Pop

“The media, the corporations, the politicians have all done such a good job of scaring the American public, it’s come to the point where they don’t need to give any reason at all.”

–Michael Moore in Bowling For Columbine (2002)

“Rupert’s extremely radical. Do you know that he selects his books on the assumption that people not only can read but actually can think?”

–John Dall in Rope (1948)

In South Park‘s season 13 episode “Dances with Smurfs” (2009), Eric Cartman becomes the school’s morning announcement reader, and unsurprisingly, he uses the platform to bellow nonsense about the school, its government, and the student body president. A clear parody of the right-wing sphere of misinformation, and the “just asking questions” style of rhetorical incitement that was then on the rise and now dominates right-wing thought entirely, “Dances with Smurfs” gradually becomes a freewheeling tale of Cartman infiltrating the Smurfs only to join their society, which is then wiped out by student body president Wendy Testaburger.

The early portion of the episode is an exaggerated but pitch-perfect satire of the right-wing commentariat and their practically knee-jerk reaction to an opposing party having some power. Cartman makes nonsensical, even contradictory claims based on nothing but the will to create stories out of thin air and then insisting the claims deserve credence. Criticisms snowball from the petty to the bigoted to the elaborately fabricated, and while accusing a political rival of committing a “Smurf holocaust” seemed silly at the time, but it’s barely crazier than QAnon.

The eerily predictive episode also prefigured something that’s become apparent in the last couple of years, and particularly in the first quarter of 2021. Republicans, in the face of a Democratic presidential administration that’s not actually left-wing enough to criticize from the right and a slate of infighting amongst their own party, have taken to pop culture to fight their battles.

No longer able to fight on the political front, Republicans fight on the pages of books and in the images on screen. The visual from “Dances with Smurfs” of Wendy Testaburger gleefully bulldozing a Smurf village has become the Republican image du jour, as they imagine us tearing down the tentpoles of the (implicitly or explicitly) white and/or “Western” culture they simplistically divine to be a straight line drawn from the gods of Olympus to Theodore Geisel (who, I was shocked to learn, is not in fact trending because of outrage over a misused honorific).

This is a new front in a long history of U.S. fearmongering. With a base locked in fervent worship of a reality television star, it makes sense that pop culture would become a new battleground. No, really, there’s a perverse logic to this: if Republicans’ and conservatives’ entire identity is Donald Trump, and Trump’s entire identity is quintessentially a product of popular culture, then there was always a risk that they might never have existed. The modern conservative mindset is a Back to the Future nightmare, as though applying modern sensibilities to world history is akin to going back in time and stopping their parents from ever meeting.

At the end of “Dances with Smurfs”, Wendy turns the tables on Cartman: rather than denying his nonsensical allegations, she leans in and takes control of his narrative, admitting to wiping out Smurfs and having sold the rights to Cartman’s Dances with Smurfs idea to James Cameron. “Go look, the movie came out already”, she tells him, only for Cartman to become outraged at a movie theater with a banner advertising Avatar. For the right-wing cipher that is Eric Cartman, the politics become indistinguishable from the fiction.

When Michael Moore accepted his Academy Award in 2003 for the film Bowling for Columbine, he asserted that “we live in fictitious times”. He hadn’t seen anything yet. Modern conservatives only have fictional battles to fight and fictional battlegrounds to do it.

“The strategy”, writes Parker Molloy at Media Matters, “is to keep audiences angry, aggrieved, and aware that at any moment, one of their beloved cultural icons could be whisked away by an overzealous group of liberals dedicated to persecuting conservatives.” I honestly find this protective safeguarding of cultural paraphernalia to be rather absurd. Conservatives must imagine themselves to be bravely rescuing contraband cultural output like in V For Vendetta. Or as The Onion so neatly put it, “Heroic Conservative Risks Own Life to Hide Mr. Potato Heads in Attic”.

But the draconian (yet selective) hoarding of culture is more than absurd; it’s effective. Conservatism in the U.S. has a long history of setting the framework for debate, which is often as important as the substance of the debate itself, given an increasingly ideologically entrenched group of people inclined to agree with whoever they decide to agree with before the debate has even started. Outrage over the firing (she wasn’t fired, she was simply not re-hired) of Gina Carano is not their contribution to any debate; it’s their way of setting the terms of a debate that hasn’t happened yet.

As Jessica Valenti wrote in a Substack post , “There are unspoken rules about who gets to be a victim”, of who gets a full-throated defense by the conservative outrage cycle. These rules, of course, fall pretty much along lines you’d expect. I can guarantee you that if Mr. Potato Head was a vocal supporter of BDS or had called a conservative’s thinking “Neanderthal”, they’d be first to throw stones. But in a sense, the real victim is always the Fox News viewer or CPAC attendee. They are all victims in potentia of a society gone mad with sensitivity.

