Boyhood

This Slate discussion seems sort of backwards:

I liked the earlier years of Boyhood when it felt like an ensemble picture, though the parents, too, got less interesting thanks to the film’s message that eventually we all become square and middle-class. But as the focus narrowed on Mason, I completely lost interest. That ending with that sunset felt like unearned, banal triumph—congrats, kiddo, looks like you’ve got a reason to put a sock on your dorm-room doorknob.

This is the danger of bringing a little too much to one's viewing. The movie read to me in the opposite way: the parents become more interesting as they get older, since the son gets a progressively larger view of them. Ethan Hawke isn't cool anymore, but he's a much better father, more grounded and mature, who has opened himself up to experiences whose validity he had previously denied (he's clearly somewhere on the religious map, if not as crazy as some of the relatives). The mother is an accomplished professional who gets to do work she loves, and the focus is at least as much on her as anyone--she gets the pleasure of seeing her son succeed, all that work coming to fruition, and a real moment of actual pain at losing him to college. What the parents are no longer is godlike, inexplicable beings: they're people. And people are both deeply interesting and a little boring.

The ending is, indeed, an "unearned, banal triumph," which seems as accurate a description of going away to college as one could imagine--it feels, significantly, like both the beginning and the end of something big, when it is (in reality) usually neither.

Prince > Michael Jackson

Prince, Sign 'O' the Times (available for free for all you Amazon Prime havers)

A few months ago, I was listening to a Michael Jackson song--"Bad," probably--in the way that it is occasionally possible to hear something you've heard a thousand times with comparatively new ears. What I heard was a basically strong melody and composition that was positively swimming in dated 1980s recording effects--compression, chorus (a light delay that is more or less coterminous with 80s-sounding music), synthesizers everywhere rather than actual instruments. If it were a song produced by anyone else, I would set it aside as a nostalgia piece, and nothing more. Having heard it in one song, it was easy enough to hear in the rest--Dangerous ups its production values to the state of 1989's art--and it made me wonder how something so obviously time-contained could remain so popular. But people still like Bon Jovi, so there really is no accounting for taste.

By comparison, this is disc 2 of Sign 'O' the Times:
"U Got the Look"
"If I Was Your Girlfriend"
"Strange Relationship"
"I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man"
"The Cross"
"It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night"
"Adore"

Seven songs, six of which are legitimate Prince classics, one of which ("The Cross") on the short list of his best songs ever. The seventh song is a nine-minute funk jam and workout, a format at which Prince excels. What's impressive is how the songs vary: "U Got the Look" is very late-80s in its production; "The Cross" could be from pretty much any period of time. But even accounting for the time-bound features of the album, it transcends them all. A few speculative reasons for this: for as much as Prince is synonymous with synthesizers, he is also a multi-instrument specialist, and it makes a notable difference that many of the synth-y sounds are actually guitars; it gives a fullness to the composition of each track that Michael Jackson can't hope to match, even on his Quincy Jones-produced songs (whose merits redound to Quincy Jones, if anyone). Many of Prince's songs would be as good, or better, stripped of their studio-enhanced qualities. The songs manage to cover a wide range of textures and song styles, but all sound quite distinctively of Prince.

And really, any comparison of Michael Jackson and Prince will face the depth-of-catalogue issue: Michael had Off the Wall (parts of it), Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous (parts of it), and a few late singles of negligible quality. Prince had Controversy, Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Sign 'O' the Times, Lovesexy, and Diamonds and Pearls before turning into the r&b Ryan Adams, releasing so much music so quickly that it becomes hard to track what's good. MJ might (barely) have had a higher peak, but Prince produced more quality music over a longer period.

An Ur-Theory of the Internet

The internet is not cool. There is nothing cool about it.

Facebook was cool, until it was opened to everyone, thus defeating its purpose as a graphical representation of the people college students and graduates know (ie a facebook); less cool until it allowed pictures to be tagged and thus stopped people from putting photos on Facebook;* and not at all cool as the repository for people's bumper sticker-length political musings, meme images that you would have been embarrassed to receive as attachments in an email from your dad 15 years ago, and attempts to position yourself as someone who reads the news.

