Knowing Without Understanding
Mission statement: to chronologically watch every movie that received a nomination for Best Actor, starting in 1950.1 As my expertise in film is limited to having attempted to read Douglas Gomery’s “Movie History: A Survey”—and having stopped after 200 interminable pages on silent film—the blog will be oriented around something I am (kinda sorta) good at: trivia. For each film, I’ll give you a rundown on what’s “trivia-worthy,” including elements like plot, cast, crew, and legacy. Each post will also include a deep dive on a topic related to the film to give you even more trivia goodness.
Consider joining us! We’re gonna have lots of fun.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why start in 1950? Why not start in 1929 when the Oscars actually began? Because I don’t want to watch a bunch of old black and white movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s and you don’t want to read about them. Yes, we’re going to miss some classics—Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, the list goes on—but on the whole, I’m much more interested in the post-1950 movies. Perhaps when we get through 2023, we’ll go back and knock out what we missed, but I’m not sweating it right now.
Why Best Actor? Why not Best Picture? When trying to put together a project, I considered watching all the movies that had won Best Picture and dismissed it as not a big enough challenge. Then, while considering other alternatives, I realized I could watch all the movies nominated for Best Actor, which would be roughly 350 movies—more impressive but still doable. I didn’t go back and consider watching all the movies nominated for Best Picture, and when such an idea was brought to my attention, I had already watched The Magnificent Yankee and Bright Victory and Viva Zapata!, and because I don’t understand sunk cost, it was far too late for me to change streams.
But if anyone asks, just tell them it’s because I love good performances or whatever.
So why Best Actor and not Best Actress? This question has a number of answers, all somewhat unsatisfying. As a trivia blog, though, I could argue that movies nominated for Best Actor are more likely to be represented in the trivia canon (see below) than movies nominated for Best Actress. This is difficult to measure, but take this statistic: of the 365 movies nominated for Best Actor between 1950 and 2022, 186 of them were also nominated for Best Picture. Of the movies nominated for Best Actress, only 123 were also nominated for Best Picture. I won’t try and explain this—though if I were to try, I’d probably use the word “misogyny” at least once.2
Why do you keep saying “trivia canon”? What does that mean? The trivia canon can be considered the list of “stuff” one can pull from to create an engaging trivia question. Consider this question:
What is the tallest mountain in Austria?
Well, you might try and reason it out by thinking of tall European mountains and hoping that one of them is in Austria. Mont Blanc, maybe? Or the Matterhorn? Or Mount Elbrus? Good try! Unfortunately, the answer is “Grossglockner,” a mountain you’ve probably never heard of.3 Now, there’s nothing factually wrong with the question, but the problem is with how fun it is. A question that’s too hard or too easy isn’t satisfying—and note that that question might be both too easy in Austria and too difficult in the U.S.
Let’s use the concept of the trivia canon to refine the question. We may believe that asking our audience to give us the proper noun “Grossglockner” is too hard, so instead we may ask:
What mountain chain is Grossglockner in? (answer: the Alps, a well-known mountain chain; you can guess that Grossglockner’s there from how German the name sounds)
In which country is Grossglockner the highest mountain? (this one might be inferable because the name is German and German is the official language of Austria, but Germany itself is some pretty serious negbait)
What does “Grossglockner” mean in English? (this one seems hard, but one may recognize “gross” from phrases like “gross anatomy”4 and “glockner” from “glockenspiel,” leading us to an answer of “large bell”)5
Think of the “trivia canon,” then, as one way for trivia writers to meter difficulty, allowing them to try and estimate what percentage of a typical audience may know some discrete fact needed to answer a question.6 As a player of trivia, if you familiarize yourself with the set of things that can be used to create fun questions—say, by focusing on Mount Etna, Ben Nevis, and Jungfrau instead of Grossglockner—you’ll likely improve your results.
I’ll note that the trivia canon—the set of things you hear on game shows or at bar trivia—tends to cater to the tastes of white, middle-aged men. Some in the trivia community are doing active work to make trivia more inclusive by writing questions that bring in other perspectives and widen the canon. This is important, as a canon that pretends that all history, art, and science was done by white men isn’t just wrong but also does a tremendous disservice to one’s ability to understand the world.7
Trivia is stupid. I respectfully disagree, though if you just read that whole thing on the trivia canon, you’ll know that I see where you’re coming from.
