I was thinking some more about that one reblog where I tried to analyze the concepts of “objective quality” and “personal enjoyment” in the context of the different Tron movies.

And my brain kept getting stuck on my claim, near the end, that some things seemed “forced” to me in Legacy, but nothing seemed “forced” to me in the original movie.

Which I realize may be a hard feeling to explain.

Because the things that feel “forced” to me in Legacy are such little tiny inconsequential things (mainly little details that are put in there just to call back to earlier parts, like Quorra saying that she’s “a rescue” in reference to Sam saying that earlier about Marvin). They’re things that throw me just slightly out of the story, because I have trouble parsing them as things the characters would actually do or say, rather than parsing them as things that I can see the scriptwriters sticking in there to fill a particular narrative purpose.

But they aren’t big, structural problems. If you changed them or took them out, you’d still have a story of pretty much the same shape.

Whereas in the original ‘82 movie, there are what seem like HUGE gaps. Things that… may not be exactly plotholes, but they demand explanation that isn’t explicitly there, and they require imagination from the viewer.

Like why does Dillinger have such a laughably stupid password, and IS that why Flynn broke in so easily? And why does the MCP hide the incriminating evidence instead of destroying it? (Was it only to save it for the blackmailing-Dillinger purpose that he mentioned later? And if so, what did he tell Dillinger the reason was, prior to that?) How does poor nervous Crom start acting so confident by the time he’s pitted against Flynn? Why does sweet gentle Ram seem so gleeful about killing his Lightcycle opponent? Did Flynn actually even play any important role in their escape, since Tron was the one who made the hole in the wall? …And so on.

And I’m not saying there aren’t things like that in Legacy, too! But to me they somehow feel more smoothed-over, like they don’t stick out as noticeably.

Maybe it’s my own bias. Or maybe it’s just how aesthetically polished Legacy feels to me.

Anyway, I think the best way I can think to express it is just to go back to my “car vs painting” analogy…

So, in that post, I argued that I don’t see any actual difference between saying “I enjoyed it” and saying “I think its quality was objectively good.” …Even though I know there are things that people sometimes describe as “objectively good quality” in a work of art, even if they didn’t personally enjoy it.

And I know that some of the “polished” feel of Legacy– the smoothness of the special effects and cinematography, the neatness and symmetry of the plot– would fall into that category of things.

And when I was trying to explain why I don’t use the term “objective quality” for this kind of polish… I said that to me it feels like “comparing the aesthetics of a Ferrari to the aesthetics of a Dali painting,” and that I like paintings better than cars, and I like how a painting can be chaotic, but a car has every part forced into serving a specific purpose in its structure.

And I think that’s probably what I meant by parts of Legacy feeling “forced” in a way that doesn’t appeal to me.

The way I imagine it is, suppose you’re building a car. And some of the materials you’ve chosen aren’t actually that well suited to fitting into the car you’re trying to build. But you bend them a little, turn them around into weird positions, squeeze them in and make them fit.

And at the end you’ve still got a car, and it’s pretty much the same shape you planned for it to be. And it’s still clear to everyone that your intent was to build a car, and to build it in a pretty normal car shape. And you’ve succeeded at that… well enough that the position of the few weirdly-placed parts is a small nitpick that most people wouldn’t care about.

But suppose you take all the same materials, and instead of trying to build a car, you build a big chaotic weird sculpture out of them.

Maybe you’ve planned out some aesthetic themes, arranging the parts in patterns of your own design– maybe some of those patterns are even set up to call to mind the idea of a car, or something of a car’s aesthetics. There’s a design in what you’ve built– it’s just not quite as specifically clear WHAT the intent behind it is.

And if some of the materials you chose don’t end up fitting your original plan, you have more leeway here. You can even set them up in a weird, jarring way that sticks out from the rest of your pattern– and the beauty of it is, your audience is not immediately gonna say “You did that wrong.”

They’re going to try to interpret it. They’re going to try and come up with an understanding of why you chose to make it look that way. Because it’s not a car, and it doesn’t HAVE to have a certain shape, and as an artist you get the benefit of the doubt that however you made it look is probably how you wanted to make it look, and you did it for a reason.

Hell– even if you WERE building a car, and you decided to make some parts stick out in an obviously weird, jarring way– even then, if it was an obvious enough choice, viewers might still begin by trying to think of possible reasons why you chose to do it like that, instead of just yelling at you that it doesn’t fit.

But if you squeezed the not-fitting parts in as inconspicuously as you could, and tried to hide how they don’t fit– Well, then maybe most people won’t notice it, and maybe most people will think your design is objectively better than others.

But those who do notice will probably interpret it as a covered-up mistake, not an artistic choice. (And honestly? the same goes for painting and sculpture, a lot of the time.)

And my point is not that one movie’s better than the other. It’s that neither one is, because “objectively better” isn’t a thing.

Every design has people who like it, people for whom it brought joy into the world. And all the technical analysis of what makes something good or bad– well, it might help explain the number of people who like or dislike a thing, but it won’t do much to change how those people feel.