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jlhHey it's my 2000th Livejournal entry! And in honor of that I'm going to be completely self-indulgent and actually write a long essay of the sort I don't really put on my LJ anymore. You know, for nostalgia's sake.
Let's start with a brief disclaimer: I read and loved Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which got so close to so many things I've been thinking about for years now that I can't tell you for sure which of the ideas I'm talking about below are my own from years ago and which came from Carl Wilson's book, so let's just state at the front that I'm heavily influenced by it and keep going. Oh: READ THAT BOOK.*
Or, let's start with an infamous and often-parodied album cover:
It's the cover of a collection of certified-gold records, which interestingly isn't that great a collection (only two made it onto the #1 collection issued a few years back) and is probably more known for the cover and a title that says, in effect: "Elvis is very popular among many people, so you should check him out, because how can all those people be wrong?"
Studies show that blockbusters, generally, draw their large numbers not by winning over most of the audience for their type of product, but by drawing in people who don't usually consume that product. In other words, the reason Avatar is a blockbuster is not because most people who see movies saw Avatar, but because Avatar got a lot of people who don't see movies to come down to the local multiplex. It's easier to see with other blockbusters—The DaVinci Code became huge not with people who read books, but people who never read them, for whom that was the only book they read that year. Susan Boyle's album was huge because people who never buy music went out and bought it.
50,000,000 Elvis fans, or whatever fans, can't be wrong, because taste isn't right or wrong. But that doesn't mean that I have an obligation to follow them.
Or here's an even better and more direct example. The indie band Of Montreal played a show here in New York Tuesday night, and there are two videos up on YouTube from that show that are making the rounds. In one, Solange Knowles joins the band onstage for a cover of "I Want You Back." In the other, Susan Sarandon gives over-the-knee spankings to men dressed as pigs. Of course the second one will have more hits, because you don't need to know anything about Of Montreal or even Susan Sarandon to find a milf spanking pigmen to be worth your three minutes of viral video attention. To care about the cover, you'd have to know that Solange is Beyonce's sister and Jay-Z's sister-in-law and that she's a singer in her own right who's really into the indie scene and infamously got her relatives to attend a Grizzly Bear show a few months ago—basically, she's one of those cultural glue types. So having her get up on stage with a band who write songs called "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" to sing an old Jackson 5 song is inherently interesting from a musical perspective. It may be more interesting to people in the scene, but the spanking video will be seen by more people. But that doesn't make the spanking video better or more worthy of viewing. Make sense?
Note that I'm on the far end of the "you should pay attention to mainstream culture" debate, because I very much think you should. If you're still asking your friends "now who's this Lady Gaga?" then yeah, I'm going to tell you you should pay more attention. You should have a general sense that there is a pop singer called Lady Gaga who tends to dramatic performances and out-there clothing and wigs and has some song that contains the line "p-p-p-poker face." What I'm not saying is that you have to like her, or buy her music, or want to watch her on the Grammys.
When we talk about Avatar's box office record (and there are arguments for and against whether it really is a record) what are we saying? That it's a movie everyone is aware of is undeniable. That it's a movie everyone should agree is good, however, is arguable. Avatar could win all the awards—I wouldn't bet against it winning the Oscar though there's a possibility it may not—and be number one at the box office from now until Iron Man 2 opens, and none of those things will mean that I have to "break down" and say it's a good movie. It doesn't even mean that I have to break down and see it. (Bad movies can win Best Picture, like Crash, which is a preachy, facile, self-congratulatory piece of shit, or The Greatest Show on Earth which isn't even a movie as much as a collection of set pieces featuring charming circus folk plus a maudlin subplot about a mute clown.)
None of these things, in fact, mean anything at all. None of these outside factors people use to justify liking this or that—it's popular/it's obscure, it's award-winning/it's an indie darling, etc, etc—none of them can actually justify your taste because nothing can justify your taste. We all like having our tastes justified; we all want to "level up." It's more fun to be in a community of people who have similar tastes and can all be happy about something together. But there literally is no right or wrong here. There's just stuff we like and stuff we don't.
