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August 21, 2008

Pop Will Eat Itself

Pop has a leg up on high art; at its best (and that's a best that is almost entirely subjective), it can freely traverse the currents of cultural favor, flirting with academia as it coasts along the zeitgeist. But this isn't a two way street; this there-and-back-again luxury is not mutually inclusive. Sontag said it was okay to like The Supremes, and so The Supremes become art. Górecki's 3rd, on the other hand, can hit the pop charts, but it will never become pop on its own terms. Pop is celebrated in whole, regardless of whether text is applied or extracted from it. Art from the opposite spectrum can only be divvied up, reappropriated, paid homage to or denigrated (a phenomenon highlighted by Rodger Jacobs in his excellent overview of the mistaken pop commodity culture made of Nabokov's Lolita). As frustrating as it is to see something beautiful be trampled on, as thrilling as it can be to have one's guilty pleasures validated, the fact that these transmutations and transpositions occur at all belies the level playing field on which these works ultimately coexist. Their malleability within an immediate cultural context denotes sustainability outside of the same, which itself denotes a deeper, richer manner of qualification...

I'm digging myself in deep here, treading blindly on territory worn thin by thousands of critics and grad students before me. It all began when I noted to a friend a few weeks ago that my appetite for films these days is pretty squarely bifurcated between two vague categories: I either want to see something small and strange and unique, something that will get under my skin, or I want really great pop. There's a middle ground between Mr. Lonely and Iron Man, and I don't think I'm too terribly interested in whatever occupies it. I don't know on what terms to delineate these tastes - I don't even want to delineate them, but this categorization seems undeniable and probably accounts for the ever-growing number of movies I don't go see. And so, as per my wont, I'm tracing the geography of these ill-defined regions, looking for parameters and switchbacks and getting terribly lost on adjunct avenues of theory.

Indeed, my initial assumption - that a mastery of form might fold the distance between these modes - now seems little more than a straw man, easily blown down by the hefty gust of iconography. The possibility that form is ultimately the common ground between, say, The Dark Knight and Vendredi Soir, is rendered null when one considers that, in the case of the Denis film, the form is self-defining, whereas every phrase of filmic language in Christopher Nolan's magnum opus is ultimately in service to an extant icon (although one could reasonably argue that the reverse is not only true but the very reason for the picture's popularity). There's a bit of reverse leeway (e.g. Michael Jackson wouldn't be Michael Jackson if Billie Jean hadn't been so musically sound) but once again any chance at strict definition is subjugated by culture, which likes to throw camp into the mix, and by artists, who turn camp on its head and tweak it, and by my own tastes, which throw a subtle wrench into any hypothesis I might come up with. There's no syllogism to this, but there must be a reason why I can vacillate from Bela Tarr to Will Ferrell, from Justin Timberlake to Jandek, and it's not enough to simply say that I like what I like and leave it at that - I've conditioned myself to want to know why I like something.

This can, in truth, be vaguely annoying. I do love mysteries, but I'm no good at math.

A tertial footnote to this train that's scarcely left the station: I experienced a strange, tingling shift between the hemispheres of my frontal lobe a few nights back when, during a Jon Brion show at Largo, I realized that the Beatles song he was playing was actually a Nirvana tune. It wasn't that I'd mistaken the latter for a specific Beatles song - I recognized the number (it was Lithium) but for some reason instantly associated it with the Fab Four instead of its actual progenitor. There was, in this tonal lapse, a moment in which some light appeared at the end of the tunnel. Some archetypal glimmer. On the one hand, maybe my mistaken assumption was reductive of both the artists in question; on the other, maybe it speaks to why they still get performed at all in the wee hours of a Friday night.

Posted by David Lowery at August 21, 2008 11:23 AM

Comments

Posted by: Clay Liford at August 21, 2008 11:56 PM

Posted by: Don Logan at August 22, 2008 12:30 PM

Posted by: Clay Liford at August 22, 2008 2:08 PM

Posted by: James M. Johnston at August 22, 2008 3:20 PM

Posted by: James M. Johnston at August 23, 2008 3:10 AM

Posted by: Don Logan at August 23, 2008 8:10 PM

Posted by: David Lowery at August 24, 2008 1:47 AM

Posted by: Rodger Jacobs at August 30, 2008 1:06 PM