I'm not a spring chicken and these kinds of manifestos don't mean anything to me. I have zero use for or time for Lena Dunham anything.
The funny
thing is, the defining traits of AI and social media slop are the very
qualities cultural snobbery used to rail against. One of these was naked
commercialism: AI content takes barely any time or effort to create and
economies of scale mean profit is the point, while the success of social media
content is judged almost entirely on its viewership. Another was soulless
imitation: AI draws crudely on existing culture; social media slop, meanwhile,
often involves re-enacting trends or crazes.
Some of these old standards will feel alien to zoomers and
alphas. In his 2022 book The Nineties, the critic Chuck Klosterman explores the
decade’s hostility towards “selling out,” which he calls “the single most
nineties aspect of the nineties”. Selling out involved a respected artist
deciding to make work that was more “palatable” and therefore more commercially
viable. By 2010, says Klosterman, “it was hard to illustrate to a young person
why this act was once seen as problematic; by 2020 it was difficult to explain
what the term literally expressed”.
I'm not going to quote much more because too much of the editorial is the same old same old. Pop culture causes brain rot. Academics discussing pop culture are caught up in making things worse. If academics talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Taylor Swift songs this is a sign that culture is losing out.
Is it? Just because pundits across the left and right talk about what comes after progressive neoliberalism doesn't mean that everything about "now" is necessarily bad. it's easy to lament that K Pop Demon Hunters has annoying K pop songs and a trite plot. But the film (which, yes, I did see) was no less fun (and sometimes more) than the Star Wars movies that have come out since Disney acquired Lucasfilm. The joke of a mopey K pop star attending the Met gala in a sleeping bag, scowling at the camera, was a joke that landed. The conceit that singers armed with songs can defeat armies of demons is cliche, sure, but when you find out how pervasively people have believed music has had an apotropaic function for the last few thousand years the cliche is based on something very real about the human condition. If pop culture critics wanted to say something like "Could these songs ward off demons or were they written by them?" would be a cheap shot, but it would be an attempt to take seriously that even pop cultural tropes can tell us things about the human condition if we put in a modicum of effort.
And American musicals are hardly what they were in the days of Gene Kelly. There is a case to be made that the musical movie had more of a lease on life by way of South Park and Team America: World Police than by adaptations of Chicago.
What is that movie? Chainsaw Man - The Movie: The Reze Arc. Not Demon Slayer, whether the Mugen Train Arc or the Infinity Castle, Part I arc. Chainsaw Man is pretty much what the title tells you. Look, I've been watching anime since the old bowdlerized Star Blazers series was syndicated in the U.S. back in the 1980s. I started watching subtitled anime around 1992. I'm happy to see Angel's Egg is getting an anniversary re-release. I own a copy of Night on the Galactic Railroad and have most of Hayao Miyazaki's films. In Seattle, at least, it's been alright to say you're an anime fan since the days when Bill Clinton was president. Maybe the West Coast has differed from the East Coast on that point. If Nicole Veneto loves Chainsaw Man that's fine. But I do think that without 'late stage capitalism" we wouldn't be living in a United States were anime releases are trouncing American-made films in the box office or even defeating them for Academy Awards. I enjoyed Across the Spider-verse but Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron beating it for the Oscar for best animated feature was fine.
Within anime Chainsaw Man can be read as being as "mid" and rote as any number of Spider-man films or cartoons. Anime invocations of American film are so legion you don't have to try that hard to find them. Just off the top of my head I think of "The Great Dodgeball Plan" episode of Spy x Family where Anya Forger (four, passing herself off as six) hears there is an opportunity to play dogeball and her adoptive mother Yor Forger sets about training her daughter in a montage that culminates in mother and daughter with outstretched hands in a send-up of the Rocky training montage. Anya goes on to be unceremoniously knocked out in the game of dodgeball.
In other words, intercultural cinematic references and mash-ups can please film critics but it's dubious to say that these are necessarily signs of sophistication.