Twitter was never cool, as evidenced by the ease with which "Tomorrow is [whatever day tomorrow is]" trends. It has also misguidedly convinced people that their thoughts are best expressed in 140-character bursts. Being inarticulate is not cool, especially if you are articulate.**

The rest of the internet is, more or less, television in the 1980s: wildly popular, with content ranging from boring to insulting, depending on one's preferences. 'This was a mildly amusing use of five minutes' is an argument advanced in favor of well-regarded content. What matters is advertising, and thus web publishing is based around those things that drive pageviews, and increase both the length of time spent interacting and the intensity of that interaction. Thus lists, listicles, nostalgia bait, advice columns--most of which now intentionally lead off with the most sensational questions, oral histories and interviews that are barely-edited interview transcripts, and posts that flatter or outrage the biases of that site's audience.

Mgoblog is my favorite site on the internet because it runs like a bespoke outfit: they clearly have goals about when to post new content, and attempt a set schedule week-to-week, and generally fail to do either. Brian writes his game column and publishes it when it's done. Ideally, that's at noon on Mondays, but if it's done at 11:00, it goes up at 11:00. If it's not done until 2:00, it goes up at 2:00. There's very little that feels that unforced anymore, though it certainly helps if you're already the largest single-team college sports blog.

Like tv in the 1980s, there are exceptions, both of the "things that are good considering what else is out there" and "things that are objectively good" variety, but they are rare.


*I cannot be the only one whose friends have a lot of pictures from 2006-2008 or so, and very few after. Or, at least, very few until they start having babies.

**I know many interesting people on twitter, and almost exclusively through twitter, and this is intended as no slight on them. I am just convinced that however interesting they are on twitter, they're more interesting in longer form.

Boy howdy:

Some describe conservative life in their liberal enclaves as akin to living “underground” or being in the “counterculture.” This romantic feeling of embattlement is fundamental to the undergraduate conservative’s identity. “I really have been able to fine-tune my arguments and my thoughts and my politics as a result of being around so many liberal people,” says one student. “I really sincerely feel that you become a much lazier thinker if you are part of the majority because you just aren’t challenged that much,” says another.

The latter half is generally true: for whatever reason, students who perceive themselves to be sledding against the majority write better papers. The first half is more problematic, especially given how widespread the culture of conservative victimhood is, and how paradoxical: "Those two contradictory cries—the left have overrun our campuses! the media overstate the student left’s strength!—sum up the overdeveloped sense of siege that has long animated conservatism." The very strong tendency is to read every thought, development or behavior through the ongoing and neverending battle. It's not just that the battle is ongoing, it's that it can never possibly end, and this view tends to warp exactly the sort of sustained reflection conservatism prides itself on; if one is on the team, one gets a hearing. Otherwise not. (For evidence, look at the furious energy expended on tearing down Wendell Berry after he expressed his favorable view of same-sex marriage--'he has betrayed our side the in battle therefore he must be wrong!' I never had use for Berry before, and don't now, but the energy devoted to undermining him is furious and unseemly.)

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

The Dark Knight Rises: After all the controversy generated online, I was looking forward to this as an unparalleled opportunity to engage in contrarianism of the "I told you so" variety. Imagine my disappointment, then, that I enjoyed the movie. Not as a serious statement about Our Times, nor as a strikingly realistic final entry in a trilogy marked by attempts at acutely measuring human psychological responses. I enjoyed it, instead, as the one thing it probably least wanted to be: a comic-book movie.

