Today, we’re asked to review everything from our latest bus journey to our latest rectal exam. Frankly, I wouldn’t recommend either to anybody, but I’m not sure that is the point.
Culture has been the object of reviews much longer than all the everyday experiences we’re asked to score. Which strikes me as odd. Culture is, after all, remarkably badly suited to the thumbs-up, thumbs-down treatment.
A sushi restaurant with a hundred one-star reviews will quite likely give you food poisoning, but Xena: Warrior Princess doesn’t care that thousands of people have ridiculed it since it first aired. It has gloriously gone on to give generations of queers a happy place and women like me a warrior to aspire to.
It’s very easy to call out the silly plots. (Yes, “Married with Fishsticks”, I’m looking at you.) The cheap props are a story of their own. (No, rock walls don’t act as vertical trampolines in real life.) And the historical inaccuracies — where do you even begin? (No, you wouldn’t be able to hang out with Hercules, Homer, and Boudica unless you pack well over 1000 years, and a demigod or two, into your lifetime.)
And yet it’s almost impossible to explain how all those gloriously ridiculous parts add up to something that still attracts a massive, highly dedicated following.
Reviews are great at examining the individual parts, but they struggle to capture how they add up and what happens between the work and the person experiencing it. That’s why we’ve all wanted to chuck a review in the bin at some point. Not simply because its verdict didn’t match our own, but because it seemed to describe a completely different experience of the work.
And then there’s the problem of reading a review before experiencing the work yourself. Once someone has told you what to look for, it’s awfully hard to see anything else.
Yes, all art is subjective, I know. But this is something more. It’s about allowing ourselves to have an experience without immediately positioning it against someone else’s. And more fundamentally, it’s about asking the right question.
A review asks, “Was it good?” and then answers that question. I’m much more interested in “What did it do?”
And that’s why I don’t write reviews.
What’s the worst-reviewed thing that did something wonderful for you?
You’ve just read a Tiny Tendency, the smaller sibling of the usual Cultural Tendencies essay: one little thing I’ve noticed about culture, taken seriously for a few minutes—just for fun. Tiny Tendencies appear every other week, between the longer essays.
Still feeling a bit culturally promiscuous?
