Digital culture is predisposed towards irony, because digital culture annihilates context. It's impossible to create a set of shared norms—and anybody who tries will find themselves constrained by the medium itself. How can you propagate a set of norms when the Internet reduces your voice to one among many, no matter how loudly you or your chosen clan shout? Even the loudest of us are drops in the ocean. (It is possible that Donald Trump's Twitter account represents the high-water mark of a single voice permeating digital society, and even then, some of us don't know that he once took it upon himself to offer Kristen Stewart public dating advice.)
Richard Rorty described irony as an awareness of contingency: we develop a sense of irony when we realize that the things we think we're saying rely on such a broad and complex understanding of meanings that, in actuality, very few people understand us as clearly as we think we're being understood. Even the most powerful and lasting symbols of our society become impossible to understand: ask five different Christians what Jesus Christ believed, and you'll receive five different answers. The only thing approximating genuine awareness, then, is the awareness that what you perceive is different than what others perceive, and that you have to work that difference into your self-expression, somehow. That gap, and the expression of that gap, is where all irony stems from—and it's why, even leaving aside the dramatic ironies, I find that the best writers of character all have deeply ironic senses of their characters, and understand that each see a different world even as they live next door to one another.
On the Internet, surface-level sincerity all-too-often leads to echo chamber-like congregations of agreement, where people not only congratulate each other on the correctness of their worldviews but prod each other into sharing only the most extreme possible versions of whatever they believe. That's not just true of politics: witness the fury of certain fandoms when Martin Scorsese publicly said that, in his opinion, Marvel films weren't entirely functioning as cinema. Some of the response to his remarks was relatively level-headed—Marvel directors, perhaps a bit more respectful of Scorsese than most, articulated their disagreements with him in careful, measured terms—but another subset began insisting that Scorsese was, not only wrong, but wrong in a somehow misogynist way, purely because they thought they could sound more intelligent and credible if they made Scorsese's comments a matter of cultural wrongdoing. All that, because somebody they barely knew said a thing they liked didn't qualify as a type of thing they didn't particularly care about!
Another way of putting it is that sincerity has a tendency of becoming smarm once it's shared online. Tom Scocca's "On Smarm" remains one of the most eye-opening reads about the modern world I've ever read, in part for that reason—I vividly remember how dizzy it made me feel, almost high, as I saw a number of threads I'd never put a name to connect before my eyes—but "On Smarm" self-consciously derives itself from an earlier work, Harry Frankfurter's "On Bullshit" (which, in addition to the title patterning, "On Smarm" directly namedrops early on). And while "On Bullshit" is primarily concerned with distinguishing between bullshit and flat-out lies—and arguing that bullshit is more damaging for our society—I remember being struck by the conclusion of the original essay, which built patiently to a conclusion that nevertheless blindsided me: that to value sincerity is to pretend that we understand ourselves well enough for "sincere" to matter much at all, or that our sense of self is reliable enough or stable enough or aware enough to serve as a meaningful gauge of anything. "Our natures," Frankfurter concludes, "are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit."
The digital world is intensely atomized. We're not just divided from each other: the things we consume are shattered into a million little pieces. Memes, reaction GIFs, snappy quotes "printed" on fake paper, movie and TV stills, vital tweets and Tumblr summaries of media most people haven't consumed. All depth collapses. (Do you really want to read either of those two ten thousand-word essays I linked to above? I get complaints when I write a thousand pithy words on a subject.) On top of that, we're increasingly pushed towards mediums which are designed to function as giant, shapeless silos, and encouraged to phrase our thoughts and contextualize our emotions around their languages. What do social networks, TV shows, and video games have in common? Each is a media experience designed to last for hundreds of hours, and demands a commitment of us that can take literal weeks. On top of that, you have the sprawling Disney universes (including Star Wars and, yes, Marvel), and the canonization of young adult book series like Divergent and Harry Potter, largely because those are the sorts of books which can get massive enough traction that people can form languages around those, too.
