I am still deciding what I think about this book and his position on snark, that it is somehow poisoning culture.
In order to make this interview more interesting I took the pro-snark position but I'm not sure exactly where I stand. I love one of the sites he is most critical of, which demonstrates how conflicted I am. I may later add a few comments on what I end up deciding on this issue.
Looks like I predicted correctly what some of the sites targeted in the book, sites like Wonkette and Gawker, would say in response to the book.
Those site's main objection is one I share and one I press him on several times, namely isn't deciding what is and isn't snark (or good and bad snark) so subjective as to be almost meaningless? I may come back after I clear my head of some personal matters to add a few additional thoughts about this book but for now let's get to the actual interview
What did you hope to accomplish by writing this book?
I wanted to call attention to a rotten style, maybe even start a public conversation about a phenomenon that seemed to be growing in this scary transitional period of journalism when so many established magazines and newspapers are beginning to subside into the Web.
I'll come back to that, but, first definitions. Trying to define snark-- isn't so easy, since it overlaps with common insult, sarcasm, hate speech, and so on, and the book forced me to think spin through different forms of abuse and comedy. After all, I love satire of the scabrous but civic-minded Stewart-Colbert type, and also the literary stuff, both classic (Juvenal) and modern (Gore Vidal), and I also love dirty-mouthed farces like "Knocked Up" and "Superbad"--I've certainly praised a lot of them over the years. I'm not walking around with a bucket of soap, trying to wash out everyone's mouth--that's @!$%#ing not it at all.
Gentility is not what I want. So what in the world is bothering me? It's abusive, undermining insult that doesn't bother to create a new image, or a new form of speech, but just lazily picks up some reference lying around the media junk heap. Snark is not just mean, it's knowing--parasitic, derivative--and people do it not just because they're trying to be funny (which isn't so easy) but because they're terrified of being one step out of date, and they want to send signals to their audience that they're on top of things.
So, yes, I wanted to call attention to it as a kind of bad writing, but I suppose behind every idea of style, positive or negative, there's some sort of moral idea, too. For instance, people doing their best to destroy other people's reputations with anonymous snark gives me the creeps; it cowardly fun. The Internet has liberated not only all the people with cool and interesting information and sentiment to share but also all the other-annihilating crazies. Snark is the vehicle of a lot of their attacks.
Why did you decide to write a book about snark?
I was afraid a kind of Gresham's Law was operating, or beginning to operate, in which the bad writing drove out the good, for the reasons I've given above. Explicitly, I was in a sweat last Spring and Summer that Obama would be done in by all the smears running around the Internet and dropping out of Republican Party mouths--he was a Muslim, he palled around with terrorists, he wasn't really American, and all that. I was pretty sure that the attempt to "otherize" Obama (as Nicholas Kristof put it in the "Times") was an appeal to racial prejudice in code. Well, my fears were true, I think, but Obama was saved. He was our democratic prince, and, for every smear, there was someone else ready to step forward and unmask it or denounce it. The media eco-system attained a kind of equilibrium in his case. But not, of course, in Al Gore's.
What do you see as the downside to snark?
It cheapens whatever it touches. Why? Because it doesn't engage anything; it's bulimic--it regurgitates rather than digests. It turns every issue into a matter of personal style, every substance into gossip, every character into caricature. It's the vehicle of Internet shaming and snooping (no one goes on the Net to somberly and soberly complain about his neighbor's behavior).
Everyone wants to be funny, and why not? But genuine wit is hard to pull off. Do you realize how many jokes Stewart and his staff toss out every day? Dozens. Nastiness, on the other hand, is easy, and it can hurt people--not, generally, people well-established in their lives but younger adults and kids, who live and die by what others think of them. And there's the long-term effect on your reputation and your privacy. Anyone can say anything about you on the Net and hide behind a handle.
Suppose a woman was sexually active in college or some guy did some cocaine at a frat party, and a jerk, hiding behind a handle, posts that on "Juicy Campus," naming names. This happens all the time. Ten years later, when you go for a job interview, that accusation is going to pop up on Google. It seems like careless fun when you're nineteen, but not so funny later on. I'm not exaggerating, it's happening. There was a big conference of legal scholars at the University of Chicago in November (the papers will be published by Harvard University Press) in which the issues of privacy and the Internet were thoroughly ventilated. These people didn't use the word snark, but that's what they were talking about.
