I visited Allure Magazine in the Times Square building of Conde Nast last week.

I got to see what can only be described as a "photo pour."  A editor works in a smallish room with her two assistants as if sitting on a rope bridge over an Andean river gushing fat with spring run off.  The photos pass before her in the thousands. She is charged with making choices that she will pass upward to her editor, the editor of Allure Magazine.

I felt like shouting, "What about that one?  Hey, what if you missed that one!"  Ok, sure, I suffer Monk-like indecision. ("These socks or these ones?") So this is bound to impress me.  But as the photos poured past us, my anxiety grew.  How can the editor be sure she doesn’t want that batch.  And more pressingly, how can she spot the one photo she wants as it races by?  The ratio of churn to choice must be something like 2000 to 1. How can she know?

Yes, maybe it’s a matter of Gladwell’s Blink.  It is also a matter of Bateson’s Ecology of the Mind.  This editor’s powers of pattern recognition are porous.  She has been trained, prepped by her editors, and recalibrating by last night’s 60 Minutes and this morning’s New York Times.  Conscious choices are constantly being fed into the unconscious field.  Most blinks start as a wink (and an editorial nod) from someone or something.  This editor is programmed and self programming. 

What’s weird is that the editor is not just choosing good photographs.  The photos she choses have the ability to arrest our attention and program us.  Ah, yes, that photo captures the celebrity of the moment, and exactly how and why she is the celebrity of the moment.  Ah, here’s a photo that captures the trend that matters now, and yes, that photo helps show me what makes the trend compelling.  This editor is choosing photographs that diminish the noise of contemporary culture and make good on every Conde Nast magazine’s promise: that the reader is now a little more calibrated, a little more part the loop, and a little less overwhelmed by the Andean rush of contemporary life.  By choosing photographs, this editor is, in a much better than trivial sense, choosing us. 

The Frank Gehry cafeteria was a revelation of its own.  As if to satisfy my fondest hope of a celebrity sighting, there at the "first table" was Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue.  As luck would have it, Ms. Wintour was surveying the room.  Now it was in the Renaissance, a  very big deal for anyone at court, to fall, even for a moment, within the gaze of a monarch.  Did I pass muster?  Hard to know.  For the record, I was wearing a black mock turtle neck, gray flannel pants, while carrying a briefcase, a green apple and a bottle of Root beer.  I wish now that I had been juggling the latter but you can’t have everything. But I feel certain I made an impression.  I mean who wears gray flannel pants these days?

The restaurant is a kind of cafeteria, a good cafeteria to be sure, the best company food in the city, so they say at Conde Nast.  And this means that people have to stand in line.  And this means they have plenty of time to scope one another out. This is a "gaze economy" of major proportions. 

It’s a slightly anxious place, because a) everyone looks fabulous, except of course your devoted anthropologist and, b) they are engaged in the activity that threatens their fabulousness, eating.  This is a world in which a carrot stick counts as calorie loading. 

Design to the rescue.  Or at least Mr. Gehry to the rescue.  As you leave the cafeteria, you pass a running, reflective wall that makes you look 10 pounds lighter.  (This photograph, above, captures the line of the wall, but it has now been resurfaced with something silvery.)  I will tell you in my mock turtle neck and my gray flannel pants, I had an anti-narcissistic moment, I can tell you, and resolved then and there to lose twenty pounds and ditch the flannels.  I mean, really, who is that guy?

An anthropologist who studies America is struck by the fact that there are some people in this culture who believe they know better than other people in this culture.  It’s not always a delusion and when indeed they do know better, we are well served.  Smart, thoughtful people give us the benefit of their advice.

But too often the critics act as if they are they only ones who "get it," that without them the rest of us wander without light, unable to see what is wrong, unable to see that something is wrong, and certainly unable to put wrong things right. 

Here is A.O. Scott in today’s New York Times. 

[T]he phenomenon of family viewing – the mothers and fathers of American taking their children to the movies – has become a central cultural activity consistent with the highly participatory style of parenthood currently in vogue.  I would not wish it otherwise, but I also worry that the dominance of the family film has a limiting, constraining effect of the imaginations of children. 

Here the film critic presumes to know what happens in the interaction between child and family film.  Mr. Scott may actually have done research here or consulted those who do, but I would be very surprised if this were the case.  No, this is the almost certainly something that has just occurred to Mr. Scott.  It is his little worry, a stray thought.  Now, lots of us have lots of stray thoughts and some of us are shameless in our efforts to blog and flog these thoughts.  But only a few of us presume to issue a "cultural advisory" of this kind, as if Mr. Scott were a tweedy version of the Director of the Center for Disease Control and called upon here to put the nation on alert.  ("Honey, where’s that Jules et Jim DVD? Tommy’s seen Shrek so many times his eyes are starting to roll back in his head.") 