The plot was preposterous, taking a left turn from reality at the moment that the CIA agent does not ask the identities of the two additional captives, much less take off their hoods to see who they are. The rest was a mess. The dialogue was ridiculous, alternating (unintentional) camp with painfully literal conversations about the themes of the movie--the camp heightened by the tendency to speak dialogue in four or five word bursts (Batman and Bane being the worst offenders), and by the inelegance of most of the important lines, which attempted to avoid being one-liners by becoming too verbose (Catwoman's line when she saves Batman is one clause too long to be elegant or witty). The motivations of the characters were shallow--Bane did it for love, y'all--and missed too many opportunities for conceptual richness. It's a pity that Talia isn't revealed until the end, because wouldn't have been interesting to watch a movie in which the protagonist and the antagonist are both motivated by the deaths of a parent or parents, all of whom were murdered when in the process of attempting to make the world a better place? Wouldn't that nullify approximately 95% of Batman's self-righteousness, and cast a better, more interesting light on how much of his character is based on vengeance (just directed at different subjects), and how thin his conception of justice actually was? Wouldn't that constitute an actual reason to do away with the Batman persona, along with explaining its strange allure to Bruce Wayne?

Instead, we got some cool new Bat-toys, a largely incomprehensible plot, and a fetishized Bat-death, undone not fewer than five minutes after it supposedly happened. Perfect popcorn.

When I occasionally talk about the impoverishment of critical vocabulary, this is exactly the sort of thing I mean:

The Dark Knight Rises has a fairly complex view of heroism and symbolism, recognizing that people need heroes while also realizing that the line between leadership and demagoguery is thin.

The film's view is in no way complex. First, the film's treatment of this theme can be adequately summarized in a sentence. The discussion captures the essence of the film's view: it omits examples, but no content. Second, one knows this about the film since there are a number of conversations within the movie itself that discuss exactly this point (sample question for discussion: does Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon's treatment of Harvey Dent as an unimpeachable ideal ultimately help or hinder their attempt to bring justice?). Third, it in no way represents a 'complex' view of anything, but rather the fundamental starting principle of all comic books, and by extension comic-book movies: the presence of qualities that make one 'super' can be used to both good and bad ends. Heck, even Aristotle was clear enough on this point: to live outside the polis one needs to be a beast or a god.

"But while we're making grand proclamations, the one thing that Lena Dunham has most definitely done for all of womankind is to emancipate them, forever and ever, from being The Friend."

Were you aware that Lena Dunham and Louis C.K. are responsible for toppling* long-standing TV tropes? Impressive work, especially considering Dunham managed it in ten episodes of one season, and C.K. has managed it in 25 or so. I might have doubted the ability of one or two programs to radically change things in such a short period of time, but that's why we have the internet: to establish timeless truths that are definitely not going to be revised at any point in the future.


*Of course, neither of them actually topples the stereotype: they merely invest them with human feeling.

It might just be a coincidence, but I'm fairly certain there must be some internal New York Magazine blogging standard that requires every single post to reference Lena Dunham. Who is now pretty much the female Louis C.K.*, complete with faux-backlash to allow people to claim fulsome, credulous praise as somehow contrarian.


*It seems obvious to me, at least, that much of the love directed at C.K. has to do with male critics who like someone who raises the aesthetic and intellectual stakes of their lives, and the rise of Dunham is similar: it's no coincidence that the target audience finds the content deeply personally flattering.

Somewhere I have a list of claims a speaker can make that will cause me to instantly suspect the veracity of their argument. Prominent on this list is any thesis that covers over a hundred years: a carefully-written book might be able to connect all the relevant threads: a hour-long talk will not. Similarly, any claim that involves a sufficiently large-scale abstract noun: for example, 'religion.'

Does religion cause violence? Only if you have no idea what qualifies as religion, as apparently many academics who study the question do not. As someone who a. knows a decent amount about the development of theology, Christian and otherwise, in Europe and b. studies the late-medieval and early modern period, when people were constantly fighting about 'religion,' this seems obvious to me. All possible cases are sufficiently complex that I'm not sure I could say what is 'really' driving decision-making: does Ferdinand II, during the Thirty Years War, honestly believe in the correctness of his Jesuit Catholic view and consider converting Protestants and other strands of Catholic to his point of view to be a good thing for their souls? Probably. Is he also a political leader who is attempting to control most of Europe and weaken his adversaries, Protestant or Catholic? Certainly. Which is 'actually' determining his policies? Both, or some combination thereof, which I am not certain one could specify apart from inspection of his soul. So any large-ish claims will be close to unprovable.