Where I think some of the _____fail conversations drift into dangerous territory is in suggesting that a particular genre can be so problematic as to have no reason for anyone to like it. I tried to be very specific in my post about Avatar that the reason I wasn't going to see it was that the things it was bound to do well aren't things I care about, and the things it was bound to do poorly are things I care about. As a matter of fact, all that stuff people said about how Avatar was going to suck (except maybe that the CGI wasn't very good) were completely true. For some people those sucky things overwhelmed the cool parts, and for other people they didn't.
There are other genres, other movies and books, where there is plenty of _____fail and I consume them anyway, because they do give me something I love, be it romance or comedy or music. (I'm much more aurally responsive than visually; give me pretty pictures and I'll nod politely, but give me a great song and I'm yours.) Romance in particular is built on heteronormativity, monogamy, and stereotypical gender roles; it's usually racially segregated, ableist and complicit in the dominant beauty culture, not to mention pro-capitalist to an extreme. At its core is the fantasy that there is one perfect person out there for everyone, and it's your job to find them. And yet … I adore romance! I read them, I write them, I watch them in movies. I'm very critical of them because I've consumed so many, and I think you can write a romance that doesn't do any of the above list of things—but you can't get rid of the idea that the happy ending is finding that person(s) and making it work, and the tragic ending is finding that person(s) and not being able to be with them due to external factors. If your ending is something else, it may be a very good story, probably a more realistic story, but it isn't a romance. You may not like romances because of that core fantasy, and then additionally be dismissive of them for their problems. But mostly, you just don't like romances. That's okay! That doesn't make you cooler for not liking them, or me cooler for liking them.
I'm not a huge fan of sci-fi or high fantasy. It does have big fat gender, sexuality, and race problems, which aren't so much endemic to the form as they are relics of a kind of laziness on the part of the creators—just as with romances. Sci-fi and fantasy can change, can work on the problems, and still keep the core of what they are. But while I personally am willing to indulge in the fantasy of romance, I'm not willing for the most part to indulge in the fantasy of the hero's journey. So I'll watch the kind of sci-fi that appeal to people who don't really like it much, you know, like Star Trek. That doesn't mean Star Trek is bad sci-fi—I'm certainly not the person to evaluate that—but that it has enough other stuff in it that it appeals to me. And that's also okay! It doesn't mean I'm a "mundane" because I don't like sci-fi; it means I like other stuff. I'm not cooler, you're not cooler, we're all cool.
Or as Brian Moylan said in Gawker:
The seedy underbelly of this is that genres that are seen as female—romance, musicals, female-centered comedies—are of lower prestige than genres that are seen as male—action, sci-fi, fantasy, male-centered comedies. We see this replicated in geek spaces all the time; even though there's an argument to be made that sci-fi might be held in lower esteem by the culture than, say, straight-ahead drama, plenty of geeks will in turn denigrate romance in favor of action, say that "plot" only means "adventure plot" and that all romance in a narrative is "fan service." That's really just internalized cultural misogyny, or as someone said to me the other day, "the way that the tomboy police and the geek police feed on each other is pretty damn toxic." (Which means the next time some guy tells me that musicals are unrealistic but action movies aren't, I'm going to kick him in the face.)
It's incredibly difficult, when we build communities based on taste agreement, to just like what you like and not worry about it. What you like becomes a badge, with a certain amount of status or cred attached depending on the community you're in, and as I said, we all want to level up. But seeking external justification for your taste—or insisting that other people share your taste because of that external justification—is a losing strategy. When something you like becomes a big hit, or gains prestige, it can feel like you won, personally. But you didn't really win anything. The thing you like still exists. The things you don't like still exist. The people who didn't agree with you are still not going to agree with you.
So maybe, stop fighting so hard? You can't win, because there's nothing to be won.
*You could also, while you're at it, read Pictures at a Revolution, the amazing book by Mark Harris which follows the making, marketing, and reception of the five movies nominated for Best Picture of 1967: Doctor Doolittle, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Graduate. It's one of those "turning point" books, but it still has affection and understanding for the dinosaurs even as it lauds the harbingers of the new—an attitude I think a lot of folks pontificating on the internet could learn from.
