Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
This is the graphical representation of the generational gap that harass me every week on Letterboxd due to my beliefs and film ratings. Yes, it's that bad.
Applauded and supported by YouTube users (and greatly promoted by Aronofsky) with a 640K / 11K like/dislike ratio (meaning 1.7% of the people disliked it), dividing the reception at IMDb with an average rating of 6.2, and absolutely trashed to pieces by Letterboxd users with a rating of 2.63/5, it comes as an interesting Marketing Research exercise to study the generational gaps between platforms and construct a correlation (remember that correlation does not entail causality) between the average gap of said platforms and their respective views on life. Youth today is more... anarchic, to put it in a way, whose favorite sport is cultural, racial, geographical, historical and even spiritual appropriation of groups of people they don’t even belong to. This generation is also responsible for a significant amount of spiritual and religious discrimination, which receives way less attention by the administrators of the aforementioned sites than all other human spheres mentioned.
Wesley Wang belongs exactly on that demographic: 19-year-old Harvard student with a camera and many ideas. The ideas are not bad per se, because the ideas say absolutely nothing. Yet, for some reason, this short has “insulted the intelligence” of its audience according to its youngest viewers.
Here is where I would actually love to bring a word that today has lost all objective meaning and is coined as something generic and derogatory with no real substance that sustains its reasons: “pretentious”. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “trying to appear or sound more important or clever than you are, especially in matters of art and literature.” Notice how this definition refers to two scenarios, and if you fulfill one of them, you fall into that classification: you consider yourself either more important OR cleverer than what you actually are. The “importance” connotation is subjective, which is the main problem of this definition: what would the objective standard for importance measurement be? The Bible? Humanism? Philosophy (already a problem since Philosophy fluctuates)? The second connotation is objective: intelligence. If one begins sprouting conclusions about how an equation is solved without actually knowing the logic and relationship between both sides of it, nor a logical method, and you solve it incorrectly while stating that you have found the actual solution, you are claiming to have an intelligence you do not possess. However, is intelligence based on objective laws and truths? If so, would the recently defined area “emotional intelligence” would classify as actual intelligence?
The Oxford Languages definition states: “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.” This definition considers more areas of human life, and can be speculated that it refers to all of them. However, the common denominator found is “greater importance”. We have encountered the same problem once more: what is the objective standard of importance in all spheres of life?
So, is either Wesley Wang or his viral short film pretentious? What is the actual cause for such divisive reactions? I insist, this is an important phenomenon to study, just like with Moby & the Void Pacific Choir: Are You Lost in the World Like Me. The answer to the first question cannot really be determined; however, this does not entail the impossibility of knowing if someone is pretentious, and for stating a prime example on film, (don’t) refer to Bill Maher in Religulous (2008): that is the perfect example of an individual that considers himself superior exactly at the time in which he steps foot into any religious environment, and goes to the extreme of mockery and insults. No less.
About this short? It’s a plethora of ideas that say nothing, and it is problematic in the sense that this stuffed, disorganized collage of ideas and life events is meaningless in the way it is constructed, like random ingredients in a nauseating soup, but when you take every ingredient separately, they all taste good; they all matter individually. In short, mix everything without saying anything and all you have left is cerebral diarrhea, the equivalent of eating a cheesecake, tacos with green sauce, soda, a milkshake and an instant soup in the same night: you won’t sleep well... at all.
31/100
