A friend of mine who doesn't watch Star Wars (and admits openly to never having gotten through one of the movies due to finding them boring) recently sent me an online article by one J.S. Clingman titled "10 Good Reasons why The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy is better than the Star Wars Film Series". Receiving that article ended up being the perfect catalyst for a lot of recent musings I've been having about what it means for a piece of art to be "good" or "bad", or "better" or "worse" than another piece of art, to boil over into an actual thesis: namely, that art as a whole cannot be objectively critiqued relative to other art because the "quality" of a given work of art is inherently bound up in the audience's subjective perception of the art.
I originally spewed out to my friend a whole ridiculous set of specific rebuttals of each of Clingman's "10 Good Reasons" (which are, spoiler alert, actually all terrible and fallacious reasons). If you want to read those rebuttals, skip to the end of this post. My argument for my thesis (which is what I'm really interested in posting here) follows.
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I'm all for having aesthetic opinions. I'm all for leaning into loving a particular work of art. I'm all for saying, "I enjoyed this movie way more than I enjoyed that movie because of all of these subjective reasons." I'm even all for saying, "I will never watch that movie because I get totally bored when I try to, and I'm not going to waste my time on something I don't enjoy." But those subjective opinions cannot be referenced as a basis of objective judgments.
To acknowledge my biases, I freely admit that I have a pretty radically subjectivist perspective when it comes to aesthetics. For example, take The Human Centipede: the concept of that movie is totally disgusting to me, I find its existence kind of offensive, I don't understand why it was made in the first place, and I will never watch it. But I'm nonetheless not willing to say that The Human Centipede is a bad movie, because everything I just listed is a personal aesthetic response to the movie; and I don't have the universal authority to definitively say that something is bad based on my own perspective.
I get that a lot of people are uncomfortable with that level of subjectivism, and that's fine. Everyone has their own philosophy of aesthetics (even if that philosophy is unexamined and can't be stated clearly). I'm not here to advocate for subjectivism, but I am here to say that you have to have some sort of solid empirical argument to definitively say that one work of art is better than another work of art. This is especially true of films, which are by comparison closer to something like a cathedral than to something like a painting. Scores of people work on film sets. The final product as we the viewer experience it is the result of probably thousands of hours of work from individual artists. No one person could "do better" at making a movie than the multiple people who actually made it, because no one person can do each job required to make a film to the level of expertise that a professional in that job could.
How do you judge a movie's quality?
Is it solely by its sound design? If so, can you really say that the sound design team on The Fellowship of the Ring did a better job than the sound design team on the original Star Wars movie (who created some of THE most iconic sounds in ALL of cinema with, for example, the Darth Vader breathing, the TIE fighter engines, the Wookie noises, the lightsaber sounds, and the blaster noises)?
Is it solely by its acting? If so, can you really say that Martin Csokas's performance as Celeborn in The Fellowship of the Ring was better than Liam Neeson's performance as Qui-Gon in The Phantom Menace? (For the record, I love Csokas, but I and my family have mocked his Celeborn for as long as I can remember.)
Is it solely by its visual effects editing? If so, can you really say that the visual effects for the dream sequences of elven healing throughout the Lord of the Rings movies was better than the visual effects for the final lightsaber fight sequence in The Revenge of the Sith?
Is it solely by its set design? If so, can you really say that the digital ruins in the walking montage in The Fellowship of the Ring look better than the Geonosian arena in Attack of the Clones?
My point is this: any single film is a composite of numerous, relatively tiny works of art that all come together to make a whole, and my individual aesthetic response to that whole is actually itself a composite of my individual aesthetic responses to each of those individual works of art. There's not really an empirical way to determine which of these individual works of art is the most important to any individual movie, let alone to all movies of all time (a martial arts movie will have a very different emphasis on dialogue's importance than a movie by Quentin Tarantino); there's not really an empirical way to determine which between two movies' individual works of art (like their music or their costuming) is better; and there's not really an empirical way to determine which overall composite is better than another overall composite. The closest we can get is to say, "Well, more people liked this movie than liked that movie," but (leaving aside all of the many ways that argument from authority is fallacious and all the numerous counterarguments for things that are popular but shouldn't be) does the fact that 100 people disliked a movie mean that 1 person is wrong for liking that movie?
Ultimately, I think that's what it boils down to: making the objectivist claim that "Movie A is better than Movie B" (as opposed to the subjectivist claim that "I like Movie A more than Movie B") is making the objectivist claim that, "Someone who likes Movie B better than Movie A is incorrect," and the sheer weight of the logical lift needed to confidently and coherently make that assertion is, to my view, insurmountable. Lots of people disagree, but I've yet to have someone make a good argument why they're justified in disagreeing.
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What follows is a point-by-point rebuttal of Clingman's illogical article. Before I go any further, I want to preface that I enjoy the Lord of the Rings movies immensely. I have deep admiration for and appreciation of all of the incredible hard work that went into making them, and regularly rewatch them purely for the enjoyment of it. Please don't misconstrue my arguing against Clingman's points as somehow dissing The Lord of the Rings. I'm not dissing The Lord of the Rings; I'm dissing Clingman's illogical article.
