04 Feb 2010
It amazes me how much we communicate to each other with just our faces. With all the fine muscles behind them faces can be extremely expressive, so it’s not the capability that amazes me. It’s the accuracy with which its interpreted. Fundamentally, we rarely see our own faces. We even more rarely see them while they’re delivering all these subtle emotional cues. It blows my mind that we operate at this level where I can nonverbally make some facial contortion to represent a rather nuanced emotion and that someone else can understand that.
We never took facial communication classes where we all sat in front of mirrors practicing our vocabulary. No, we learned this all in the wild. And we started pretty young. It’s never been intuitive to me that babies learn the complexities of speech long before they learn to not poo themselves. But they’re picking up and delivering facial cues well before they start babbling. So really the language of the face is the first mode of communication we learn. This stuff is deeply ingrained in us.
Since we can’t see ourselves, all of this has to be learned by making a face and judging reactions. Maybe we will just invent some combination of muscle contractions that seem to represent our inner state, but it’s more likely that we’re copying a face that we’ve someone else make. Which, since we can’t see ourselves and judge the success rate, could have hilariously bad execution.
There are some smiles that are cold, forced, and unbelievable; there are others that are delightfully contagious. Some of this may have to with aptitude, but a lot of it has to do with the honesty of the emotions behind what’s being presented. I’m sure that the good actors spend an absurd amount of time in front of a mirror learning how to lie with their face (so either they had raw talent, or they’re just narcissistic?).
I wonder sometimes how well I filter what I’m feeling inside to what my face is projecting outside. I don’t know of course because you can see it and I can’t. If I’m feeling something powerful, can I repress it? If there’s something I dislike, my instincts tell me to make a foul face. If it’s something small, my cultural filters kick in and I can prevent the emotion from making it my face and being inappropriate. But if the emotion is stronger it becomes more and more difficult to not wear that on my face. And if it’s strong enough, there’s no stopping it. If I feel love, how can that not be read in the details big and small written all over my face? Even my eyes alone are going to carry a message that clear. But with the whole face in concert? For something that big you’re going to get communication on all open channels.
Love is obviously an emotion that we rarely have a reason to repress, but there are plenty of things that we do need to keep from making it to the surface. There are all sorts of things flying through our heads, and every one of them shouldn’t vent out through the face. Well, unless you want to look like the crazy person that you are on the inside. So it is that we’ve all developed a controlled path from emotion to facial communication; we all have filters, conscious or unconscious. We have some knowledge of our facial vocabulary and are making decisions about which faces to put forth based on proven effectiveness and relevance to the situation.
Although our potential vocabulary is large, it’s always being refined by the reaction we see in other people. When we make a face, we’re looking for the reaction face in other people. If we perceive that reaction to be positive, we’re more likely to use that face in the future. Or maybe their positive reaction causes us to return a positive reaction, and it all cycles until we’re just standing their grinning like idiots.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. The topic just completely fascinates me. How much of myself is projected with completely subconscious imprecise facial communication? How accurate is what I put out there? Can everything I’m thinking be plainly read on my face? I really have no clue how well I communicate what I’m feeling, or how well I conceal the thoughts and emotions I don’t want other people to see. I can know what I’m saying, because I also have ears. But I have no idea what my face is telling you.
:/
21 Jan 2010
Sourcing off the same list that I got Let the Right One In, I added Thirst to my Netflix queue. This time the origin is Korean instead of Scandinavian, so it’s another subtitled vampire movie. Turns out not all of the best vampire movies out there come from America, go figure.
Outside of the fact that I’ve had to read, there were no real other similarities between the movies. Let the Right One In was very down to earth, but Thirst is a bit more crazy. It’s a textbook recommendation to do some more background work before you decide to turn your loved one into a vampire. The end result is one character who’s overwhelmed with the guilt of their affliction, and another who’s drunk with power. A recipe for disaster (with disaster having proven correlation to entertainment value).
And it’s a love story, of course. Why is that all vampire stories are love stories? I’m not complaining, it’s just odd that there’s such a strong association. Maybe it’s an exploration of our love-inspired promises to be together forever. When you have to deal with real forever then it gets more complicated. Or maybe its that we just find all this blood lust somehow erotic. I’m sure there’s a long discussion to be had just on that, but I’m off-topic now.
So Thirst is the love story between a priest accidentally turned vampire and an oppressed but not-so-innocent girl. It’s one of those stories that is at its core familiar to you, but at the same time unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Just enough off axis to keep me guessing. The movie also has a nice escalation to it. There’s a steady ramping up from the mundane to the supernatural that fits nicely with the progression of the characters. The end moments are particularly charming.
If I had to rank my recent forays into foreign vampire films I’d put Let the Right One In slightly higher. Maybe its just this Norwegian blood of mine, but I really connected to that movie’s pacing. It’s a simple story with a truly drab setting, but that all made it so much more real for me. But that’s just a slight preference, because Thirst is also definitely worth a spin. Unfortunately I think I’ve run out of vampire movies on my list. Maybe it’s time I bumped True Blood up in the queue?
