On Gimmicks and Context in Pop Culture

The best movie-watching experience I have had over the past couple of years or so – or at least the most important – came a couple of weeks ago, when I watched Boyhood. I’m going to be a little melodramatic here for a second. Boyhood felt more like a form of therapy than entertainment; it felt like I was watching my own life unfold in front of me (if the minute particulars of my life, like where I had been born and who my parents were, had happened to be different); every scene (with a few exceptions) seemed to at once depict and transcend the patterns of real life. It was three hours long and I usually have a pretty short attention span, but I was transfixed the entire time. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Now I am not alone in being a fan of the movie. It was the 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner, after all, and plenty of critics have adored it. But there has also been a backlash – a number of people who found it boring or pretentious or pointless. And as much as I enjoyed the movie, I find it pretty unsurprising that so many people disliked it. It is not even that hard to imagine an alternate version of reality where I am among them.

The thing about Boyhood is that I think your reaction to it will largely be dictated by the context in which you watch it. Well, that’s true of all media, all art - but something about Boyhood really makes me particularly cognizant of it. Because there is one fact about its creation that it is never going to get away from – the one thing that everybody knows about the movie, if they know anything about it at all - which is that it took twelve years to make. They started filming Boyhood when the lead actor was six years old, and then they filmed a segment of it each year until he was eighteen.

That certainly sounds like a gimmick. And I think a lot of the negative reaction to the movie has been based on the perception that it is all based around a gimmick. People get sick of hearing “It took twelve years to make!” over and over. Hell, that line has basically become a cliché by this point, the sort of thing that is only ever uttered ironically, mocking the frequency with which it was once said sincerely.

Fun fact: Boyhood was originally going to be called 12 Years, but has

to change because of this movie. And that would make this whole

thing very different, because you can't say "12 Years took twelve

years to make."

I am reminded of a friend who once said that she initially thought the only reason people listened to Joanna Newsom was because she had an unusual-sounding voice – another gimmick, another unavoidable piece of context – but then realized her music was actually good as well.

I also think of another indie musician, Bon Iver (who I have been lucky enough to see live twice in 2017, once in the pouring rain and the other time in a place that rhymes with that [see footnote for the answer]). No one ever seems to be able to talk about him (I find it very strange to refer to Bon Iver as a “them,” even though Justin Vernon plays with a full band a lot of the time these days) without mentioning the “story” of his first album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Bad breakup, illness, cabin in the woods, winter, solitude – debut album. I’ve long wondered how much of the appeal and popularity of Bon Iver could be explained by people latching onto this story.

And even now, he can’t quite get away from it. Every article written about Bon Iver has to mention it at some point. Even if it does so self-consciously – even if it’s making a comment about how frequently people bring up the story – that still counts. It’s like this: Daniel Radcliffe is never going to escape the shadow of Harry Potter, not as long as everything he does is described as an attempt to escape the shadow of Harry Potter. We’ll only know he has when no one is even asking the question anymore. (Though if nobody’s asking the question, that includes us. Which may mean we can never actually know.)

That bit of context, that little myth or legend, is always going to be there in one form or another. And that is always true. It’s an inevitability of engaging with art. There is really no such thing as interacting with “the work itself,’ devoid of context. The thing that really makes the difference – that determines whether we disparage a piece of context as a gimmick or embrace it – is just whether we respond to the work or not. I happen to like Bon Iver and Joanna Newsom and Boyhood, so the bits of context that are attached to them, barnacle-like, do not bother me.

Remember when this was a thing?

And then finally, this whole discussion makes me think about Kanye West, whose great genius in my opinion is his ability to create a context around his work. When he released Life of Pablo the way he did – one version, then another, then another – he made it virtually impossible to listen to the album without imagining him as its creator, perpetually dissatisfied, tweaking one little thing after another – a paragon of creativity. And how is it possible to listen to “Famous” these days without thinking about the whole Taylor Swift feud – not just what happened before the song, but also what happened afterward: her reaction, Kim posting the video of her approving the line on social media. What would that song be without that context? What would Kanye West’s music be without his persona? They are one and the same, inextricable. And I feel like, in his case, that is deliberate.

And it might have been deliberate with Boyhood too. Maybe Richard Linklater, the director, wanted people to repeat that line about how it took twelve years to make; maybe he even anticipated that it would lead to backlash and disappointment from those who saw the movie after all the hype. But I liked it. And at the end of the day, that may be all that matters.

