Bright Lights Film Journal's Banned Words.

MEDITATION, n. This is in some ways the most insidious of these terms. It is the most sentimental, pretentious, fanciful, and misleading of this little group. Example: "Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is a meditation on violence." Translation: "Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is an extremely violent movie, filled with bullet-riddled bodies, women beaten to the ground by grunge-faced old cowpokes, Mexicans massacred in churchyards," etc. This concept of meditation is a way of disingenuously stating a concept — most often, violence — while sidestepping its implications and of course the authors' (both critic of the piece and director of the film) involvement, even complicity in it...