Out the Movies is a bi-weekly newsletter about queer film for AF+ subscribers written by Drew Burnett Gregory.

I love music, but I don’t know much about it. Perhaps that’s an odd thing to say about something that’s so important to me, something I experience daily, and yet it’s true. When it comes to music, I like what I like and I don’t have the knowledge to know much beyond that.

I have friends who know about music — whether as a career or a hobby — and I look to them for recommendations. I also enjoy reading essays from music critics or watching a TikTok where someone breaks down a Sondheim composition. I don’t have a deep understanding of music and I don’t have a broad awareness of the latest releases, but when in-depth thought on the art form finds me I feel stimulated and challenged. I love to listen to someone who knows more than me break down why a song I love works so well, or, even, why an artist I don’t like is so beloved by others.

My lack of knowledge about music theory and music culture doesn’t mean my opinions are wrong. “We Found Love” by Rihanna, “disco tits” by Tove Lo, and “Twisted” from the Twister soundtrack really might be the best songs of all time. But I also present these opinions with an acknowledgment that the people in my life who really know music might present a wider breadth in their music taste and a better explanation for that taste.

When I make a playlist, I’m often driven by narrative — classic writer — and by the end the tracklist is about a third songs introduced to me by my friend Laura, a third songs I learned about online, and a third songs I heard in movies and TV shows, two art forms far more familiar to me.

As someone who knows a lot about film, I’m baffled by the way expertise is reviled by many. I love the Letterboxd interviews where they ask cast and crew for their four favorite films, because I’ve always found it revealing to know what art fellow artists look to for inspiration. But I’ll never understand the frequent responses to these videos, responses from people who theoretically care about movies if they follow Letterboxd on social media, or at least cared to sit through a full video that came across their feed. When people choose four very recognizable films, especially when those films were made for children, they’re praised for being real. When people choose four films that might be more obscure, even if obscure means Sight & Sound top 100 instead of IMDb top 100, they’re accused of pretension, of posturing a taste that must be inauthentic. The people answering this question have dedicated their lives to film — why wouldn’t their selections be more obscure than the average person?

There seems to be a defensiveness to these comments. It’s as if a person selecting movies you haven’t seen — or, God forbid, haven’t even heard about — is akin to calling you stupid. It’s seen as a personal attack rather than what it should be: an opportunity. The way I really began to learn about film was from Martin Scorsese’s documentaries on American and Italian cinema. His enthusiasm for this work was infectious and I felt a deep desire to see the films for myself. I had seen very few of these films, and I hadn’t even heard about most, but that was a good thing. There were suddenly all of these worlds waiting for me to explore.

When it comes to film the more I know, the less I know. Every door I open leads to a room with three more doors. Because of my job, I watch about 500 films each year. And yet, even with so much of my life dedicated to the medium, there’s so much great cinema I haven’t seen and so much I’ll never see.

While it’s true that I have seen more movies than most people I know, this expertise provides me context not infallibility. My opinions are not more right than those of a casual viewer. I just might be able to articulate them better and they might be shaped by the other work I’ve seen. There are times when a new movie doesn’t work for me, because I’ve seen its inspirations and feel like those earlier films are better. If I express that opinion, it’s not to say someone who did connect with the new film is wrong. We just had different experiences of a work of art based on our tastes, our personal experiences, and, yes, our knowledgebase. All I ever want is for people to connect with art and then seek out even more. It doesn’t make me sad when people love different movies — it only makes me sad when people say there are no good movies out there for them to love.

Do I think certain movies are made with more attention to craft while others are made more for the desire of profit? Yes. Does the influence of capitalism, weakening attention spans, and anti-intelluctualism on cinema frustrate me? Absolutely. But nothing saddens me more than a lack of curiosity. That’s true in terms of people dismissing work they deem too artsy or obscure. And it’s true in terms of people dismissing the opinions of those who know less than them.

I will admit I have a tendency to state my opinions as facts. It’s a habit that has gotten me in trouble over the years. But I do so with the hope that people will state their own opinions with as much confidence. It’s less that I think my beliefs are facts and more that I’m so enthusiastic about the work I love — and even the work I hate! the art form itself! — that I say these beliefs with a lot of force.

My primary goal at Autostraddle has always been to share the work I love with more people. My secondary goal has been to push queer cinema beyond the limits of our current culture. When I give a bad review that’s all I’m doing. I’m not saying that anyone who connects with the film is wrong or bad or stupid. In fact, there’s actually something so comforting about how even two so-called experts can have drastically different experiences of a movie. Even when I’m writing about copaganda or transphobic tropes, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with having a positive emotional or intellectual experience of that work. I’m just encouraging people to go beyond that initial experience and to understand how it might fit into a larger framework.

I love being wrong. I love being right. I love knowing that, like most things, those words are rarely a binary, especially when it comes to art. All I want is for us to keep talking, keep watching, keep remaining open to new beliefs, new thoughts, and new discoveries.

To quote Stevie Nicks in “Twisted” aka one of the objective three greatest songs of all time: You think you hear demons/I think we are the demons/In this place where the images are born. We all experience the world differently and we all experience cinema differently. Let’s stay curious about the world. Let’s stay curious about that difference.

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