The chatter

The bankruptcy of the modern cultural conversation

Marie Kondo is a brand. She was never the saviour we made her out to be

Consuming art for the sole purpose of having an opinion about it is killing the criticism that surrounds it

For someone who writes about culture for a living, I am fairly nauseated by the cultural conversation — by the discourse, widespread and inexorable, that emerges in the wake of something nominally provocative. It sometimes seems an annual tradition, in film criticism circles, for a movie to arise as the cause célèbre of the moment, attracting clamorous debate and polarizing discussion, often before the movie has even been released and ordinary people have had an opportunity to see it.

The tenor of this commentary tends toward the sanctimonious and blithely moralistic, and you can hardly believe some of these arguments, ungenerous and literal minded, have been made in good faith. I love movies, and love talking about them. But talk requires sense and reason, and a healthy attitude of receptiveness and sensitivity. This kind of conversation is a non- starter. It’s enough to make you yearn for silence.

I remember the paroxysms of indignation into which the film world briefly lapsed when Zero Dark Thirty was released in the winter of 2012: Pundits everywhere were eager to litigate the case of the movie’s depiction of torture, with many appalled that such a bald- faced championing of the CIA’S enhanced interrogation techniques should be Oscar- nominated. The following year it was Martin Scorsese who aroused the web’s ire: Did The Wolf of Wall Street endorse its hero’s behaviour, critics wondered, and if so, was it morally tenable to accept the film on other terms? We had to hear about American Sniper in 2014 (was it earnestly pro-war or slyly critical of US foreign policy?). By the time 2017 rolled around, it had begun to seem that more people had an opinion about the politics of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri than had actually seen it.

This year, you could sense it coming ahead of schedule. It was in the air around Joker — apprehensive, castigatory, presumptuous. It felt as if it had been declared as problematic in advance. When the movie screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, mere days after it won the illustrious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, there was a sudden influx of aggrieved dismissals. As though in reaction to the European acclaim, critics in Toronto widely and vehemently took Joker to task.

The sentiment was familiar. It had the same air of righteous reproach that frequently marks the cultural conversation. What Joker means, it soon transpired, was very bad indeed. Joker was “the antihero the alienated and angry have been waiting for, and that’s precisely the problem,” according to one editorial. Joker was “a dangerous film,” claimed another, one that “empathizes with a violent sociopath” who “uses gun violence to enact revenge on the society that rejects him.” It was characterized by many as fodder for budding incels.

Todd Phillips, the director, was chastised for being socially irresponsible. The studio was obliged at one point to issue a statement insisting that “neither the fictional character Joker, nor the film, is an endorsement of real- world violence of any kind.” On the eve of its theatrical release, the New York Police Department announced that it would be deploying undercover officers to screenings for the sake of public safety. All this had the effect of making Joker seem pretty irritating. The conversation that had started as a grating din in Toronto in September had risen by the time it was released in cinemas to a deafening roar, and the controversy was so exhausting that I felt drained of any interest in seeing the movie.

Conversations of this kind have a way of forcing you to take sides: It can feel as if you’re seeing the film simply in order to stake a position, to judge the evidence against the arguments and determine which of the prevailing postures you will ultimately take. The pressure to catch up and weigh in — to tender your own meagre opinion in the midst of the brewing polemic — is often more pressing than the desire to watch, and enjoy, the film. But the cultural conversation is capable of distorting and misrepresenting the object under review, as I ought to have remembered from previous debates. And when I got around to seeing Joker, reluctantly, begrudgingly, weeks into its theatrical run, I was astonished to find that I loved it.

It struck me as really surprising and well- realized — sad and complicated and genuinely beautiful. Disappointed too often this year by benign nonentities at the multiplex — by a lot of amiable, focus-grouped trifles, stuff like Men in Black International or Hustlers — I found it bracing to watch a real, intelligent, serious movie, one that tried to do some interesting things and take creative risks. I really liked Joker. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen all year.

Of course, the movie I saw shared little in common with the movie I had been reading about and hearing about for the last three months. The Joker I saw was so obviously not dangerous in any meaningful sense, so obviously not appealing by design to incels or the alt-right, so obviously not advocating the behaviour of its violent protagonist, that it was difficult to imagine that any serious person could really think so. At the same time, it seemed equally obvious that Joker isn’t a satire or some acerbic critique of the easily radicalized, as has been the common counterargument.

“Why, sir,” Saul Bellow imagined an enterprising student asking his university professor in an essay in The New York Times, “does Achilles drag the body of Hector around the walls of Troy?” The professor is intrigued: “That sounds like a most stimulating question. Most interesting. I’ll bite.” “Well, you see, sir,” the student continues, “the Iliad is full of circles — shields, chariot wheels and other grand figures. And you know what Plato said about circles. The Greeks were all made for geometry.” The professor is duly impressed. “You have exquisite sensibility,” he says. “Your approach is both deep and serious. Still, I always believed that Achilles did it because he was so angry.”

Bellow was deeply suspicious of the tendency of academics to what he called “deep reading” — the dubious act of “attaching meaning to whatever is grazed by the writer,” whereby the white whale is the mother and Ahab has an Oedipus complex, and indeed anything mentioned even passingly in a novel may be seized as a potent and expressive symbol.

Bellow wrote the essay quoted above in 1959. In the intervening years, deep reading has migrated away from the academy and onto the internet, where the heady pursuit of meaning in the art we consume has become a tireless, and indeed tiresome, pastime. The books and movies and TV shows we enjoy now have a secondary life online: They’re discussed and debated, run into the ground in the hours and days after they’re released. And the important thing, the thing that commands the conversation, is what it all means. The cultural conversation rarely concentrates on the form of an artwork, it focuses on themes and messages that lend themselves better to headlines and tweets, as well as simplistic bickering.

The conversation arrives swiftly, as a matter of course. Critics, the first to see a film, will always be the first to debate it, and there are certain professional advantages to establishing a clear position on a matter early. If this can overwhelm a movie, distracting from its possible merits by exhausting people before the movie’s even out, it’s also shortlived, and quick to fade. A movie’s reputation is rarely determined long- term by the debate that once surrounded it, and a great movie, like Joker, is sure to survive the controversy it attracted unscathed.