The contexts in which we form our language, in other words, are at once intensely demanding and deeply shallow. I'm not saying there's nothing meaningful to gleam from this media: I'm saying that the strict commitments they ask of us make it harder for us to think in the considered, broad-minded ways that we need to if we want to reach genuine, significant understanding. It used to be that Trekkies were somewhat viewed as outcasts: they spoke a foreign language, more or less, that only specialists could understand. Nowadays, there are thousands of likeminded cultural silos, and they're propped up by increasingly formidable marketing engines which would like nothing more than for us to devote our time and our thoughts and our money to these "singular" manufactured passions.
This is not just about our media. Or, perhaps, it's about the flattening of everything to media. If you want to understand QAnon, maybe you need to understand The Office first. Whether or not you were in the Russiagate bubble defines whether or not you're outraged at Republicans (for colluding with Russian agencies) or Democrats (for manufacturing false evidence against said Republicans) or both. Forces like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan command considerable political attention, sheerly for having created their own unique verticals. "Cancel culture" as a phenomenon, or "wokeness", or "intersectional feminism", are all similarly phenomena defined by a series of fandoms, more-or-less, who have decided to take particular positions based on an arbitrary influx of information.
Remember, I'm not saying this to be nihilistic. I'm not implying that all these things are equal. That would be tantamount to saying that all these stances are valid because people sincerely believe in each one of them, and sincerity, you may recall, is bullshit.
No: I'm bringing this up because this mode of thinking encourages one of the predominant tones we see online these days, which is an incessant outpouring of outrage, grievance, and despair. We need to be upset at Them, whoever they are. We are furious at Them. And what upsets us most, more than anything else we can imagine, are people who could possibly agree with Them rather than us. How could they! How are there so many idiots! How, when they could just be reading the same things we read, agreeing with the same opinions we agree with!
The end result is, not quite closed-mindedness, but a contempt for disagreement that may as well be closed-minded. We become landmines waiting to be tripped, waiting for a single take—or even a single phrasing—that we find so abominable that the only possible response can be Fuck you!!!! Fuck you for saying that!! Fuck you for putting those words in that particular order!! Fuck you for even saying something that might be interpreted like that!! Fuck you for daring to articulate a shadow of a doubt, or for having a moment's uncertainty!! How very fucking dare!!!!!
Social media, in particular, encourages this. It encourages us to form long, long memories of people who have violated our shared code, even when we all collectively agreed upon that code three months ago. It encourages us to score points off people's agreements with us, which is easiest of all when the things we say are furious or contemptuous or dismissive. It makes huge stories out of every form of collective grievance—and huge stories, therefore, out of every instance of someone saying something we might decide is upsetting. We are encouraged to talk and talk and talk. And the points that we receive are proof that we are winning. We are doing something here. This isn't all for nought: we might just win the war, and win the world, if we can get more likes than the other guy. Never mind that, every single time, all those likes are from the same handful of individuals.
David Roth, the single best chronicler of Donald Trump and the society which surrounds him, said it simplest: Donald Trump became president because he cut the bullshit and spoke, very directly, to a large crowd of people who just wanted to feel aggrieved. Did he bullshit on every other front? He most certainly did. But while other politicians of his ilk masked their feelings behind flowery rhetoric, Trump just squatted on Twitter being pissed off at random things—including but not limited to Kristen Stewart's ex—and a nation united behind him. When Trump lost in 2020, it was as much because a slightly larger nation united in grievance against him as it was any other reason. But it's not just Trump: it's just as much people who hated the all-female Ghostbusters movie versus people who hated the haters. We're all like this. Our culture makes us this way. The sincerity of our actions pushes us towards greater and more glorious wars.
In a climate like this, people are rewarded, perversely, for glibness. The more you expose your private self, the more messily you put yourself out there, the likelier it is that someone will find cause to get absolutely furious with you about something. The only way to remain likable is to hide everything resembling a nuance, either by draining yourself of all color and muscle or by being the one to whip all the others up into a tizzy. Demagogue or brand: those are your options. And the best way to manage either, of course, is to make sincerity a part of your brand, a part of your identity, sincerity sans substance, a performance of sincerely meaning things so long as those things are pulp-free and readily digestible.
Or—hear me out—you can shitpost.
