The 50 Shades of Grey Book Club

PhilGoetz

I think it would be a useful rationality exercise to take something that millions of people love, that you have contempt for, and sincerely try to appreciate it. The purpose would be to get practice imagining a different point of view, and to see whether you're able to do so.

50 Shades of Grey might not be the best choice for this exercise. I haven't read it. Maybe a better choice would be The da Vinci Code, NASCAR, or professional wrestling. But a book has a definite length that you have to get through to be allowed to say that you honestly tried.

The idea is to start a thread for people to discuss 50 Shades, or something else perceived as trashy, and try--not to find what you might like in it, but to get inside someone else's head and imagine why they might like it. (Of course it could backfire, and leave you less open-minded than before, if you always conclude that your contempt was simply right in the first place.)

I think the biggest problem is that if people succeed at finding something to appreciate in it, they would feel terribly embarrassed to say so. So this can be done with alternate accounts.

Anyone interested? What do you hold in contempt that you might be willing to take a closer look at?

I think the biggest problem is that if people succeed at finding something to appreciate in it, they would feel terribly embarrassed to say so. So this can be done with alternate accounts.

Anyone interested? What do you hold in contempt that you might be willing to take a closer look at?

I tend to agree that almost none of what the reviewer pointed out was put into the movies with the intent she suggests, but that begs the equally interesting question - how did all that stuff get in there? Did the filmmakers do certain this subconsciously? Is it really all in Terry's imagination?

Anyway, I'm much less quick to write things off as merely "bad," especially if I notice that my brain keeps returning to them later without any immediately obvious reason.

Anyway, I'm much less quick to write things off as merely "bad," especially if I notice that my brain keeps returning to them later without any immediately obvious reason.

On this note, I found the film Get Over It reasonably enjoyable but nothing special. But deliberately or not, the plot has some wonderful strange loops, including one which I've come to think of as a "strange moebius loop", and thinking about it after the fact has seriously increased the entertainmet factor.

2Protagoras13y

Well, I don't think she's completely wrong about everything, but I think the movies probably have a lot of uncritical borrowing from a wide variety source material. Some of what is uncritically borrowed may be better stuff, and may actually have had some of the subtle intentions she attributes to Bay and crew. And other uncritically borrowed elements are so bad that she can't imagine someone would borrow them uncritically, and so she assumes too charitably that the badness must be intentional for some subversive purpose. It may not help that she's not American, so she may not realize that some attitudes which seem extreme to her are common among Americans. I also think she's too quick to assume that inconsistencies between what Optimus Prime says at various points indicate dishonesty rather than simply sloppy continuity, especially as she herself admits and notes that the continuity is pretty sloppy. Widespread inconsistency certainly helps greatly when someone wants to read their own agenda into something; you can interpret the bits that support your interpretation straight, and then since the bits which don't support your interpretation can't be interpreted straight without inconsistency, you can argue that those inconsistent bits must involve some deception.