I wrote this essay several years ago, so the many of the references in it are dated. But it deals with things that are still relevant in today’s pop culture, and since it’s mostly a book review, I thought I’d post it here.
A few years ago I wrote an essay about TV serials and novels and how they were more unalike than alike. During the early aughts, the “Golden Age of Television,” critics and fans were drawing comparisons between the two with annoying persistence and accepting them unquestioningly with little thought as to what made them so similar other than they were both serialized (which isn’t entirely true since serialization isn’t a defining feature of the novel, at least not by today’s standards). My argument was simple, but only because the comparison itself was simplistic, owing more to the fact that cable dramas had changed how we think and watch TV faster than we’ve come up with the language to describe those changes. Their use of serialized storytelling had enlivened and enriched television viewing, so one was tempted to compare them to novels, especially when critics like Alan Sepinwall went so far as to call The Wire “The Great American Novel for television,” further blurring the lines.
In my essay I wanted to explain that the differences between serialized television and the novel were too great to invite such easy comparisons and that cable television was more of a direct descendant of day- and nighttime soaps, whose continuous stories predated television and spanned generations. I argued that, while cable dramas had certainly pushed the envelope on what was permissible for television, they were nonetheless a part of a grand tradition of TV storytelling and should be seen and respected as such.
After the essay was published online under the title “HBO Not TV: How the Wire is Not Like a Novel,” it received even-tempered responses on the site, but decidedly hyperbolic ones elsewhere on the web. Over at a forum where the essay had been linked in an original post, the responses ranged from denials over the assertion that The Wire had been literally compared to a novel to ad-hominem attacks––one poster hilariously and ironically dismissed me as a “hipster.” Exhibiting a glutton for punishment that I’ve never before realized, I read through the entire thread, growing more despondent. While I concede that I should have provided more examples of the comparisons being made (Sepinwall being one such example), I thought my argument, as simple, or as posters pointed out as “simplistic,” as it was, still needed to be said, especially since I believe there ought to be a way to critically analyze television that respects the historical and aesthetic context of the medium without making simplistic comparisons to other media. In the intervening years, other critics, such as Salon’s book editor, Laura Miller, pushed back against such comparisons as well and got the same responses.
My experience was hardly the worst. Quite frankly, if you expect 100% agreement on anything you write, then you’re in the wrong line of business. However, some disagreements have turned vituperative. Critics expressing opinions about pop culture are usually greeted with fans who flood comments sections or emails with harsh language or, in the case of Janelle Asselin, a DC Comics editor who committed the grave sin of criticizing a comic book cover, rape threats. But excluding even these hyperbolic examples, there seems to be little room on the internet for serious engagement about pop culture that goes beyond the usual fanboy fawning. Take, for instance, the recent dust-up following an episode on HBO’s fantasy drama Game of Thrones, in which one of its popular characters raped his sister. When some feminist critics argued that the show relied too heavily on rape as a cheap storytelling device, further muddying discussions about rape and rape culture, fans of the show struck back by claiming that the series or any piece of pop culture shouldn’t be interpreted or taken seriously as anything deeper than “fiction”––“Hey! It’s just a TV show!”––as though social criticism plays no role in how we watch/read/engage with fiction period. Other fans went a step further as one did at Esquire.com: “Someone needs to take Esquire's rape whistle away. Penis guilt is almost as annoying as white guilt.” Any opportunity for critical engagement with television or film that explores deeper implications of the society we live in will be met with “dude bro” opprobrium.
We truly are living in the era of Fanboys/girls.
Perhaps there’s nothing new to this. Perhaps there have always been fans who were able and willing to go to bat for their favorite pop culture treasures to the point of crossing the line of appropriate behavior. Yet there’s no doubt that the internet has made it more possible for fans to congregate and even mob those, either on Twitter or blog sites, who dare disagree, creating a hive-like mentality that offers little room for contrarian opinions. Today fans exercise their power to speak to and back at critics and showrunners, which is certainly liberating and egalitarian as far as that goes. But blind love is blind love, and when fans strike back, what is often missed is a real critical dialogue that can only enrich us in the truest democratic sense. So the question bears asking: Is there room for pop cultural critical analysis on the Internet?
A version of this question percolated in the back of my mind as I read James Baldwin’s book-length essay, The Devil Finds Work. Published in 1976, The Devil Finds Work is a book of film criticism, memoir and social and political treatise delivered in Baldwin’s usual lacerating prose. Divided into three sections, Baldwin recounts the films and actors that affected him as a child and continued to affect him well into middle age.
Baldwin’s book, written in an age before the internet dominated public discourse, is a revelation in how it thoroughly differs from much of contemporary pop cultural criticism. Never one to hold his tongue, Baldwin is fierce in his critique of American cinema, his eye, sharply attenuated to the way race plays out on the silver screen, extracting sharp observations that are brutal and thought-provoking. He recognized both its power to seduce––such as his revelation that actress Bette Davis, with her pop eyes just like the author’s, was still considered beautiful and so could he––and to manipulate, especially when it comes to matters of race.
Baldwin begins the essay with one such memory of the cinema’s seduction. Sitting in the dark theater with his mother, he is entranced by Joan Crawford’s back as it moves through the corridor of a train car before she meets Clark Gable in the movie Dance, Fools, Dance. He becomes enthralled with movement itself: “I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like heaving and swelling of the sea (though I have not yet been to sea): and which is also something like the light which moves on, and especially beneath, the water.”
