The Problem With Number One

A meditation on ranking, false precision, and why we keep putting numbers beside things that refuse to be measured.

There is something ridiculous about asking for the greatest movie ever made.

Not the greatest western. Not the greatest silent film. Not even the greatest movie of a decade.

The greatest movie. One. Out of everything.

More than a century of cinema, reduced until a single title is left standing.

And still we ask.

Sight & Sound asks. IMDb asks in its own way. Critics do it. Directors do it. Magazines periodically count backward from one hundred as if some urgent question has finally been settled because Vertigo moved three places.

I do it too.

The Great Cinema Master List has a Number One.

What interests me is not really whether that particular film deserves the spot. I am more interested in why the spot itself carries so much authority.

Say one film is extraordinary and another is magnificent, and everybody understands that we are talking about judgment.

Write: #17 and #31 and suddenly the language changes.

Seventeen beat thirty-one. Fourteen places separate them.

It feels as though something has been measured.

But measured in what? Fourteen units of beauty? Fourteen measures of craft? What exactly is supposed to fill the space between them?

There is no answer. The gap between #17 and #31 is not a quantity. It is what remains after a long chain of decisions.

That should make ranking pointless.

I don't think it does.

If anything, that may be where the interesting part begins.

The Human Appetite for Order

We rank almost everything. Restaurants, colleges, cities, albums, quarterbacks, vacation spots. Roller coasters. Breakfast cereal.

Sometimes ranking makes obvious sense. Put runners on a track and somebody crosses the finish line first. There is a clock. There is a line. Nobody has to explain what first means.

Art gives us none of that.

We construct the finish line ourselves.

Maybe we do it because abundance is hard to live with.

There are thousands upon thousands of films. Some are masterpieces. Some are important but not especially pleasurable. Some were ignored and rediscovered. Some carry reputations so enormous that it becomes hard to separate the film from the reputation.

If somebody simply says, “They are all different. There is no meaningful way to compare them,” that sounds generous for about thirty seconds.

Then you still have to decide what to watch.

Where do you start? What deserves attention first? Which films still feel alive? Which changed the language of movies? Which famous works are now more admired than loved? Which supposedly minor films deserve a second look?

A film can also disappear simply because there are too many films competing for attention. A title sitting at #143 is at least making a claim on you in a way that “one of several thousand films worth seeing” does not. The number may be debatable, but it gives obscurity a little leverage against abundance.

Sooner or later, curiosity asks for some kind of shape.

Ranking gives it one.

The shape is artificial, but that alone does not make it useless. The danger comes when we forget that somebody drew it.

What Number One Pretends to Know

The top position carries an especially strange burden because it seems to answer a question that probably cannot be answered.

What is the greatest film ever made?

To name one title is to compare works made in different countries, decades, industries, technologies, and artistic traditions, sometimes with almost nothing in common except that light once passed through them onto a screen.

A silent comedy from the 1920s and a digital epic made a century later were not solving the same problems. A two-hour thriller and a four-hour historical drama are not trying to create the same experience.

A comedy may achieve greatness through effortlessness. Another film may be powerful precisely because it is difficult, abrasive, slow, strange, or impossible to take in all at once.

What scale settles those differences?

There isn't one.

That is the contradiction sitting inside Number One. It looks certain even when the judgment underneath it is not.

And that may be why people love attacking it.

Nobody gets particularly angry because The Godfather appears somewhere on a great-films list.

Put The Godfather at #1 and suddenly the placement itself demands an explanation.

Why not 2001? Or Seven Samurai? Somebody else will insist on Persona. Somebody always has another answer.

The ranking has created pressure, and now somebody has to explain what they value.

That is where it starts to become useful.

The Cowardice of the Tie

There is an easy way around all of this.

Stop ranking. Make tiers.

Put twenty masterpieces in the top group. Put fifty extraordinary films below them. Alphabetize each category.

Nobody has to pretend that #23 is meaningfully better than #24. Everybody gets to keep their dignity.

I understand the appeal. I also find it unsatisfying.

Eventually somebody asks: Fine. But which one?

That question is uncomfortable because it takes away the shelter of equivalence.

Suppose I say two films are masterpieces. You ask which one I think is greater. I say they are too different to compare.

Sometimes that is true. Sometimes I am avoiding the question.

A ranking has a way of exposing that.

It forces you to choose even after your confidence has run out. Maybe the difference is tiny. Maybe I would reverse the order next month. Maybe another viewing changes everything.

Still, for that moment, I have to decide what I actually think.

A numbered list turns admiration into claims.

This famous movie means slightly less to me than its reputation suggests it should. This genre film deserves more respect. This obscure film belongs in the same conversation as movies everybody already knows.

A list tells you what I admire. A ranking makes me choose.

Without ranking, we can exchange favorites forever. Once we rank, we eventually have to exchange reasons.

A rank is a terrible way to measure a film, but it can be a useful record of a comparison.