Just as bullshit isn't lying so much as it's not caring about the truth, shitposting isn't about not being serious so much as it's about not taking things seriously. It's not shitposting to call bad things good and good things bad, exactly. Shitposting starts when you learn to acknowledge bad things as bad without getting too wrapped up in them, and when you start to herald good things without preparing to fight all comers over them. It's ironic, not for the sake of irony, but for the sake of giving yourself a little space, a little less attachment, a little room to breathe. And if shitposting has a universal target, it's the structures of this society itself: the tendency we all have to take things just a little more seriously than we ought to.
In a way, shitposting is an embrace of garbage things, but a self-aware embrace. It's a celebration of the fact that those things are garbage, in other words—without losing sight of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, non-garbage things might exist.
I'm low-key obsessed with Tim Heidecker, whose Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! came to define an entire flavor of media culture, and who's gone on to have a career of brilliant work after brilliant work. From the start, Heidecker's work sought to be more trash than the original trash things: trash that knew it was trash, and loved it, and found its sincerity in enjoyment of things which, while bad, are nonetheless enjoyable. (Awesome Show dedicated an episode to Tommy Wiseau, the outsider auteur whose film The Room may forever be the pinnacle of this.) His current project, On Cinema at the Cinema, is somewhat of a sprawling epic of American trash, ranging from podcasts to action TV to court cases to political campaigns, targeting oddly specific microcultures (dine-in movies! germ-killing nutritional supplements!) while connecting them all to a single central theme: a world of endlessly-manufactured content, more marketing than meaning, pushed out into the world by people who'd more-or-less do anything to make a buck. (You will not be surprised to hear that Heidecker is a huge fan of Martin Scorsese, or that On Cinema has such peculiar takes on Marvel that its universe, in a sense, is even larger than the MCU, in that Marvel directors have allowed On Cinema to infiltrate their films—even letting them write parts of the credits of the second Ant-Man movie.)
This attitude—embrace the garbage, rather than defining yourself in opposition to it—provides a way out of the endless, useless dichotomic debate between two aggrieved forces. What else is there? Action, for one. Substance, for another. The pursuit of those things which lack easy definition or direction, and therefore may actually hold significance.
I've been pulling my writings back to here, because it's satisfying for me to write in a place where I don't need to interact with the endless whirlpools of social media, or pretend to tolerate the stifling outrage on both sides. I'm tired of forming connections with people whose personalities consist of canned complaints of certain things, canned enthusiasm for other things, and an eagerness to "debate" whichever things they and others might disagree on. It's too much. It's worse than empty calories: it's poison. "Toxic," you might say, if you wanted to use a loaded contemporary term, though maybe that's overstating it a bit. More precisely, it's noxious.
I've been pulling away from the Internet in general, and from television, and from video games—and from the Internet more than the other two. I've had a hankering for books lately, and for movies, particularly the old directors whose films felt entirely unlike the way movies tend to be made today. Robert Altman's really been grabbing me lately, that lovely man with his fondness for overlapping dialogue and sprawling casts and films that just seem overwhelmed with all the things happening in it, and unwilling to reduce themselves in the slightest. I watched Gosford Park for the first time, and then did something unusual for me and films: the second I finished it, I started it up and began to watch it again, this time more slowly, and with subtitles, so I could appreciate every last bit of what that movie had to offer. When it finished, I didn't run off and tell a dozen people about it. I just sat with it, and stewed, and what I stewed on I couldn't quite tell you, because every real takeaway I had from that movie involved tiny details, little subtleties, that I couldn't put to words anyway without great effort. And why bother, when I could just marinate in that movie, and follow it up with a Shirley Jackson book, and watch half a dozen old film noir flicks to prepare for The Long Goodbye, another Altman movie that I hear does counterintuitive wonders with the genre?
I've always found older media more comforting than newer media, and preferred slight obscurities to loud classics, but more and more I realize that the sole reason for that is my uneasiness with the endless cycles of performative opinion. Anything to steer clear of Those Assholes, where assholery is defined less by the specific tastes and more by the performance of taste itself. I like having experiences that feel, for all their loudness, quiet. I like to have room with things, and let them be whatever they are.