Slate is a grand experiment in trolling the rest of the internet, and in general, I try to avoid taking the bait. But this is just too dumb: the Supreme Court shouldn't comment on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act because Congress and the President have already decided it's constitutional. No, really:

Passing a major, controversial piece of national legislation is a heavy lift. It requires the support of 218 members of the House, 60 Senators, and the president. It requires committee hearings and grandstanding, takes up hundreds of hours of cable news time and thousands of inches of newspaper columns, engages activists of all stripes, and requires intense negotiation, the expenditure of political capital, and the imperiling of electoral prospects. It should not also require the blessing of Anthony Kennedy.

I suppose it will be sufficient to point to the Defense of Marriage Act as a federal law passed under the same conditions. There. Now no one will like this argument.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

The Hunger Games: Somewhere, Michel Foucault is saying "I told you so!"

Went to see the movie this weekend, and had what can fairly be described as an "intensely negative" reaction to it. Call me old-fashioned, but watching a bunch of kids get killed is not my idea of a good cinematic experience.

What interested me the most was that it was a pretty clear example of a type that's been of concern to me for awhile, the movie that attempts to decry the violence that drives the narrative and provides the spectacle. I've previously noted this phenomenon in The Dark Knight and No Country for Old Men, both films whose most important characters are also the worst, and whose violence is both the central part of their appeal and the thing which is formally, if ambiguously, condemned at the end. There's an undeniable fascination in watching a crazy person at work, and this is no doubt part of it, but the glory of violence is too central to the plot of both.

The Hunger Games seems problematic in a worse way: I'm not sure how one watches that movie and develops the necessary attachment to Katniss without having the same reaction as the fictional characters in the movie's world. To want Katniss to win is to want the others to die: some of those deaths will be sad and played up for the narrative quality of their sadness, and some of them will be deserved and so, when the bad kid (kid, not 'guy') gets eaten by dogs, that's a deserved comeuppance rather than a tragic end.

Now, I'm clear that the Games themselves are supposed to stand in analogically for something, which, in the descriptions I've read, is usually something like our own interest in the spectacle of reality television, taken to an extreme end. (I'm leaving aside the politics for the moment). So we're supposed to recognize the cruelty and lack of humanity within the Games themselves; the tragedy comes from those who are forced to play it. And so we're supposed to think the Games are bad, and be glad that Katniss emerges relatively uncorrupted from the whole process.

But it also seems like the movie is forced to re-inscribe all the human reactions the Games are there to critique: the whole thing only works by developing rooting interests, etc. Without accepting the narrative, constructed no less than the various storylines of the Games, that Katniss is good and so should survive, the narrative frisson is gone. And if it's gone, there's nothing left of the movie. I don't intend this to be a critique of movie violence per se, though it seems important that in, say, Die Hard all of Bruce Willis' violence is as a reaction to violence first done to others, nor do I mean it to be a critique of violent movies with political messages: Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead are both good examples of violent movies with political themes that avoid this problem: you can appreciate the analogies being drawn and the context of a zombie movie in which to draw those analogies, or you can simply enjoy them as zombie movies. If you strip the level of critique out of The Hunger Games, all that's left is a pretty horrifying plot.

And it's the second level that I'm not sure exists in the movie itself: the argument of the thing would be strengthened if the viewer was supposed to recognize in their own reactions as perverse and the sort of thing that would make the fictional world possible. But I'm not sure that's the intended reaction, and I'm much more sure it's not the reaction of at least the people I saw the movie with. Which, it seems, leaves one in the awkward position of just having rooted for children to die.

But, as the girlfriend pointed out, I haven't read the book, so there's a definite upward limit on my knowledge of the story. Does the book handle the problem of spectacle and the reader's reaction in a way that anticipates or responds to some of this?

