Baiting Rage or Failing Brain?
Are young critics morally just or neurally mush?
Media literacy is hardly an objective metric. To take a purely textual read on art or culture can be reductive – does a creator’s intention matter if a consumer takes it a different way? Are these conflicting reads not the point of art? Be it film, literature, or softcore hentai drawings of Spongebob (that one’s a little specific), the inherent subjectivity in art is a feature, not a bug. Discussions can transcend individual pieces and take on new meanings as time goes on. One man’s Madame Web can be another’s Mona Lisa. To some, Paul W.S. Anderson is one of our greatest filmmakers and Paul Thomas Anderson makes snoozefests for adolescent wannabe intellectuals. These are both acceptable.
And then, there are lazy, thoughtless takedowns like the one published by The Independent by a 22-year-old Newhouse grad who has just learned a valuable life lesson. Sex and the City is far from a perfect text – the writer in question does correctly point out uncomfortable social stances that are played for jokes on the show – but her outright dismissal of it as problematic Gen-X artifact and therefore unworthy of an entire generation’s time is foolish and narrow-minded. I have nothing against her – she should never have been put in the position to publicly face plant in front of millions. The Independent set her up to fail because they knew some precious clicks would be coming their way.
There is a tendency with today’s youth to close eyes and plug ears when an uncomfortable situation arises (full disclosure – I am 27). This total disconnection leads to an infantilization of real-life, and a sanitized version of a world that has never existed takes root. Take the cross-generational success of The Office and Friends, which The Independent writer specifically contrasts with Sex and the City as having “likable characters”, which helps drown out their more questionable aspects. The Office and Friends are ultimately fantasies – saccharine depictions of a world that has become a Valium substitute for millions. Valium was actually introduced to subdue suburban housewives and prevent the working woman from taking a foothold – perhaps one day we’ll find out what mindless, incessant rewatches of The Office and Friends are keeping people from. Actually challenging art does not hold hands and it does not insist on providing comfort.
None of this is to say that Sex and the City is some lodestar of problematically educational fiction. It was groundbreaking for its honest conversations about sex and female autonomy, but Gen Z criticism today seeks to erode generational context from analysis – they simply want to shake their heads and indicate that “that shit would NOT fly today”. Of course, this is the laziest criticism somebody can make. If that’s the standard that we use to vet even engaging with art, then say goodbye to anything pre-2015. Closing your eyes and covering your ears exists to preserve a life without context or challenge.
As a 27-year-old man born in 1996, I am, depending on who you ask, among the youngest millennials or the oldest zoomers. This gives me a unique ability to transcend barriers and become generationally ambidextrous, or it disqualifies me from lumping myself in with either group. I’d like to believe the former, but I’m too young to have watched Sex and the City when it aired and too old to not remember 9/11. Therefore, I can understand both sides of this argument. A hardline stance on outdated social dynamics helps normalize a better way. It’s also unrealistic to censor viewing habits in the name of social betterment. Putting your head in the sand is a childish, unproductive practice. Culture is history, not the current snapshot. It’s a scatter plot of ever-changing norms and trends – and in the case of film and television, by the time something is produced and released, it may already be behind the times it was transcending when conceived. To only look at the shape of it and yell at a point for being literally behind the curve is intentionally myopic. It’s a prop to gain brownie points with some people that don’t know what they’re talking about. I’d rather understand it point-by-point and appreciate previously broken ground for what it did, not what it didn’t do.
Circling back to The Office and Friends – there is an over-reliance on “likability” in armchair criticism today. Somebody somewhere instilled the brain rot that having characters to “root” for makes a piece relatable and therefore quality, and I’d like to put that person in an intellectual gulag for 6-9 months. Many of the greatest pieces of fiction showcase awful people, whether we’re looking at Cormac McCarthy, Alfred Hitchcock, Joan Didion, or the fucking Bible. Even prodigious recent successes like Succession or Game of Thrones showcase the wicked acting on terrible impulses. To those able to appreciate characters beyond Rachel Green and Pam Beesly, horrible acts committed to celluloid can represent what humans are capable of when pushed, or even act as escapist fantasy. Consuming media is not an endorsement of its depictions. It’s fucking fiction. Maybe you’re supposed to hate what’s happening. But everything is taken so literally now that subtext does not exist and people need messages spelled out for them like a paint-by-numbers horse. Because to zag today is to risk moral failure, and to zig is to protect yourself from a potential onslaught of people telling you that Carrie Bradshaw and her squad are bigoted shrews that don’t deserve your precious eyeball time.
Maybe that’s where we went wrong – in the process of upending structural bigotry, an entire generation lost the ability to discern. The Independent writer notes that Carrie Bradshaw’s wining and dining lifestyle doesn’t click with hers and is therefore bad. Like, morally and financially irresponsible. Cost of living is up and wages are down, so I understand the financial component, but frequently this can be a prop argument to justify opting out of public life. Gen Z is so afraid of being perceived as morally bad that they spend their entire lives cultivating an image of what they consider right, without stopping to consider if that image is productive or even sensical. The pendulum has swung too far the other way - young people discard family members for not adhering to their specific views on politics or class, rather than speaking to them and compartmentalizing ideology from the overall person. To live in an ideological and moral echo chamber is to spend your life nodding along in agreement with people that have, maybe literally, never touched grass. And it creates bad faith readings of critical texts in the name of… not much.
Also, Sex and the City is a show led by four women in an era where the top male movie stars’ salaries significantly dwarfed those of their female counterparts. Their behaviors - heavy drinking, sleeping around, finding their way forward through friendship rather than love – are celebrated traits when presented in men, historically. It was genuinely progressive for its time. I’m curious if Mad Men would frustrate the writer in a similar fashion – “Man, this Don Draper guy loves to smoke inside and cheat on his wife. Hey, why did his dinner cost 3 dollars? These cars are old! I hate this! Get me out of here!” Can we no longer separate context from product? Are we hurtling towards a follow-up takedown from a Gen Alpha writer saying that, actually, Adam from Girls was an abusive sex menace? And because of that, the show itself is an unwatchable depravity? Are we becoming so myopic intellectually that we are unable to simply realize that that was the fucking point?
This is somewhere between a diary entry and an op-ed, but this discussion weirdly hijacked my day and I thought I’d throw some noggin dumpings out on here. Are pieces like this going to define Gen Z’s contribution to artistic discourse (which I, to be clear, am I not saying, despite the writer’s claims that she speaks for her entire generation)? If so, I’ll hop on the millennial side of the fence that me and my 1996 brethren occupy. I’d rather be cringe than stupid. Let’s shame these philistinic, moronic takes out of people. For posterity.
neurally mush!!!!!!