Missing the point

Or, “Inadequacy of response revisited.”

Ben Sixsmith, a young British writer and a contributing editor of The Critic whose work I enjoy, recently published an interesting review of a new book on “Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment” in the Washington Examiner. This ostensibly academic study includes a chapter on “Jackass,” a show that apparently “takes aim at America.” I’m guessing it also does a lot of “calling into question” and, especially, “interrogating.”

The less said about the state of academia, the better, perhaps, but the book’s “opportunistically ideological” section on “Jackass” is where Sixsmith zeroes in. Having noted that the author suggests that the show’s self-inflicted comic violence is some kind of reaction to “the contextualizing bleakness of America” post-September 11th even though “Jackass” premiered in 2000, Sixsmith makes a more broadly applicable point:

It might seem peculiar to take an analysis of an obscene stunt show quite this seriously, but the point I am prowling toward is that intellectual analysis of pop culture that purports to expose its hidden aesthetic or social relevance often misses the point on the most basic level. Writers would never get away with saying The Waste Land was inspired by World War II, but the lofty heights from which they judge more unsophisticated entertainment allows mistakes to sit unnoticed.

The charge of “politicization” is often philistinic. All culture can have political or at least social implications. When culture is assessed through a specific political lens, though, it can diminish rather than expand its significance.

Coincidentally, this morning a friend passed along this video essay on antiwar filmmaking and the new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. It compares 1917 unfavorably to the new All Quiet because it is not bleak or nihilistic enough to get an antiwar message across but does so without stopping to consider whether that was actually the point of 1917.

You might recognize that this is similar to Slate’s accusation in 2020 that, by not explicitly sermonizing against nationalism, 1917 was an “irresponsibly nationalistic” film. As I wrote then:

These are manifest absurdities, but are apparently what Slate writers and their ilk want out of a movie like 1917. Tell us how bad the British officer class was. Don’t other the Germans. Don’t “validate the nationalist impulses that led to such terrible bloodshed.” Don’t give us a movie, give us a disquisition. Give us a sermon. Give us a Slate article.

All of which cheapens or, in Sixsmith’s well-chosen words, diminishes the story and its power.

See again my remarks on inadequate political or ideological responses to art from a couple of months ago. Or go, as is always recommended, to Chesterton: “Missing the point is a very fine art; and has been carried to something like perfection by politicians and Pressmen to-day.”