POINT 1 is fallacious because it's an argument from authority. Using the Academy Awards as an indication of comparative quality is an inherently biased and elitist perspective.
As an example, Alan Rickman never won (and as far as I know, was never nominated for) an Oscar. Does that automatically make him a worse actor than Eddie Redmayne, who has? Is Nicolas Cage, who's won an Oscar, automatically a better actor than Willem Dafoe or Ed Harris?
I would answer "No" to both questions, because (a) whether an actor is better or worse than another actor is subjective (since acting is an art), and (b) the Oscars are not a reliable metric of quality but rather a reliable metric of what the upper echelons of the filmmaking industry want to recognize as important or valuable.
To be even more specific, The Return of the King far and away has the most academy awards of any of the Lord of the Rings movies, but does that mean it is inarguably the best of them? (In case it's not obvious, I would also answer "No" to this question.)
POINT 2 is fallacious because it's an argument from majority--"Look, lots of people like this thing so it must be good!"--but even more so is just based on a misunderstanding of how public reviews work.
Brigading is a well-documented problem within user reviews open to the general populace. There are all kinds of reasons that people will review-bomb something, but even beyond this, the very fact that people can review something they've never seen and have no interest in seeing shows that you can't rely on these reviews.
For example, on Goodreads The Winds of Winter by George R. R. Martin has a 4.39 average rating over 12,261 ratings... and not only hasn't been released yet but hasn't been finished, meaning these reviews are all just people expressing how excited (or not) they are about a book that may never come out.
I'm not saying that's where every single online rating comes from, but I am saying that online ratings are inherently unreliable metrics in any context because of the presence of this problem.
POINT 3 (like pretty much the rest of this list) is fallacious because it's an argument by assertion; or, to put it another way, this is where we start getting into purely subjective statements presented as authoritative and objective.
What does it even mean for one fictional, make-believe story to be more "authentic" than another? They're both totally made-up worlds. You could just as easily say that Star Wars is more "authentic" than The Lord of the Rings because it was born out of a desire to tell a story, as opposed to Tolkien's writing conlang fan fiction, or that the Star Wars movies are more "authentic" than The Lord of the Rings movies because they're original stories, not an adaptation of a preexisting work.
Looking past nitpicking word choice and criticizing the assumption of objective standards here, there's this problem: saying that The Lord of the Rings is better than Star Wars on the basis of this definition of "authentic" is ALSO subjective! I personally prefer things that have LESS world-building in them because I get extremely bored with having to slog through memorizing all these details about an imaginary world just so I can engage with a good story. Thinking that being more "authentic" in this way is better than being less "authentic" in this way is based entirely on personal taste.
POINT 4 is also fallacious because it's an argument by assertion. The author believes that the music of The Lord of the Rings is scarier than the music of Star Wars. First, that itself is a subjective opinion, and second, saying that having scarier music makes The Lord of the Rings better is also a subjective opinion. This is the same logical problem as the use of "authentic" in the previous point.
Let's allow Clingman's assertion that the music is scarier (which, again, I'm only doing for the sake of argument because scariness is in the eye of the beholder: I once worked for someone who found corgis absolutely terrifying). Peter Jackson (at least at the time of making The Lord of the Rings) was a horror film creator. Howard Shore was a horror film score composer. A creative intention of The Lord of the Rings is to be scary. That's not (as far as I am aware) a creative intention of most of Star Wars. You would expect something made by a horror film director and composed by a horror film composer to be scarier than something made by a pop sci-fi director and composed by the biggest mainstream film composer of all time. That doesn't make a non-scary film worse than a scary film.
You can easily see the silliness of the argument here by reframing it: "Alien is better than Shawshank Redemption because the music is far scarier." That's obviously a ridiculous assertion, no matter whether you like Alien more than Shawshank Redemption. Whether scary is "better" or "worse" is entirely subjective here.
POINT 5 is just... nonsensical in every way?
I mean, first of all, Clingman says that both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are beloved movie series, but The Lord of the Rings fans hate on The Hobbit all the time. I remember The Hobbit being hugely controversial among my LOTR fan friends when it came out, and later on in this very point he says "The Hobbit trilogy was met by fans with less joy". So that's one argument by assertion (fallacious): "these are both beloved because I say they're both beloved".
Second, he arbitrarily decides that we should split Star Wars into separate trilogies and consider them individually because "The Original Trilogy was a phenomenon in its day, and is still acclaimed as the best of the three, and is therefore probably the only real challenger to LotR." Then, he immediately turns around and says that "its day is long past", which first is an argument from novelty (fallacious) and second doesn't even make sense because The Lord of the Rings is itself decades old.
He goes on to say that the Original Trilogy's legacy has been tainted by the other trilogies, which also doesn't make sense because Clingman said it should be considered individually. Does he think the other trilogies should count in this comparison or not? Furthermore, while this article was written before Amazon's The Rings of Power was made, do we use how people think that series did as a basis for judging The Lord of the Rings? I don't even know what fallacy this would be. Does sheer mind-numbing inconsistency have a fancy fallacy name?