But if you just add the phrase "late stage capitalism" and you are the least bit progressive and have an advanced degree or two then you can baptize the American release of Chainsaw Man as a critique of late stage capitalism rather than a demonstration that we have the opportunity to see Japanese cinematic adaptations of manga because of, well, late stage capitalism. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. I went and saw Takashi Miike's bonkers adaptation of Samura's Blade of the Immortal in theaters. Considering that two thirds of the story got cut the film was a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the material and, thankfully, Shira was dispatched swiftly and the whole prison arc was understandably cut.
That we can see such films in the United States at all, let alone in theaters, is a sign that global "late stage capitalism" has opportunities and costs. I don't think Americans can say that trope-ridden genre fiction from Japan is automatically "better" than the glut of superhero films we've had. I like the Raimi Spider-man films and I like the Christopher Nolan Batman films. I also like Dostoevsky and Kafka and am revisiting Melville.
The bad faith of the snobbery defense is that the people who defend their snobbery forget that at some point in the past the canonized had not yet been canonized. A friend of mine once told me that he found it funny yet cool that I could write about Batman cartoons in the same way I wrote about Dostoevsky novels. I have. I can write about Bjork songs and Haydn string quartets in the same way, taking both seriously. Snobs would have us believe that it's a waste of intellectual capital (if you even have it) to discuss pop culture. But there are times and places to discuss Hollywood nostalgia. I think that merely ranting about how Hollywood has run out of ideas is a stupid canard. I think it's more interesting to ask why it seems to be that Hollywood nostalgia has clustered around franchises that distilled the utopian and dystopian concerns of entertainers during the JFK/LBJ Camelot era and the Reagan years because that is what I began to notice over the last thirty years.
People were not rushing to retrieve all that many franchises from the Nixon or Ford or Carter years compared to the Kennedy and Reagan years. Franchises that kicked off back in the Clinton years do come back. The ill-advised live action Cowboy Bebop was probably not-so-good but I'm sure Kanno's music is still great.
Now I have not read Chainsaw Man for myself. My brother read the first volume and called Makima as one of the big bads the panel she said any lines. Decades ago I was hanging out with a friend in my college years and he declared European films were better than American films. I suggested, bluntly, that European film can be just as cliche as American film, to which the friend said, "Well, I like the European cliches better." That, okay, I take that preference as given.
But if a film critic presents Chainsaw Man as a critique of late stage capitalism and how under global neoliberalism we are all forced to make deals with devils, nah. If I want to tout a manga that reveals how working class people struggle to get by in an age of economic precarity I could tell people to go rea the recently re-issued slice of life manga Maison Ikkoku by Rumiko Takahashi. If anyone ever remakes that manga Saori Hayami would make a killer Kyoko Otonashi.
My brother's been reading Dan da Dan lately and the artist who created that manga worked on Chainsaw Man as an assistant. I'm not going to say there's nothing to Chainsaw Man because I haven't read it. Something I don't care for can have an influence on something I enjoy, kind of like I abominate Wagner's music but he influenced Paul Hindemith, whose music I actually do enjoy.
What I'm circling around is something Theodor Adorno mentioned in Aesthetic Theory, that there were a bunch of new left types following the example of Marcuse who alleged that if you just applied radical/Marxist political critique to your interpretation and reception of pop culture that buying Beatles records could stick it to the man and be as profound as Beethoven's string quartets. Adorno said "No". Watch me quote him:
Aesthetic
Theory
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of the University of
Minnesota
Continuum
ISBN 0-8264-6757-1
pages
319-320
The demise of art, which is today being proclaimed with as
much glibness as resentment, would be false, a gesture of conformism. The
desublimation, the immediate and momentary gain of pleasure that is demanded of
art, is inner-aesthetically beneath art; in real terms, however, that momentary
pleasure is unable to grant what is expected of it. The recently adopted
insistence on culturing uncultivation, the enthusiasm for the beauty of street
battles, is a reprise of futurist and dadaist actions. The cheap aestheticism
of short-winded politics is reciprocal with the faltering of aesthetic power.
