Writing a movie review about the movie’s qualities—its actors, cinematography, directorial direction, etc.—is no less redundant than describing the shape of a mirror while ignoring the face inside it. The moment the movie is seen again, all its written descriptions remain in the movie, and the review invalidated. What is more important is the viewer’s relation to the work. This experience is always unique: an artifact of the intimate connection between the person and the thing which they spend their always-thinning time with. As it is why we consume media, it is the only experience important enough to record.
As many watch to share with friends, others what they’ve seen, they describe only the shape of the thing while missing its why. Taste catalogues increase between them, but the people themselves remain separated outside of movie-associated assumptions. Even a review read through a critical or theoretical perspective can only do so much. Only if their ideas are integrated into the viewer’s lives do they become meaningful, but without that connection they are only factoids—nothing. If the theories influence the viewer’s viewing experience then the review was still useless as a film review, but transformative for the act of viewing. The process being greater than the consumed artifact.
In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” a man and wife host a blind man at their house where the hosting man feels distanced from both. He turns the TV on. The blind man cannot see the program: a show touring cathedrals, and the host describes cathedrals to the other. Understanding little, the blind man guides the host’s hand across a sheet of paper to draw a cathedral together. By the end of their shared drawing, the host is changed, and he and the blind man experience a transcendent, real union. His character shift is then assumed to also influence the man’s relationship with his wife. The TV program itself held no transformative power. Its value entirely in the human connection it prompted, the commentary spoken during, and the shared act inspired afterward. Carver’s story reveals how to approach art: focus less on what is on the screen and more on what is happening in the room, in the mind, with another. A film’s true value is to prompt and situate human transformation.
When a reviewer writes about a movie’s qualities it holds little value as those details exist before and after the review is written. But the viewer watches the movie as they themselves are changing, are impressed by their thoughts, the people they are with, where they are watching. It is crying in a movie not because the actress moves you to, but reminds you of your mother, your sister. The love story that puts you back into your own that failed, or the one that is fresh, and growing. These moments drop on us as unexpected rainfall. Each rewatch another rainshower.
Unifying the viewer with the work creates space for introspection, similar to the process of journaling. If a film touches the viewer through the calmness of its main character, they can express the significance of that portrayal through memory or circumstance. Rather than focusing on how well the actor did, the writing may focus on a moment of their own, as the eye of a tornado, surrounded by disruption. The actor triggers these emotions, encouraging the viewer toward a conversation with themselves. Instead of the movie being only a space of time spent, the individual review turns it into an artifact of memory, growth, change.
The term Cathedralism comes both from Carver's story and the cathedral itself. What is religion without relationship? The Bible, only another book if not for attachment. A cathedral, only admired for its workmanship and not its personal, spiritual connector found within. Recognizing the connection between our experiences is one of the few ways we give structure to life, and without this, a dichotomy is raised: “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” If we are negligent of the connection between our experiences we actively deny our own structure, purpose. By removing a film from its objective form and internalizing it, describing its surroundings and significance, the stream-of-consciousness experienced throughout—meaning forms.
If art is subjective, as is the counter-argument to any conversation about objectivity within it, why are movie reviews still written as summaries of facts already known or soon to be realized, denying the viewer’s own subjectivity? What matters is the association of the movie in all its atmosphere with the viewer. This is the human element. It is what is worth reading, writing. Not the film trivia, but the person themselves. No longer displaced, now at the axis.
1. The review is personal.
2. The review doesn’t make any mention of the movie or its parts: editing, coloring, acting, etc.
3. The subject of the review is the writer, the viewer, the “I.”
4. As the review is understood through the writer, the memory, moment is presented as it is known to the writer.