Do you see any upside to it?
No one human being could fail to make a joke about Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face. Snark can be a release. Everyone except possibly John Kerry does it, sooner or later, in conversation. On the page, though, it looks cheap, lame, impotent.
So I take it you are not a fan of sites like Television Without Pity where they mix their reviews and recaps with snark?
Um, no. Recent sentence: from TWoP, about "Supernatural": "Of course, the Monster Chow refuse to heed the Winchesters' most excellent and reasonable warnings and shove all of their belongings into the place anyway, and soon enough, the aggravatingly adolescent son's tossing around a baseball with The Thing That Lives In The Walls while his rather kick-@!$%# older sister finds herself the unwilling object of That Thing's decidedly slobbery affections, and before you know it, the family's charming little doggie has had its fur and flesh ripped from its bones, and the smart-mouthed uncle's taken a butcher knife through his windpipe, " etc."
Whenever I turn to TWoP, the writing is mainly endless plot summary with snarky adjectives. If I've missed some good writing, I apologize. But most of what I've seen is snarko-drivel. Okay, it's fun to sit around with friends and decorate a TV show--the jokes may be better than the show, and if the snark is flying, the evening becomes a kind of combat to see who can be the meanest and funniest. But that's a social occasion, where spontaneity and speed is what the fun is about. On the page, it palls very quickly.
There's another problem. All would be forgiven with TWoP if they actually responded with ardor to something new, fresh, a little difficult. If only they loved, forgive me, art, and even craft, a little more and the sound of their own sarcasm a little less. In their movie reviews, are they excited when something astounding like "There Will Be Blood" comes out? What really lights their jets is trash like "Bride Wars." In a way, despite all the sarcasm, they operate as the thugs of the conglomerates--they're largely within the world of corporate culture. If they did get behind something serious, they would risk making a fools of themselves--someone would slam them, so sarcasm is safer. Sorry for the self-plug, but it's at that point of fear that's criticism takes over.
I am a fan, however, of TPM, rather than TWoP--that is, Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall's political site, which I think is the best thing to come along in journalism in years. And I admire Pitchfork, smart, erudite pop-music site. In the end, the Internet will be the salvation of criticism, since book and movie and music critics are all dying in hard copy, but it may take a few years. Right now, it's certainly the easy entry point. I tell kids who want to write about the arts that they now have the opportunity to go on at length, maybe work with a good editor (even a tough friend will help), and develop a voice. But don't expect to make a living at it for some time.
Do you want to respond to the negative review of your book in New York Magazine?
Adam Sternbergh's main point was that snark was an appropriate response to a corrupt and dishonest world. I wouldn't disagree with his description of the world, but the appropriate response to corruption and dishonesty, dear Adam, is satire--what Stewart and Colbert do four times a week. That's what I praise in the book over and over. Snark just doesn't cut it. Sternbergh defends his friends at TWoP, and he way overvalues snark's strengths, and if that's what pleases him, so be it. Edward Champion, on his book blog, took the Sternbergh piece apart point by point, so I'll leave it at that.
Is the book getting the kind of reception you expected?
Well, it's very early--it was just been published. But I expected that the book would scrape some people's nerves and please others, and that will continue to be true. If you actually say something, and don't just do the old soft shoe down to the bottom of the page, as Wilfred Sheed once put it, you will get in trouble. But it's healthy to get in trouble, particularly as you get older. I certainly wanted to disrupt the snarkers--I wanted to say to them, "You're not punching your weight. You're making things too easy on yourself." And, sure enough, they've taken the bait. And I wanted to reach out to people who are bored with the same kind of cruddy writing that I'm bored with.
But there's something else going on that I hinted at earlier--a kind of panic in print journalism. The great newspapers and magazines are subsiding into the Web, slowly, agonizingly, but inevitably, and no one wants to be left behind, cast out as clueless, so there's a kind of forced embrace of New Media., even among well-established Old Media journalists. Much of what the Internet does is great, but certain kinds of terrific writing--the beautifully crafted sports story, the resonant book review, and, most important of all, investigative reporting--could weaken or disappear from newspaper and magazines once they go exclusively into the Internet.
