Critics and Audiences

There’s an instructive sequence about a third of the way into Bohemian Rhapsody, the new Freddie Mercury biopic. We’ve just seen the band led by Rami Malek as Mercury battle with a record exec over the infamous song of the film’s title. The exec, played winkingly by a heavily make-upped Mike Meyers has pointed out that it’s unusually long, not to mention deeply weird and that it wasn’t deserving of single status. The band walks out, releases it as a single anyway, and we hear it as a series of quotes from music critics of the time appear on the screen. Critic after critic brands the song “meandering,” “bizarre,” “non-sensical.” The words crowd the screen and then suddenly are literally blown away by the band playing the song live in front of a screaming crowd. The implicit message is that critics don’t matter. That haters gonna hate, but ultimately, a song’s worth (or a film or book or whatever) is determined by the people who love it and are moved by it. 

It’s hardly the main point of the movie and serves more as a funny, rock-and-roll middle finger to all the fools who didn’t appreciate Queen’s genius back in the day. But it raises an interesting question that’s perhaps even more prominent now than it was when Freddie, Brian, Roger, and John set stages ablaze with their eclectic, electric brand of rock. Thanks to review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic, you can know at a glance what scores of critics across the country and the world have to say about a film before it even hits your theater. In some ways, this gives professionals and (ahem) semi-professionals who critique films an exposure and power like never before. I have a friend who absolutely swears by Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, refusing see anything that’s not rated at least 70% fresh.

 But these sites also have a place for everyday audience members to log their own scores of films, and we have a “Bohemian Rhapsody” moment whenever critics hate something but audiences love it. Most recently, the supervillain movie, Venom, scored a lousy 29% with critics but a resounding 87% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. The gap isn’t as profound, but with Bohemian Rhapsody the film, the discrepancy is there with an unenthusiastic 66% rating from critics and 97% from audiences.

So what do we make of it when there’s such disparity between how the trained and the untrained react to something? Rather than get into arguments about who is right or wrong, it’s more useful to examine what it is that each group values.

A critic is generally looking at the big picture, examining how everything hangs together, how the plot, script, performances, cinematography, editing, and music form a series of patterns and variations to all add up to something larger than the individual parts. They try to place the movie in its historical context and articulate how it does or doesn’t do anything new or have anything to say.

An audience member is often interested in the experience of the film itself. Did it make me laugh? Did it make me cry? Did it make me want to dance? Yes, "Bohemian Rhapsody" the song is long and weird, but when Brian May begins shredding with that muscular, chunky guitar solo, who cares?

So it isn’t that critics are right and audiences are dumb or that critics are snobs and audiences have a pulse on what’s actually important. On the contrary, even though it is communal, film spectatorship is ultimately individual – but those personal experiences can be influenced and informed by friends at work, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic posting on the internet, the person sitting next to you in the theater, and even the guy on the radio. When there is a Bohemian Rhapsody-like discrepancy between critics and audiences, that’s all the more reason to go see if for yourself and figure out what you think.