Long-time blog-friend Joe Carter has a truly excellent evisceration of the Front Porch Republic phenomenon. He does a good job of isolating the problems of localism as it pertains to food:

For example, one professor (they were almost all professors) presented his localist bona fides by explaining how he bought his vegetables from a local food co-op. He was very proud of the fact that he paid a higher price to support a local farmer—despite the fact that the same vegetables from the same local farmer could be bought at Whole Foods. For most agrarians throughout history, food was considered fuel for survival and cheap food has made it possible for populations to grow and thrive. For the tenured agrarians, though, food is a totem, a symbol of how they are not only making the “right” consumption choices but how they are supporting the environment and the community in the process (a debatable assumption). The professor’s underlying message—though admittedly presented rather winsomely—was that if you bought bananas at Wegmans rather than whatever was in season from your local farmer, you were part of the problem.

During the question and answer session that followed, an earnest student stood up and asked how people like him—poor kids on the college’s meal plan—were expected to partake in the “luxury of buying local.” The professor’s rather dismissive and surprisingly smug answer was that the student should buy what he could afford and make his meals in his dorm room. And if the student couldn’t afford the higher prices charged by local farmers, then the right thing to do, said the professor, was to eat less food. Hunger was the price one pays for philosophic consistency. Can’t afford organic arugula? Let them eat leeks.

Here's where I disagree: "They respect freedom—they just want you to use it to make the right choices." If this were the case, I'd have no real problem with the FPR argument. I think the actual argument is different--something like "freedom only obtains when the right choices are made." The person who buys their bananas at Wegmans is not free, or is laboring under a delusion about their freedom, or (most confusing of all) somehow wasting their freedom by making the wrong choice. If freedom is only making the right choices about how to live, and the program of how to live is intricate (to put it nicely), freedom begins to look like its opposite.

This is where the libertarians have a serious advantage--the willingness to admit plural conceptions of the good. Modern city life and "authentic" rural life are neither better nor worse than each other, they're just different. One can live with integrity in either environment; one can live without in both. The behaviors, beliefs, and dispositions that actually matter can be fostered or prevented in either: country folk turned bad are no more incredible a possibility than good city folk. Making the worth of one's moral character hang on where one's food is bought, or where one lives, is just madness.*

Also, unrelatedly, except it's in the post: monarchism is to real conservatism what defenses of the antebellum south are to libertarianism: immature, politically and historically naive, and the sort of thing that (rightly) keeps each to the margins of American political life.


* Not least because it automatically disqualifies some from virtue because they were born in the wrong place. Rod Dreher will always have the proper bona fides no matter how much of his adult life he lived in major U.S. cities; someone born in Manhattan can stay there, and be authentic but contrary to the full spirit of liberty, or can move out to someplace rural, and be an interloper who has forsaken their roots.

Jonathan Lethem does a pretty good job of laying into James Wood:

What’s at stake is the matter of unsanctioned journeys into the life of culture. And I don’t believe anyone sanctions any other person’s journey into the life of culture. This is the point where I need to confess that my attention to James Wood, in the years since sending my letter, has been as cursory as it was before that uncomfortable passage (uncomfortable for me; I doubt I ruffled his feathers). Earlier I’d been content to sustain a cloudy image of a persuasive new critic who made people excited and nervous by passionately attacking novels that people (including myself) passionately believed in; now I found myself content to revise that in favor of an impression of a unpersuasive critic whose air of erudite amplitude veiled — barely — a punitive parochialism. It didn’t make me want to read him, so I’m not qualified to make any great pronouncements. I’ve only glanced, over these years, and it may be that my confirmation bias is in play when I do. Here’s what I see in my glances. When Wood praises, he mentions a writer’s higher education, and their overt high-literary influences, a lot. He likes things with certain provenances; I suppose that liking, which makes some people uneasy, is exactly what made me enraged. When he pans, his tone is often passive-aggressive, couched in weariness, even woundedness. Just beneath lies a ferocity which seems to wish to restore order to a disordered world.

I disagree with Lethem on the larger point about culture, but he's spot-on about Wood's tendency to confuse credentials for excellence.

