The Biases of Critics

I have a cold. This isn’t to make you feel sorry for me; it’s to explain why I have not finished Midnight Mass. I started it, you see, but it’s a genre I don’t normally get into, and first my kid was home sick all last week and then even though he was hiding in his room and I could’ve watched it without his seeing it my feeling lousy meant I wasn’t going to watch something in a genre that isn’t a major interest of mine. I don’t watch a ton of horror; so sue me. It’s one of my natural biases as a critic.

We all have them. Gene Siskel famously hated any plot that involved putting a child in danger and couldn’t get beyond that. He thought it was a moral failing of anyone involved in making the film, in fact, and I wonder how a Gene alive today would talk about having doxxed Betsy Palmer, who played Mrs. Voorhees, over the whole thing. Roger Ebert, meanwhile, loved comic books and gave bad reviews to comic book movies that he felt didn’t live up to the potential of what they could be. Probably if I knew more about more critics, I could list even more of their biases; I can tell you more about several Magpies writers, but I’ll let them speak for themselves on that.

Now, some biases are outright toxic. If you think a movie that is positive towards trans people is icky, what is wrong with you? That’s not “I’m allowed to have my tastes.” That is “I’m a bigot.” If there’s something about a plot that bothers you because of who they made their main character, consider what about the main character is the problem and if the problem is not, in fact, with the viewer and not the film. If you think movies about female characters are only for women, that is also a problem with you and not with the movie.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re not even talking about the fact that I myself turned off High Plains Drifter because there was a rape sequence not fifteen minutes in, and the rapist was our ostensible hero. (I know I’ll get pushback for calling him that, but at very least he’s the protagonist.) We’re talking about the fact that I wasn’t able to give The Other Boleyn Girl a fair shake because it starts out with flawed history and only gets worse from there. I know too much about the real history, and many of the changes don’t make sense—the movie even ends with Mary Boleyn walking away with Baby Elizabeth I, and in what universe did that happen?

I’m fairly open about mine. I’m not usually a horror fan. Most action movies aren’t my thing, either. Cringe humour? Count me out. Since no one actually pays me to watch movies except my handful of personal Patreon subscribers, I don’t have to watch anything I don’t want to. If I were a professional critic, I’d have to watch those movies anyway, but I wouldn’t have to like them. I’d have to be open about why I don’t necessarily like them, especially when I can acknowledge they’re well done, but that’s not the same thing.

The thing is, it’s okay to have biases. Everyone does. I know people whose ADHD prevents them from reading subtitles and concentrating on the movie, and that limits what they can watch. Unfortunate for them but not their fault, and as long as they frame it as a problem with the act of reading subtitles and not “foreign film bad,” well, who are they really hurting? Roger was allowed to not like slasher films, something we have in common. Heck, you’re allowed to have positive biases, too; I’m a sucker for the plot setup I describe as Plucky British People Doing Things—The Full Monty, Calendar Girls, Kinky Boots, and so forth. I’m sure you can think of your own.

The goal is not a completely unbiased review, because that’s impossible. The goal is a review with honesty about its biases. “This is not my thing” is a perfectly reasonable stance to take, even if you’re getting paid to have that stance. And sometimes the movie is bad anyway; that movie about how Shakespeare didn’t really write Shakespeare’s plays wasn’t bad because of my biases. It managed that all on its own without any help from me.