So much cultural criticism boils down to chewing on the strange result of popular genre chum--guilty pleasure stuff--being taken more seriously than it was really designed for or capable of sustaining.
Im thinking about the furors around American Dirt, Bridgerton, and WW84, which, in different ways, are all objects meant to be consumed for pleasure without thinking too much about why and how. And then you think about them and you're like "wow, this sucks."
Scads of thrillers as bad or worse than American Dirt are published constantly, and no one but their readers notices, but THIS one got lots of "serious" attention, so it was held to real literary standards and eviscerated.
Bridgerton is an adaptation of romance novels--not serious alt-history--but when claims for the progressive work it was doing were made, lots of folks were like "wow, this seems pretty silly and kinda careless?"
And the conversation around WW84 is fascinating because of the strange way "comic book movie" is simultaneously "stupid goofy fun, not supposed to make sense" and "this is an allegory for America under Trump" (doubly vexed by the "saving cinema!" role WW84 was slotted into)
To be clear, I think it's GOOD to take such culture objects very, very seriously! But they work in genre terms, and have to be read in terms of how those genres teach audiences to take pleasure in them.
There's a critical short circuit if you review Bridgerton but don't place it in the romance novel genre (or Shondaland), when you review WW84 but not by reference to MCU/DCEU, or when you talk about American Dirt as if there aren't scads of narcothrillers doing analogous racisms
In short, to coin an extremely original idea: if you're going to decode the structure of a text's political unconscious, always historicize
I'm also not sure "highbrow literature and cinema" really exists: you *can* watch ambitious cinema on mubi and read incredibly sophisticated and challenging novels (esp in translation), but mainstream cultural conversations on "the novel" and "film" totally ignore all of that
Put differently: what happens when "guilty pleasures" became so mainstream and commercially dominant that they cease to be, in any sense, "forbidden"?
(obviously poetry doesn't exist)
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I regret to announce that I've started playing chess online. however I'm very bad at it, so that's some comfort
My opponents like to triumph over me by utilizing the fiendishly clever tactic of "me making a stupid move"
More bad news: this website makes it really easy to learn chess openings without having to set up a board and move the pieces yourself, am now learning even more chess chessstrategyonline.com/content/tutori…
In a way, Searching for Bobby Fischer has it both ways because Josh does win his last game with The Evil Chess Kid, BUT: I love how sweet and gentle and kind that movie ultimately is and the actor that plays Josh is incredible
"Can I tell you a secret? You're a much stronger player than I was at your age" is an all-time great joke
I think what makes the movie work is that Josh is mostly too young (and too sweet) to articulate what HE wants with any real clarity--allowing each adult to project their own egos onto him--but, crucially, he *does* act, and eventually clarifies his own preference for kindness
"And that’s what I can’t stop thinking about: this accident of visual storytelling, this convergence. It’s one thing to say that things like this just happen; it’s another to ask what’s really happening when they do." lareviewofbooks.org/article/dance-…
Phil, on The Crown:
"There’s an eleven-minute dance sequence in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock that made me feel the way those early film spectators must have felt when the Lumière brothers showed them leaves rustling or dancers dancing."
I'm sort of fascinated by how The Discourse on Lovers Rock doesn't exactly know what to do with [the incident sexual violence that occurs in it]; it's hard to incorporate into a celebratory story about community, which I suspect is exactly why McQueen included it
A lot of the talk about LR--in many ways following SM's lead--emphasizes the *safety* of the community formed by the blues party, but the most interesting thing about LR, I think, is that it doesn't sit comfortably in that celebration of celebration
"Safe" is such an interesting word to use about a 70 minute movie that includes an act of sexual assault!
It really cannot be overstated what a trash movie "Ava" is
Like, did they improvise the entire movie after the scriptwriter forgot to show up
all the action in the movie is motivated by a crisis of conscience or something which you have to intuit because it started before the movie started and in the last scene the big bad guy has her at an advantage and then just... walks away, allowing her to easily kill him