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D(usty) has a great post which evolves into a discussion of the phenomenon of quirk fueled by this article from The Atlantic. In between sunburn induced wincing and the adjustment to a life where shirts hurt and no one can ever touch me again, I was able to move my eyes enough to read both and suggest you do the same. Anyway, I'm stealing his topic.
I feel a deep ambivalence about all things quirk (including that phrase, which I'm only using because apparently someone at The Atlantic decided its the phrase for this movement. Frankly, I would prefer something that uses the words "Precious" or "Wonderment," but that's just me. Also, I think it's odd Hirschorn, the article's author, doesn't mention the whole 'new sincerity' crowd which seems inherently linked [sigh, by which I mean the McSweeney's-ish set rather than the anti-irony, post-9/11 critical set, although maybe them too]).
If my mom got to label this movement--and who's to say she shouldn't--she'd call it "cutesy."
It's not that I find the work of the filmmakers, writers, etc. that Hirschorn writes about to be uninteresting or ineffective, if anything I find it too effective at pulling my strings by a well-placed song or perfect pop culture reference. So too, those artists that eschew pop culture references in favor of unadulterated (but profoundly nonthreatening) oddity, win me over with their perfect combination of precociousness and absurdity. These artists view the world and its denizens as machines of coincidence oiled by awe. Or, if that rhetoric is too much, at the very least the work often seems to be vaguely existential only instead of leading to absurdist meaninglessness it leads to a shy, vulnerable hope.
The hope often seems to be a promise made good, however. Characters in these "quirk" stories generally turn out okay, often by making an improbable connection with another quirky character or by discovering a deeper problem than their own malaise. The stories work because they're reality crooked enough to turn the mundane into something strange and wonderful.
They are remarkably insincere.
Or at least most are. I'm trying hard not to mention names here, but let me just say that some of the artists who fit these labels I enjoy to the point that I would defend their work against said label. Others, I enjoy but as a bit of an emotional guilty pleasure (sort of like listening to an emo song and getting all angsty). Some I think are shallow and manipulative. For many of the artists mentioned in Hirschorn's article, I feel all of these things.
The insincerity is what I can't shake and what keeps me from committing to the idea of so much of this "quirk." That the movement--and it is a movement unless we're willing to call it a great coincidence--misreads itself as being sincere is what is profoundly frustrating to me. I remember when someone introduced me to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I flipped through it at a party, getting only so far as the long preface, and stopping completely when I got to the part that said, "This is a picture of a stapler." next to, in fact, a picture of a stapler. That was it for me.
You could argue it's sincere insomuch as it's a picture of a stapler and not, say, a puppy next to the text, but the gesture of identifying something so meaningless and unimportant is insincere, and, to me, it's enough to make me want to spend my limited reading time elsewhere.
(For what it's worth, I've enjoyed some of the other Eggers I've read, especially his short stories, but haven't read much McSweeney's or The Believer for the same concerns about sincerity. I've heard What is the What is amazing, but again there are just enough questions with motive and authenticity [why is it called a novel? why is this even Eggers' story?] that I feel reluctant to pick it up. Every time I think about buying it, I can't help but feel like I'd be better served reading one of the other hundred books about the Sudan. I'm probably wrong).
I guess I just like my absurdity to be a little more dangerous and done with the tools of the art (e.g. the prose or the camera work). This is one of the reasons why I think poetry handles this sensibility better. Free from the obligations of character and setting, the absurd/surreal can be sincere in a really powerful way. For prose, George Saunders and Aimee Bender, for example, take askew glances at the world and make them seem like dark possibilities, a reality we just haven't visited.
In film, David Lynch manipulates with color and haunting (rather than pop) music, and his worlds always seem delicately balanced on top of some deep evil. What those artists do not do, is let their sensibility get in the way of confronting something that isn't precious or adorable. Take Me and You and Everyone We Know. The fact that one person spends the film trying to sleep with pre-teen girls goes completely unjudged because he does it in such a strange, funny way. That when the girls seem to agree to the act he hides apparently excuses him, but it doesn't take the violence out of the previous flirtation.
I liked the movie well enough, but it was tough to ignore this scary inner conflict in favor of July filming her own feet.
It gets to the heart of the problem for me, because no one in the quirk examples mentioned seems to need anything except to be acknowledged and accepted for their own eccentricities. If they can connect with someone with a matching set of eccentricities, all the better. Zach Braff paralyzed his mother, takes a lot of anti-depressants, but all can be redeemed when he meets an epileptic who murders gerbils.
I'm not much of a Marxist, but there also seems to be something highly consumer oriented about these stories, and not just because they're normally about the upper-middle & middle class. Not only do characters seem to be able to obtain happiness wholesale, as if they were buying a lamp at Target, but a lot of the manipulation of the world seems to be done in ways that have more than a little to do with advertising principles (lots of nostalgia, "in" jokes, highly targeted demographics, etc.)