I know there are sites uniquely devoted to serious book and film criticism, and I admire them, but it will take a while before they establish the authority of the old publications. I think journalists have to find some way of holding onto what they do best and not get stampeded into lowering their game just to survive. So I guess I'm sending out a signal--"Here's a bad style. Don't fall into it."
You speak about Maureen Dowd. Why her? What is her role in all of this?
She's brilliant, the most talented writer of snark in the country, but she's completely irresponsible--a stuffy word that I would normally never use about a writer, but she deserves it. If you're a pol and you're vulnerable in any way at all, if your throat is exposed for a second, she'll leap at you. With what point, though? If she has a political idea in her head, a belief in any legislative program, any direction the country should be going in, I've yet to hear it. For her, politics is just a parade of phonies seeking power--imagine what she would have done to Lincoln or F.D.R. At the moment, she's lost, because she can't do anything with Obama. He's obviously intelligent and serious and accountable, so she can't find a way to attack. But she will, sooner or later. Look, I think she played a role--a small role--in the destruction of Al Gore in 2000. He presented himself awkwardly to the public, and she caricatured him relentlessly. And got many things wrong about him. As I say in the book, that election was snark's greatest victory and snark's greatest disaster.
Has there been an increase in the level of snark in film reviews?
No, I don't think so. Years ago, John Simon infuriated a lot of people (including me) by commenting on women's looks in a beauty-contest way without ever getting to the main point, which was how they used their looks. That failed as criticism; it was snarky. No one's doing that now. There are certainly nasty-funny reviews (I wrote one on the preposterous "Australia"). A.O. Scott, who's basically serious, even a little lofty at times, can be very funny when he wants to be, and Manohla Dargis, his colleague at the "Times," has an easy, slangy way with language in which humor is built into description and phrasing from the beginning. My colleague at "The New Yorker," Anthony Lane, is often very funny, but, if you look closely, there's a melancholy, even tragic view of life flowing uneasily beneath the jokes. That's not snark.
There's no reason to write a lengthy review of a terrible movie without being funny, and entertaining the reader is a perfectly legitimate use of criticism. The best at this was Pauline Kael, who was often barbarically funny, but always with a serious point behind it.
On a related note, do you read other film reviewers and which current ones are your favorites?
I read the ones I mentioned above, and also David Edelstein, who's doing a bang-up job at "New York" magazine, and Joe Morgensteren in the "Wall Street Journal" and, in "Entertainment Weekly," Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwatzbaum, who are admirably tough-minded in a very commercial magazine environment. I read a lot of others, on an occasional basis, on the website "Metacritic," which aggregates all the reviews.
Last question: one problem I anticipate with your book and the reviews of it is one you allude to, namely the difficulty of defining snark. For example, you praise Stewart and Colbert and say what they do is not snark but point to, say, Dowd as snark. But I can easily see someone suggesting Stewart and Colbert ARE snarky and you are picking and choosing which snark is ok and which is not ok. How would you respond to that?
Stewart can be snarky, as I admit on the first page of the book, but a lot of his jokes, and Colbert's, are fueled by a passionate civic idealism. The government should not lie or take away our civil liberties or start wars without adequate reason; a Supreme Court decision should make sense (Colbert's recent "defense" of the Ledbetter decision, which exposed everything wrong with it, was a daring use of irony).
These are not snarky themes--in fact, they're very daring themes for comedy. I'm not sure we've ever had popular political satire on this level of invention before. Dowd wants honesty, too, but she largely ridicules people's appearance, manner, affect, language. She's all on the surface, with no political passions, no positions, no sense of what government and politics are for in the first place.
Whatever you're in favor of, she's against it if you say it in some way that, in her book, isn't cool. But she gets things wrong all the time. She thought Obama was "effeminate" and "diffident." (Obama diffident? Is she nuts? This is one of the most ambitious men of the last hundred years.) She couldn't really see Obama, because she stayed on the surface and snarked and misread his surface calm as weakness. Basically, she's a conventionally-minded woman with a wicked tongue. Funny, but a real hood--a snarker to the core. She's very different from Stewart/Colbert.
This is the second part of my two part interview with David Denby. The first part focused
almost exclusively on his new book. I asked if we could also talk some
about films so this part contains comments both about snark and about
films.
I decided to break this into two parts for two reasons, namely it would have been too long and I hesitated before asking him if he minded going off-topic of the book and talking movies. So here we go, first some movie questions than two last snark questions.
