Early this summer movie enthusiasts of my acquaintance spent some weeks in amicable dispute over the relative merits of Armageddon and Deep Impact. I lost track of how the tallies went; I don't think it got to the point where folks were taking sides championing one against the other--mainly the discussion remained a level-headed consideration of the particular strengths leading to the respective successes. I think Deep Impact was felt to have better character development, while Armageddon was gifted with superior special effects, particularly the exceedingly loud soundtrack, which was found to help you get into the story more. The camera work was better in Deep Impact, but Armageddon's comedy was deft. Nobody liked Bruce Willis. I couldn't participate.

It's not that I think the enthusiasts are wrong and that I want to be polite about the difference of opinion--that sort of difficulty is trivial, requiring nothing more than a cooperative spirit and a little friendly dissimulation. The trouble here is that the propositions offered, even the whole topic, perfectly fail to correspond to anything in my mental landscape. If you were to ask me I'd say that there is no comedy without wit; that special effects obviate camera work; that you can have Bruce Willis in a movie or you can have characters, not both. Most of all, a thing isn't a movie (or a tale, lie, anecdote or action) unless it was created and realized with semantic intention--this is really no more than the scientific requirement that a hypothesis be falsifiable. If I approach you with a story to tell it must be for one of two reasons: Either I want to tell you a story or I want to do something else, like distract you while my beautiful assistant here picks your pocket (thank you, Mavis). If my telling comes from the latter motive then I'm not really telling you a story, am I? What I'm after in that case is not to share some ideas with you which mean something to me, but to deliver a pattern of sounds which will elicit from you the behavior I desire; the content of the latter can be anything at all that doesn't interfere with the effect.

So in terms of believed information conveyed these apparent movies are existentially not there at all. The disjointed little bits of intentional muscle the things possibly could contain are richly smothered by the disjointed bits of ulterior fat; without the semantic intent no choice was involved in their assembly, and the seeming activity of filmmaking was thus without effect. What was displayed in theaters near you was not movies but certain side-effects of a large-scale fleecing project. From the get-go, therefore, there's nothing here to talk about. Nobody meant for there to be any characters, so there can be no development; nobody cared about doing anything funny--they simply wanted ticket purchasers to laugh. (Do note that there is such a thing as accidental art, an important category in which the merit of a piece can far surpass its original conception. For a work to develop this characteristic, however, requires a secondary reception, substantially removed in time or context from its original point of emergence; here I'm only concerned with primary receptions.)

Of course this is just my view. Not opinion, mind you, because the principles of judgment I've cited are structural parts of my world-apprehending apparatus and operate automatically and prior to the emotional investment that gives one an opinion; they are among my mental rods and cones. If in some other system than mine there is any appreciable merit to these movies, the kind that gives you leverage to pry open a piece of the world and understand it, then I am no more able to detect that than I am the ultraviolet wavelengths that stimulate a honeybee's eye. And as no amount of argument can induce me to see ultraviolet reflections, neither will any amount of jollying cause me to have any concern for these pictures but to avoid them. Not, God forbid, that every picture you go to should make you into some kind of a Better Person, or that we should never come out of a theater without having Learned Something. Actually after a really good movie you might find you know less than you did before. What's to be avoided are those emissions that putty over the wrinkles in your cerebral cortex and clog your spiritual arteries with individually-wrapped slices of processed American cheese-food morality.

Which is not to say you can't find nice things there if you are under the impression that you can. Many moviegoers can see patterns in those carcinogenic frequencies, and logically enough are not apt to understand how these features--a bracing thrill-ride; reminders of the importance of teamwork and, conversely, individualism; good value for your entertainment dollar--could be missed; in fact they'll be disinclined to believe it possible. You must be duller than expected, or lying, or most likely just being difficult with your tired old intellectual-elitist disdain for anything that's not Great Literature, and go on back to Berkeley why doncha.

Or feelings to that effect. But honestly--it's not like that. Not on good days it isn't. Thing is, you may lead me to grope blindly at your ultraviolet action-adventure elephant but all I'll be able to detect is a long tube with a powerful vacuum on one end. "What is this thing?" I'll say, "It sucks. Certainly it's not an animal, like what you'd see in a movie." And then I for my part will be perfectly unable to imagine how you could not perceive that Skidoo enhances your ability to make sense of the world while Chasing Amy tends to gum up that faculty (or destroy it outright), or that the world is a better place because of Heavenly Creatures but every soul has lost something that was exposed to City of Angels. How can you not see THAT? Can you not see me sitting here before you? It's obvious.

