Comment Section Democracy/

A Billion Little Paulines

Originally published 10/25/2019

[Some writers] have taken a rather fancy way out: they turn films into Rorschach tests and find the most elaborate meanings in them... The deficiency of this technique is that the writers reveal a great deal about themselves but very little about films.
-- from "Movies, The Desperate Art", by Pauline Kael.

About ten years ago, there was a story people on the internet liked to tell each other. It went something like this:

Once upon a time, while guest-lecturing for a college literature class, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury did the unthinkable. In front of a room full of innocent, impressionable students, Bradbury insisted his famous dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 — known worldwide as a terrifying tale of government censorship gone amok — was actually about how the public would passively consent to the mass burning of books out of laziness and apathy. Instead of allowing the students to get away with settling on the easy lesson that censorship was bad, Bradbury encouraged the students to consider the idea that populist solipsism and the collective intellectual inertia of American society pose a bigger threat to humanity's shared cultural heritage than any authoritarian fiat. In response to Bradbury's prompting to reconsider how they thought about the book he had written, the brave and righteous students decided Bradbury had insulted and abused them by telling them their opinions were wrong, and then took the only logical next step: the students declared, "NUH UUUUUUUUUH," and told Bradbury they knew what his book was about better than he did. The students, faced with such shocking blasphemy against a book at least half of them didn't read, bravely took up the defense of Fahrenheit 451's "true" meaning, i.e. the one other people had told them the book was about and that they were happy to keep repeating as long as it meant they continued to be praised for their superior understanding didn't have to think too hard. Who was Bradbury, the students insisted, to claim that such a small thing as being the person who wrote the book Fahrenheit 451 made him qualified to lecture them about the intended meaning of Fahrenheit 451, the book which he wrote? Before the scheduled lecture was finished Bradbury reportedly stormed from the classroom in frustration, to the jeers of the triumphant students.

When the internet denizens of yesteryear told each other this story, it was with the feel-good moral that even authors can be wrong about their work, and that no one could tell you your opinion is wrong (unless you’re the author). But the real moral of the story is that a lot of people are bad at reading and don't care to get any better at it. Like so many banal and inspiring clichés before it, the attitude that all interpretations are equally valid (except the ones you don’t agree with) has become the cynical ideological justification for mob tyranny. Under the prevailing order of comment section democracy, criticism is not an exploration for meaning but a contest to see who can shout their meaning the loudest and longest without experiencing any feelings of self-awareness or shame. Gossip, slander, and threats against the people who make art, and those who consume and enjoy it, have become the common currency of popular criticism, the coin that the noxious and self-pitying blusterers of the world love hoarding to buy the loyalty of eternally disgruntled consumers.

The mass audience has decided that fiction and art mean whatever they feel like it should mean, that no interpretation can be wrong (if they agree with it) and that all opinions must be treated as equally true ("all opinions" meaning "my opinions"). From this perspective, the only reason to even seek out a work of art or entertainment is to arm oneself for the next step, a race to see who can most effectively appeal to the petty ressentiment of consumers spoiled rotten by a lifetime of targeted content production. There is no collective audience, merely a billion individual consumers, temporarily embarrassed thought leaders all; and their belief in the individual's right to vomit as much intellectual bilge into the collective consciousness as one pleases is the only common principle shared between them. Those who have been granted a platform to broadcast their opinions are tolerated on sufferance only so long as the aspiring consumer-pundit can imagine them to be their proxies in the public sphere, and only so long as they are willing to submit to constant public challenges to their ideological fitness from spiteful commentators and resentful would-be competitors. "All interpretations are just as valid," because according to the beliefs that lead someone to take that stance, meaning lies not within a work itself but in the brute application of political will to inflict a meaning on a work to soothe their fragile, pampered egos.

The most malignant form of this ideological solipsism is closely tied to what me might as well call "special interest criticism," the abominable trend of self-appointed fandom-advocates-slash-scam-artists-cum-online-cult-leaders pandering to the endlessly factionalized mass audience's pathological need to be scandalized over how not every piece of mass culture is made with them specifically in mind. These fandom lobbyists scrutinize every new piece of media with a zeal only found in fanatics, con artists, and the rubes who sustain both. They comport themselves with the wounded pride of those compelled to spread the message they are being silenced because they only have unlimited access to a plethora of digital platforms with no editorial standards or quality control to make themselves heard, with only a large audience of uncritical and devoted followers to hear them and inflict suffering on others in their name. On the other end of the feedback loop is the pundits' audience, trained to expect every cause to center on them and swindled into believing the only fulfillment to be found in art or politics is spiting one's enemies, always secure in the knowledge that whatever a piece of art is about it should have been about them. The panderer pundits are always just scandalized enough to inflame their audiences with new tales of outrage and perfidy coming from all sides, but never scandalized enough to stop consuming and thus have to stop talking. The audience, for its part, is always just scandalized enough to swallow whatever slop those enterprising editorialists serve to them.

Renata Adler's description of fellow critic Pauline Kael's later writing summarizes the prevailing mode of mass engagement perfectly:

The pervasive, overbearing, and presumptuous "we," the intrusive "you," the questions, the debased note of righteousness and rude instruction -- the whole verbal apparatus promotes, and relies upon, an inability to read. The writing falls somewhere between huckster copy (paens to the preferred product, diatribes against all other brands and their venal or deluded purchasers) and ideological pamphleteering: denouncings, exhortations, code words, excommunications, programs, threats... There is no underlying text or theory. Only the underlying review, virtually divorced from movies, as its own end.

Kael is still cited as an influential critic, mostly for how her unabashed enthusiasm and acerbic wit inspired other critics to think critically and speak their minds. More and more, it seems like her true legacy is the way her bloated sense of self-regard, her readiness to fling slanderous accusations with little prompting and even less evidence, and her increasingly frantic assertions that anyone who would disagree with her must be a moral cretin, are reflected in the viewing public's attitudes about consuming media and interacting with people with different tastes. Kael's specter haunts us not to remind us she wrote "Circles and Squares," but that her preferred way to discredit the targets of her ire was to imply they were gay.