Middlebrow

Here’s a story.

There was this man I used to think I was in love with. He was a working artist and when we met, he expressed disdain for my career as a cog in the institutional machine. But you’re a writer, he said. Not really, I had to tell him. He clearly was not in love with me, but I thought if I became a writer, maybe he would be. I started this newsletter, which now has almost two thousand subscribers. It only made things worse. He went from contempt to jealousy. His own career, like everyone’s, had not gone exactly the way he hoped it would. The switch gave me whiplash. The thing that had seemed attainable to me, making him fall in love with me, turned out to be impossible, while the thing that had seemed incredibly difficult, gaining creative accolades, felt seamless and easy.

No one reading this will be surprised like I was. It is well known that people are complex and temperamental and fickle, even those who are not my Phantom Thread like romantic interests. I generally feel uplifted by friends and partners who are successful and accomplished in ways I aspire to be. I can bask in their afterglow. Many people do not feel this way. It makes them feel insufficient, small, humiliated, jealous.

I was thinking about this again because I went to see Poor Things, the new Yorgos Lanthimos film. If you haven’t seen it, this may spoil it, so be warned, but it basically is a Frankenstein type story except about a woman named Bella. There’s a whole sequence where she befriends a pair of intellectuals and starts reading philosophy and history and questioning the world. Her lover, a very uninteresting but devoted playboy, is shocked and disturbed by her divided attention. He throws her books overboard, tries to throw her friend overboard. She is puzzled by his reaction to her attempts to better herself and to understand her circumstances. In her case, the confusion is understandable. Unlike me, she was basically born yesterday.

What I liked about Poor Things, aside from the visuals which I found enrapturing, was how seriously it took the idea of education. Several reviews I read compared it derogatorily to Barbie and dismissed its simplistic and basic feminism. The comparison is apt in some ways. Like Barbie, Bella is a kind of doll, brought to life and manipulated by a series of men. Unlike Barbie, she starts out life ignorant, literally a toddler in the body of an adult woman, and is forced to educate herself. This explicit childishness distinguishes her trajectory though. She discovers what sex is the way that teenagers do. For a while, she is insatiable. She comes to understanding through life experience. By the time she is offered political ideology in the form of a socialist group, she is equipped by experience to understand her own exploitation. She is working at this point as a sex worker, and her boss takes a third of her earnings. There is obviously more to Capital than this (1,100 pages more), but a lot of it boils down to this kind of financial arrangement. You don’t have to read Marx to understand that you are being exploited. Many people understand it intuitively. What reading offers is a language to describe your exploitation.

It’s not that I think Poor Things is a particularly radical film. The socialism is kind of incidental, albeit woven into its gender politics. But there is also a common insistence by those who have read critical theory (mainly academics) that radical ideas cannot be easily understood or made commonplace. At a talk I went to, one of the speakers repeated this idea bluntly, remarking that radicalism about time, about work, about attention, are very niche and confined to a small group of thinking people. The masses, so the assumption goes, are spoon fed popular culture and are incapable of distinguishing different kinds of messaging, incapable of seeing propaganda, incapable of understanding the circumstances of their own lives.

But exploitation is quite simple. Stolen time, coopted and transmuted into capital whose profits do not accrue to us, is also easily understandable. Most people who have ever worked understand it. The more exploited the worker, the more deeply and intuitively they tend to understand it. It is true that our culture offers powerful defenses for it. It can seem as impossible to question as it must, at one time, have been impossible to question the supremacy of kings. But it is not really difficult to understand.

What results though from this kind of thinking is usually an assumption that complex things are inherently more radical and that simple things are inherently hegemonic and work to prop up the status quo. There is some basic truth to this. Radical leftwing ideas have long been sidelined and punished in the US. They are often expressed in the kind of media that is considered highbrow, alternative, or challenging. Much mass-produced pop culture is thinly disguised messaging in support of imperialism, of white supremacy, of traditional heterosexuality, and so on. But this is correlation, not causation. The systems that support popular culture are deeply invested in the maintenance of the present.

Many of the systems that support highbrow culture are also, of course. Elite universities have been accused of creating hotbeds of leftism since the era of McCarthyism, despite their fundamental conservatism. Our apparent present widespread inability to distinguish between the kind of “lowbrow” mass culture that is sterile and fascistic and the kind that is simply broadly accessible, and similar conflation of the highbrow with the meaningful, derives largely from this mire. Camille Paglia famously called Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, the “first shot in the culture wars.” The supposed “culture wars,” a tired and vacuous obsession with the alleged outsized influence of fringe critical theory on American life, has swollen since Bloom to encapsulate nearly everything.

Even Urban planning, an issue that is as solidly grounded as it is possible to be, has become a frontier for culture wars. In the Bay Area, where I grew up, wealthy tech worker transplants have staged a kind of culture war battle against the supposedly NIMBY hippie Marxists of the older generation. Housing, bike lanes, public transportation, all concrete and pressing crises for ordinary people, are alchemized into a massive conspiracy theory about some kind of snobby, leftwing ideology which makes people hate developers. For example, someone who lives near my parents, who works for Google Maps, is this kind of person. He is a homeowner, invested in the kind of forensic surveillance technology and algorithmic living that Maps encourages. He is clearly not particularly a victim of the housing crisis. And yet the language of grievance he adopts is similar to how I might speak about my landlady, who refuses to repair my roof. If I see her as exploiting me, stealing my wages ostensibly to maintain her decrepit property, this type of culture war thinking transforms my suspicion of new development and hatred of landlords in general into a kind of exploitation of the poor. The unfettered market leads to progress, so the argument goes.

There is clearly a kind of existential war at play here. Our cities, as David Harvey writes, “increasingly become cities of fortified fragments, of gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance.” But the conflict is, as Harvey identifies, a class conflict, between those who benefit from this kind of atomized landscape (developers, hedge funds, politicians) and those who do not (tenants, poor people, and so on). The unique gift of the culture wars is that it makes it possible to argue the exact reverse of this power dynamic. There are many other examples of this. Book publishing, an incredibly conservative and opportunistic industry that frequently publishes bestselling books by politicians and other types of war criminals, is frequently accused of being incredibly “woke.” So is Hollywood, the violent producers of Marvel movies and other war propaganda. So is Yale, which churns out powerful lawmakers, including Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh.

It is often “highbrow” media then that successfully converts basic and widely understood economic dynamics into vague, pernicious, and complicated ideas designed to trip up, confuse, and ultimately strip away radicalism. These then trickle down into mainstream media: The New York Post, Colleen Hoover, Barbie, this Chipotle ad that a friend sent me with a note saying “this is you.”

I have a short story up on Hobart that I have (hopefully) successfully convinced my mother not to read. Hobart is controversial precisely for propagating the culture wars, but it also seems like a fitting byline for my first weeks out of the publishing industry. It’s like when ex-Disney stars do really edgy performances to prove they’re different now. No one is fooled by it, but our culture has a short memory.

My friend got into a fight with someone once who called her “middlebrow.” Somehow more insulting than lowbrow or highbrow (which can both be insults). I’m leaning middlebrow right now, though, I think. I’m looking for a simple life. Simple pleasures. “One wondering thought pollutes the day,” writes Mary Shelley in Frankenstein.