The number does not tell you how much greatness is sitting inside the movie. It tells you what happened when somebody had to put that movie next to another one and make a choice.

That is a smaller claim. I trust it more.

Of course, admitting that one person's rank is a judgment raises an obvious question: what happens when the judgment belongs to hundreds or thousands of people?

Consensus Has Numbers Too

It is tempting to think this problem belongs to personal lists while big institutional polls somehow escape it.

They don't.

They just spread the judgment around.

A thousand voters may produce a broader, wiser, more representative result than one person. Of course they can. But scale changes the authority of a judgment more easily than it changes its nature. A thousand subjective judgments do not become physics simply because they have been averaged.

What the crowd can produce is something different: consensus.

That matters enormously. It tells us what a particular community valued, and the larger and more knowledgeable that community is, the more seriously we should take the result. But consensus is still made from human judgments. It has simply distributed them widely enough that the people behind the number become harder to see.

And once that consensus becomes prestigious, it begins exerting force of its own.

Once a movie spends decades near the top of canonical lists, people encounter it already knowing it is important. That importance attracts attention. Attention produces scholarship. Scholarship deepens reputation, and reputation sends more people back to the film.

Consider Citizen Kane. Its innovations are real, but for decades viewers also encountered it already labeled one of the greatest films ever made. That framing changes the encounter. People look harder, teach it more often, write about it more deeply, and in doing so help sustain the reputation they inherited. None of that diminishes the film.

After enough time, some of the evidence used to defend a film's canonical status exists because the film already had canonical status.

That does not mean the masterpiece is fake. It means reputation has momentum.

Some films deserve every bit of it. Others benefit from it. And some films never accumulate enough of it to become visible in the first place.

That is one reason I think another list can still be worthwhile.

Not because civilization was crying out for one more declaration of the greatest movies ever made.

Because every new ordering gets to ask inherited judgments some irritating questions.

Why must this film stay above that one? Are we rewarding influence, or achievement? Are we admiring the movie, or admiring the fact that everybody has been admiring it for sixty years?

I am especially interested in the categories that can disappear inside their own effectiveness. Comedy is one. Genre filmmaking is another. Sometimes critics notice difficulty more easily than fluency.

A ranking can reinforce the canon. It can also poke at it.

Sometimes poking at it is useful.

The Person Behind the Number

Maybe every ranking is autobiography to some degree.

Mine certainly is.

I am a nurse. I have four kids. I went to Catholic school. I love sisig.

That sounds like a strange set of credentials for ranking movies.

Maybe it is.

But those things have shaped the person doing the ranking.

Nursing has made me suspicious of theories that forget the person standing in front of you.

You can build clinical scales and track behavioral data, but a chart score doesn't tell you the whole story of the human being in the room. The theoretically perfect answer is not always the useful one at three in the morning. A person may be exhausted, frightened, distracted, overwhelmed, or simply out of patience. Pretending those conditions do not exist has never struck me as especially wise.

Viewers have limits too.

Having four children has made time feel very concrete.

Three uninterrupted hours are not an abstract unit. They are three uninterrupted hours.

Sometimes I have them. Often I don't.

There are nights when spending them with a difficult, austere masterpiece sounds ideal. There are other nights when getting everybody fed, transported, settled, and reasonably happy feels like enough of an achievement already.

That does not tell me whether the film is great. But it does affect how movies actually enter a life.

I think about this when someone asks me for a movie recommendation. A friend in Collingswood once asked what he could watch with his daughter. I have written elsewhere about why that question helped me think differently about accessibility, but another part of it stayed with me too.

They live close enough to the PATCO line that you can hear the trains go by. For some reason, that is the detail I remember. I picture a movie playing in their apartment and a train passing outside.

A ranking can tell me where I put a film. It cannot tell me what that film might become in that room, for those two people, on that particular night.

Catholic school probably left its own marks on this whole project too.

I have a suspicious fondness for systems, categories, definitions, hierarchies, and rules.

Some part of me apparently still believes that if everything is classified carefully enough, the universe may eventually stop being messy.

It has not happened yet.

Then there is sisig.

Sisig is chopped, grilled pork with onions, chili peppers, and calamansi, the small Filipino citrus that gives the dish its sharp sourness. It is rich, spicy, acidic, fatty, crisp in places, soft in others.

What makes it work is everything happening at once.

I could build a scoring system for food. Technique. Balance. Complexity. Presentation. Tradition. Originality.

I could assign weights and calculate the total to two decimal places.

And sometimes I would still rather have a sizzling plate of sisig.

That does not mean the scoring system is nonsense. It means the scoring system cannot eat the food for me.

The sourness matters because of the richness. The chili changes the citrus. The crisp parts change the softer ones. You can pull those qualities apart and evaluate each one, and you will learn something about the dish.

But the moment you put them back together, you are eating sisig again, not a set of categories.

Movies can be like that.

