poison pen: responding to my hate mail pt 1

Only four months have passed since I stated my on-line journals; and considering a month and a half of that was spent without a working computer, it is no great surprise that the feed-back has been limited. It’s also no surprise to me that what little feed-back I have received has been mostly negative. The sole motivation in creating this site was and is to disrupt the current tone of passive spectatorship that defines the public’s perception of popular and high culture. While it would be serious self-delusion to think that one sporadically updated site could generate even a small amount of damage to the Colossus that the hype-machine has become, all the same I refuse to budge from my commitment to the belief that we can and should have a richer cultural legacy then the pablum we’re currently being spoon fed.

I’m fully aware that there are those who take the questioning of conventional wisdom far too personal; were I for instance to suggest that “Mystic River” was a morally bankrupt exercise further ruined by the least nuanced, ham-fisted acting I’ve ever suffered through, there are those who would not just disagree with my opinion, but react in an explosion of violent self-defense. It’s strange, but I’ve never known it to be lovers of the off-beat or obscure who react so poorly to differing tastes. I have, for instance, admitted to devotees of death metal that I personally find their beloved music a bit on the silly side, and they always accepted this, either suggesting something along the line of “dude, you gotta rock!” or perhaps even cherry-picking a particular title they think closest to my non-satanic palate. No, the people who react with the most bizarre defensiveness, the people who act like I just called their child homely are the people whose opinion is the most comfortably buttressed by the mass culture. It’s not fans of Cannibal Corpse and Solstice of Suffering that scare me, it’s fans of Billy Joel and Bon Jovi that’ll stomp you into the gutter if you voice dissent.

The heart of the Hype-Machine’s sell is the promise of consensus- if we convince ourselves to all like the same things we can experience the communal identity inorganic to a nation so large and diverse. Setting aside how utterly unappealing (and dangerous) the idea of actually achieving communal identity is, the fact of the matter is, we’re never going to return to the time when we can define ourselves in such a simplistic manner. The definition of multiformity as a singularity is inherently flawed and based on a system of exclusion- consider the safety and innocence one thinks of when considering the American 1950’s; is this an honest understanding of that time, or simply the limited perception of middle-class white children mistaken for official history? How we currently view the complex, tumultuous time says nothing about what actually happened, and everything about who frames our national conscious.

Anyway, the point of writing this was to address the angry comments I’m receiving. As I said earlier, I do not happen to believe that any argument I post here, no matter how tightly I construct it, could ever begin to loosen the entertainment industry’s steely grip on popular taste. What’s more, even if I magically had the power, I have no interest in reconstructing the world to match my likes and dislikes. What doesn’t seem to be understood by people who take exception to, for instance, my disinterest in a movie like “We Are Marshall” is that I have no desire to -or delusions of being able to- stop such films from being produced or enjoyed. What I do want to put at stop to is the expectation of enjoyment…the common assumption (resulting from clever marketing) that you can’t but love such heart-warming fare. This same culture of common assumption resulted in me leaving someone sitting there in mute horror and disbelief after I said I personally find it the height of tackiness to have a television that reaches more than sixty inches width. Have we sunk so low into passive consumerism that not wanting to see sitcoms blown up on a surface larger than a dining table is consider sedition?

So we return again to why I’ve started this site. The age of canons is past, and no adult with the least bit of consumer savvy can look at something like the American Film Institute’s 100 best movies list without seeing the obvious manipulation of studios and retail distributors. With the rise of digital technology and the internet, there is the possibility for a great reshuffling, a total break-down of distinction between mainstream and marginal, ‘classic’ and obscure. I’m loath to be optimistic, but I do think these absurd classifications are falling apart and that people have at their finger-tips a variety of choice unimaginable fifteen years ago. Which is not to say the Hype-Machine still doesn’t exert a considerable amount of influence on what we can see and hear; it’s just that the cracks are growing, and the amount of work involved in finding alternatives to their over promoted, middle-brow mediocrities is less and less.

I accept that I will continue to receive angry e-mails… in fact, I’m hoping for it. Even if I fail to persuade the authors to develop an appreciation independent of Extra! and Entertainment Tonight infomercials, I have at least succeed in forcing them to consider and defend their positions, an essential first step in the process of liberation of dogmatic thinking. So in the end, it’s not even so much that I want to stop people from liking stupid crap (although that would be nice), it’s that I want them to like stupid crap because they think it’s good, not because it’s what you’re supposed to do.