Thinking too hard about something on purpose, in the
open, with the workings shown.
We do not call these theories. A theory predicts something and can
be killed by evidence, and almost nothing in this line of work can be. A case is a question
that can be argued out of the work itself, and the rule is that what contradicts it gets the
same room as what supports it.
C-001
Is Orbital a novel at all, or a long poem that has been shelved wrong?
Because two serious critics read the same book and disagreed about what kind of object it is, which is rarer than disagreeing about whether it is good. James Wood says it is barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories. Alexandra Harris says the introspection is the strength. They are not arguing about quality. They are arguing about the category.
What holds it up
Nothing in it changes. Six people orbit the Earth sixteen times and the book ends where it started, which is the shape of a form that repeats rather than one that develops.
Wood counted: barely a novel, barely tells, barely interact. Three uses of the same qualifier in one sentence is a critic reaching for a category and not finding one.
The unit of the book is the pass over the Earth, not the chapter or the scene. That is a stanza.
What pulls it down
It has six characters with separate histories and they are not interchangeable, which is a novelist's work and not a poet's.
Harris locates the achievement in the introspection, and sustained interiority across many pages is exactly the thing the novel form was invented to do.
It won the Booker Prize, which is a prize for novels, judged by people whose job that year was deciding what counted as one.
Where it stops. It cannot be settled, and that is the finding. What the disagreement actually shows is that the plotless novel has no agreed name in English criticism, so two good readers reach for different ones and both sound right. The case is worth keeping open because the next book like it will produce the same argument.
C-002
Did the critics who disliked Thunderbolts dislike the film, or the thing it is attached to?
Fifty-seven points between two reviews of the same picture is a lot, and when a gap is that wide it is usually worth asking whether both people were reviewing the same object.
What holds it up
Robbie Collin's charge lands on the end-credits scene, which is not part of the film's story: it is an advertisement for the next one. The phrase he uses is talk about creating a market.
Jake Coyle's praise is measured against the studio rather than against films in general: works together seamlessly in a way Marvel hasn't in some time.
Both of them are grading the picture partly by where it sits in a run of pictures, which is a judgement about a series.
What pulls it down
Collin's other words are about this film's own texture: dollop upon dollop of dourness is a complaint about tone, and tone is in the picture and not in the franchise.
Coyle names a performance. Pugh commands every bit of the movie is a claim about ninety minutes of acting and would be true or false if this were a standalone.
Where it stops. Both readings are in both reviews, so the honest answer is that neither critic separated the film from the series and there is no reason they should have. What the gap measures is not disagreement about the film. It is disagreement about whether being the eleventh of something is the film's problem.