What I Woke Up Wondering
Why did Siskel & Ebert eschew the two additional thumbs they shared between them? Why was a two-point scale preferable to a four-pointer? What did the simplicity of an up-or-down vote afford that could have outweighed the advanced precision of an up/down and/or up/down alternative? Was it some eschatological ruse they were pulling by keeping their extra thumbs-up in reserve? Some Kantian-cosmopolitan assertion of the impossibility of absolute perfection intended to nurture the indefinite progress of the form? Or was it rather an awareness of the wholly individualistic nature of the critical ‘meh’? And that art is no place for ambivalence? And that a mixed review formed by the mutually inverted thumbs of two opposing parties at least retains its dialectical fecundity?
