Moralism Is Ruining Cultural Criticism
When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. Helpfully, there was a song whose lyrics consisted precisely of this aesthetic theory: “Input Output.”
Input, output,
What goes in is what comes out.
Input, output,
That is what it’s all about.
Input, output,
Your mind is a computer whose
Input, output daily you must choose.
The search for the “inputs” of secular artwork sometimes took a paranoid form—such as the belief in subliminal messages recorded in reverse, or in isolated frames from Lion King where smoke allegedly forms the word sex. Most often, however, the analysis was more direct. Portraying a behavior or describing a belief, unless accompanied immediately by a clear negative judgment, is an endorsement and a recommendation, and people who consume such messages will become more likely to behave and believe in that way.
This theory underwrote the whole edifice of Christian contemporary music, which aimed to replace a particularly powerful avenue for negative messages. One of my running jokes for many years has been that all Top 40 music is effectively Christian contemporary music now; American Idol confirmed the hegemony of the “praise band” vocal style. More clear is the fact that all mainstream criticism—especially of film and television—is evangelical in form, if not in content. Every artwork is imagined to have a clear message; the portrayal of a given behavior or belief is an endorsement and a recommendation; consumption of artwork with a given message will directly result in the behaviors or beliefs portrayed. This is one of the few phenomena where the “both sides” cliché is true: Left-wing critics are just as likely to do this as their right-wing opponents. For every video of a right-wing provocateur like Ben Shapiro decrying the woke excesses of Barbie, there is a review praising the Mattel product tie-in as a feminist fable.
Here, however, I am more concerned with the critical practices of my comrades on the left. Among leftist publications, Jacobin stands out for its reductive and moralizing cultural coverage. Addressing the other major movie of this past weekend, for instance, the critic Eileen Jones worried in a recent column, “If you’re already convinced of the dangers of nuclear war, superseded only by the ongoing end-times series of rolling climate catastrophes that now seem more likely to kill us all, this film is going to lack a certain urgency.” Sadly, instead of an educational presentation on nuclear war, film audiences will instead find a biopic that takes some liberties with its subject’s life and character for the sake of creating a Hollywood blockbuster. Jones finds more to like in Barbie, despite “the familiar, toothless, you-go-girl pseudo-feminist pieties that Mattel has been monetizing for decades, alongside the nostalgic how-can-our-consumer-products-be-bad affirmations of Barbie as some sort of magic, wholesomely progressive uniter of generations of mothers and daughters.”
This trend is not limited to one publication. It is pervasive in online culture, above all on social media. For instance, over coffee on the morning after the epic Barbenheimer Friday, I learned some disturbing facts about Oppenheimer on Twitter. At least one viewer was worried that the film about the man who created the nuclear bomb did not include any Japanese characters. Indeed, it did not even directly portray his invention’s horrific consequences. Surely this aesthetic choice was meant to minimize his actions by rendering his victims invisible. (An article in New York magazine drew attention to the same absence.) I also learned that the area surrounding Los Alamos was actually cleared of Indigenous and Hispanic residents, another bit of history that is effectively erased by the film.
[John Hendrickson: Oppenheimer nightmares? You’re not alone. ]
Let’s imagine, though, that those complaints had been anticipated and addressed. Let’s imagine an entire subplot of a family going about their business in Hiroshima. We get to know and like them, to relate to them as our fellow human beings. Then, shockingly, they are incinerated by a nuclear blast. One can already hear the complaints. If the family were portrayed as too morally upstanding, it would be a dehumanizing portrayal that idealizes them as perfect victims. If they had moral flaws, the film would be subtly suggesting that they deserved their fate. And either way, the film would be attacked for offering up their suffering as a spectacle for our enjoyment. The same would go for the displaced population of Los Alamos—by portraying them as passive victims with no agency, critics would surely complain, the film would be reinscribing white authority.
Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content. And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism. During that dark era of Soviet history, writers and artists were expected to subscribe to the standards of socialist realism—which, instead of portraying the sordid and brutal reality of the present, anticipated the future reality of socialism by showing heroic workers building a utopian society. Those who fell short of those ideological expectations could expect a personal phone call from Comrade Stalin, if not worse. By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.
To be clear, I don’t want to defend Oppenheimer in any way. I have not actually seen the film. Nothing anyone is saying is necessarily wrong; it’s just not interesting. Like most film and TV viewers, I read reviews because I want to decide whether or not to see a given movie or show, or else to think it through from a fresh perspective. For example, I note that Oppenheimer is very long—how is the pacing? Does it maintain a clear focus throughout, or does it indulge the common vice of biopics by trying to cram too much in? The type of critical literature that concerns me does not address such basic aesthetic questions, or does so only incidentally.
Even more insidiously, though, the logical goal of such very narrow standards could be to create artwork that is straightforward political propaganda. We’ve seen how badly that turned out for the evangelicals (and, indeed, for the Stalinists). Even if we are unlikely to face the scourge of a Leninist equivalent to VeggieTales, however, this style of criticism infantilizes its audience members by assuming they are essentially ideology-processing machines—unlike the wise commentator who somehow manages to see through the deception.
Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences than that they are somehow reading their politics off Succession, for example (“Welp, I guess rich people are good now. Better vote Republican!”). Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics. That’s because aesthetics and politics are not the same thing. They are not totally unrelated, obviously, but they are also and even primarily different. A political message can be part of an aesthetic effect, just as a political movement can benefit from an aesthetic appeal. But we get nowhere if we confuse or collapse these categories.
This story was adapted from a post on Adam Kotsko's blog, An Und Für Sich.