There are films I admire more than I actually want to watch. There are films whose importance I understand perfectly well and rarely feel an urge to revisit. There are movies with flaws I could point out all day that I would still choose, tonight, over supposedly superior films.

I have caught myself doing all three.

A ranking eventually asks me to resolve those contradictions into an order.

But the person doing the resolving is still the same person: a nurse who knows what exhaustion feels like, a father of four who knows what uninterrupted time costs, a former Catholic school kid who cannot quite stop organizing things, and a Filipino American who knows that sometimes the sophisticated answer really is:

I want the sisig.

That is not an argument against criticism. It is an argument for admitting who is doing it.

The misleading leaderboard is the one that pretends nobody is standing behind it.

I don't need another person to reproduce my exact ranking for it to have value. I need them to see enough of the reasoning underneath it to know where, and why, we part company.

That is enough.

Calling a ranking autobiographical does not mean biography settles the argument.

“This is who I am, so this is my list” would not be criticism at all. The autobiography matters because it exposes some of the conditions behind the judgment. The judgment still has to survive contact with the film.

You can watch what I watched, examine the reasons I gave, and decide that I saw it badly. That possibility is why another person’s ranking can matter. Private taste becomes useful when it is turned into a public argument.

Rank Is Sometimes a Neighborhood

Another mistake is assuming that every gap on a ranked list means the same thing.

It doesn't.

The difference between #5 and #205 may be enormous. The difference between #51 and #57 may be practically nothing.

At the upper end of a serious list, the problem actually gets worse because nearly everything being compared is already exceptional.

Think about street addresses.

If two people live fifty miles apart, the distance tells you something.

If they live at 214 and 216 on the same street, the numbers tell you almost nothing about whose house is better.

Rank often works that way.

A film's position tells you roughly where it lives. The exact address matters less.

As a list gets bigger, there will inevitably be places where the precision of the number exceeds the precision of the judgment. That is simply what happens when you force messy comparisons into a clean sequence.

Some parts of a list have steep drops. Other parts are flat and crowded. A movie can move ten places and barely change company.

The numbers look tidy even when the thinking underneath them is not.

A ranking becomes more useful when the reader understands that.

The Pleasure of Being Wrong

There is another reason I like rankings.

They give people something concrete to reject.

You find a movie you love at #86.

Your first thought is immediate: Eighty-six? That's ridiculous.

Good.

Now we are somewhere interesting.

Why should it be higher? What does the list fail to see? What matters more to you than it did to me?

Maybe you are defending the movie. Maybe you are defending a memory. Maybe you think I am undervaluing an entire genre.

In fact, the middle of a long list may tell you more about its personality than the top. Everyone expects certain monuments to be somewhere near the summit. The revealing choices are farther down: the comedy raised above solemn prestige, the famous classic quietly lowered, the genre film treated as central rather than disposable, the supposedly minor work given a place nobody expected. Those are the places where a ranking stops repeating consensus and starts showing you what it believes.

Maybe you watch the film again and prove your own point. Or maybe the movie embarrasses you a little.

I have had both happen.

Either way, the disagreement has done something useful.

The ranking does not fail because you reject it. Sometimes rejection is exactly what makes it worth having.

If everyone nodded politely from #1 all the way to the bottom, I would be suspicious.

Either the list had achieved a kind of perfection nobody has ever managed before, or it had simply reproduced familiar opinion so faithfully that there was nothing left to argue about.

Neither sounds very interesting.

The useful sentence is not: Your list is wrong.

It is: Your list is wrong because...

That last word opens the whole thing up.

Now you are no longer just reacting to my hierarchy. You are beginning to build your own.

Maybe that is one of the best things a ranking can do.

It can make you notice what you value.

So What Does Number One Mean?

After hundreds of comparisons, somebody eventually has to sit at the top.

What should we make of that?

Probably less than we usually do.

Number One does not mean cinema has finished a tournament and crowned a winner. It does not mean every film below it has lost, and it does not mean another thoughtful viewer should arrive at the same answer.

I may not arrive at the same answer forever either.

It means the chain of judgments had to end somewhere.

So it ended there.

That may sound modest, but it is still meaningful.

Once there is a first film, there has to be a second. Then a third. Eventually all the comfortable general statements about what I value have to survive contact with actual films sitting next to one another.

That is where the list becomes useful to me.

I can see the choices. You can challenge them. I can change them. You can move them around in your head.

And if you do, sooner or later you have to ask yourself why.

At that point the list has stopped being entirely mine.

There is something funny about attaching neat little integers to works of art that routinely make language feel inadequate.

I think that is healthy.

A little embarrassment keeps the exercise from becoming scripture.

So the number beside the film is not the last word.

It is closer to a marker planted in unstable ground.

It says: For now, I put it here.

Walk over and look at where I put it. Then tell me why you'd move it.

That is the problem with Number One.

It looks like the end of the argument.

It never was.