The laziest response to criticism, so far as I’m concerned, is “It’s just not for you.” It’s a cheat. Instead of engaging with the criticism, it brushes it aside. It declares it invalid without looking into what the criticism actually is; generally, it is brought out to say that any problems you might have with the work in question are really problems with you, and you need to just accept that you’re wrong. Obviously, it’s possible to follow it up with a detailed explanation of why a person might not be the intended audience, but usually, it isn’t, and depressingly often, the “detailed explanation” can pretty well be summed up as “because you’re not a white cis het dude of a certain age and economic background.”
That said, it isn’t actually always wrong. This week, I showed my six-year-old Clue for the first time. He didn’t like it. While I’d thought it possible that he would, I’m also not surprised. Few of the jokes make any sense to him. There weren’t enough slapstick elements to hold his interest given that he doesn’t even know what communism is, much less who J. Edgar Hoover was. And the jokes about sex and sexuality are definitely beyond his maturity level right now. I’m much more likely to explain J. Edgar Hoover to him, come to that.
Similarly, I’ve long said that one of the greatest failings of the Code was that it assumed that every movie had to be for everyone. That’s why so many things were banned—there was this belief that every movie absolutely had to be acceptable to bring a child to, somehow, and that’s simply ridiculous. There are any number of things I’ve watched where there’s basically nothing I wouldn’t want Simon to see in them—though I’ll admit I’m a much more permissive parent than the Code would have expected—that he wouldn’t want to see simply because nothing in them appealed to him. He would be bored.
This is part of why I think it’s silly that there are people that insist on G-rated cuts of, say, Pulp Fiction. Let’s say we trimmed all the objectionable stuff out of that movie. Leaving aside that what you’re left with wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, would what’s there really appeal to the sort of person who would be insisting on watching a G-rated movie anyway? I know Simon would be desperately bored, and the sort of religious person who objects to sex, violence, swearing, and drug use but still wants to be part of the cultural conversation should maybe watch literally just about anything else instead, because they probably still aren’t going to like that movie.
When I was writing about a certain Japanese TV show that also involves a video game and a collectible card game, I found out that someone who wasn’t fond of certain aspects of it—though different ones than the ones I don’t like—made his own collectible card game about the Bible, and from what I’ve read about it, it sounds as though the rules are just terrible. It sounds, honestly, as though he didn’t understand that some of the things he objects to are necessary for a game that makes any sense at all. Because really, just making it about Jesus doesn’t make the game for him.
Not everything is for everyone. That’s really at the heart of the “let people enjoy the thing” stance. Often, that’s just a matter of taste. Every year, I have friends help me populate a list of horror people for October, because horror isn’t really my thing. It’s not made for me, because it’s not something I enjoy. In that sense, “it’s not for you” is a perfectly legitimate response to “I didn’t particularly care for what I saw of Friday the Thirteenth.” (Though I did think Halloween was just a better film, albeit not one I’ve felt a need to revisit.) But if I did like slasher movies, and I gave you a detailed explanation of why the script I’ve read for Jason X was vile, that’s just a cheap cop-out. More people need to learn that difference.
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