I recently made the mistake of reading critical reviews of Ari Aster’s film Midsommar. I’ve written about this movie before, and as you might have gathered from my words about it, I loved it. Some critics did not. And that’s okay. It isn’t imperative that everyone recognize undeniable artistic genius when they see it. What I noticed about these criticisms, however, was something that creeps up constantly in the gargantuan amount of video essays and blog posts about film pumped out every month: using studio expectations of what films need as the yardstick for whether a film is good or bad.

[Note: I’m not going to address how many critics completely misread the pagan community Hårga in Misdommar. That is another discussion altogether, and my previous writing on the film (linked at the beginning and appearing directly below this post) covers enough of the topic that going into audience reception of Hårga would retread too much to make it worth anyone’s time.]

The Producer’s Voice in Our Heads

Anyone who has written a screenplay, and therefore sought out advice on how its done, knows how cynical a market it is. Almost all screenplays purchased and produced in the United States adhere to a uniform plot structure, with each plot point appearing on or near the same page in each script. Protagonists encounter a call to action, refuse it, become convinced, reach a midpoint where there is no turning back, hit a wall and decide they can’t reach their goal, are forced to return to their journey, and make a final push in the climax. Protagonists need to have agency and must develop. All major plot twists need proper set-ups. Etcetera, etcetera, so on and so on.

Many of these story features work well most of the time. That’s why this structure has become industry standard in Hollywood: if a screenplay fits into that mold, it will work as a story.

Of course, the problem of demanding this strict format industry-wide has clear implications. Slowly, films produced move more and more into a center line, and most films become simple reskins of the same story. This is all bad and terrible and what not, but that’s not what we are concerned with here. What I’m even more concerned with is how this is generating a language inside of the viewers themselves that limits their ability to see films that decide to work in a different way.

When these rigid expectations are broken, middle brow viewers who are half-trained in this notion of film believe those breaks to be mistakes rather than choices. The consumption of criticism that is built around these studio expectations ends up constituting the filter by which the consumers of this criticism begin to process films. It is a case of viewers who are both too well and not well enough educated in the discourse.

The Cost of the Profit-Driven Discourse

Going forward, the depth of this mistake might be hard to see. But considered against works from the past, we see how quickly these concepts break down. Take for instance, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, one of the greatest films ever made (and a film I will likely write about in the future). Almost all of the decisions characters make in the film that have any real impact or consequence happen before the beginning of the film, with a small number of exceptions. Large swaths of runtime are devoted to situating the viewer in the mysterious Zone or the future Russia. Pipes dripping water, a train rumbling, people smoking outside a bar, water running over abandoned items both sacred and profane. Time is devoted to putting the viewer in a place. No, nothing is happening. There is no character development going on. There is no conflict. There are only compelling images that relate the world and reflect the truth of ours.

That isn’t a flaw. It isn’t that Tarkovsky didn’t know what he was doing. It isn’t that they wanted to stretch a thirty page script into a three hour movie. This tonal decision does not fit into Hollywood’s strictures of what a film needs to be doing, but it leads to a film far greater than just about anything Hollywood can achieve using its current system.

Perversity Into Maturity

And this seems almost naive to write about, but a strange phenomenon is occurring alongside and in tandem with the one described above where a cynical outlook on how a screenplay ought to function according to film producers is now considered the adult one. The over-correction against romantic notions of art as an intuitive process that flows from the muse through the artist and into the world has reached an apex where any defense of intuition and non-systematic filmmaking is seen as childish, naive, not serious. It is seen as somehow shrewd to know that a film needs these certain elements, that a film couldn’t be good without them, that their lack can only exist as a flaw and not a feature.

The truth on the other side is that filmmaking is a unique art form in that it often requires huge sums of money and large groups of people to accomplish, and therefore it is not reasonable to expect all of those resources to go into a project that relies on trusting an individual’s artistic vision. Here opens a side argument for the artistic productivity of state funded film programs with missions focused on cultural production and not high returns, but for our purposes here it is to elucidate just what inside this line of thinking is true, because that truth gives the mindset power. But when carefully looked over it is clear that the purpose of these rigid guidelines is a pecuniary one rather than an aesthetic one.

Of course, everyone is allowed to like what they like, and if you prefer films that stick to this Hollywood style, that is A-OK. But it is this reverse use of the style that is troubling. To see people being trained to dismiss films solely on the basis that they break from this style is a part of a continuing devolution and middlebrowing of our culture. And sure, something like character agency can help you identify why you aren’t connecting to a story, but to seek it out as an item on a checklist and docking points whenever a film leaves it unchecked is the exact perversity outlined above.