Scott: Do you pay attention to the Oscars? Do you think the right movies get nominated but don't win or that that the right movies are not even nominated?
David: I don't take the Oscars all that seriously; no critic does, though the awards are fascinating as examples of what Hollywood thinks it's doing well.
The real puzzler this year is the 13 nominations for "Benjamin Button." "Citizen Kane" got nine. What is that placid movie about, anyway? It's academically obsessed with working out its own conceit about backwards aging. A stab: Everyone in Hollywood is obsessed with aging, always having "work" done. So here's a movie that begins with its protagonist a wizened baby in an old-age home and he winds up growing down to Brad Pitt, which seems to embody Hollywood's worst nightmare and most happy dream of perfection in one package. It's been reliably reported that men around fifty are sitting in theaters weeping. Dear God.
What movie was overlooked - by the Oscars or by the box office - that readers of this should go see?
I wish they had nominated "WALL-E," a brilliant movie about the death of industrial civilization and its ironic rebirth in a space station that looks like a cruise liner; and ""Rachel Getting Married," Jonathan Demme's movie
about the fissures and bonds in a complicated family.
And the toughest question of all for movie critics what's your five (or ten - i'll let you choose the numbers) favorite movies of all time and why? (hey, it could be worse - i could have made you choose just one)
I don't have a list of absolute favorites because it's an endless wave of viewing and reviewing, though I certainly love screwball comedies like "My Man Godfrey," "The Awful Truth," and "His Girl Friday. Also Welles's "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons," film noirs like "The Big Sleep, Antonioni's "LAvventura," Bergman's "Persona" and "Smiles of a Summer Night," Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai," silent films like "Sunrise."
We talked before about movie critics you liked and I noticed you didn't mention Roger Ebert. Was that an intentional omission? My biggest coup at newsvine was getting an interview with him. https://thinkingandtalkingandacting.blogspot.com/2017/07/interview-with-film-critic-roger-ebert.html
I know you two have different styles so can you articulate how you two review movies differently and what you think of his work? And I dont think I have to remind you (bringing us back on topic) not to be snarky:)
Roger Ebert writes a plain, vigorous style which can be very effective. He certainly nailed
what was wrong with "Benjamin Button." I should have mentioned J. Hoberman of the "Village
Voice," who knows an enormous amount not only about film but modern culture
in general.
Aren't some of the famous put-downs by Churchill, Twain and Dorothy Parker essentially snarks?
They all said brilliant, funny, nasty things, but what they said depends on astounding shifts of language. In Parker's most famous crack, someone walked into the Algonquin and said "Calvin Coolidge is dead." And she said, "How can you tell?" And also, of an early Katharine Hepburn stage performance, she said, "Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut from A to B." And then there's "If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be surprised."
What she does is shift the ground underneath your feet by reversing the expected normal response or upending the way language usually works. That's wit, not snark. Someone in Churchill's hearing was gassing about the "great traditions of the Navy," and he said, "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, buggery, and the lash," which is so startling that it's like a slap across the face. That isn't snark either. It shocks you into a new perception. He also described his rival Clement Atlee as "a sheep in sheep's clothing," which works the way Parker's jokes do, by reversing normal expectation. Mean, funny, but not snark.. Twain's wit is generally warmer, though he was hilariously nasty on James Fenimore Cooper. But that piece--"James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"--is really a kind of realist criticism of Cooper's romantic fables. Criticism, not snark.
Re: Churchill I was thinking of his famous line where a woman said he was drunk and he said she was ugly. Was that not snark?
Yes, Churchill could be rough on women who attacked him. He said he wouldn't touch a woman politician with a ten-foot pole. An apology was demanded, and he said something like, "I apologize. I WOULD touch her with a ten-foot pole." In the quote you mentioned, he said, "Madame, tomorrow I will be sober," leaving the implication that tomorrow she would still be ugly. Mean and funny, of course. But look at the way he reverses the expected come-back and plays on language. That's invention, that's wit. Whereas Penn Jillette saying last Spring, "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch month, right?' just gives me a pain in the side. Lame, snide, weak, knowing--depends on racial prejudice and misogyny and does nothing fresh with the language. It's snark.
