A never-miss holiday classic in my house is the film scholar Elena Gorfinkel’s polemic “Against Lists,” which was published in the journal Another Gaze in November 2019. This piece—part prose poem, part dark prayer—reminds us in its first line that “Lists will not save you.” “Lists will not enshrine your hallowed taste.” Instead, lists “are attentional real estate for the fatigued, enervated, click-hungry” that “consolidate power.” They are instruments “of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic capture.” A best-movies list “consolidates all that its lister failed to learn, to see, to know.”
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