the cult of not knowing sh*t
or, "how are u a movie fan and you don't recognize 'bicycle theives'???"
(originally published Dec 17, 2023 on Substack)
“Fascism… expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of spectacle/contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
“A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Loathe am I to base a piece on TikTok discourse because I want my writing to remain evergreen, but some set dressing is needed:
Letterboxd, once a movie review site, now the secondary social media for the Film Twitter Entity, went onto the red carpet for the movie Poor Things and asked actors Emma Stone, Kathryn Hunter, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and Yorgos Lanthimos their four favorite movies.
To my pleasant surprise,The Magician, Le Dolce Vita, Bicycle Thieves, and Husbands were mentioned, all important titles to film history that movie devotees should either recognize or be made curious enough to seek out and deepen their knowledge.
That’s not what happened. Instead, people accused them of putting on airs, of saying “obscure” names rather than popular ones just so they can look more cultured than the “rest of us”. Why couldn’t they choose something like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, why say names that signal “insider status”? These actors’ appreciation of genre pioneers was interpreted as stuck-up posturing aimed to place them out of reach of the audiences who sustain their careers. Occam’s Razor says that those actors named those movies because they appreciate what they set out to do and what they achieved. Social media is not built to reckon with that.
Bicycle Thieves didn’t get huge box office numbers, which means that people didn’t like it because nobody went to see it, which means it isn’t actually good, which means Kathryn Hunter must have mentioned it because nobody liked it and it isn’t good. It’s true that people at the time didn’t like Bicycle Thieves becaue they didn’t get what it was doing, but nowadays? It’s a wild accusation based on logic that seems sound at first — why would something be popular if it wasn’t good? The real answer is that “good” is its own spectrum with many axes, but the real-ER answer is that marketing budgets often determine success. In general, quality sneaks into the mainstream rather than the mainstream producing quality that sometimes misses what exists on the fringes. Artistic statements are often appreciated by the masses on accident rather than intention. People broadcast approval of things through exclamations of “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?” and “It’s worth the hype” rather than engaging with any context. Discourse and criticism has been boiled down into win/lose dynamics for maximum social media reward, and the best way to take advantage of algorithms is to translate thought into binary. Either you’re with “us” (the mainstream, the hivemind, the society), or you’re against “us”.
I do not appreciate how this economic mindset that fetishizes high numbers has transplanted onto media criticism. Media loses its ability to forge personal connections when you use it to signal belonging and not belonging. In an era addicted to aestheticizing the real world, the -cores and Pinterest “___ aesthetic” searches turn rich histories into surface-level, SEO-ready symbols. Spotify popularized the concept of a “rewind” that atomizes your listening habits into languages of virality (or rather, publishes the tracking they’ve done in the background so the algorithm can curate your taste as screenshottable graphics to post as a form of advertising and artist loyalty), and with its rise came an increased tendency for people to describe their media consumption as numbers. It’s cool to read 300 books a year, but when people question the value of a number obtained through mass consumption of cookie-cutter smut and easily digestible YA, it becomes such a threat to the perceived value of being the Person Who Read Three Hundred Books This Year that the questioners are accused of treating the hobby like homework. Letterboxd reviews have degraded into attempted one-liners with no mention of the movie’s substance, yet when people question why attempts at going viral have overtaken longer form discussion, the threat of not being the Funniest Reviewer Whose Takes People Look Forward To often kickstarts a day of whining about filmbro pretentions. A pattern emerges: users aim for status, other users question the methods used to obtain that status, the fragility of the status reveals itself through overgeneralized and relentless antagonism. Within an aestheticized mind, questioning isn’t part of an additive process, it’s a weapon to knock someone down a peg.
Here’s the thing: thinking is slow. It’s ponderous. There’s a lot of dead ends that demand further research. Looking up interpretations takes time. Seeking out discussion redirects your attention away from the next thing. Numbers don’t increase when you take a moment to breathe, so if you seek endorphins from rapid completion, there’s no incentive to delay gratification with analysis. Name the technique in use but not its function in the narrative. Describe the story, do not connect it to context. Venerate apoliticism even as it contradicts the text. The curtains are blue because they’re blue.
It’s a fascist way of moving through the world described by Umberto Eco in Ur-Fascism: “No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism… In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.” If you’re part of the biggest crowd, you’re part of the “right side” that “everybody” “wants” to be part of. If you don’t, you just want to be contrary, not because there’s richness to be found away from the well-worn path. Numbers (box office performance, Goodreads ratings, Metacritic scores, album sales) become “objective” measures of quality that are further divorced from human culpability by making “objective” computers do the calculations; the hand is abstracted away to manufacture consensus and silence dissent.
Quarantine isolation allowed people to find community through new hobbies and it metastasized into a constant performance for clout. This performance is always tied to an implied authority, “For Ur-Fascism… the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity, expressing the Common Will… citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People… a theatrical fiction.” The “hobby” is not genuine. There’s no striving for quality and no drive to know the most out of anyone. Nerdiness became cool because floor-to-ceiling shelves of paraphernalia are satisfying to look at. They’re something to look at, a tangible product of being a Fan. Spending hours within digital archives sourcing obscure scraps of information to develop a world you love is invisible labor, and can therefore be discarded since it’s already out of sight. Why spend years on a single Dungeons and Dragons campaign when you can listen to Critical Role or play Baldur’s Gate 3, transposing your favorite tropes onto whomever looks the best in fanworks? Why argue over meta and worldbuilding when contemporary offerings don’t provide anything to chew on? Game developers crunch their teams into burnout for the sake of unfinished games that future patches, guided by audience reaction, can massage into a completed state. Art becomes a vehicle for crowdsourced mythologizing — the motivation behind everything made into external pressure to quickly align with a majority to manufacture satisfaction. If genre-sustaining depths in the text must be sacrificed for this, then it is done with glee. The ones who mourn its absence are carceral mood-killers that want to ruin “everyone else’s” fun.
Totalitarians love it when people think that way. Shallow populations that prioritize groupthink are the fascist’s bread and butter: fit into an archetype, the majority is always good, life is good versus evil, evil needs to be destroyed. As reactionary movements sweep the planet under the United States and Europe’s malevolent watch, the human desire to belong will continue being manipulated to stifle critical thought. This must be resisted with intention. Let yourself be absorbed by what you love.