Maybe this happens to you all the time, but for me it was a first: The other day I discovered that I'm the star of a 55-page academic paper by two French economists whose work scientifically proved that I'm a habitual and systematic liar.
In "Structural Estimation of Expert Strategic Bias: The Case of Movie Reviewers," Toulouse School of Economics Ph.D. candidates Fanny Camara and Nicolas Dupuis devise a series of logarithms.
They assess the professional reputations of 35 veteran film critics (including me), whether we thought the movie was going to be good before we saw it, whether our opinions were "correct" (i.e., in accord with the majority) and whether we were telling the truth about what we actually thought.
The model meant to predict our responses didn't work on me (I'm unpredictable), so they concluded I'm a liar. Among 35 critics surveyed, I came out as the leader in "misreporting" my actual views.
It follows that I must routinely publish reviews that are the opposite of what I really think, according to the paper, because "experts may disregard noisy signals and conform to the prevalent opinion in order to pass for good predictors of the state of the world."
I've been accused of many things in 9 ¹/₂ years as a film critic, but this may be the first time anyone's ever said — much less empirically proven! — that I just tailor my views to go along with the majority. I don't recall anyone saying that when I panned "Iron Man 3," "American Hustle" or "Skyfall."
Lazily relying on a simple yardstick — the Google Trends index, which counts how many times Google users searched for a given person in a given month — the Ph.D. students also scientifically prove that I have a really high reputation. They have me at third only to the late Roger Ebert and his "At the Movies" colleague Michael Phillips.
Trust me when I say: This is the first time anyone's ever said that, either.
According to a formula that covers the years 2004-13, my Google-search-based reputation is 40, Ebert's is 1,100 — and New York Times critic A.O. Scott's is 6. Really? My reputation is six times higher than his? I look forward to the Acad♠♥émie Francaise paper that scientifically proves the genius of Jerry Lewis. Charles Manson has a lot more Google searches than I do. Does he have a higher reputation?
In the wacky logic of the paper, which is written in abstruse jargon that doesn't easily lend itself to brief quotation, high-reputation critics have the most incentive to lie. If we're not sure about a movie, we ding it, which means no one goes to see it, which means no one will know we were lying.
"The incentive for the expert to overreport the low signal to obfuscate the realization of the state of the world is stronger for highly reputed experts whose recommendation can change more dramatically the consumers' updated prior on the quality and then influence more their purchasing decisions," says the paper.
In other words, a pan from me and Americans reroute their weekends away from the multiplex. That explains why "The Lego Movie," "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "We're the Millers" flopped.
I confess I don't understand the mathematical equations in the paper, which to me look like a box of spilled toothpicks, but I apply the cold calculus of GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The underlying assumptions of the paper are simply false. "The career of these reviewers," the authors state, "is built on their reputation for accuracy." No it isn't. I'm not a "financial analyst," a gig they seem to think is equivalent. If I were supposed to trim my sails to the box-office or critical winds, I would have been fired around about the time I said I didn't like "Sherlock Holmes."
Moreover, the paper's assessment of whether a critic is truthful depends on something called "priors," a complex yet silly formula involving the budget of a film, whether it's a sequel, how many screens it's released on and other factors, all of which are tossed into a big equation bouillabaisse that gives the authors magical mind-reading powers. They claim that these figures enable them to rule whether we critics expected to like a movie before seeing it.
Another problem: There is also no empirical way to assess the quality of a film. You can call me a liar if I say nine times five is 6,286, but not if I say "Inherent Vice" is a bore. It's just my opinion.
The paper essentially is a long-winded way of saying that since, among 35 film critics surveyed I am the one least likely to agree with the overall score on the review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes (63%, while the others were mostly in the 70s) that I must lie the most. And I'm doing it so people will love me.
That isn't my understanding of how honesty works. If you're the only one in the room who tells the Robinsons their new baby is ugly, it's more likely you are incorrigibly honest than trying to ingratiate yourself.
It sounds like a lot of effort, coming up with fake opinions and writing detailed arguments to back them up all the time.
Secretly I love all those plodding, plotless arthouse dramas I panned as tedious miserabilism? Hey, maybe I'm also a closeted Al Franken-loving liberal.
If the French students had called me, I would have told them that their thesis sounds completely exhausting. If I'd wanted to work for a living, I wouldn't have become a film critic.
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