1 Portland, Maine

The Emoji Movie: An Existentialist Fairy Tale

It’s definitely cool to hate on The Emoji Movie. And, like, I get why. When I first heard that that it was being made, my reaction was pretty much equal parts: a) I can’t believe that’s an actual thing b) of course that’s an actual thing c) what a shameless attempt to pander to “kids these days” that is probably going to make someone a ton of money and d) couldn’t they at least pretend to come up with an actual name for it?

And my past-self was not alone. The Emoji Movie currently has a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and there was a while when it seemed certain like it was going to land at the somehow-slightly-more-dignified 0%. There have been copious articles and blogs and Tweets panning it, calling it a sign of the death of culture or “soul-crushing” or the end of the world or the worst thing since unsliced bread or whatever other histrionic cliché you want to insert in there.

Yes, Patrick Stewart does the voice of the poop emoji.

But the movie itself, it turns out, actually isn’t bad. (I watched it in a couple of installments over the past couple of days - because I had to rent it for the fifth-grade class at my school, who earned a hot-chocolate-and-snacks-and-a-movie party for bringing in the most donations for a food drive that I was in charge of - and doing so was kind of a long and tedious and complicated process, which involved signing up for a membership at my local movie-rental store, because yes, there are places where those do still exist and play a non-negligible role in the local community, and so I figured I might as well get my three-dollars-and-fifty-cents worth - and besides I kind of wanted to see what it was all about, anyway.)

Plot-wise, it’s basically just Inside Out’s poor, underdeveloped cousin, with the inner workings of the human psyche replaced with the inner workings of a cell phone. (And arguably those two things are rapidly becoming indistinguishable, anyway.) And there are some clever jokes and examples of wordplay interspersed with the more gimmicky aspects of it. My favorite bit was probably the elderly emoticon who gets knocked down by one of the younger emojis and then exclaims, “My colon!” (The fifth-graders, on the other hand, seemed to prefer the poop emojis chanting, “We’re number two! We’re number two!”)

But besides all that, The Emoji Movie is an excellent vehicle for exploring the existentialist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.

Simone de Beauvoir is probably most famous for her feminist writing these days – or, sadly and ironically, mentioned only as a footnote to her partner Jean-Paul Sartre – but she is also the writer of what I would currently maintain is the best work of philosophy ever written, The Ethics of Ambiguity. I can’t do it justice here, of course, but Beauvoir basically makes the claim that to be human is to be in a perpetual state of ambiguity. We are not essentially anything – a profession, a member of a religion or a political movement, a moral or immoral person, or even a man or a woman. Rather, these are all merely identities that we adopt through the choices that we make. Though there are certainly people who try to escape the ambiguity of their condition by trying to define themselves by one (or more) of these identities – and Beauvoir has a lot of negative things to say about such people – their fundamental nature remains ambiguous. Our essence is to have no essence.

Everything about her is so FRENCH

Enter Gene, the protagonist of The Emoji Movie. (I have yet to figure out if there is anything significant about his name. It’s not a pun, as far as I can determine, and the connection to genetics does not seem particularly fruitful to explore.) Gene is supposed to be a “meh” emoji like his parents – an emoji that only experiences and expresses disinterest and boredom – but he actually experiences the full spectrum of emotions. Because of this, he is labelled a “malfunction” and cast out of emoji society. And you can probably fill in the gaps from there – wacky sidekick, love interest, impending doom, adventure, learning to accept himself in the end.

Nothing about this is particularly groundbreaking, of course. It’s a kids’ movie about learning to be true to yourself. Which is pretty much just redundant. (I think it was Jeopardy champ and Twitter all-star Ken Jennings who once Tweeted, “Are there any kids’ movies out there about being true to yourself?” – a joke that was lost on a lot of his followers, who gave him earnest responses. Sadly, it was a couple of years ago and I don’t feel like getting lost in the labyrinth of Twitter to find it.)

But what makes the “believe-in-yourself” message of The Emoji Movie different (and more existentialist) than those of all the other movies, is that Gene does not really want to be something else. It’s not that the forces of society want him to be a “meh” and he would rather be a “smile” or an “angry face” or even a “high-five.” Gene wants to be what he fundamentally is – what we all are, according to Beauvoir – nothing, essentially. He wants to retain the freedom of ambiguity. He wants to be able to be express and project different identities based upon - well, based upon nothing at all. That's the whole point.