(I'd also like to note that he's saying "about 80%+ liked" the non-Original Trilogy Star Wars and saying that's bad, but somehow 90%" liking The Hobbit is good, I guess because that extra 10% makes all the difference between something "apparently terrible" and something "acclaimed to be excellent". I'd ALSO like to note that he's getting these statistics from just googling the movies and using the search results, which looks like some weird combination of an argument from authority and an argument from majority, both of which are fallacious.)
POINT 6 is fallacious because it's once again an argument from authority and an argument by assertion.
First, saying that The Lord of the Rings music is better than Star Wars music is a subjective aesthetic judgment: people like different music, full stop. (If you'd like an example, my favorite artist is Petey. I pitched him hard to all of my work friends, two of whom said, "This can't possibly be what you're recommending because it's so bad.")
Second, as I've already mentioned in point 1, you can't use Academy Awards as a reliable indicator of objective quality.
Third, two can play at this game! Sure, two of The Lord of the Rings movies won Oscars, but one of them wasn't even nominated, whereas ALL of the Original Trilogy movies were nominated and ALL of the Sequel Trilogy movies were nominated, for a total of 6 nominations to 2. Does that mean the Star Wars scores are better than the *Lord of the Rings* scores because there were more nominations? No, it doesn't, the same way it doesn't mean the Lord of the Rings scores are better because they had more wins.
POINT 7 is once again fallacious because it's once again an argument by assertion.
To start, it's very weird to say that an entire series is better than an entire other series just because one of the characters in one series is better than two of the characters in the other series. That's like saying, "Harry Potter is better than The Lord of the Rings because the Death Eaters are better than the Ringwraiths." It doesn't hold up because again, the whole point here is that "better" is subjective, so how do you even start to decide which set of characters is better; and second, these subset characters don't define the entire series, so comparing them doesn't say anything about the overall works themselves.
To continue, his whole argument for WHY Gandalf is better than Obi-Wan or Luke boils down to... POWER LEVEL?! Is what makes a character good or bad how strong they are? If that's the case, doesn't that make... I dunno... Boromir better than Sam? or Denethor better than Frodo? or Saruman better than Aragorn? or Sauron better than Gandalf?
And then to say that because Gandalf is more powerful than Obi-Wan or Luke, The Lord of the Rings is better than Star Wars is just foolishness. I mean, I'm sorry that Star Wars isn't a story about "primordial being[s] endowed with great power by the great Eru Iluvatar himself", but what does that have to do with its quality? Is The Eternals better than The Curse of the Black Pearl because the Eternals are more powerful than Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann? NO!
POINT 8 is another bizarre and nonsensical one.
First, it's once again an argument from majority (fallacious) because it's saying that how many people go to see a movie determines how good that movie is.
Second, if we're using box office numbers to gauge quality, then both of James Cameron's Avatar movies, every Avengers movie, and--huh, that can't be right--TWO OF THE STAR WARS MOVIES are better than The Return of the King. Additionally--get this--five of the Star Wars movies are listed on the top 50 grossing films on Wikipedia, and only The Return of the King is on that list. So the argument that he's trying to make, fallacious as it is, doesn't even prove the point that he's trying to make.
Third, he already said that we should only really pay attention to the Original Trilogy, so why are we talking about Solo, which is a spin-off film not even in one of the main Star Wars trilogies? Fourth, it's factually inaccurate to say that "the movie 'Solo'...didn't make its budget", because according to the film site The Numbers, Solo made over $60 million more in worldwide box office than its production budget.
POINT 9 is once again fallacious because it's once again an argument by assertion.
What makes the Lord of the Rings names "sound better" and "more imaginative"? Like genuinely, how is Rohan a more imaginative name than Tatooine? How is Eowyn a more imaginative name than Padme? All of these comparisons Clingman presents as self-evident examples, but they are totally based on his personal preference.
I personally think Star Wars names are really cool and have a fun cadence to them that somehow manages to feel consistent without having any of the nerdy linguistic underpinnings that Tolkien put into developing his names. (Also, as a little quibble, I think it's very funny to compare a person's name to a space station's name or the name of a mountain to the name of a person.)
But EVEN IF we grant that the names are somehow objectively more imaginative or objectively sound better (which they aren't and they don't), how does that make the movie better? Answer: it doesn't.
POINT 10 is once again fallacious because it's ONCE AGAIN an argument by assertion.
Clingman personally likes faux-early modern English dialogue more than modern vernacular dialogue. He's entitled to that opinion, but his holding that opinion doesn't make the one film's dialogue better than the other's, nor does having the better dialogue automatically make a movie better. Does he really think Star Wars (a pop sci-fi movie, remember) would be better if that dialogue were something like, "Answer me forthwith, upon what swift zephyr have you and your stunted fellows stowed our stolen missives?" "I beg you, my liege, release me. Our purpose entire in presenting ourselves in these great interstellar routes was to bear unto a faraway world a servant of the diplomatic arts." "Tell me, then, wherefore seest I not this 'servant of the diplomatic arts' of whom thou so glibly speakest?"
Even if Clingman does think that dialogue would be better, I don't think that, and what makes his opinion more valid than mine? NOTHING.