What a lot of this quirk means to do is show and then correct a character's numbness. This is supposed to be sincere since we all sometimes feel lonely and disconnected from the world. What these stories usually do, however, is taunt a gray-tone world with a pastel one. That the world in these stories is highly artificial and manipulative is what makes them insincere, and even the non-fiction is highly edited to remove any problem truly insurmountable. It leads to sadness without desperation which isn't, of course, sadness at all but rather just a melancholy expression of numbness.
It may be cathartic, but it isn't eloquent.
6 comments:
I think your point about Lynch, that "his worlds always seem delicately balanced on top of some deep evil," is what makes the movement problematic for me. Quirk can't ever acknowledge that evil exists in the world, because then it exposes their hoping as petty instead of profound.
Meanwhile innocent people die everywhere and people in power withhold basic human rights in order to keep that power close.
This is of course why Hirschorn's separating of Foer I think is apt (at least Foer in his first novel). Foer looks the evil of the holocaust quite directly in the face and makes his readers face it as a result. Foer understands that humor isn't necessarily an effective way of engaging in the world.
And re: Eggers, the admission of evil is why What is the What is probably a more heartbreaking work than Heartbreaking Work. Eggers's title of his memoir is of course the first clue to its insincerities, which might be better understood as self-aware claims of self-worth that no one is meant to value. But despite the problems of authorship and fiction, WitW advertises its sincerity in its title, I'll argue.
I should say that I too agreed with Hirschorn on Foer's first book though I do think Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is problematically "quirky" in ways that end up hurting the novel.
Is the only difference between the quirky shtetl in Everything is Illuminated and the quirky NYers in ELaIC that we know the Germans are coming in the former which makes their eccentricities about innocence destroyed, like some kind of doll crushed under a boot? Maybe. In any case, the quirky NYers seem to be quirky because it is as if JSF thought that an old man wouldn't be interesting unless he had some funny habit like writing down one word to describe everyone.
It will be interesting to see what JSF does without a catastrophic and universally felt tragedy as the emotional core of his novel. Short of writing about the plague, he will have to do this next time, right?
Well, no. I think his next novel is about Cuba Gooding Jr.'s career, so we're sticking with catastrophe.
But this dissing of quirk (Science of Sleep sucked for so many reasons, not entirely because of its quirkiness) misses the point of it that preceded its tiping point moment into Atlantic Monthly-smothered genuine phenomenon. And this is the voice of innocence, the ability to be in relation to the crushing pain of existence & the terror & awe of the mundane without getting all uppity about it & without devolving into a cerebral theoretical view. This is why Blake's Songs of Innocence are more terrifying than Jerusalem, because the imagination of a child is given the respect of a vatic voice.
So yeah, quirk as a cultural movement is destined for irrelevance but i don't think July can be dismissed out of hand. The disgusting nature of the horny dude is juxtaposed against the sincere-dude of whats-his-name-from-Deadwood & that is important. Both of them are hunting, one is undefendable the other one is a sort of aging-emo-slacker version of an ideal-man, but that juxtaposition is more revealing than you give credit to the horndog character. Both are in search of the terror & awe of human contact & both of them are in search of it wrongly.
The innocence of the narratorial role in that movie makes the horndog's position one that could be considered, even empathized with strangely. He isn't forgiven for his ultimately non-molesting behavior, he's still a dick in the movie. But his story speaks as a counterpoint to Deadwood dude.
I would have been better served as a commenter by looking up those actors' names. But I prefer to not know them.
Science of Sleep was terrible because it was a f-ing stupid movie, first off. It was a cliche of its own narrow man-child genre. But it was unforgivable because the innocence of the film was essentially an obvious mask of the viciousness of sexuality in the Motorcycle Diaries-guy's character. I thought it was like one of those movies by that guy who did Storytelling & Happiness, with a sickening candy coating. (That director sucks for a whole different set of reasons, however.)
I vow to never, ever learn an actor or director's name.
--Mathias
I like those thoughts on innocence. I think where it can be cross over for me is when the innocence is taken out of the hands of children and given uncorrupted to adults. A lot of "quirk"--god I hate that word--wants the audience to believe a character is capable of and desires a very mature form of love yet constructs the character in such a way that they sometimes seem incapable of it.
To be honest, I don't even remember MaYaEWK terribly well. I remember I liked it. I remember noises from it. That movie had great noises.
Science of Sleep left me totally nonplussed. I remember nothing about it, not even noises.
Todd Solondz is, like, the opposite of quirk. He's irk.
Yeah, I might be wanting to defend M&Y&EWK because i just dug it, whereas Science of Sleep made me feel icky. I like Irk as a cultural movement -- art with a preponderance of annoying or vexing elements.
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