C. Thi Nguyen

Tell me why she's right.

Let me take a simple pass at it, and then I'll take the big, huge pass.

So my friend Matt Stroll, who's a philosopher of art, who wrote the beautiful book, Why It's Okay to Love Bad Movies,

has an essay about Rotten Tomatoes.

I think it's just called Against Rotten Tomatoes.

And one thing to note is that he notes that if you think about like, if you ask most people who love movies to list off great movies by their own taste, and you look at them on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the things you'll find is most of them sit around 50 or 60% because good movies are often controversial.

They're often like a lot of things that are incredible, often like push against some people are repelled by like David Lynch movies, right?

Incredible, fascinating, weird, provocative.

Some people are repelled by them.

Some people don't get them, right?

So a crucial thing about a movie that's kind of daring or kind of subtle is some people are not going to get it, right?

So if you're using Rotten Tomatoes as a measure, what you're going to pick up on, the kinds of movies that do well on Rotten Tomatoes are precisely the movies that are engineered or made so that everyone will get and everyone will get about equally.

So you're not going to get daring movies.

You're not going to get subtle movies.

You're not going to get provocative movies.

You're going to get movies that are kind of acceptable to every taste.

So you won't get anything that plunges into a particular taste.

This is, by the way, this is, this is,

This is different from the question about whether taste is objective or subjective.

Even if taste is completely objective, right, a measure like Rotten Tomatoes is going to give you rough.