Why are words bolded at random throughout your posts? Consider the bolded items a cheat sheet to what’s trivia-worthy. If you see a sentence like “Jean Racine is known for the plays ‘Phedra’ and ‘Britannicus,’ ” assume there’s a qualitative difference between the two plays and that, if you can only learn one of these things, learn “Phedra.”8
You got something wrong! I sure did! But my mistake gives us a chance to discuss epistemology. Much of what is in this newsletter is what I learn from Googlin’ around. Mistakes are inevitable. If you use these posts for something that matters (i.e., not trivia-related), I’d highly recommend a philosophy of “trust, but verify.” If you’re just using the information here to make your life a little bigger, I’d recommend remembering when I’m your source for fun facts. That way, at least you can blame me if you tell someone some dumb thing about Burt Lancaster or whatever and it turns out that thing isn’t true at all.9
Yes, logging how or why you know something doesn’t feel natural, but it’s an important habit to build. Focusing on epistemology can help to not be overconfident in matters you’re not expert in and to build in necessary uncertainty into your thought process. There’s an interesting section in Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” about a language in Papua New Guinea that hardcodes epistemology into the grammar, forcing the speaker to define how they know information in the same way an English speaker has to specify the gender of the subject. This has been shown to actually change the way the speaker thinks about information—and, though English grammar doesn’t require such a thing, it might help us all if it did.
Can’t you just Google anything you want to know? Not exactly, since knowledge isn’t just the capacity to access information. Consider:
Google has a tough time combining ideas to create new information. The Chinese educational system stresses memorization10 not because information isn’t readily available but because having the information already internalized allows you to do higher-ordered work with it.
Getting better at trivia can expose you to different types of information and help you learn what you personally are interested in. Googling “what should I be interested in,” on the other hand, is less likely to net you useful results.
Say you’re out in the real world having a conversation and the person you’re talking with brings up a topic they’re interested in. If trivia has given you familiarity with the topic, perhaps you can hold down your end of the conversation and make a human connection. Google can’t help you with that in real time.
Lots of these movies are bad. Yeah, that’s true. But the goal is to write interesting things about them, irrespective of the quality of the movie. There’s something to learn hidden in every movie, hopefully.
Yes, this plan shamelessly apes Tom Breihan’s The Number One’s column, which itself cribs from Tom Ewing’s column Popular. As they say, good authors borrow, great authors etc., etc.
Probably more than once, really.
Unless you have heard of it, in which case, allow me to say Willkommen bei meinem österreichischen Leser.
Gross anatomy being the anatomy of structures large enough to be examined without a microscope.
Wikipedia informs us that “Glockner” may just be a Germanized version of the Slavic word “Klek,” which means “mountain.” This suggests that this hypothetical question might not be well pinned, which is another way questions can go astray.
In the revised questions, those discrete facts might be “the Alps are a big mountain range” (lots of people know that) or “German is the national language of Austria” (many people know that). Also note that another way to mess with difficulty is by asking tricky questions whose answers might be something familiar. The “Grossglockner translation” question is in this category; the answer is two simple words but getting there requires a bit of lateral thinking.
At its best, the trivia canon can be considered to represent our shared culture, shedding light on a wide swath of knowledge that it might be desirable for everyone to know. Still, considering the trivia canon to be the entirety of the set of things one should know is also damaging. The best trivia players go a mile wide and an inch deep, but real understanding isn’t built like that. And yes, that’s the explanation for the name “Knowing Without Understanding.”
“Phedra” ends up being more important because both the play and the story of Phaedra (the English spelling) are well known. Phaedra was the wife of Theseus but she fell in love with her stepson Hippolytus. Yadda yadda yadda, both Phaedra and Hippolytus die. Here’s a cool song called Phaedra that may or may not be about the mythological story.
Famously, Burt Lancaster was born in 1892 with the name Josip Broz in present-day Croatia [citation needed].
Epistemology time! I know this argument sounds like one of those fictitious things that people parrot without giving any consideration, but I read it in Lenora Chu’s “Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve.” You can do what you will with that information.
