YOU BETTER WATCH OUT: Kindertrauma has a list of their favorite Christmas horror movies (and some lumps of coal to avoid)! Definitely check out the comments, too. I’ve already voiced my problem with Black Christmas–it doesn’t actually say anything despite an exceptionally meaning-freighted symbolic alphabet–but I love that KT, like Sean Collins, groks that Eyes Wide Shut is best watched as a horror movie. I got that perspective from Collins and it really elevated my experience of the film.

In fact, arguing about EWS with Collins (a more patient person would link to all of our discussion, but I am lazy so here is my last post) made me acknowledge a major problem in how I sometimes write about artworks for this blog. I don’t think I’ve been nearly attentive enough about restraining this tendency in myself: the tendency to summarize, to grade. To say, “This movie was fantastic in ways x, y, and z, but ultimately failed/succeeded because q.”

It’s that “ultimately” which I need to work harder to avoid. Art is not an exam! You don’t pass or fail. Some of the reasons behind the “ultimately, yes” or “ultimately, no” impulse are good: Man is mortal and I already have several hundred dvds in my Netflix queue. And the pass/fail language can reflect an immediate emotional response to the movie: I know it did a lot of amazing stuff, but at the end I was left with a nagging sense of incompleteness, and it’s that incompleteness which I want to explore or highlight in this post. (I think that’s the main reason I used the pass/fail language w/r/t EWS.) But there’s also a gross, ingrown-toenail motive to this language, where you (I) try to render magisterial judgment on the artwork instead of being mastered by it.

One of my New Year’s resolutions for this blog is to do specific and evocative reviews which nonetheless avoid the temptation to render pass/fail judgment. It’s ultimately (!) a reductive approach to art. Eyes Wide Shut is a movie I’d love to watch again right now; it’s a movie I think would reward repeated viewings. Sure, it has a diffuse and desultory midsection in which Tom Cruise searches for clues, and I stand behind my criticisms of the ending. But “I want to see this again, so I can discover more of what it’s got” seems like the most important thing to say about it.