But that the real problem is not the alert, it’s that the alert is always the same.  Oh, look out, popular culture is dumbing down and bottoming out.  In this case, that movies has fantastically imaginative as Nemo are putting our children at risk. Evidently, these critics believe themselves to be the canaries in the coal mine.  When they exercise their higher faculties it is to see what we cannot, that our culture is in trouble.  It is this presumption (this arrogation) of superior knowledge that puts my teeth on edge. 

Oh, sure, I’m sure there are moments when warnings are in order.  But warning is the critic’s penny whistle. Really, there are only so many tunes it can play.  The trouble is there is a lot of other, more pressing, critical work to do.  Indeed, the warning function of the critic is now so reflexive, it does not represent a genuinely analytical or explanatory accomplishment.  Now, it’s just yet another blast on dime store plastic.  The anthropologist can help feeling that there are other things to observe, but as long as the critic is captive of critical orthodoxy, the real work of anthropology (or whatever one calls one brand of pattern recognition) goes undone. 

We know where this comes from the what Lionel Trilling called the “subversive” role of the critic: “to detach the reader from habits of thought, giving him ground from which to judge and condemn the culture around him.”  Now that the culture has escaped the uniformities and conformities of mass culture, this work is done. (I wonder if it was ever necessary.  I think popular culture rehabilitated itself.  Aaron Spelling lived long enough to see TV transform itself.  What displaced or at least transcended him, was the likes of Homicide’s Tom Fontana and The Wire’s David Simon, and not Lionel Trilling’s intellectuals.)

Anne Thompson has a great column today in the Hollywood Reporter.  She described the new novel by Tolkin, Return of the Player.  (Tolkin wrote The Player the Altman made the basis of his famous movie of the same name.  Anne is very  kind but it is hard not to suppose that Tolkin is not applying old model criticism to a new model world. 

Return of the Player provides a moral dissection of the values of the entertainment world’s moneyed elite.  It’s about how panic, selfishness, greed and fear can "drive you to do things you shouldn’t do," [Tolkin] says.  "It’s about the difference between panic and social responsibility."

This is boiler plate and the very stain that every word smith wishes to inflict about tinsel town.  But when we read on we discover that some of the fear and panic comes not from greed but something else. 

"The entertainment industry has been unsure of where things are going, how to conduct business, what movies should be or what entertainment is. It is TV, or a download?  Everyone was grabbing at what the Next Thing should be.  I was interested in that anxiety, fear and panic.  That’s what the book is about."

Hmm.  If this is what the book is really about, it’s not about Hollywood, it’s about all the world. Everyone is grabbing at what the Next Thing will be.  Our professional lives depend upon it.  At least the Hollywood execs are coming to terms with the world as it is, which is more than can be said for the camp that promotes critical orthodoxy. 

But am I not the author of a massive contraction?  Do I not presume to know better when I criticize critics for presuming to know better? No and here’s why.  I never think its my job to give warning about what is happening in contemporary culture.  (Let this blog be entered into evidence.)  It’s my job to describe it and to have a go at explaining it.  My private feelings are a private matter.  I may be appalled by My Super Sweet 16, but that doesn’t matter.  The last thing the world needs is another Mr. Smarty Pants rendering judgment.  I can’t believe our patience has held out so long.  Surely, the time will come when we repudiate the experts.  (For a wonderfully quiet act of repudiation, see the article by Chris Hedges on Mark Chrispin Miller.)

No doubt I feel too passionately about this issue because I’m Canadian.  Wha?  I was raised on the West coast of Canada where we were the constant recipient of moral advise and policy directives from the mandarins in Ottawa.  We thanked God we were thousands of miles away from the center of things, and a little sorry that telegraph, telephone, and newspaper distribution stretched far enough to reach us.  We hoped that one day Canada Post would break down, that mountain paths would fill in, that train tracks would twist and buckle, that cloud cover would prove inpenetrable, and that finally our betters would just shut up and leave us alone.  I don’t know what we thought we would do with our little village in the rain forest but at least our mistakes would be our own.

But I digress.  The point I wish to make here is that fantastic intellectual resources are now locked up in the "critical" school of cultural commentary.  We can only release these resources when we persuade the offenders to give up judgment and take up the work of explanation, or at least investigation.  More plainly, no more pony rides on the high horse of righteous indignation.   No more cultural advisories from the Center for Disease Control.  Cease and desist judging us from on high.  Or as my dear friend Hargurchet Bhabra used to say, it isn’t popular culture anymore, it’s our culture.  Judge it if you must, explain it if you can. 

References

Hedges, Chris.  2001.  Public Lives: Watching Bush’s Language, and Television. The New York Times.  June 13, 2001. here. 