Let's start with a brief disclaimer: I read and loved Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which got so close to so many things I've been thinking about for years now that I can't tell you for sure which of the ideas I'm talking about below are my own from years ago and which came from Carl Wilson's book, so let's just state at the front that I'm heavily influenced by it and keep going. Oh: READ THAT BOOK.*
Or, let's start with an infamous and often-parodied album cover:
It's the cover of a collection of certified-gold records, which interestingly isn't that great a collection (only two made it onto the #1 collection issued a few years back) and is probably more known for the cover and a title that says, in effect: "Elvis is very popular among many people, so you should check him out, because how can all those people be wrong?"
Studies show that blockbusters, generally, draw their large numbers not by winning over most of the audience for their type of product, but by drawing in people who don't usually consume that product. In other words, the reason Avatar is a blockbuster is not because most people who see movies saw Avatar, but because Avatar got a lot of people who don't see movies to come down to the local multiplex. It's easier to see with other blockbusters—The DaVinci Code became huge not with people who read books, but people who never read them, for whom that was the only book they read that year. Susan Boyle's album was huge because people who never buy music went out and bought it.
50,000,000 Elvis fans, or whatever fans, can't be wrong, because taste isn't right or wrong. But that doesn't mean that I have an obligation to follow them.
Or here's an even better and more direct example. The indie band Of Montreal played a show here in New York Tuesday night, and there are two videos up on YouTube from that show that are making the rounds. In one, Solange Knowles joins the band onstage for a cover of "I Want You Back." In the other, Susan Sarandon gives over-the-knee spankings to men dressed as pigs. Of course the second one will have more hits, because you don't need to know anything about Of Montreal or even Susan Sarandon to find a milf spanking pigmen to be worth your three minutes of viral video attention. To care about the cover, you'd have to know that Solange is Beyonce's sister and Jay-Z's sister-in-law and that she's a singer in her own right who's really into the indie scene and infamously got her relatives to attend a Grizzly Bear show a few months ago—basically, she's one of those cultural glue types. So having her get up on stage with a band who write songs called "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" to sing an old Jackson 5 song is inherently interesting from a musical perspective. It may be more interesting to people in the scene, but the spanking video will be seen by more people. But that doesn't make the spanking video better or more worthy of viewing. Make sense?
Note that I'm on the far end of the "you should pay attention to mainstream culture" debate, because I very much think you should. If you're still asking your friends "now who's this Lady Gaga?" then yeah, I'm going to tell you you should pay more attention. You should have a general sense that there is a pop singer called Lady Gaga who tends to dramatic performances and out-there clothing and wigs and has some song that contains the line "p-p-p-poker face." What I'm not saying is that you have to like her, or buy her music, or want to watch her on the Grammys.
When we talk about Avatar's box office record (and there are arguments for and against whether it really is a record) what are we saying? That it's a movie everyone is aware of is undeniable. That it's a movie everyone should agree is good, however, is arguable. Avatar could win all the awards—I wouldn't bet against it winning the Oscar though there's a possibility it may not—and be number one at the box office from now until Iron Man 2 opens, and none of those things will mean that I have to "break down" and say it's a good movie. It doesn't even mean that I have to break down and see it. (Bad movies can win Best Picture, like Crash, which is a preachy, facile, self-congratulatory piece of shit, or The Greatest Show on Earth which isn't even a movie as much as a collection of set pieces featuring charming circus folk plus a maudlin subplot about a mute clown.)
None of these things, in fact, mean anything at all. None of these outside factors people use to justify liking this or that—it's popular/it's obscure, it's award-winning/it's an indie darling, etc, etc—none of them can actually justify your taste because nothing can justify your taste. We all like having our tastes justified; we all want to "level up." It's more fun to be in a community of people who have similar tastes and can all be happy about something together. But there literally is no right or wrong here. There's just stuff we like and stuff we don't.
Where I think some of the _____fail conversations drift into dangerous territory is in suggesting that a particular genre can be so problematic as to have no reason for anyone to like it. I tried to be very specific in my post about Avatar that the reason I wasn't going to see it was that the things it was bound to do well aren't things I care about, and the things it was bound to do poorly are things I care about. As a matter of fact, all that stuff people said about how Avatar was going to suck (except maybe that the CGI wasn't very good) were completely true. For some people those sucky things overwhelmed the cool parts, and for other people they didn't.
