The Inappropriate Use of Data to Assess Art

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Time magazine counted every line in every Quentin Tarantino film to see how often women talk. The article managed to combine two seemingly unrelated things that I deeply dislike the first is critics who forced their political agenda into their analyses of art and the second is the utterly inappropriate use of data or empirical investigation to assess something way too complex and messy for that data to tell us anything real. So both these things can't like had sex and had a baby and that baby was this Time magazine article we counted every line to see howoften women talk.

Our whole lives we’ve been frauds. We’re not exaggerating. Pretty much all we’ve ever done is try to create a certain impression of us in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. This episode is a perfect example, Tamler pretending to be a cinephile (check out his four favorite pieces of 2019 “pop culture” in the first segment), David trying to connect with the people (Baby Yoda, Keanu Reeves etc.) – and of course what could be more fraudulent than a deep dive into a David Foster Wallace story, rhapsodizing over the endless sentences, the logical paradoxes, the seven-layer bean-dip of metacommentary (Jesus Christ I’m surprised there aren’t like eight footnotes in this episode description), and meanwhile the Partially Examined Life dudes refresh their overcast feeds and wonder through the tiny keyhole of themselves how David and Tamler have sunk so low that they’d ramble on about “Good Old Neon” like a couple of first year Comp-Lit grad students trying to impress that girl who works at the Cajun bakery.