On Criticism: The Joy of Dissecting Media

The head of Athena, from the Getty Villa, used under a CC BY 3.0 license. Considering where this goes, I thought I’d start off someplace classy.

The piece this week will be, unfortunately, somewhat brief. We tend to post these on Wednesday, and as I sit down and write this, it is Wednesday morning. An unfortunately large number of my pieces can be off-the-cuff and less considered than I would like, but they’ve generally been percolating for a while.

Unfortunately, I haven’t really had time to do that. Edgar and I were in southern California, visiting family, and my finals week only just finished up. I mentioned as much in my piece from last week, and I promise my next piece will show a greater degree of consideration.

But between visiting a number of the art museums in Los Angeles and watching news related to the ongoing human rights crisis in Palestine (consider giving to some relevant charities, but it’s healthy to feel a certain amount of despair on this issue — we just have to keep doing anything we can.)

However, as much as I am marinating in that, I want to discuss something unrelated.

You see, Edgar’s sisters made us watch part of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.

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A while back, I wrote a piece against the idea of solving media. What I mean by this is that great — or even quite ordinary — works of art are not knots to be untied and made straight, not puzzles to be completed and set aside, but are something like interlocutors whose questions are to be chewed over and meditated upon. While you may have reached the end of Notes From Underground or Twin Peaks or have poured over every detail of Caravaggio’s “St. John in the Wilderness”, but you never finished them.

Instead, you have gotten all you could at the moment. A better way to think about it is that you have crossed a river, and now you are on the other side. As Heraclitus says, you can only do this once, because afterward both you and the river are changed. And while the actual text of the book or image of the painting are the same, it has, in a sense unfolded for you in a unique way, and will never go back to what it was previously.

Perhaps this is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps it is in the intention of the artist, perhaps it lies in the artwork itself, but a change has occurred. If you go back to it, you will have a different experience. My own experience is that you should do this after a period of waiting and meditation, lest what your meditation revealed to you previously not withstand the second experience. Like a moth emerged from a cocoon, you need to let it sit for a while and mature before subjecting it to the buffeting of the winds of chance.

I was led to think about this recently, as I rewatched Twin Peaks. Edgar was out of town and I didn’t want to move the needle on anything else we were watching, so I returned to an old favorite. The first time I watched it was the first season only, consumed in a binge in March of 2007. I was visiting my brother during Spring Break, and he lived in Chicago. While he had work, I sat with his cinephile roommate and fed as much of this show as I could into my head through the medium of their projector, sitting in the dark, under blankets, on a couch while David Lynch and Mark Frost revealed to me the secrets of the universe.

The second time was after I returned home from graduate school, as I searched for jobs in a ruined economy, streaming it on a PS3 that had a loose SD cable port (you had to get up and jiggle it occasionally), and I consumed the show in the evenings — during the day I would work as a legal courier, chain smoke, and play Civilization IV. This time I ran through the whole thing, watching several episodes before drifting off to sleep at the end of a day, far too late.

The third time was after Edgar and I moved into our own apartment, together. We could talk about it, shape one another’s reception and understanding, discuss it deeply and share theories. I thought that I understood what I had seen — I thought I had “solved” it. I had not: what I had done was decide on the interpretation that I wanted to believe was true, and discounted all others. To misquote Hamlet, I had settled into a nutshell and decided I was king of infinite space. All you had to do was decide there was nothing outside the nutshell, but none of that made the space outside any less real.

Fourth was in the lead-up to The Return, when the creators returned to tell me that there was more to the story. And Fifth was this time, as I read an okay book of criticism on it.

This bit about Twin Peaks is an aside from my main point, but it illustrates something: discourse about a subject makes it deeper because it makes it harder to simply decide you have the right interpretation. In this way, treating a work of art as a social thing, as an artifact that should be the object of discussion, reveals more of it because people always have a different interpretation.

But there is something else to consider.

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When I was in graduate school, I spoke to one of my professors from undergrad while at a conference. I had rejoined my undergraduate chapter of Sigma Tau Delta as an alumnus member, and was having dinner with my former classmates in a pub. This professor — who I would eventually go on to work with — asked me how the program was going. I didn’t have a terribly good time in graduate school, but I’m not sure anyone does. I decided to focus on how the program was changing my experience of the books I was reading.

I told him that I was somewhat unhappy with the way I was being trained to take a critical eye. I suggested that I felt as if I was being prevented from enjoying things as I had previously. He smiled and suggested that the old way wasn’t lost to me, but that I would be able to get a deeper understanding by applying a critical eye to what I was reading.