I decided to break this into two parts for two reasons, namely it would have been too long and I hesitated before asking him if he minded going off-topic of the book and talking movies. So here we go, first some movie questions than two last snark questions.
Scott: Do you pay attention to the Oscars? Do you think the right movies get nominated but don't win or that that the right movies are not even nominated?
David: I don't take the Oscars all that seriously; no critic does, though the awards are fascinating as examples of what Hollywood thinks it's doing well.
The real puzzler this year is the 13 nominations for "Benjamin Button." "Citizen Kane" got nine. What is that placid movie about, anyway? It's academically obsessed with working out its own conceit about backwards aging. A stab: Everyone in Hollywood is obsessed with aging, always having "work" done. So here's a movie that begins with its protagonist a wizened baby in an old-age home and he winds up growing down to Brad Pitt, which seems to embody Hollywood's worst nightmare and most happy dream of perfection in one package. It's been reliably reported that men around fifty are sitting in theaters weeping. Dear God.
What movie was overlooked - by the Oscars or by the box office - that readers of this should go see?
I wish they had nominated "WALL-E," a brilliant movie about the death of industrial civilization and its ironic rebirth in a space station that looks like a cruise liner; and ""Rachel Getting Married," Jonathan Demme's movie
about the fissures and bonds in a complicated family.
And the toughest question of all for movie critics what's your five (or ten - i'll let you choose the numbers) favorite movies of all time and why? (hey, it could be worse - i could have made you choose just one)
I don't have a list of absolute favorites because it's an endless wave of viewing and reviewing, though I certainly love screwball comedies like "My Man Godfrey," "The Awful Truth," and "His Girl Friday. Also Welles's "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons," film noirs like "The Big Sleep, Antonioni's "LAvventura," Bergman's "Persona" and "Smiles of a Summer Night," Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai," silent films like "Sunrise."
We talked before about movie critics you liked and I noticed you didn't mention Roger Ebert. Was that an intentional omission? My biggest coup at newsvine was getting an interview with him. https://thinkingandtalkingandacting.blogspot.com/2017/07/interview-with-film-critic-roger-ebert.html
I know you two have different styles so can you articulate how you two review movies differently and what you think of his work? And I dont think I have to remind you (bringing us back on topic) not to be snarky:)
Roger Ebert writes a plain, vigorous style which can be very effective. He certainly nailed
what was wrong with "Benjamin Button." I should have mentioned J. Hoberman of the "Village
Voice," who knows an enormous amount not only about film but modern culture
in general.
Aren't some of the famous put-downs by Churchill, Twain and Dorothy Parker essentially snarks?
They all said brilliant, funny, nasty things, but what they said depends on astounding shifts of language. In Parker's most famous crack, someone walked into the Algonquin and said "Calvin Coolidge is dead." And she said, "How can you tell?" And also, of an early Katharine Hepburn stage performance, she said, "Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut from A to B." And then there's "If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be surprised."
What she does is shift the ground underneath your feet by reversing the expected normal response or upending the way language usually works. That's wit, not snark. Someone in Churchill's hearing was gassing about the "great traditions of the Navy," and he said, "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, buggery, and the lash," which is so startling that it's like a slap across the face. That isn't snark either. It shocks you into a new perception. He also described his rival Clement Atlee as "a sheep in sheep's clothing," which works the way Parker's jokes do, by reversing normal expectation. Mean, funny, but not snark.. Twain's wit is generally warmer, though he was hilariously nasty on James Fenimore Cooper. But that piece--"James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"--is really a kind of realist criticism of Cooper's romantic fables. Criticism, not snark.
Re: Churchill I was thinking of his famous line where a woman said he was drunk and he said she was ugly. Was that not snark?
Yes, Churchill could be rough on women who attacked him. He said he wouldn't touch a woman politician with a ten-foot pole. An apology was demanded, and he said something like, "I apologize. I WOULD touch her with a ten-foot pole." In the quote you mentioned, he said, "Madame, tomorrow I will be sober," leaving the implication that tomorrow she would still be ugly. Mean and funny, of course. But look at the way he reverses the expected come-back and plays on language. That's invention, that's wit. Whereas Penn Jillette saying last Spring, "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch month, right?' just gives me a pain in the side. Lame, snide, weak, knowing--depends on racial prejudice and misogyny and does nothing fresh with the language. It's snark.
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