04 Jan 2010
The internet is moving to a very democratic place where for all sorts of content there is the possibility for comments and ratings. This is generally a good thing, but transparency in the whole system is pretty critical because frankly most people don’t have a clue how to participate in a rating system.
I was poking around on Netflix and came across a user review that started with this:
I gave it a 5 star review because I love it. I may have given it an 8 on a 10 star scale, but since I only get 5 stars thats what its getting.
And then later in the same comment:
I can see where people would rate this lower but I rate things based on if I loved it and could watch it again. So all in all, okay 3D effects, obvious plot, and some of the acting is sub-par but I still loved it.
Um, yeah. I’m glad that Netflix tells me that this person is only 21% similar to me. But I’m still kind of bitter that their rating gets averaged in with everyone else’s and in the end result is something that I really can’t trust.
It’s extremely important to establish a consistent description of what different ratings mean. Netflix does indeed include a description in the tooltip:
1 - Hated It
2 - Didn’t Like It
3 - Liked It
4 - Really Liked It
5 - Loved It
Unfortunately these definitions leave a bit too much to the imagination. I mean, I love my wife and I love ice cream, yet these are not the same kinds of love. But the problem is that both are totally valid uses of the word. There’s the love that’s about deep meaning, and there’s the infatuation that is just wanting to experience something over and over again. When I rate my Netflix movies it’s based on some combination of these two aspects: meaning and repetition.
1 - I feel like less of a person for experiencing this
2 - That was kind of a waste of my time
3 - Not life altering, but entertaining
4 - That made me feel something
5 - I am a better person for having experienced this
1 - Actively upset that I spent any time watching that
2 - Wish I would have watched something else
3 - A fine use of my time to view it once
4 - Want to see it again
5 - Could watch it over and over; will watch it anytime it’s on
This is how movies like Back to the Future and Phoebe in Wonderland can both end up being five stars. It’s unfortunate that the different meaning behind those two ratings get lost, but it’s the best I can do with a one dimensional scale.
Tangent: It’s interesting browsing someone’s movie collection. Movie purchases operate primarily under the repetition scale, not the meaning scale. You can totally love a movie, yet not need feel the need to own it. You can also have total fluff that makes you feel good that you want to have around so you can watch whenever. As tempting as it can be to judge someone’s tastes by their displayed collection, it’s only part of the picture.
There’s less of a distinction with games (either of the video or board form) where repetition is more integral to the experience. Compare to Board Game Geek’s rating definitions:
10 - Outstanding. Always want to play and expect this will never change
9 - Excellent game. Always want to play it.
8 - Very good game. I like to play. Probably I’ll suggest it and will never turn down a game.
7 - Good game, usually willing to play.
6 - Ok game, some fun or challenge at least, will play sporadically if in the right mood.
5 - Average game, slightly boring, take it or leave it.
4 - Not so good, it doesn’t get me but could be talked into it on occasion.
3 - Likely won’t play this again although could be convinced. Bad.
2 - Extremely annoying game, won’t play this ever again.
1 - Defies description of a game. You won’t catch me dead playing this. Clearly broken.
People wouldn’t know what to do with a board game that changed their life but wasn’t worth playing a second time. Although that concept doesn’t exist in the board game world, it is something we regularly see in film. But I’d love to see the board game that delivered that experience.
I often see reviews that knock video games for being too short. Because video games are quite a bit more expensive than seeing a movie there’s an expectation that the consumer should get their money’s worth. My time is not as plentiful as it used to be, so a game that delivers a quality experience with no multiplayer or other replay value is just fine. I love the short and sweet game, and so their assumed negative criticism is actually a positive to me.
It’s kind of because of this information loss that I don’t try to give numeric ratings on my blog. But I do put a good deal of thought into it whenever I give one elsewhere. But it’s a problem that not everyone puts the same level of care into their ratings. I think my first exposure to this was a decade ago back in the days of “Am I Hot or Not”, which is probably the first real large scale use of internet driven ratings. One person might be sitting there agonizing over the fine difference between a seven and an eight; another person might be treating it as binary with “hot” being ten and “not” being one. And even if you have people putting real thought into it, they many not use the scale uniformly (for example I know that I underuse the one and two star ratings for Netflix).
It’s weird, because I think this whole rating thing is hugely important to helping people sift through ever growing heap of content available to us. But I also think that we as humans pretty much suck at it. I think that identity is key to making the experience more accurate, like when Netflix tells me that the rating I’m looking at is from someone who is a bad match for me, or when you choose a particular editorial source whose opinions align with our own. But how much will we really grow and be challenged if we’re only exposed to stuff that is like what we already like?
It’s a hard problem space, and I hope there are smart people out there thinking really hard about it. In the meantime, I rate this post a “Q”.