In his introduction to the book Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Lacan But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock, Slavoj Žižek writes that although “the pleasure of the modernist interpretation consists in the effect of recognition which ‘gentrifies’ the disquieting uncanniness of its object (‘Aha, now I see the point of this apparent mess!’), the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to estrange its very initial homeliness”, producing an “interpretive pleasure of ‘estranging’ the most banal content” [1]. In other words, locate the grotesque in the normal, the hidden madness behind a collective sanity. QAnon adherents do this altogether without self-awareness. I’ve written about this before, comparing QAnon-ers to culture critics (not unlike myself) who read for deeper meaning.

But where traditional conspiracy theories tend to give order to disorder — in Žižek’s framework, a modernist approach — QAnon notably deviates in the sense that the world under Q is actually less, not more, sensible and comprehensible. Where, for example, theories over the JFK assassination or the 9/11 terror attacks tend to assign stability to an inherently unstable, earth-shattering event, QAnon assigns instability to the inherently innocuous.

More mainstream conservatives, on the other hand, are obsessing over the threat to a bunch of children’s books which have not been banned, burned, or anything else. They’re fabricating the supposed targets of “wokeness”, fabricating what’s being done to those targets, and fabricating the potential consequences of what’s not happening to the things it’s not happening to. Like QAnon, it’s not clear what’s going on, but Tucker Carlson’s audience knows to be afraid.

I don’t agree with Kyle Kulinski when he offers a blanket dismissal of popular culture as an issue not worth discussing, but when he says that “this culture war bullshit overtakes the important issues that we should be discussing”, he’s not wrong. While I find the idea that we should “leave the children’s cartoons, and children’s books, to children” deeply naïve (children, after all, become adults) and needlessly limiting, he’s again not wrong to dismiss any kind of back-and-forth sniping over Pepe Le Pew as “a giant distraction”.

The problem, contra Kulinski, is not that we talk about pop culture; it’s that we do it badly. As I wrote last year in “Destroy All Monsters”, there’s a tendency to for discussion around culture and identity to devolve into “a game … whose sole objective was the accumulation of points”. And if your entire conception of culture criticism is derived from people’s tweets, you might get the sense that anyone who discusses pop culture is just another player in a massive laser tag match.

The op-ed in question in Kulinski’s video doesn’t actually concern Pepe Le Pew, who is merely name-dropped as one of many pieces of children’s media of the author’s youth that reinforced harmful narratives, in Pepe Le Pew’s case, about rape culture. What op-ed writer Charles M. Blow is saying, unsurprisingly, goes deeper (even The New York Times probably wouldn’t devote an entire column to someone just reiterating over and over that Pepe Le Pew is sexist) and speaks from a personal place on the ways that children’s media affects children. It’s a perfectly fine op-ed; not anything amazingly groundbreaking, but it also shouldn’t be dismissed as distraction because it happens to concern pop culture.

I also wrote in “Destroy All Monsters” last year about some of the wrong ways we tend to analyze and critique pop culture. I closed the piece thusly:

it is important to be fluid rather than rigid in our criticisms, and recognize that the situation is rarely so simple as to be summed up so easily and punished so thoroughly. The shapeshifter critic attends to works of art as shapeshifting entities in their own right. This mean, to borrow from [Mark] Fisher, that nothing is essentially anything, but rather that art inhabits a complex, irreducible set of meanings. Criticism is a necessary check on power, including media power, but all too often we weaponize ‘offense’ in order to condemn, to the detriment of good-faith attempts to criticize in order to actually produce change for the better.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, two young men commit a murder solely for the sake of seeing if they can get away with it. Viewing murder as a philosophical exercise more than an act which takes the life of a human being, Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brandon (John Dall) follow in the rhetorical footsteps of their teacher, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), who prattles on about how “murder is – or should be – an art” only to become horrified when he learns his pupils have put his abstract theories into grim practice.

Rope is many things — most famously a chamber piece designed to appear as a single unbroken take — but it’s also a meditation on the relationship between philosophy and praxis, between words and deeds. I’m drawn to Mladen Dolar’s take on Bruno in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train [2], who Dolar writes “treats words as labels for things – which is essentially the psychotic handling of language.” It is precisely “a psychotic incapacity to read between the lines” that for Dolar causes the entire plot in the first place.

Phillip and Brandon, too, are guilty of a slightly different “psychotic handling of language” that sets the plot in motion: words, for them, metastasize like a cancer in their thoughts and spill into the real world. Rupert, capable of treating words as mere words and ideas as mere ideas, becomes horrified to learn that through Phillip and Brandon have transfigured word to deed, an almost Cronenbergian process that prefigures the transformative power of the signal in Videodrome.

