The Quest For A Director With A Perfect Record

Have you ever wondered why some Christopher Nolan fans can be so…extreme?

The anonymity of the internet has made death threats somewhat of a constant occurrence on message boards, social media, and comment threads, but if you speak with anyone who writes about movies for a living and ask them if they’ve ever written a negative review of a Chris Nolan movie, there’s almost a 100% chance they’ll say they've received death threats because of it. But since the same can’t be said about the works of Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino, what is it about Nolan’s films that draw such a vitriolic response — oftentimes before the commenter has even seen the movie in question?

It’s not just Nolan acolytes, but they’re probably the best representation of the phenomenon I’m talking about. Keep in mind, I’m a huge fan of Nolan’s work: he’s directed three movies that I consider modern masterpieces, and I’d place the rest of his films at various points on the “good” to “excellent” scale.

My take? These commenters are on a quest to find a director with a perfect record. 

It’s rare to find movie fans in 2015 who appreciate or agree with a nuanced take on a movie; people seemingly either prefer “love it” or “hate it” responses, and there’s not much room for anything in the middle. Those kinds of pieces certainly don’t get the same online attention as a glowing review or a scathing pan, and while it’s fun to write both of those things when the situation calls for it, I find that more often than not, I tend to have more complicated feelings about a movie than just simply whether it kicks ass or sucks. (Shocking, I know.) Applying statistics to movies and boiling down our reaction to a piece of art into a letter grade, popularized by sites like Rotten Tomatoes, have encouraged this kind of binary discussion to dominate most online conversations about movies. You either agree with the consensus, or you’re wrong.

With a statistics-driven approach to analyzing movies, all of the subtlety falls away. If a director has a perfect record — a filmography in which the hive mind agrees that all of his/her films are “good” — that person can be held up on a pedestal as a shining beacon of what a director should be. People like Spielberg, Tarantino, James Cameron, and Martin Scorsese don’t qualify, since they’ve all already made movies that were either box office duds or critical failures. But since Nolan hasn’t made an outright turd yet, he’s still riding that line where fans can try to make a case for every one of his films, desperately clinging to the notion that he’s The One, their director with the perfect record.

I’m not saying that there aren’t people out there who truly believe that every single film Nolan has made is fantastic. But I do think there’s something to this theory, and a lot of the fans lobbing death threats are probably doing it (maybe even subconsciously) as a reaction to the notion of his perceived perfect record being marred and the pedestal being knocked out from under their cinematic hero.

I'm not completely immune to this thinking, either. For me, Colin Trevorrow and Rian Johnson are two directors that immediately come to mind who would qualify as having perfect records at this point in their careers. Trevorrow made Safety Not Guaranteed (which I loved) and Jurassic World (which I really enjoyed), while Johnson has Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and Looper under his belt, all of which I adore. I understand the gut-level appeal of wanting a perfect record to exist — it's fun to root for people we like — but becoming obsessed with that idea and not allowing ourselves to engage with a piece of art on a case by case basis strikes me as the wrong way to go about it. And I can't believe I even need to say this, but come on, guys: death threats? Really?

It seems incredibly unlikely that when Trevorrow and Johnson retire, I'll be able to look back on every single movie in their filmography and declare that I love them all. And that's totally fine! We can often get a better sense of an artist's identity by witnessing their imperfections instead of a sheen of perfectly-produced product anyway.

What do you all think? Am I onto something with this "perfect record" theory?