The First Critic

History of the World, Part I. Mel Brooks, 1981. There never really was a Part II, which is its own joke, but it was one of my favorite movies growing up. And there I go referencing the eighties again, because Gen X is the greatest generation, isn't it.

But this isn't about that.

There's a scene near the start. The dawn of man. A caveman drags his hand across a stone wall and makes something. The first painting. The first time anybody looked at the world and tried to hold onto it. The narrator tells us this is the birth of art.

Then another caveman walks up, looks at it, and pisses on it.

The birth of the critic.

I saw the new Supergirl film a few weeks ago. I enjoyed it. I walked out with a smile on my face, like when I come across something good. I went online prior to seeing it and afterwards as well, and the critics did not appreciate the film as I did.

The reviews were rough. The consensus was that it was choppy. Disjointed. Badly paced. Something had gone wrong in the edit and you could see the seams.

And here's the thing. I don't know that. I didn't see any of it. I'm not a critic, I'm a consumer, a guy in a seat with a smile on his face. Whatever seams they found, I wasn't looking for them, so I didn't find them.

But here's the thing. I keep going back and forth with this in my head. A lifetime of critiquing must change a person's lens. It has to. If your whole life is looking at something and deciding whether it's good or not, that does something to you.

I don't know their process. I only know mine, and mine is slow. I look at a thing, and I sit with it, and I come back to it, and sometimes it takes years before I understand what I was actually looking at. That's the craft. Most of what I've made that's any good came from standing somewhere, maybe longer than one should.

A critic doesn't get to linger. They get one pass and a deadline. They walk in with the checklist already open, because that's the job, and the job is to have a verdict by the time the credits roll. Maybe you can't do that for a living and still walk into a dark room empty-handed. Maybe after enough years you stop seeing things and start grading them.

Or maybe I'm wrong about all of it. Like I said, not my area.

I just know what I saw.

I saw a film about a girl who didn't leave her world as a baby the way her cousin did. She was old enough to know it. Old enough to have a family, a home, a whole people. She was old enough to watch every one of them turn to ash. And then she got sent to a warm, bright, colorful universe and told to go on living in it.

So if the film is fractured, well. She's fractured. A clean three-act structure would have been a lie. You don't tell that story in a smooth arc, because that isn't how it sits in a person.

And then there's the dog.

The plot turns on Krypto being poisoned, and the critics said the emotional stakes didn't land, that we hadn't spent enough time with the two of them to care. But Krypto isn't a pet. He's the last living thing that ties her to a world that's gone. He is the final piece of home. And when he starts to die, it isn't a sad subplot. It's the universe coming back to take the one thing it left her.

The warmth is the other part they complained about. All that saturation, all that color. It looks wrong for a grief story, and that's exactly why it works. Dark and moody would have been the obvious choice. Instead they put her in a universe that's glowing, and let her be cold inside it. That's what it's actually like. Grief doesn't wait for the weather to match. The sun keeps coming up. Everyone around you is warm. You're the only thing in the room that's freezing.

The critics saw a broken movie. I saw a movie about being broken.

Same film. We just weren't carrying the same things into the theater.

My father died in April. I'm still learning what that's going to let me see.

Featured image: © DC Studios / Warner Bros. Pictures