Recommending jazz and rock-and-roll instead of Beethoven does not demolish the
affirmative lie of culture but rather furnishes barbarism and the profit
interest of the culture industry with a subterfuge. The allegedly vital and
uncorrupted nature of such products is synthetically processed by precisely
those powers that are supposedly the target of the Great Refusal: These
products are the truly corrupt.
In other words, Adorno would say that the most corrupt thing you can do is attempt to baptize the consumption of the culture industry's slop with a radical politics of resistance. You can't really, seriously, say that Chainsaw Man is a critique of late stage capitalism if you're even watching Chainsaw Man (or reading it) to begin with. Adorno was the kind of old leftist who viewed the new left emerging in the 1960s as intellectually and morally corrupt. Adorno took that assertion as given but it does beg some kind of explanation.
If you try to introduce ostensibly radical politics as a filter through which to justify your consumption of mass/pop culture then all your invocations of how Chainsaw Man can be read as a critique of "late stage capitalism" and "neoliberalism" shows that you're just enmeshed in the culture industry so inextricably you have to delude yourself into thinking that consuming hyper-violent anime adaptations of pulpy manga constitutes a critique of hegemony. To someone like Adorno no level of oppositional reading a la Stuart Hall is going to change the fact that you're consuming pop culture to begin with.
But the problem was Adorno was not particularly careful about considering just how active a role a listener or a viewer can play in "receiving" art and entertainment, a point at which he found himself at odds with other figures in what came to be known as the field of critical theory.
But since I'm not actually a Marxist my affection for manga and comic books is an affection for the beauty of the art form. I can go back and reed the old Lee/Ditko run of Spider-man and still enjoy it. I can go back and read Maison Ikkoku and love it more now than when I first read it twenty-five years ago. What I'm not going to do is flex any familiarity with critical theory and grad school concepts to explain that manga and anime constitute a critique of late stage capitalism in a way that Spider-man movies somehow can't be because, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, manga and comic books are ... kinda ... similar.
Don't tell me that the difference is a world's difference between reading from right to left instead of from left to right. If that difference were so huge all those 1990s American issues of "flipped art" wouldn't have happened.
The trouble is that we live in an age in which a film critic can tout Chainsaw Man as a critique of "late stage capitalism". yet she couldn't even have read the manga or reviewed the anime in any other context. At the same time, the problem with cultural snobbery defenses of "real" culture run aground on the reality that scholarly theoretical tools really can be applied at any level of brow you want to apply them to.
Moreover, the history of canonized art reveals that the lowbrow can become the seeds from which the highest of highbrow works in the Western canon can grow. In his multi-book exploration of the history of Western thought about personified evil (you know who that is, right?) Jeffrey Burton Russell pointed out that the old Faust legend was a street level folktale that eventually influenced academic theology in Christian dogmatics in Europe but also catalyzed the literary realizations of the Faust legend in the poetic works of Christopher Marlowe and Goethe.
Does that mean that Denji in Chainsaw Man is like Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment? Not exactly. But some of the greatest literary works of the Western tradition drew overtly upon the lowest and pulpiest material. You can tell me the art is in the execution and that's not a point I intend to debate but would a character in a Cervantes' epic reading ahead from within the novel to find out what happens to them be so different from a manga character breaking the fourth wall to explain that he'll clear up what is going to happen in an upcoming action set piece in two pages (the Patlabor manga)?
The elitist will venerate a technique in Cervantes that's just a cheap gimmick in a Patlabor manga but the actual reason is the post hoc veneration of the canonization process, not about the technique itself. That's the problem of the elitist defense of "culture" in a nutshell, it is generally predicated on the ultimate survivorship bias available in higher education. Just because the odds are pretty good Chainsaw Man is never going to be part of the global cinematic canon taught at graduate level film school courses as something "everyone" needs to study doesn't mean that an academic couldn't decide to discuss the anime. If there can be conferences exploring the pervasiveness of kabbalah and eschatology in Neon Genesis Evangelion then, sure, academics "can" talk about a guy who can transform his head and arms into chainsaws. The bad faith element, though, is to write as though that's an alternative to the superhero genre.