While I didn’t feel it at the time — and graduate school was a uniquely difficult period in my life — he was not wrong. You can do both: you can see the surface and then dive beneath it to look at the dynamics at work. You can enjoy the shadowplay that the untrained eye gives you access to and then open yourself to the resonances between texts and broader cultural forces. Nothing stops you from doing both except an insistence that one is “enjoyment” and the other is a joyless chore.

But how do you do that with bad media?

Is it simply a matter of deriving pleasure from your disdain, of hate-watching, -reading, or -playing?

Or is there something else?

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Okay, so our first night in California, Edgar’s sisters insisted on putting on Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, which is a uniquely bad film. I’m of the mind that, while action films can be fine — and often quite good — hyphenated action films are often behind the eight-ball a little bit. Action-Horror and Action-Comedy films often have a much higher bar to make it over — and I’m noting that you almost never find films billed as Action-Romance, action-musical, or action-drama (partially, I would imagine, because action stories are supposed to have romance and drama already, and musicals are almost never made in America. I would imagine that Bollywood action films have a fair amount of music in them, but that’s just stereotyping, not based on actual research.)

So this is a uniquely bad action-comedy film largely centered around making the ostensible protagonist — you can’t really call him a “hero” — the butt of every joke because he’s somewhat fat and pathetic. Edgar and I are a particularly bad audience for this, because I am — as previously mentioned — fat, and Edgar works in security. Ergo, there are elements of the character’s portrayal that we take issue with, either because it gets things wrong about security or because of its use of fatness to grease the wheels of what it thinks comedy is.

But we were not shown this in a mean-spirited fashion: our hosts had recently listened to the podcast ‘Til Death Do Us Blart, a podcast collaboration between Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery of The Worst Idea of All Time (where the hosts select a bad film to watch weekly for a full calendar year) and the McElroy Brothers of My Brother, My Brother, and Me and The Adventure Zone (AKA one of the two podcasts that made everyone on Tumblr decide they like Dungeons and Dragons.) This show — ‘Til Death Do Us Blart — is an annual podcast where the five hosts watch this film yearly, and it has been running since 2015, and has continued until (at least) 2023.

While I wouldn’t necessarily say that the hosts apply what would be considered a rigorous academic lens, what they do could be called a kind of folk-criticism (and I want to emphasize: I’m not putting these terms out to imply that one is legitimate and one is not. Academic criticism is often highly regimented and driven by reference to canonical works of theory. Folk Criticism is not done in the same way, but gains strength from the unique life experiences of those practicing it. They are different, and I would argue that there are both good and bad examples of both. I would also argue that some works of media, like this terrible movie, lend themselves more to a folk-critical perspective.) The thing to understand here is what I said above: criticism can deepen your understanding and appreciation of art. It can allow you to interpret things that were previously unclear and reveal what was previously occluded. It can direct your attention in a way that enlivens and enriches your experiences.

What we have with this anecdote about my in-laws press-ganging two jet-lagged travelers into watching a terrible action-comedy film is an illustration of this principle: they had access to critical interpretation of this film, and so could derive greater enjoyment from it. We were tired and disoriented, and so could not.

I think that this is something that the current vogue for punishing spoilers has hidden from people. If you go in to such an experience and your worry is whether or not the story has been spoiled for you, then you’re going to only get the unmediated (terrible) experience. If you allow yourself to experience it with critical aid you might enjoy it more.

The fact that we call such things “spoilers” is also interesting to me from a ludo-analytic perspective, given the convergence between spoiler and spoilsport. However, that’s a discussion for another time.

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As a coda: I’ve begun listening to the podcast ‘Til Death Do Us Blart, and I enjoy it a fair amount. I’ve enjoyed Guy Montgomery’s appearances on The Daily Zeitgeist, and a lot of McElroy content (I don’t enjoy everything they do, but it’s good for a chuckle now and then.) Am I going to take the next step and jump from this to sitting down to watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2?

No.

Another thing to keep in mind is that good criticism isn’t just good as an adjunct to a piece of media, it can — in fact — be good on its own. It can be enjoyed as its own thing, and it can be enjoyed without returning back to the work that inspired it. The barrier of entry may be high, but I’d suggest that — while I have commented on the dubious pleasures of hate-watching previously — sometimes the best way to enjoy something bad is to find something good that was made in reference to something bad, and enjoy that.

But this doesn’t mean that something bad has become good. You don’t need to take the next step.

You’re good. You can stop there.

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