This is not at all the same thing as there being no accounting for taste. There isn't, but taste is why of Preston Sturges's movies I prefer Miracle of Morgan's Creek to Sullivan's Travels, and why my enthusiast friends have a preference for either of two earth vs. the asteroids movies. I also like kale, pork rinds, and stylish beers from the Northwest. This is unaccountable--but discussible. I can tell you I like Morgan's Creek better than Sullivan's Travels because the one is daft where the other is preachy, and you may tell me I've got it backwards or that preachy is actually better. Whatever you unaccountably think, we will already be in agreement on the nature of the objects under discussion; this may not be the case should we begin arguing the merits of Nutrasweet, which you think is not as good an artificial sweetener as saccharine while I think it's a plot more devious than fluoridation. You have a taste for certain sweeteners and I have a taste for industrial biochemical conspiracy; you think me mad and I find you hopelessly naïve; and these tastes of ours are mutually irrelevant and inaccessible.

There are as many Nutrasweets as there are packets in the world; each of us must find the right one and use as directed. Same goes for everything else. If art doesn't have the same position in your affairs as in mine then the same values can't be applied to works of it, let alone the same valuations. Twice I tried to read Tama Janowitz's A Cannibal in Manhattan, a popular book; twice I flung it across the room around page 40. It wasn't that I thought it was so bad--the thing just pissed me off because it was odious. It doesn't make sense to everybody that fiction might make one angry, because not everybody believes that creative work is an habitation of truth and morality. If you don't then probably what you find there is merely greater or lesser entertainment--if a category means little to you, you are free simply to like or disregard its representatives. Your thing might be urban planning, and how I can get so worked up about a novel just goes to show what sort of nonsense people will get all excited about when they don't have the wit to really appreciate a good zoning plan.

It comes down to what is essentially a religious question. If I am approached in good faith by a religious acquaintance who enthuses to me "Isn't it great how the bread becomes the Body of Christ and helps us towards salvation?" there is no response I can offer that will be simultaneously honest, relevant, and sociable. "Yes, it's great"; "You must be nuts"; "I worship Moloch": None of these will get us anywhere, substantively or socially. To say either yes or no is a lie, since none of the events and entities described exist in my universe--least of all the "us"--so I can't validly affirm or deny them, or assess their greatness with any certainty. They don't exist to me even as the misinterpretation of something I do believe in. On the other hand any attempted demurer I offer must be a rejection--to say "I'm Jewish," or "As a Lutheran I don't believe that that happens," or at worst, "I'm an atheist," point blank refuses the community bond they were honestly offering despite any amount of friendliness I may feel towards them. Certainly they erred in assuming the universality of their creed, but that's exactly the error that does happen, and most especially when a person feels well-disposed towards you. The true answer is "It happens that though I appreciate your faith I'm not religious and can't engage in this discourse; we'll perhaps have better luck with another." Unfortunately the fact that they overuniversally included me (which after all is neighborly) is demonstrative of an underdeveloped facility for anticipating and dealing with other cognitive worlds than their own, and they may not have a way to navigate the disjunction they've just encountered. Those subscribing to the most popular cosmologies will naturally encounter less popular models much less often than alternativists will run into counter-worlds, so it's to be expected that believers in popular concepts like major religions or special effects will nearly always assume your co-enthusiasm. It's not that they're innately hostile to differences of opinion, but when all of a sudden you appear in your guise as the Other they're liable to seize up and not know how to proceed. This will anger some of them; others will get sullen about how you think you're so great; many will be initially baffled but then amused at your quaint and ridiculous ideas, and will joke with you about them for the rest of your life.

As with religion, so also with Star Wars, which according to your own rods and cones is probably either a) a monument of American cinema and the essence of the best our good-guys-win-seriocomic-heroic-cowboy national nature has to offer or b) a juggernaut of American cinema and the stuff false consciousnesses are made of--and note that whichever precept you entertain or entertains you will only be strengthened by last years's rerelease of the thing. Again, these are not matters of varying opinion but of varying truth. If you and I are both Star Wars enthusiasts we may differ in our opinions about it and you might be able, despite my initial resistance, to convince me that actually the Death Star should have been a cube (and please note that no matter who you are you know that it was not one; this itself is part of the problem--but that's for another time), as that would've been more emblematic of thusandsuch. Whether you succeed or not, we will likely both enjoy the disputation as beer follows beer. But if we get our truths from different places, one of us being a Star Wars enthusiast and the other a Star Wars revulsionist, we have the very different and remarkable situation that anything either of us says about the movie will depress the other and lead us both to no other conclusion than "Truly, this here is one sorry jackass." The beer will be as ashes in our mouths, and we will have no more than two. Conversions are possible but very rare, and are necessarily more epiphanic than concensual: You'll never get as substantial a conversion by use of arguments as will be achieved by an internal revelation like "Wait a minute--Yoda is a MUPPET!"

