The Vulnerability of Enthusiasm

When you tell a person about your deep love for something or someone, you make yourself vulnerable. Anyone who has said the first, “I love you,” in a relationship knows what I’m talking about.

I recently wrote an email to a friend extolling the new documentary You Can See Everything — which I wrote about here last week. I told him how meaningful it was to me and how I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I included a link to my blog post. I reckoned that he was well aware of the movie but may not have been motivated to see it and that my praise of it would inspire him to check it out.

It turned out that he had seen it. He told me, very clearly and in considerable detail, what he thought. Evidently he had wanted to see a different movie. He felt that the filmmakers had left Elizabeth Holmes off too easily. I found the film's ambiguity exhilarating, while he found it troubling.

It’s not as if we saw two different films; we saw the same film through different lenses. 

His comments told me that he missed what I found so remarkable about You Can See Everything: the filmmakers didn't try to tell us what to think about Elizabeth Holmes. They trusted us to come to our own conclusions. She most certainly DOES NOT come off sympathetically, as my friend suggested. He seemed to want Fielder and Oppenheim to re-litigate the case against her. But we already know what she did: She committed fraud on an epic scale. We get it.

The film gave me space to observe and think for myself.

I had a singular viewing experience. You Can See Everything confounded and fascinated me, giving me questions to ponder. What more could you want from a film?

But the main thing I’m left with from his email is this: I don't like the idea of a person eviscerating something that I've just said represented a meaningful experience for me.

I was sharing an experience that had genuinely moved me. I told him I'd seen the most amazing film I’ve encountered in many years, that I couldn't stop thinking about it, and that I’d written a blog post about it. That's personal.

My friend was certainly entitled to disagree with my interpretation. But what bothered me was the extent to which his response concentrated on dismantling something I’d just enthusiastically praised. Why do that?

Recently another friend raved to me about a movie that I thought was terrible. I simply told him that I didn’t share his enthusiasm for the film but was glad he enjoyed it. Why rain on his parade?