There's another kind of problem with such a reading, though. Someone at ArtsFuse can retroactively christen
Chainsaw Man a critique of late stage capitalism and neoliberalism for what amount to a post hoc dogmatic committment. It may not be entirely different from
a guy I met decades ago who would eventually claim Jack Bauer was a Christ type in the television series 24. If you guessed "Mark Driscoll" you'd be right! I watched a couple of episodes of the show and my conclusion was that if I was going to watch a superhero story I wanted the superhero to at least have the cape. Jack Bauer's cell phone got better reception than Batman's communicator gear.
I think it was Leonard Meyer who pointed out that evaluating works based on the perceived moral content of the work in terms of cultural norms was something that was prominent in traditional religious art examinations and also in Marxist literature on the arts. Defending Chainsaw Man as a critique of late stage capitalism is conceptually parallel to claiming Jack Bauer is a Christ type in the eyes of Mark Driscoll. The dogmatic position for or against some concept of "capitalism" or free markets precedes a generally post hoc commitment to explicating at a theoretical level whatever it was a person already liked on a more intuitive level.
A music theory professor once said in a class that with the exception of twelve-tone and serial theories the entire history of music theory in the trans-Atlantic world has been a history of post hoc explanations of how and why music that was already liked was likable. The music itself "worked" first and then theorists formulated theories to explain and understand how and why it worked. With the advent of post-tonal music theories were developed alongside of, or even in advance of, the resultant music.
In film criticism the post hoc approach can sometimes lag far behind the initial emotional and intellectual investment in, say, a manga or a novel. Tom Wolfe once quipped in
The Painted Word that the academic establishment on the visual arts in the United States staked out a view that can be sent up in the claim "If I don't have a theory of sight I can't even see a painting". Rita Felski, in
The Limits of Critique, has played with the idea that for many literary critics if a text cannot be convicted of a crime or seen as a text convicting the world of the crimes of late capital then is the text even worth talking about? Sure, but there's such a thing as just admitting that the novels of Jane Austen are funny or that the music of Bela Bartok rocks first and then getting to the theory later.
The cultural snobs and defenders of elite interest can simply never pull off the feat of precluding scholarly theories from being applied to the pulpiest of pulp. If a technical analysis of a literary work can be applied to Cervantes then it could be just as easily applied to some pulp romance or adventure tale. In the post Joseph Campbell age of post-Jungian anything this is exactly what we should expect. Pandora opened the box of theory and so theory can be applied to just about anything.
Even so, in Adorno's estimation, to celebrate Chainsaw Man as an alternative to superhero formula is to fail. Strip away the trans-Pacific cultural differences and Denji in Chainsaw Man is a superhero. He's not an alternative to the superhero genre at all, merely a manga variation within Japanese culture of, say, Frank Castle's The Punisher. The problem of the cultural snob who wants to dismiss superhero stories as having no value is that, well, what about all that Greek mythology? You can only move the goalposts so many times before it becomes apparent that you're moving them so that the already canonized is always worth emulating and the not-yet-canonized never deserves to be. It may be true that academics who are cashing in on Taylor Swift and her songs as grist for publication are potentially cashing a cultural analytical check that's going to bounce hard, but the history of academic studies of the liberal arts has had a few checks bounce for various reasons over the centuries. I recall Richard Taruskin's quip about how it was popular in the 20th century to extol the necessity of separating the art from the artist and skimming over how many pioneers in the liberal arts had literally fascist sympathies.
But if we go by contemporary progressive or left-leaning attempts to retroactively baptize a manga/anime franchise like Chainsaw Man into a critique of late stage capitalism ... it's hard to shake an intuition that there's plenty of goalposts being moved across the board whether on the liberal/left side or the traditionalist side (which is not necessarily always on the political right).