What I'm finding is that, the closer I get to mediums that demand that obsessive commitment, the more I need those mediums to work as shitposts, in a sense. The TV show that's most moved me recently is Patriot, a show that's ostensibly about meddling in Iran's affairs and which transparently, conspicuously, has no interest in making you think of Iran as an enemy—quite the opposite, in fact. I've similarly fallen in love with the Hitman franchise, which pretends to be a gritty murder game but is in fact mainly about playing dress-up and re-enacting Roadrunner cartoons. And my Internet shitposter standard, Jon Bois, exclusively tweets things like this and this, and eternally posts a series of unreadable outrage takes, a whole virtuosic range of comedy devoted to doing on Twitter what Twitter fundamentally cannot do.
(Similarly, I just watched my first superhero movie in a decade, Into the Spider-Verse, and was delighted that Phil Lord and Chris Miller once again repeated their seemingly impossible formula: pick up a franchise that's seemingly exhausted itself to the point that it can't be revitalized, and build something startlingly original on top of essentially shitposting the entire genre. Too bad Disney pulled 'em off the Han Solo movie, or I'd have gotten to watch exactly one new Star Wars film, too.)
Some people are outraged by shitposts, and seem to dislike the concept of irony entirely. These people often seem to be against the idea of humor altogether, since humor diminishes the potential for Serious Grievance. (An idea generally reinforced by what these people choose to call funny.) They're typically also the sorts who want to ban classic works of art for representing people being bad in various ways, as if representation is itself endorsement. Which is how, I suppose, you get people who accuse a man who unflaggingly calls criminals dumb misogynists of being misogynist, while embracing... well.
This has gotten rather long, even as thoughtpieces go, and I'm aware that I haven't tied these various pieces into anything resembling a meaningful conclusion. Which is just as well, I suppose, because my original intent was to talk about a video essay that I found profoundly meaningful and would love to share—and I'm saying that despite not generally being a fan of video essays. So please: if you've found the time to read this post, consider taking just five minutes of your day aside to watch, or even just listen, to this piece, by a man who at this point we all ought to acknowledge as an elder statement of society today. Even in our world of flattened information, decontextualized meaning, and obscure cultural silos, I think you might recognize something here worth truly taking in.
Until next time. ♥
Richard Rorty described irony as an awareness of contingency: we develop a sense of irony when we realize that the things we think we're saying rely on such a broad and complex understanding of meanings that, in actuality, very few people understand us as clearly as we think we're being understood. Even the most powerful and lasting symbols of our society become impossible to understand: ask five different Christians what Jesus Christ believed, and you'll receive five different answers. The only thing approximating genuine awareness, then, is the awareness that what you perceive is different than what others perceive, and that you have to work that difference into your self-expression, somehow. That gap, and the expression of that gap, is where all irony stems from—and it's why, even leaving aside the dramatic ironies, I find that the best writers of character all have deeply ironic senses of their characters, and understand that each see a different world even as they live next door to one another.
On the Internet, surface-level sincerity all-too-often leads to echo chamber-like congregations of agreement, where people not only congratulate each other on the correctness of their worldviews but prod each other into sharing only the most extreme possible versions of whatever they believe. That's not just true of politics: witness the fury of certain fandoms when Martin Scorsese publicly said that, in his opinion, Marvel films weren't entirely functioning as cinema. Some of the response to his remarks was relatively level-headed—Marvel directors, perhaps a bit more respectful of Scorsese than most, articulated their disagreements with him in careful, measured terms—but another subset began insisting that Scorsese was, not only wrong, but wrong in a somehow misogynist way, purely because they thought they could sound more intelligent and credible if they made Scorsese's comments a matter of cultural wrongdoing. All that, because somebody they barely knew said a thing they liked didn't qualify as a type of thing they didn't particularly care about!