(Via Alan Jacobs)

Reading Pascal Probably Isn't Going to Teach You These Things, Either

Even when it comes to conservative critiques of academia, this is a strange opening paragraph, to say the least:

The egalitarian ideology of our time, writes the philosopher Philippe Beneton, in Equality by Default, cuts the human heart and soul out of the profession of the teacher. “Why give priority to classic literature,” he asks, “when Pascal is no better or no worse than any other author, when his style of writing is just one technique among others?” The teacher becomes a technician—and often a not highly skilled technician at that, as witness our millions of young people who cannot calculate a 15 percent gratuity for a restaurant bill, or who cannot name the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The snark in the title: I'm not sure how well Pascal would do at naming the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The great mission of education as “the formation of taste, of character, of will, of civic spirit” is set aside. “How can a school educate,” he concludes, “when it refuses to distinguish between an educated person and an uneducated person? How can it shape a human being when it no longer knows what a human being is?” (emphasis mine).

I don't think there's any great dispute about whether someone who can't calculate a 15% tip is well-educated (leaving aside the possibility that one might be educated in many other areas but not math; absent-minded professors presumably qualify as educated). The rest of the article seems to rest of the--prettily presented--contention that the Classics are More Valuable than Whatever It Is Kids Spend Their Time On Now (content left unspecified). Per the examples given, one is also not going to learn math or geography from Dante or Plato, and heaven help those who try to learn science from Aristotle.

Esolen focuses his essay on what might be broadly considered humanities education. At the very least the words "science" and "math" never appear. This is the problem: even accepting the contention that the humanities have sunk into a morass of relativistic judgments that fundamentally betray our youth, science and math have not. They are good, old-fashioned subjects where the teacher is presumed (usually correctly) to know more than the students, subjects in which there are tightly-defined correct and incorrect answers, subjects in which failure is possible and success, if it is to be had at all, must be earned through years of patient labor. (I have a friend in engineering who graduates when he gets his machine/experiment to work. Singular: it's just one experiment. He's in year eight at the moment. And if you've ever watched someone pipette or run samples for hours, it becomes obvious how intrinsically more interesting the humanities are.)

Instead of pointing to this as a continually successful model of good education, it comes in for criticism because science doesn't 'get it':

Where is that vision of homogeneity to be found? Wherever, Beneton suggests, we find the reduction of man to his constituent parts, or to his environment, or to whatever else will replace the mystery of the human person with a general and scientistic “law.” We would then be equal—in our unmeaning. The carbon that makes up my flesh, the calcium that makes up my bones, the iron that gives my blood its energy-delivering properties, are no different from those in anyone else’s body. The encounter with a particular being, the irreplaceable person, yields to indifference, as one lump of flesh is much like another. One family, like a molecule in the economic crystal that surrounds it, is no “better” than another such molecule. What has happened is that, instead of the object of knowledge determining the method of study, the method of study has determined and reduced the object of knowledge. “The great works thus lose their status of great works,” says Beneton, and are reduced to cultural artifacts, to be explained by the technician, the neutral archaeologist, and not honored for their beauty or wisdom.

So let's all appreciate the irony of someone beginning an essay complaining about the lack of objective standards to mark knowledge, and to separate the learned from the unlearned, eventually complaining about a surfeit of objective standards to mark knowledge, which somehow manage to reduce the overall body of that knowledge. Whatever learning science and math seem to represent, it doesn't count.

I am both a Great Books person and an avid reader. I don't disagree with the contention that most people would be better rounded as human beings if they read more, and read more of what's good. But this is not the argument for that position.

It used to come up all the time, and still does, so: "they" can be used as a singular pronoun. Shakespeare and Jane Austen both say so. I will spare the remaining lecture on why it's an acceptable use and make a plain old argument based on authority.

Thank goodness the world of comedy is now open to sexy women, who could apparently never make it work before. Good to know that being unbelievably beautiful is no longer a bar to steady work in the entertainment business.

(And Tina Fey doesn't qualify somehow. Weirdness all around.)

Via Splitsider.

Posted by Mungowitz on the facebooks:

In a sign the libertarians are winning, I will often employ this logic in the decisions I make. E.g. I could go to the good supermarket (which is cheaper) and not the one closest to where I live, but once I factor in the extra time for travel and standing in line, it ceases to be 'cheaper.'

