Critical Thinking

Following up on the last post about film criticism, I tactfully declined to talk about "critical thinking."  So, what is critical thinking?  Straight definition: critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it.  This is an enormously difficult thing to explain ... and I am not going to do better than Immanuel Kant in a blog post.  At the same time, "simplifying" the method is fraught with terrors ... so I go ahead from here trepidatiously.

If we wish to understand how a spoon works (at the moment an in-depth study presently taken up by my 8-month-old grandchild), we initially examine the spoon physically: how it can be held, swung about, used to poke at things ... and naturally how it feels in our mouths, since intrisincally we first discover how everything works by shoving it in our mouth.  Take note, however.  Before we can fully train ourselves to understand how a spoon works, we will have it demonstrated for us by competent others; and they will train us to hold it correctly (or incorrectly, with some people), bypassing our need for personal research.  The speed with which we learn the spoon's use depends on how much resistance we have against learning things.

Resistance is a tricky concept.  Resistance can occur because the learner is dead stupid or bloody minded.  But resistance can also occur because the learner does not trust that what the teacher does with a spoon is everything that can be done with a spoon.  It is in this second form of resistance that we find genius.

Kant divides reason through the operation of two components: (a) intuition, which is sense perception; and (b) understanding, which is a rational interpretation of the data given through sense perception.  Sense perception is what your five senses tell you about the world, including everything related to the physicality of the spoon: shape, smell, feel, sound and taste.  When you see someone else use the spoon, or you're trained to hold it just so by repetition (and forced to repeat that training through repetition), that is sense perception also.  But when you think about the spoon, reviewing your experience with the spoon, guessing at why or how the spoon is made, you are rationally interpreting the data.  When you take the next step, which is reviewing about how you've previously considered the spoon, related to what you're thinking about it now, then you are analysing your thoughts.  And when you take that analysis so that you may approach a better way to make the spoon, then you are participating in critical thinking.

Most youtube content creators fail at producing meaningful criticism because they think what they see or hear during the film, and especially what the film makes them feel, is film criticism.  It isn't.  To critique a film, first, the critic must be capable of seeing what problems the director, writer and crew must have faced in making the film as it is.  Using a somewhat infamous example, when Laurence Olivier chose to cast Marilyn Monroe as one of the leads in the film The Prince and the Showgirl [a brilliant film of the first order by the way, only a billion times better than anything Kubrick made], Olivier had Monroe to contend with.  Which was, by all later accounts, a horrific nightmare.  In a more prosaic sense, as I've discussed before, all films, even bad ones, are logistical trials on a par with Going to War ... with the added difficulty of ensuring that everyone gets through the experience alive (which, unfortunately, doesn't always happen).

Secondly, the reviewer must be able to interpret the relevant sensory information, and external knowledge of the difficulties involved, accurately and meaningfully.  A great many content creators do not understand film, they do not understand writing or direction, they do not understand budgeting, and thus why a particular scene plays as it does because it's what we could afford, or build in time, or logically fit into the continuity of the film's story.  Morons who bitch about CGI assume that every budget must be in the hundreds of millions, or else the film isn't worth seeing ... while failing the simplest smell tests: Hitchcock's brilliant film To Catch a Thief has several lengthy special effects "failures" because the film was released in 1955 ... and absolutely no one with a brain cares.  Filmmaking has limitations.  Comprehending this, and many other realities, is necessary to good criticism.

Thirdly, the reviewer must see why and how those problems were solved, as opposed to other ways those problems might have been solved.  It is not enough to point at a film and mutter that the direction or the acting fell short ... we must explain why and how it fell short!  Specifically, to follow the director's logic with a film like Being John Malkovich so that we can understand accurately why — although it is brilliantly made, written and acted — it really isn't a very good film.  For most persons, this is virtually impossible.  Those who both love and hate it will usually do so viscerally ... while simultaneously failing to realize that vast numbers were unable to appreciate any of the magnificent work put into the film due to the utter irrelevancy of the subject material.  Keeping in mind the goal of critical thinking is not to argue that a film is "good" or "bad" ... but to use what we know about a film to make a better product.

By deconstructing films, then, and examining their methods of solving problems related to the creation of art, we can advance our reasoning on how to solve additional, as yet unencountered problems that will come up with as-yet unfounded artistic endeavours.  In short, we are not lauding the past.  We are building towards a future.  When a film reviewer wallows in the beauty of an object, while at the same time failing to see that object as a method that can be applied further on in making better objects, the reviewer is simply describing a spoon.  It is not critical thinking.

It was intended, at this point, that I apply these same arguments to the examinations and discussions of role-playing games, but alas, it is getting late.  I did say I intended to move forward with trepidation.  Some things should not be rushed.  So let's pick this up with RPGs in another post.