Another way of putting it is that sincerity has a tendency of becoming smarm once it's shared online. Tom Scocca's "On Smarm" remains one of the most eye-opening reads about the modern world I've ever read, in part for that reason—I vividly remember how dizzy it made me feel, almost high, as I saw a number of threads I'd never put a name to connect before my eyes—but "On Smarm" self-consciously derives itself from an earlier work, Harry Frankfurter's "On Bullshit" (which, in addition to the title patterning, "On Smarm" directly namedrops early on). And while "On Bullshit" is primarily concerned with distinguishing between bullshit and flat-out lies—and arguing that bullshit is more damaging for our society—I remember being struck by the conclusion of the original essay, which built patiently to a conclusion that nevertheless blindsided me: that to value sincerity is to pretend that we understand ourselves well enough for "sincere" to matter much at all, or that our sense of self is reliable enough or stable enough or aware enough to serve as a meaningful gauge of anything. "Our natures," Frankfurter concludes, "are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit."
The digital world is intensely atomized. We're not just divided from each other: the things we consume are shattered into a million little pieces. Memes, reaction GIFs, snappy quotes "printed" on fake paper, movie and TV stills, vital tweets and Tumblr summaries of media most people haven't consumed. All depth collapses. (Do you really want to read either of those two ten thousand-word essays I linked to above? I get complaints when I write a thousand pithy words on a subject.) On top of that, we're increasingly pushed towards mediums which are designed to function as giant, shapeless silos, and encouraged to phrase our thoughts and contextualize our emotions around their languages. What do social networks, TV shows, and video games have in common? Each is a media experience designed to last for hundreds of hours, and demands a commitment of us that can take literal weeks. On top of that, you have the sprawling Disney universes (including Star Wars and, yes, Marvel), and the canonization of young adult book series like Divergent and Harry Potter, largely because those are the sorts of books which can get massive enough traction that people can form languages around those, too.
The contexts in which we form our language, in other words, are at once intensely demanding and deeply shallow. I'm not saying there's nothing meaningful to gleam from this media: I'm saying that the strict commitments they ask of us make it harder for us to think in the considered, broad-minded ways that we need to if we want to reach genuine, significant understanding. It used to be that Trekkies were somewhat viewed as outcasts: they spoke a foreign language, more or less, that only specialists could understand. Nowadays, there are thousands of likeminded cultural silos, and they're propped up by increasingly formidable marketing engines which would like nothing more than for us to devote our time and our thoughts and our money to these "singular" manufactured passions.
This is not just about our media. Or, perhaps, it's about the flattening of everything to media. If you want to understand QAnon, maybe you need to understand The Office first. Whether or not you were in the Russiagate bubble defines whether or not you're outraged at Republicans (for colluding with Russian agencies) or Democrats (for manufacturing false evidence against said Republicans) or both. Forces like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan command considerable political attention, sheerly for having created their own unique verticals. "Cancel culture" as a phenomenon, or "wokeness", or "intersectional feminism", are all similarly phenomena defined by a series of fandoms, more-or-less, who have decided to take particular positions based on an arbitrary influx of information.
Remember, I'm not saying this to be nihilistic. I'm not implying that all these things are equal. That would be tantamount to saying that all these stances are valid because people sincerely believe in each one of them, and sincerity, you may recall, is bullshit.
No: I'm bringing this up because this mode of thinking encourages one of the predominant tones we see online these days, which is an incessant outpouring of outrage, grievance, and despair. We need to be upset at Them, whoever they are. We are furious at Them. And what upsets us most, more than anything else we can imagine, are people who could possibly agree with Them rather than us. How could they! How are there so many idiots! How, when they could just be reading the same things we read, agreeing with the same opinions we agree with!
The end result is, not quite closed-mindedness, but a contempt for disagreement that may as well be closed-minded. We become landmines waiting to be tripped, waiting for a single take—or even a single phrasing—that we find so abominable that the only possible response can be Fuck you!!!! Fuck you for saying that!! Fuck you for putting those words in that particular order!! Fuck you for even saying something that might be interpreted like that!! Fuck you for daring to articulate a shadow of a doubt, or for having a moment's uncertainty!! How very fucking dare!!!!!