Via Jacob Levy on twitter, an interesting link functionally attempting to disprove the hostility of the modern university to the Great Books. Ironically enough, it's large research-oriented universities that can support these programs, simply because so many courses and so many instructors are required. Anecdotally, I also had no difficulty finding courses along those lines in my college years (I took Dante and the Russian Novel, British history in the 20th century, etc etc), and my professors tended to be broad-minded about politics whether they made their beliefs explicit or not.

The best explanation I've come up with for the persistence of these complaints is historical: the professors who are at or near the peak of their influence all came up in the mid-80s, and got their first jobs in the late-80s or early-90s. That is to say, they perceived themselves to be (and many in fact were) in a vulnerable position in the Canon Wars, and don't quite see the shift that's occurred in the last 10 years. It's the revenge of the Organization Kid: the people I know and am friendly with are all concerned to help each other develop professionally, and go out of our way to be helpful even when someone else's work begins with assumptions we don't share. For the moment, at least, it appears as a kinder, gentler form of academia.

Some thoughts from the leading edge of the Louis C.K. backlash:

I've finally been able to pinpoint what exactly it is that seems excessive in the praise heaped on Louie. A sample of the praise:

I think Adam is right that C.K. can get away with things that, as Conor puts it, Rush Limbaugh would be pilloried for because people trust him and feel like they have a clear sense of his worldview. And that, of course, because of all the work C.K. put in before he had a critically raved-about television show to build up his credibility as a white guy who is sensitive and intelligent about race in a way that lets him say somewhat raw things.

Except, as best I understand it, C.K. himself has denied this is a valid approach to take towards comedy. Somewhere in my archives unaccessible to search at the moment I discuss a scene in the TV special Talking Funny where Louis C.K. and Ricky Gervais get into an argument about whether a particular dumb joke is funny or not, and if it's funny, why it is. Gervais takes the position that bad jokes are only funny, and can only reflect well on the comedian telling them, if we know that the comedian has built in an ironic appreciation of the joke itself. He gives as an alternate example David Letterman, who is respected even though he tells essentially nothing but bad jokes because he's created a persona in which bad jokes are celebrated for their badness. Letterman gets a pass because he's aware. C.K. takes the opposite position: a joke is funny if it's funny, and it doesn't matter why it's funny, or even if the comic telling the joke has any particular awareness of its humor. The intention of the comic doesn't matter, and probably doesn't even register, if it's knowable at all. Given that, it seems odd to credit C.K. with master intentions behind his work when that doesn't seem to jibe with his reflective view on comedy.

But if all that's true--commentators are reading a level of seriousness into C.K.'s work that is unknowable and quite possibly orthogonal to what he's attempting to do--then it raises a more interesting possibility: the whole critical exercise is a way for otherwise conscientious folks to enjoy the thrill of the transgressive while allowing themselves an intellectual veneer of respectability. And if one wants some evidence for that theory, and for the idea that C.K.'s work is more scattershot than critics will admit, one needs to look no further than the scenes from Louie that are usually omitted from discussions of the show. People will talk about the scene with the suicidal comic, or where Louie confesses his love, or the irony of the racist great aunt as though these are all planned and transcendent moments, while ignoring the homeless guy who gets his head knocked off by a truck, or the abducted-and-replaced homeless guy, or the weirdness on the subway platform* as--irrelevancies? Either way, have to respect a man who gets people to talk up the brilliance of his best work while getting them to ignore all the work he does that they don't like.


*Someone--Sepinwall, maybe?--pointed out C.K. really seems to have it in for homeless people this year.

I know some people amongst whom "heteronormativity" is the go-to example of postmodernism or PC culture run amok. Doing the usual post-move trip to Target, I discovered that "men's soap" is sufficiently different from "women's soap" that it needs to be explicitly labeled as such and placed on a different aisle. Obviously, if a man uses Dove, that's a sign of questionable sexuality; what precludes women from buying Irish Spring or Dial I cannot fathom.