an unachievable goal, but to the extent that audiences are herded in one direction, this is tantamount to a loss of analytical power (since I only have an analysis insofar as my analysis is different from yours).

Allowing oneself to be seduced by hype is not a matter of giving up your objectivity in favour of subjectivity. Rather, it is a matter of permitting your expectations and desires to be more or less dictated by an apparatus specifically designed to do so, and for specific (short-term) commercial ends. Retaining or creating for oneself a critical apparatus is only possible so long as one does not make the mistake of confusing the inevitability of "context" with the inevitability of "hype."

Excellent post.

[MmzHrrdb]

Excellent post.

Even though it has almost nothing to do with the topic you started? You clearly weren't talking about "overhyped" from a marketing standpoint in your first post.

[djross]

FitFortDanga, I disagree with your reading of the initial comment by HorrorMaster which opened this discussion. While some distinctions could perhaps have been teased apart a little more clearly, I also think it is clear that the "hype" he was talking about referred to marketing as well as to the proliferating consequences of marketing upon audiences and critics. My reading was that by "hype" HorrorMaster meant these two things combined (the marketing plus the consequences of marketing), which not only seems an entirely legitimate thing to do, but is indeed necessary to a proper understanding of the process by which audiences are, to the degree possible, calculated, controlled, and created.

And, we might as well add, calculated and controlled in advance, since films are, today, conceived and concocted according to this calculability and controllability. Large budget productions depend on investor confidence in this calculability and controllability of potential markets. That is, they depend on investor confidence that audiences can be calculably and controllably created. We could call this the industrialisation of collective desire.

[Stain]

We don't watch films in a vacuum. We bring in all sorts of cultural baggage, and the movie experience is not just the movie itself. Whether or not it's the movie's "fault" that it was overhyped is irrelevant -- the hype, like it or not, is part of the experience. You can temper this in a review by saying something like "I might have enjoyed this more if I hadn't heard so much hype about it", but the experience is what it is.

In a perfectly "objective" review, you would never compare one movie to another one, but who ever complains about that? You would never talk about genre rules or the track record of the director or any expectations whatsoever.

A review is subjective, it can't NOT be. Deciding if a review will be useful to you requires assessing the reviewer and determining what cultural baggage you have in common.

You have taken the words right out of my mouth.

It's not just a matter of rising expectations due to hype, either. There are some films I may never see -- Doubt and He's Just Not That Into You, currently -- just because I'm tired of seeing their trailers so often. It seemed that Doubt's was in front of every movie aimed at older adults released during the entire season of last autumn.

This, however, comes right back to how movies are highly subjective experiences, ultimately. The overtrailering is a problem for me because I just absolutely, positively have to see at least three movies a week, and almost all of them on the big screen where they belong. A man's quest for purity always has its consequences. To quote one of my favorite films: "Each man creates his own heaven... his own hell."

On a tangential matter, it's funny how some of the most thoughtful contributors here like you and Moribunny have TCIs that are not even remotely close for me.