Social media, in particular, encourages this. It encourages us to form long, long memories of people who have violated our shared code, even when we all collectively agreed upon that code three months ago. It encourages us to score points off people's agreements with us, which is easiest of all when the things we say are furious or contemptuous or dismissive. It makes huge stories out of every form of collective grievance—and huge stories, therefore, out of every instance of someone saying something we might decide is upsetting. We are encouraged to talk and talk and talk. And the points that we receive are proof that we are winning. We are doing something here. This isn't all for nought: we might just win the war, and win the world, if we can get more likes than the other guy. Never mind that, every single time, all those likes are from the same handful of individuals.
David Roth, the single best chronicler of Donald Trump and the society which surrounds him, said it simplest: Donald Trump became president because he cut the bullshit and spoke, very directly, to a large crowd of people who just wanted to feel aggrieved. Did he bullshit on every other front? He most certainly did. But while other politicians of his ilk masked their feelings behind flowery rhetoric, Trump just squatted on Twitter being pissed off at random things—including but not limited to Kristen Stewart's ex—and a nation united behind him. When Trump lost in 2020, it was as much because a slightly larger nation united in grievance against him as it was any other reason. But it's not just Trump: it's just as much people who hated the all-female Ghostbusters movie versus people who hated the haters. We're all like this. Our culture makes us this way. The sincerity of our actions pushes us towards greater and more glorious wars.
In a climate like this, people are rewarded, perversely, for glibness. The more you expose your private self, the more messily you put yourself out there, the likelier it is that someone will find cause to get absolutely furious with you about something. The only way to remain likable is to hide everything resembling a nuance, either by draining yourself of all color and muscle or by being the one to whip all the others up into a tizzy. Demagogue or brand: those are your options. And the best way to manage either, of course, is to make sincerity a part of your brand, a part of your identity, sincerity sans substance, a performance of sincerely meaning things so long as those things are pulp-free and readily digestible.
Or—hear me out—you can shitpost.
Just as bullshit isn't lying so much as it's not caring about the truth, shitposting isn't about not being serious so much as it's about not taking things seriously. It's not shitposting to call bad things good and good things bad, exactly. Shitposting starts when you learn to acknowledge bad things as bad without getting too wrapped up in them, and when you start to herald good things without preparing to fight all comers over them. It's ironic, not for the sake of irony, but for the sake of giving yourself a little space, a little less attachment, a little room to breathe. And if shitposting has a universal target, it's the structures of this society itself: the tendency we all have to take things just a little more seriously than we ought to.
In a way, shitposting is an embrace of garbage things, but a self-aware embrace. It's a celebration of the fact that those things are garbage, in other words—without losing sight of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, non-garbage things might exist.
I'm low-key obsessed with Tim Heidecker, whose Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! came to define an entire flavor of media culture, and who's gone on to have a career of brilliant work after brilliant work. From the start, Heidecker's work sought to be more trash than the original trash things: trash that knew it was trash, and loved it, and found its sincerity in enjoyment of things which, while bad, are nonetheless enjoyable. (Awesome Show dedicated an episode to Tommy Wiseau, the outsider auteur whose film The Room may forever be the pinnacle of this.) His current project, On Cinema at the Cinema, is somewhat of a sprawling epic of American trash, ranging from podcasts to action TV to court cases to political campaigns, targeting oddly specific microcultures (dine-in movies! germ-killing nutritional supplements!) while connecting them all to a single central theme: a world of endlessly-manufactured content, more marketing than meaning, pushed out into the world by people who'd more-or-less do anything to make a buck. (You will not be surprised to hear that Heidecker is a huge fan of Martin Scorsese, or that On Cinema has such peculiar takes on Marvel that its universe, in a sense, is even larger than the MCU, in that Marvel directors have allowed On Cinema to infiltrate their films—even letting them write parts of the credits of the second Ant-Man movie.)
This attitude—embrace the garbage, rather than defining yourself in opposition to it—provides a way out of the endless, useless dichotomic debate between two aggrieved forces. What else is there? Action, for one. Substance, for another. The pursuit of those things which lack easy definition or direction, and therefore may actually hold significance.