Though Baldwin recognized even at a small age that Crawford was white “in the way that the landlords and the storekeepers and the cops and most of my teachers were white,” he nonetheless recognized something in Crawford’s “straight, narrow, and lonely back,” that taught him to perceive the real world, its shape and movement, and the way people navigate within it. Specifically, he sees in the black woman he encounters in a store that same shimmering movement of the silver screen: “she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile...” Crawford’s body winnowing across the screen, the movement of light surrounding the black woman, and his fascination with both allowed him to grasp the world around him with greater clarity. Baldwin isn’t simply critically analyzing here; he is describing the power of cinema on the mind of a young, innocent boy.
Elsewhere, Baldwin’s deep reading of the cinematic image is more sophisticated, as with his review of Birth of a Nation. In one scene of the silent film, the arrival of black slaves in America is depicted as though they were white immigrants arriving on Ellis Island, “huddled, silent, patient, and hopeful, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty,” looking “as though they want to enter the Promised Land.” Baldwin sees through this nonsense: “This is not exactly the way blacks looked...nor were they covered by European clothes.” This image, Baldwin reads, carries the whole of slavery apologias and justifies the mass murder which followed almost immediately after the South’s defeat in the Civil War. Though he doesn’t state it explicitly, he certainly implies it: the image is power––power to define, to obfuscate, to lie. Whereas Joan Crawford’s back allowed an opening for Baldwin to integrate himself onto the silver screen, the silver screen, now viewed with adult eyes, blocked entrance. It denies the existence and experience of anyone who is not white.
He draws similar conclusions from films like The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night, Lady Sings the Blues, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, films that sugarcoated the reality of black life even when they came packaged with able and talented actors like Sidney Poitier and Diana Ross. Some of Baldwin’s observations are perfectly predictable. Even by the time of the book’s publication, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner had been routinely mocked for its safe, liberal vision of racial (or was that even then post-racial?) tolerance, but he still had the power to force open eyes, even nearly forty years later.
Take, for instance, his observations of The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s spin on devil possession, released only a few short years before the book’s publication. When I first saw The Exorcist for its premiere television broadcast, I spent most of its airing either looking away or covering my eyes, though this did little to protect me from the audio, which proved far scarier. Subsequent re-watchings dulled the scariest moments, so my enjoyment of it lives on mainly in the remembrance that it once scared me silly, but, outside of its gender politics (Regan possessed less by the devil than by men’s fear of female menses), I rarely thought of the movie beyond occasional harmless fun.
Baldwin, however, saw something far more sinister, far more banal. He recognizes the tormented guilt of its two main adults––the priest whose guilt over his mother’s death turns him into the devil’s vessel; and Ellen Burstyn’s actress mom, whose career and divorce has left her daughter vulnerable to forces of evil. Yet, as Baldwin notes, the film can’t “exorcise [this guilt] since it never confronts it.” To do so, he states, would have meant a real confrontation with the devil, one, that Baldwin singles out, is far less fantastic than split-pea vomit and levitating beds. As he writes:
For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself.
There are hints of this interpretation scattered through the movie: the dirty, rundown tenement and mental institution where Father Karras’ mother is confined, the unrest depicted in the film-within-a-film mirroring the real social unrest occurring in the heart of D.C., the movie’s setting, and across the nation; Regan, the daughter whose possession disorders the adult world, overhearing her mom’s overheated conversation about her absent, uninvolved dad (a dad so uninvolved that he not only forgets to call for her birthday but who can’t be bothered to be there for her during her crisis). But these evils aren’t easily swept away, Baldwin points out, when the gratefully exorcised Regan kisses the priest at the end of the film. They continue to linger in the background, in the negative space of celluloid, and in the negative spaces of American lives.
The evil Americans should certainly know about, warns Baldwin, is self-evident and to “pretend otherwise,” is a form of denial, one that “any black man, and not only black––many, many others, including white children––can call them on...he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.” From a mere “fiction,” Baldwin lifts a deeper, more profound examination of evil in the wake of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, urban uprisings, racial strife, and antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s––it is the evil of racism, of war, of capitalism, or apathy and indifference.
Reading Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, whether nodding in agreement or frowning in confusion or disagreement, is a powerful experience for anyone who loves pop culture and wants to engage with it beyond mere entertainment. Baldwin pushed past the facile and thought critically in ways that reached toward clarity and a greater awareness of the world around him. He questioned and demanded to be present and active against rather than passive to the forces around him. Good art does that; great critics do that as well. When we shut ourselves off from both, we shut ourselves off from the world.
And yet, I wonder: In this age of fanboys, whose voice rings with the same clarity, cuts through the hype and gets to truth? Were Baldwin alive today, would he be able to engage with contemporary pop culture––and one can only wonder what Baldwin might have to say about shows like Mad Men or The Wire or films like The Help––wringing out the same brutal truths in his searching, examining prose, especially in an era where a black man now sits in the Oval Office and racial, gender, and economic discontent once again openly punctures the American landscape? But, more significantly, would he be heard, taken seriously, disagreed with intelligently, honestly; or would his voice be drowned out by fanboy outrage, reduced to being a troll for daring to look the devil in the eye?