Scott, A.O.  2007.  And You’ll Be a Moviegoer, My Son.  The New York Times.  January 5, 2007. here.  

Thompson, Anne.  2007.  Risky business: Tolkin’s new "Player" in everyman territory.  The Hollywood Reporter.  January 5, 2007.  here.  subscription required.

Thanks to Zyra for the image.  See Zyra’s website here.

I watched heroic quantities of TV over the holidays.  And I was struck by how much comedy now comes from characters who are self interested, self serving, self aggrandizing. 

I’m thinking of Charlie Harper played by Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, and Barney Stinson, played by Neil Patrick Harris on How I Met Your Mother.  Both Charlie and Barney are in it for themselves. They have no empathy.  They have no principles.  They have no shame. They are serene in the knowledge that they are without moral reflex of any kind…and that that’s ok.  The rest of us a struggling to live a good life (more or less, give or take) and these guys just couldn’t care less. 

There are British origins to this character, let’s call him the unapologetic male.  John Cleese’s character on Fawlty Towers, Martin Clunes’ character on Men Behaving Badly, and Rickey Gervais’ character on The Office all made a contribution.  It is worth pointing out that these British tokens of the type were just as likely to make us cringe as make us laugh, whereas the American instance is appealing even when appalling. 

American contributions came from Phil Hartman’s character on NewsRadio, David Spade’s character on Just Shoot Me, Jack on Will and Grace, and perhaps even, and distantly, Archie Bunker from All in the Family.  There is a bit of the SNL Bill Murray and a bit of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers, but there is a difference between being self possessed and being self centered.  And there is a bit Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy but there’s a difference between self centered and dumb as a post.  Ron Burgundy is too dim to know better.  Charlie and Barnie know exactly what they’re doing. 

The unapologetic male is a species that appears only in comedy.  And this must be because someone who acted like this in a simulation of real life would be intolerable.  He would, in fact, be Borat.  The unapologetic male always exists always in a series (and not a one-off movie).  We have to get to know him.  We have to grow to love him.  It takes awhile to forgive him.  Something.  But duration counts here.

The unapologetic male is a still minority face in TV comedy which continues to be dominated by characters like Frasier, The King of Queens, Old Christine, Will and Grace, or the Seinfeld crew, all of whom are usually struggling to do the right thing, and ruefully bad at it.  Is it just me, but does the unapologetic male appear to be gaining on the outside.  Is Charlie Harper the future of TV comedy. 

Why is the unapologetic male so funny?  Well, I guess that everyone likes what William James called a moral holiday, the occasional moment when the rules of decency do not apply.  But Charlie Harper and Barney Stinson are always on moral holiday.  Surely, we should tire of them.  Why aren’t they a one-note whistle, predictable and finally annoying.  But this is wrong too.  Charlie and Barney are characters that comedy writers love to write for and we love to listen to.  It’s as if our expectation of the wrong, selfish, abominable thing never goes for enough.  Charlie and Barney are always one step ahead of us. 

I think the Basil Fawlty character worked in England because the English are generally speaking more careful, more exacting in social life.  Watching someone shambling and shameless is good fun.  But we Americans are not so constrained.  Haven’t we always been famous for our candor and freedom?  Perhaps this was only the case when we didn’t really have to pay attention to different points of view and new diversity-borne delicacies in the workplace.  Maybe Charlie and Barney represent the "good old" days when Americans weren’t proceeding with caution.  I really hope this is not it. 

We could look at the unapologetic man as progress, an evolutionary development even.  Feminism demanded a more sensitive male, and the likes of Alan Alda obliged.  Then Madonna sounded the all-clear signal with her "boy toy" video, and many men took this as license to retire to Morton’s, order steak and whiskey, and return to the old rules of gender.  In fact, many males began to think of themselves as "dogs," as big, stupid, but lovable, brutes driven by appetite, capable of only the smallest, simplest niceties.  The unapologetic male, at least he’s a step up.

The obits painted an odd picture of our culture this year.

I mean I can see how a culture could produce a James Brown.  I can see how a culture could produce a Gerald Ford.  But James Brown and Gerald Ford? 

It’s almost impossible to think about these two in the same thought.  You have to shift frames and assumptions like crazy.  And sometimes you can’t.   It’s like having one foot on the dock and the other in the row boat when the two suddenly part company.  Mismatched pairs are hard to think.

But Brown and Ford are the only mismatched pairs for 2006.

Aaron Spelling, check.  Mickey Spillane, check.  But Aaron Spelling and Mickey Spillane?

Robert Altman, ok.  Steve Irwin, ok.  But Altman and Irwin? 

Oriana Fallaci, ok.  Don Knotts, ok.  Fallaci and Knotts? 

We are a mysterious people. 

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Down the Avenue for the December 31, 2006 post "Deaths, Deaths, Deaths" here.