I've been pulling my writings back to here, because it's satisfying for me to write in a place where I don't need to interact with the endless whirlpools of social media, or pretend to tolerate the stifling outrage on both sides. I'm tired of forming connections with people whose personalities consist of canned complaints of certain things, canned enthusiasm for other things, and an eagerness to "debate" whichever things they and others might disagree on. It's too much. It's worse than empty calories: it's poison. "Toxic," you might say, if you wanted to use a loaded contemporary term, though maybe that's overstating it a bit. More precisely, it's noxious.
I've been pulling away from the Internet in general, and from television, and from video games—and from the Internet more than the other two. I've had a hankering for books lately, and for movies, particularly the old directors whose films felt entirely unlike the way movies tend to be made today. Robert Altman's really been grabbing me lately, that lovely man with his fondness for overlapping dialogue and sprawling casts and films that just seem overwhelmed with all the things happening in it, and unwilling to reduce themselves in the slightest. I watched Gosford Park for the first time, and then did something unusual for me and films: the second I finished it, I started it up and began to watch it again, this time more slowly, and with subtitles, so I could appreciate every last bit of what that movie had to offer. When it finished, I didn't run off and tell a dozen people about it. I just sat with it, and stewed, and what I stewed on I couldn't quite tell you, because every real takeaway I had from that movie involved tiny details, little subtleties, that I couldn't put to words anyway without great effort. And why bother, when I could just marinate in that movie, and follow it up with a Shirley Jackson book, and watch half a dozen old film noir flicks to prepare for The Long Goodbye, another Altman movie that I hear does counterintuitive wonders with the genre?
I've always found older media more comforting than newer media, and preferred slight obscurities to loud classics, but more and more I realize that the sole reason for that is my uneasiness with the endless cycles of performative opinion. Anything to steer clear of Those Assholes, where assholery is defined less by the specific tastes and more by the performance of taste itself. I like having experiences that feel, for all their loudness, quiet. I like to have room with things, and let them be whatever they are.
What I'm finding is that, the closer I get to mediums that demand that obsessive commitment, the more I need those mediums to work as shitposts, in a sense. The TV show that's most moved me recently is Patriot, a show that's ostensibly about meddling in Iran's affairs and which transparently, conspicuously, has no interest in making you think of Iran as an enemy—quite the opposite, in fact. I've similarly fallen in love with the Hitman franchise, which pretends to be a gritty murder game but is in fact mainly about playing dress-up and re-enacting Roadrunner cartoons. And my Internet shitposter standard, Jon Bois, exclusively tweets things like this and this, and eternally posts a series of unreadable outrage takes, a whole virtuosic range of comedy devoted to doing on Twitter what Twitter fundamentally cannot do.
(Similarly, I just watched my first superhero movie in a decade, Into the Spider-Verse, and was delighted that Phil Lord and Chris Miller once again repeated their seemingly impossible formula: pick up a franchise that's seemingly exhausted itself to the point that it can't be revitalized, and build something startlingly original on top of essentially shitposting the entire genre. Too bad Disney pulled 'em off the Han Solo movie, or I'd have gotten to watch exactly one new Star Wars film, too.)
Some people are outraged by shitposts, and seem to dislike the concept of irony entirely. These people often seem to be against the idea of humor altogether, since humor diminishes the potential for Serious Grievance. (An idea generally reinforced by what these people choose to call funny.) They're typically also the sorts who want to ban classic works of art for representing people being bad in various ways, as if representation is itself endorsement. Which is how, I suppose, you get people who accuse a man who unflaggingly calls criminals dumb misogynists of being misogynist, while embracing... well.
This has gotten rather long, even as thoughtpieces go, and I'm aware that I haven't tied these various pieces into anything resembling a meaningful conclusion. Which is just as well, I suppose, because my original intent was to talk about a video essay that I found profoundly meaningful and would love to share—and I'm saying that despite not generally being a fan of video essays. So please: if you've found the time to read this post, consider taking just five minutes of your day aside to watch, or even just listen, to this piece, by a man who at this point we all ought to acknowledge as an elder statement of society today. Even in our world of flattened information, decontextualized meaning, and obscure cultural silos, I think you might recognize something here worth truly taking in.
Until next time. ♥