And – spoiler alert (though I’d be fascinated to meet the person who both wants to avoid spoilers for The Emoji Movie and has bothered to read this far) – it is Gene’s ability to manifest many emotions at once that ultimately saves the day. Because Alex, the kid-whose-phone-all-these-characters-are-living-inside is also fundamentally ambiguous: when he is around the girl he likes, he feels so many different feelings at once that they could never be expressed in a single emoji. So he decides to utilize Gene, and in that same moment decides not to erase everything on his phone. (Yeah, that part of the movie is a little bit contrived. I’ll grant the naysayers that.)

Beauvoir would also have something to say about Jailbreak, the

princess-turned-hacker, but there's only so much time in a day.

So Gene is an existentialist hero right up there with Mersault from The Stranger and Roquentin from Nausea. His willingness to embrace the ambiguity - or, if you prefer Camus to Beauvoir, the absurdity - of his existence rather than flee from it makes him worthy of our admiration. But things get a little bit more murky when you consider the larger world of The Emoji Movie. It’s not quite clear if every emoji is like Gene or if he actually is different. Towards the end of the movie, it is revealed that Gene’s father, Mel Meh, experiences other emotions but has been hiding them. He, too, is fundamentally ambiguous, but has tried to forsake his nature. He has tried to define himself by his identity as a “meh,” for which Simone de Beauvoir would scorn him.

But as for the other emojis – like Gene’s mother, Mary (and here I find the Biblical connotations of the name to be just as useless as the scientific ones mentioned earlier) – the issue is never really addressed. And that makes a pretty big difference. Because if every other emoji is truly nothing but his or her nature, then this is not an existentialist movie at all. Indeed, that would make for a movie with some truly worrying implications. If only the protagonist and his father can experience more than one emotional state, are the others really characters at all? Or are they merely automatons, prisoners of their genetic makeup? Is there no such thing as freedom in this world? (Except for two characters, which is actually weirder than if there was no freedom at all.)

I think we have to believe that all of the emojis are like Gene – or, rather, like his father Mel, fundamentally ambiguous but able and willing to hide it. And the movie does give us some hint that this is the correct interpretation, through the movie’s main villain, Smiler. Smiler is a female, smiley-face emoji who, yes, is always smiling – but she definitely experiences anger and frustration and even a sort of sadistic pleasure as well as happiness. Her identity seems to be a performance - based upon her external appearance rather than her inner states, as is suggested by her name.

(This makes me come back to Inside Out – the character Joy, voiced by the fantastic Amy Poehler, definitely experiences more than just joy. But in Inside Out, it is much more clear that Joy is called that because she has a tendency to be happy, which is not incompatible with existentialist principles. Nor is Inside Out really about the personified-emotions-as-characters so much as it is about the way they impact their human, Riley. Which is perhaps part of the reason why Inside Out seems like the better movie.)

But if Smiler is any indication, then maybe all the emojis are fundamentally ambiguous in their nature, and the only difference is the degree to which they are willing to accept that. Moreover, there is a moral dimension to this: Gene is better than Smiler because he embraces his ambiguity. And that is precisely where Simone de Beauvoir takes the discussion as well. As she writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity: “Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.”

Just replace “man” with “emoji” and it all falls into place.

The Chicken Joke: A Close Reading

What is the most famous joke in our culture? The one that would be most people’s automatic, instinctive response if they were asked to give an example of a joke. The one that was quite possibly the first joke we heard as children (or at least the first one we remember hearing). The one that is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it is almost synonymous with the very concept of joke.

It’s got to be this: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”

And yet - that really isn’t a joke at all. It’s an anti-joke. Which I find absolutely fascinating for a number of reasons.

The whole point of the chicken-crossing-the-road joke is that it takes the typical structure of a joke and violates it. Instead of a humorous answer to the question, we get a literal answer. Yes, the most common and obvious reason why one would cross a road is, indeed, to get to the other side. And if that is funny at all (it certainly isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, at least not to me), it’s ostensibly because it subverts our expectations. The set-up makes us anticipate one thing; the punchline gives us something different. That’s kind of the whole point of comedy.

But with the Chicken Joke – again, our number one go-to example of a “joke” – that’s not really what’s going on, is it? Think about a young child hearing this joke for the first time. He or she probably doesn’t have much of the context needed to fully appreciate it. In fact, since the joke is so ubiquitous – not to mention associated in our minds with childhood – he or she may not have heard any jokes of this kind before hearing the Chicken Joke. That means there are no expectations present within the child for the anti-joke to subvert or violate.