There are other genres, other movies and books, where there is plenty of _____fail and I consume them anyway, because they do give me something I love, be it romance or comedy or music. (I'm much more aurally responsive than visually; give me pretty pictures and I'll nod politely, but give me a great song and I'm yours.) Romance in particular is built on heteronormativity, monogamy, and stereotypical gender roles; it's usually racially segregated, ableist and complicit in the dominant beauty culture, not to mention pro-capitalist to an extreme. At its core is the fantasy that there is one perfect person out there for everyone, and it's your job to find them. And yet … I adore romance! I read them, I write them, I watch them in movies. I'm very critical of them because I've consumed so many, and I think you can write a romance that doesn't do any of the above list of things—but you can't get rid of the idea that the happy ending is finding that person(s) and making it work, and the tragic ending is finding that person(s) and not being able to be with them due to external factors. If your ending is something else, it may be a very good story, probably a more realistic story, but it isn't a romance. You may not like romances because of that core fantasy, and then additionally be dismissive of them for their problems. But mostly, you just don't like romances. That's okay! That doesn't make you cooler for not liking them, or me cooler for liking them.
I'm not a huge fan of sci-fi or high fantasy. It does have big fat gender, sexuality, and race problems, which aren't so much endemic to the form as they are relics of a kind of laziness on the part of the creators—just as with romances. Sci-fi and fantasy can change, can work on the problems, and still keep the core of what they are. But while I personally am willing to indulge in the fantasy of romance, I'm not willing for the most part to indulge in the fantasy of the hero's journey. So I'll watch the kind of sci-fi that appeal to people who don't really like it much, you know, like Star Trek. That doesn't mean Star Trek is bad sci-fi—I'm certainly not the person to evaluate that—but that it has enough other stuff in it that it appeals to me. And that's also okay! It doesn't mean I'm a "mundane" because I don't like sci-fi; it means I like other stuff. I'm not cooler, you're not cooler, we're all cool.
Or as Brian Moylan said in Gawker:
When bitching about musicals, people always say, "I hate musicals, because the people are in the supermarket and they break out in song. I can't believe that." […] There are only two solutions for musical movies in the future, either the songs need to be part of the narrative because they are about music—like we saw in Dreamgirls or we get week after week on Glee—or the movie needs to tell those "they don't sing in the supermarket" people to shut the fuck up. It's a musical. Busting out into song is as integral a part of the genre as meeting cute is to romantic comedies. And the "supermarket" haters aren't going to pay to see your movie anyway, so why try to please them?
The seedy underbelly of this is that genres that are seen as female—romance, musicals, female-centered comedies—are of lower prestige than genres that are seen as male—action, sci-fi, fantasy, male-centered comedies. We see this replicated in geek spaces all the time; even though there's an argument to be made that sci-fi might be held in lower esteem by the culture than, say, straight-ahead drama, plenty of geeks will in turn denigrate romance in favor of action, say that "plot" only means "adventure plot" and that all romance in a narrative is "fan service." That's really just internalized cultural misogyny, or as someone said to me the other day, "the way that the tomboy police and the geek police feed on each other is pretty damn toxic." (Which means the next time some guy tells me that musicals are unrealistic but action movies aren't, I'm going to kick him in the face.)
It's incredibly difficult, when we build communities based on taste agreement, to just like what you like and not worry about it. What you like becomes a badge, with a certain amount of status or cred attached depending on the community you're in, and as I said, we all want to level up. But seeking external justification for your taste—or insisting that other people share your taste because of that external justification—is a losing strategy. When something you like becomes a big hit, or gains prestige, it can feel like you won, personally. But you didn't really win anything. The thing you like still exists. The things you don't like still exist. The people who didn't agree with you are still not going to agree with you.
So maybe, stop fighting so hard? You can't win, because there's nothing to be won.
*You could also, while you're at it, read Pictures at a Revolution, the amazing book by Mark Harris which follows the making, marketing, and reception of the five movies nominated for Best Picture of 1967: Doctor Doolittle, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Graduate. It's one of those "turning point" books, but it still has affection and understanding for the dinosaurs even as it lauds the harbingers of the new—an attitude I think a lot of folks pontificating on the internet could learn from.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 04:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 05:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 04:39 am (UTC)and
But seeking external justification for your taste—or insisting that other people share your taste because of that external justification—is a losing strategy.
A lot of YES, to both.