Many popular things are not-so-great

On Jack Reacher, Furiosa, Challengers, the Freewrite Alpha, and the Ancient World podcast

It's impossible to say whether today's pop culture is better or worse than what came before. No direct comparison is possible, because we experience the full extent of the present, while when it comes to the past we experience only whatever has been so beloved that someone is willing to preserve its memory. For instance, the most popular novel of the early 20th century (at least in America)—Gone With The Wind—has much more vitality in it than the most popular novel of the late 19th (Ben-Hur). If we judge contemporary popular fiction against Gone With The Wind then we're likely to come up with a different sense of its value than if we judge it against Ben-Hur. Moreover, there is a chance that we might be mistaken in our contemporary judgements! Ben-Hur was part of a trend of historical religious novels that were extremely popular in their day. That tradition today lacks appeal—we're unused to reading it—while nostalgia for Confederate times (an early 20th-century literary trend) is still vital and hale, even in the present day. As another exampler of mistaken judgements, I'm on record as saying that Uncle Tom's Cabin has only fallen out of favor because now we read slave narratives instead, but most of these narratives were not yet published when UTC was written! Harriet Beecher Stowe based her book in part on interviews with escaped slaves, and it's remarkable the extent to which her book resembles later-published slave narratives. To some degree this is because UTC and slave narratives drew from a similar well of experience, but in other cases it's probably because UTC created an appetite for and expectation of certain tropes (particularly the overt Christian religiosity in slave narratives).

Which is to say, the literary merits of Uncle Tom's Cabin might be obscured by the fact that it's been succeeded by relatively more authentic and less overtly-constructed narratives. We might be unable, because we're so familiar with the tropes of the slave narrative, to see what genuine art was needed to construct those tropes for the first time and what a startling occurrence it is that audiences responded in such numbers to such a novel work.

The point is: I try to eschew nostalgia. I have no idea if a reader in the 19th century or 1920s or 1940s or 1960s might've felt more or less optimism when looking at the state of popular literature.

What I do know is that I've grown up in a time of relative optimism about the quality of popular literature. Within my lifetime it's become exceedingly common for writers with serious literary reputations to admit to a fondness for works of commercial fiction. I've seen the Library of America issue compilations of crime novels and science fiction novels. I've seen a work of post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction win the Pulitzer Prize!

Indeed, most of the execration these days (and surely for at least the last fifty or sixty years) for popular fiction has been not for commercial fiction but for 'middlebrow' literature, a shifting target meant to encompass fiction that's supposed to be smart but isn't smart. The hate that such fiction gets tends to increase in accordance with the genuine literary merit of the work. Thus, Sally Rooney gets an order of magnitude more hate (for being shallow and middlebrow) than does a much more popular novelist like, say, Jodi Picoault. Same with Jonathan Franzen and, say, Nick Hornby. This seems to me less a policing of the borders of a literature and more a sort of ressentiment, wherein younger writers try to rise by taking down the giants amongst their peers and the generations above. You can tell this is the case because it is rare in the extreme for any author to write a scathing review of a writer from the generation preceding theirs: it would be untoward in the extreme for Nicholson Baker to take down Lauren Oyler.

About true commercial fiction, there's little criticism. Some of this comes from ignorance. When I was in my MFA program I found it so interesting the degree to which most of my professors were simply unaware of the science fiction ecosystem. The idea that there existed sci-fi journals which paid money, sci-fi short fiction awards, sci-fi anthologies, and short story writers who lived solely within this niche world—all of this was complete news to them. Moreover, they were astonished by the health and vigor of this world: the idea that Clarkesworld receives more submissions than Granta and probably has more readers (certainly more sincere ones!).

Now that I'm a mid-career writer, I realize that by the time anyone cares what you've to say about contemporary pop culture, you're generally no longer engaging with it. I would say that the moment when I stopped being authentically interested in popular culture came around 2015 (not incidentally, the year I turned 30). That was the year I listened to my last Taylor Swift album and stopped seeing all the Marvel movies.

Since then my engagement with contemporary culture has usually been sporadic: I see lots of movies, usually from the indie or prestige studios. I don't watch almost any TV dramas—they require too much time and emotional investment—but I still watch some new half-hour comedies. I read little contemporary fiction in any form, but I do try and stay abreast of what's popular (I'm helped in this by belonging to several book clubs). With regards to music, I listen to the radio, but it's all quite indistinct to me, and I'd have a hard time naming any of this year’s hits. I'm not particularly old (38) by writer standards, and I still have a number of friends who think it their duty to keep up with contemporary culture, but I just don't see the point. When it comes to literature, my reaction is so inflected by envy that it's hard to distinguish what I really like and what I don't. While in other art forms, I just don't think most of it is worth my time. The superhero movies in particular were absolutely titanic in their soullessness. They were visually dull, and their action sequences were incoherent and uninspired. In the realm of spectacle, the torch had to be carried by upstarts like John Wick and RRR—big studios couldn't even be trusted to put together a big budget tentpole that was at all watchable! I think it's probably in television where I've missed the most: I keep being told of TV shows that are genuinely compelling (most recently I've consigned The Bear and Beef to my 'will regretfully never watch' list). I just don't like dramas. I can't account for it! I think they're too long, take too many hours, require too much expenditure of my attention. I get restless sitting and watching a show for hour after hour.

Nonetheless, although my consumption is unsystematic, I still view, watch, and listen to a lot of contemporary art, much of which I dislike. And although shitting on contemporary culture isn’t a core part of this Substack’s project, I do think some element of snobbery is inextricable from being a Great Books evangelist. Thus I’ve decided that on behalf of paid subscribers I’m going to do capsule reviews of contemporary things I disliked (as well as, sigh, a much-less-interesting catalogue of things I enjoyed and/or liked).

So today I present (behind the pay-wall): reactions to Furiosa, Challengers, the Jack Reacher novels, the original Mad Max, the Freewrite Alpha device, and the Ancient World podcast.