It is, once again, a “psychotic handling of language” that we see present in conservative (and even some liberal) outrage engines. When conservatives began raging over some children’s books, they, like Phillip and Brandon, carry ordinary language and abstract ideas into a twisted media practice. The process in this case is highly distorting, like a game of telephone in which a company’s decision to stop publishing books (a function of the free market conservatives claim to worship) becomes a quest by the left to ban a beloved children’s author.

Tucker Carlson, who could easily be cast as the effete, snobbish, domineering Brandon in the direct-to-streaming remake of Rope, did a story about Dr. Seuss (CW: Tucker Carlson’s face) in which he makes the claim that “they’re banning Dr. Seuss not because he was a racist, but precisely because he wasn’t.” Carlson then performs an analysis of “The Sneetches” that wouldn’t pass muster in a 10th grade lit class: “The story is a plea for colorblindness”. In doing so, he of course evokes what he calls “Martin Luther King’s most famous precept” (aka the only Dr. King quote that racists like) “that what matters is the content of our characters, not the color of our skins”.

This analysis of “The Sneetches” intrigued me; not like the start of a good mystery or a thesis presenting a compelling new idea, but more in the sense that I wanted to rhetorically punch Tucker Carlson in the face. So I went to my local Barnes & Noble and, to my surprise, not only was I able to locate an entire section of Dr. Seuss books, I was not even arrested when I walked out with The Sneetches and Other Stories following an uncomfortably capitalistic exchange of money for literature. I was actually pleasantly surprised by what I found inside the book.

Specifically, I can say without a doubt that not only is Tucker Carlson is wrong about “The Sneetches” (not surprising, given that Carlson is both stupid and a liar), it’s a much more interesting and ambiguous story than I remembered. “The Sneetches” details a society segregated on the basis of stars; specifically, the sneetches who have stars on their bellies consider themselves superior to those who do not. In the end, the sneetches decide that who has or doesn’t have a star is of less importance than their shared sneetch-ness.

Simplistically read, yes, this story hits Carlson’s points, if you actually read the story as one about race, which isn’t actually a foregone conclusion. But Carlson, like most white supremacists, reads what he wants into stories, and transmits to an audience of viewers like Brandon and Phillip; abstract philosophical ideas take on chillingly literal materialist practice, at which point Carlson’s practice is itself another form of media transmission to viewers who are just like him. Tucker Carlson is not a person, he’s a medium unto himself, an intermediary who serves as a filter for a complex series of ideological functions.

The center of “The Sneetches” is a businessman who, recognizing a cash flow when he sees one, charges sneetches to either add or remove stars depending on which is more desirable in the moment. Pitting stars against non-stars, the businessman milks the sneetches for all they’re worth, and it is only when the money dries up and the businessman leaves that the sneetches find a kind of solidarity (at which point I’m going to assume they rise up against the exploitative capitalist class, although that for some reason didn’t make the book). Personally I think “The Sneetches” is more about class than anything else.

But “The Sneetches” isn’t, and never was, the point. Since writing the passages above the right has moved on from defending Dr. Seuss to working to ban Toni Morrison and other alleged vectors of “critical race theory”, which is in quotes because, for the one billionth time, conservatives do not know what critical race theory is and have simply applied the label of an academic discipline to whatever they find to be uncomfortable and/or a convenient political target, and both in the case of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

So to be clear: a legendary novel that won the Pulitzer Prize is bad; a poorly (I assume, I won’t watch it) doctored anime video fantasizing about the murder of a sitting member of Congress and the president of the United States is fine. The drawing of this distinction even in the mainstream is palpable, as this Media Matters study suggests. It seems inconsistent, but it’s makes perfect sense when you realize that it isn’t actually about free speech or freedom of any sort; it’s all coded stochastic terrorism against women, people of color, queer people, poor people, etc. Paul Gosar’s aforementioned video affirms that.

The problem with art, in the reactionary mind, is that it tends to take you to unfamiliar places. But modern conservative philosophy sometimes seems to stem from a grossly literal interpretation of the most famous line of The Wizard of Oz, specifically the chant Dorothy is instructed to perform, that “there’s no place like home”. In the BFI Film Classics volume on the film, Salman Rushdie incredulously disputes this as the moral of the film, asking, “Are we to believe that Dorothy has learned no more on her journey than that she didn’t need to make such a journey in the first place?” [3]

[1] Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (Second Edition), p. 2

[2] Mladen Dolar, “Hitchcock’s Objects”, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (Second Edition), edited by Slavoj Žižek, p. 41

[3] Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (2nd Edition), p. 57