The generally unnoticed thing is, this gap is far greater in kind and magnitude even than that between a Socialist and a Republocrat; these at least will concur on the objects under consideration, the meaning of "goal," and the fact that their strategies conflict. But if one person watching a movie sees a collection of characters engaged in an interplay of competing interests which achieves the goal of entertainment where the other sees a pastiche of unsupported fols de rol which accomplish the accident of diseducation, contaminating the minds of the young and reinforcing the folly of the previously contaminated, where will the common ground be upon which this hash can be settled?

There is none. But more than the difference itself, it's the failure to note the nature of the difference that leads to mischief and shattered careers. If your boss or someone you hope to take home tonight says to you "Hey--I just got the video of the new Star Wars release for my birthday! Is that great or what?" the closest thing you've got to a corresponding opinion may be the Hatebath maneuver: "The only reason you like that movie is that you had the sheets and pillowcases when you were twelve." And factually you might be exactly right, but if you express this truth you have failed in two ways: Conversationally you have mistakenly addressed a topic which only appears to be the one they led with, and pragmatically you will soon be fired, or go home alone yet again.

And yet by convention some response is required. Some response is required. I've been after this grail for some time now and must confess myself as much at a loss for useful gambits as ever. What I have got though is a little stratagem that may at least keep such situations from spiraling out of control. First, borrowing from Soviet military tactics, you must determine what category of situation it is that you find yourself in. This information may be found in the nature of your immediate reaction. Given the opportunity to help someone watch their Star Wars commemorative release video, if what you're about to say next is "I think it's terrible how they mucked it all up with the new footage," well and good. What you are experiencing is merely a difference of taste and you may feel free to have it out in whatever manner best suits your personal lifestyle choices. Enjoy the show. If, however, you're about to say "WhŠwhat are you, some kind of idiot??" you should judge that you have encountered a denominational conflict and must proceed with caution. It is a borderline case if what occurs to you is a snappy comeback of some kind; in this event you'll have to evaluate your proposed retort. If it's snappier and more delicious than your average you should probably disengage--note that between the honest poles of uncritical enthusiast and overwrought acolyte lies the insupportable position of the asshole, arch and knowing: movie-school graduates, MFAs, twenty-three-year-olds and other paraphiles, delicate bullies who will scoff even in your face if the piece that pleases you is on their Pope's list of the "sub-moronic." Asked what they do like they'll strain themselves to produce only examples you can be expected not to have heard of, and to muddy what little clarity you've got. Like the dissimulators who emit footage or pages because it suits their other purpose, the knowledge of the knowers is not for sharing but for wielding: They don't care to know, they want only that you should not. They are disingenuous; don't speak to them. We concern ourselves only with the incompatible honesties of simple enjoyment or principled ardor.

If it does seem that caution is called for, then your next move should be to create a diversion. "Look over there!" may be just fine but probably won't work more than once per interlocutor. One that may be more reliable as well as reusable is, for example, "Well it sounds like you sure enjoyed it!" Or didn't, as the case may be; it doesn't matter how they feel so long as you can get their own wool pulled back over their eyes. The urgent goal at this point is to remove yourself and your views from the field of consideration; replacing yourself with your amiable opponent and encouraging them to talk about their own incorrect analysis will win you extra friendliness points, which may be strategically useful--though tactically the purpose will be as well served by developing a sudden nosebleed (which of course in some of these situations may be exactly what happens).

After this you're on your own. I, at this point, am most likely to smile blankly for a while and as long as they keep talking there usually isn't a problem; you can probably do better than that. At any rate what follows should be no worse than any other cocktail party and probably nothing bad will happen. If you're up to it you might try the merest sublethal bit of evangelizing of your own principles, but strictly offhand, and with no evident end in mind. Most important to remember is that whatever your point may be in this discussion, it cannot be made.