Aww, look at him go!

And yet, it’s not like kids hear the Chicken Joke and think that it is a straightforward question-and-answer. They do understand it as a joke. I mean, sometimes they even laugh at it. So that means that they are literally learning the structure of this type of joke from something that presupposes their familiarity with it. Which is a pretty complex cognitive process if you think about it. And I think that it has implications for the way we understand learning.

Maybe you really don’t have to understand the basics of a subject before you can appreciate something that relies upon those basics. Or maybe being exposed to something that presupposes an understanding of the basics is itself a way to apprehend them. That is: maybe you don’t have to walk before you can run; maybe running is a way of learning how to walk.

I remember once, when I was maybe nine years old or so, I was watching an episode of Boy Meets World with my dad. It was the episode where Cory and his class watch some outdated movie about puberty. And Cory is making a point about how outdated the movie was, so he says something like, “The delivery guy was played by George Burns!” Cue the laugh track. And cue nine-year-old me, lying on my couch, laughing as well.

My dad looked at me. “Do you even know who George Burns is?”

I didn’t. (Though I’m sure I lied to my dad and pretended that I did.) And sure, you could take this little anecdote as illustrative of the power of laugh tracks, or the stupidity of human beings and our Pavlovian response to anything that is supposed to be funny. But I think it’s more than that. It’s also true that the experience of hearing that joke taught me who George Burns was in some sense. At least, it taught me that he was an old actor, someone whose name you would invoke to make the point that something was really old. And that is all the context you need to appreciate Cory’s joke.

So a truer answer to my dad’s question might have been, “I do now!”

*

This is George Burns. Or maybe

it's not. You're not gonna look it up.

Another thing I find interesting about the phenomenon of the Chicken Joke is how we have responded to it. We have constructed traditional jokes based on it, like this: “Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.” This relies on our being familiar with the original Chicken Joke - or else we would not appreciate the rhyme of side and slide. And in this case, for whatever reason, I don’t think we could grasp that necessary contextual information from hearing the joke that presupposes it.

Or there’s this one: “Why did the turkey cross the road? It was the chicken’s day off.” To someone who had never heard the Chicken Joke (as hard as that is to even imagine), this would probably just sound absurd. Or would it? Maybe the experience of hearing this joke would allow someone to deduce that there must be something about a chicken and a road that they were expected to know. I guess this whole thing is rather nuanced.

Then there are those who have reinterpreted the Chicken Joke entirely. I remember this one post that was making the rounds on social media at one point, wherein the poster “realized” that the true meaning of “to get to the other side” was “to get to the afterlife.” This kind of reminds me of those edgy posts about children’s shows where every Winnie the Pooh character is reimagined as a manifestation of mental illness, or Angelica is actually hallucinating the rest of the Rugrats or whatever else. Except those are (usually) deliberate reinterpretations, whereas the one about the Chicken Joke makes it sound like this was always the meaning of the joke. Which makes me suspect that the poster – and all those who enthusiastically shared the post – never fully grasped that the Chicken Joke was an anti-joke. So I wonder: what the hell did they think it was all this time?

*

"All black everything"

I also think it’s significant that, when we think joke, we actually think of something that was originally a subversion of the concept of a joke. There is something similar about the way we think about art. Or at least Art with a capital A. When I read that word, the image that comes into my head is just as likely to be some sort of Dada or Abstract Expressionist or Minimalist painting as it is to be something more traditional like da Vinci or even Picasso. And yet those movements were originally conceptualized as anti-Art. But they have become Art, at least to most non-artists. When people say they don’t understand Art or dislike its pretentions, that is invariably what they are referring to.

This happens in every medium, of course. The revolutionary, over time, becomes the new establishment – thereby necessitating a new revolution. It’s like what David Foster Wallace said about postmodern irony and cynicism: “Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the US has now been done and redone . . . Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” And so he advocated for a return to sincerity in literature. (Now, I’ve never actually read any of his books so I can’t say whether he was successful in this. But I do like the idea. And Infinite Jest is one superlong entry on the superlong list of books I’ve been meaning to read.)

But with humor, it almost seems like we have reached a point where no further revolution is possible. The anti-joke has become synonymous with the joke. It’s kind of like the end of Animal Farm – looking from pig to man, man to pig (or chicken, as the case may be) and it becomes impossible to tell the difference.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing, necessarily. But it certainly is interesting.