Author: bsperduto

Sometimes our enthusiasm can get out of hand.

The hyperbolic nature of our cultural discourse encourages us to take strong positions on the things we like. Everything has to be either “amazing” or “terrible”, with little room for variation in between. These sorts of statements are driven primarily by emotion, even if they’re nicely dressed up with logical arguments (or at least the pretense of them). But emotions are a tricky thing; they can mislead you or cause you to overlook things a less enthusiastic observer might notice. There’s nothing wrong with being emotionally invested in the things you like, but at some point, if you ever want to have a productive conversation with someone about it, you need to be able to set that enthusiasm aside.

Take, for instance, one of the Culture Tsar’s favorite films of the last five years, Mad Max: Fury Road. When this movie comes up in conversation, the discussion goes one of two ways; either the other person loves the movie as well and proceeds to describe just how much they love it, or they bristle and mutter something about “not getting what all the fuss was about”. In the latter situation, sharing all the reasons the movie excites you isn’t going to get very far. Instead, you have to remove those emotional responses and talk about the film from a critical, pragmatic standpoint. In this case, the Culture Tsar usually deploys the “art film as action movie” argument, pointing out that the structure of the film as a two hour long car chase is the whole point of the movie and then indicating how the cinematography, production design, and practical effects all combine to serve that concept. The goal of the conversation at that point is not to make the other person “like” the movie, but rather to make a persuasive case for why it’s a good film even though they don’t care for it.

Internet commentary has largely debased what we used to call “criticism” because most people can’t seem to put their emotional attachments aside. There’s also a tendency to project one’s own feelings onto the general public. A friend recently related to the Culture Tsar that he argued with someone who believes The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the greatest video game of all time and that it “changed gaming forever.” Now, despite the fact that the Culture Tsar loves Skyrim, he found this statement to be completely and objectively ridiculous. Setting aside question of whether it’s the best game ever (spoiler alert: it’s not even the best game in the Elder Scrolls series, but let’s save that for another post), what on earth does the phrase “changed gaming forever” actually mean? When pressed on this statement, the person said vague things about gameplay options and open world game design, but all of these things existed in various degrees long before Skyrim. Furthermore, Skyrim didn’t spark an entirely new breed of video games afterward. Open world rpgs existed for more than a decade before Skyrim’s release in 2011, and even if you restrict that category to first person rpgs, even those had become fairly common by the early 2000s.

But the person wasn’t making an objective argument; he was defining the game according to his own experience. For that particular gamer, Skyrim changed the way he viewed games forever. The problem is that he couldn’t set his emotional response to the game aside long enough to recognize that his enthusiasm said more about him encountering something for the first time than it did about the game itself.

Everyone wants to play the role of critic these days, but not enough people out there understand the role of criticism. Put simply, it’s not about you. Just because a work of art provokes an emotional response from you doesn’t automatically mean it’s objectively good. The Culture Tsar may love listening to Bryan Adams songs, but he’s never going to make the argument that Adams was one of the most influential and important artists of his era (tempting though it may be). If you want to engage in serious critical discussion, you not only need to curb your enthusiasm, you need to curbstomp it.

There’s a great scene in the film Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back in which Ben Affleck’s character remarks that the internet has given people around the world the power to share information and ideas like never before and they’ve decided to use that power to bitch about movies. The Culture Tsar thinks about that comment every time some fan-driven controversy breaks out over (insert media franchise here) and overloads his Twitter feed for 12-24 hours.

As the saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Now, the Culture Tsar obviously has nothing against bitching about movies in principle. There’s a big difference, however, between debating the merits/flaws of a film as cultural products and debating them as extensions of someone’s personal identity. In the former, disagreements over the work in question are defensible positions easily set aside after the debate. Someone can like or dislike a film for various reasons, but that in no way affects anyone’s enjoyment of it. For instance, the Culture Tsar thinks the Transformers films are equal parts dumb, vapid, obnoxious, and tedious. Their continued existence and success, however, doesn’t affect him beyond forcing him to watch the trailer for the next one every time he attends a movie (honestly, The Last Knight feels like it’s been “Coming Soon” for five years now).

But when a work of popular culture becomes deeply entangled with a person’s identity, criticism ceases being criticism and instead turns into an existential threat. The most obvious and intense example of this phenomenon is Star Wars fandom. Seriously, there were Catholics executing Protestants during the Reformation who felt less strongly about the sanctity of the Holy Scriptures than some Star Wars fans feel about the franchise’s canon. Take a look on any Star Wars forum and you’ll find people decrying, well, just about anything that’s happened with the franchise since it was sold to Disney. From the decanonization of the “Expanded Universe” to the casting decisions behind each new film, there’s a rabid cult of fans out there who are on a crusade to defend the “true” Star Wars from “outside” meddling. Never mind that many of these people were not even born when most of the films came out or lived through the shock of the prequels upending longstanding assumptions about the original trilogy; they view the entire canon as an internally consistent scripture that must be adhered to down to the last detail lest the entire franchise be invalidated.

There’s a reason the Culture Tsar compared this situation to the Reformation: it’s because this intense form of fandom only makes sense through the lens of religious scripture. The Catholic Church persecuted Protestant Christians because it feared that if erroneous interpretations of Holy Scripture were allowed to take root in society, scores of unsuspecting Christians might be led into heresies that could endanger their eternal souls. Of course, there’s also the more cynical interpretation that Protestantism threatened the religious authority of the church (and the political power that came with it), which is equally viable here. While Protestantism wasn’t particularly democratic in form in those early days, it did represent a broader democratization of the faith by making it possible for Christians to worship in multiple ways.

The Reformation also swept away centuries of Church practices that had little, if any, basis in actual Scripture. In this sense, Protestantism literally changed what it meant to be a Christian. Methods of worship changed, sources of authority shifted, and expectations of behavior were redefined. For devout Catholics who remained invested in pre-Reformation practices, this change represented an existential threat. After all, if minor changes were permitted to gain strength, they could potentially lead to greater heresies down the line.

It might seem glib, if not sacrilegious, to compare Star Wars fandom to the Reformation, but the analogy fits quite well. Longtime Star Wars fans who resent Disney-era Star Wars are largely motivated by a sense that the franchise has been taken from them and redefined by people who lack their deep commitment to the rituals of fandom. Virtually every internal religious conflict in human history boils down to an argument over which sacred texts are considered legitimate. When Disney/Lucasfilm announced that the “Expanded Universe” would no longer be considered canon for the franchise moving forward, it was tantamount to Protestants declaring that numerous Catholic sacraments were no longer necessary elements of salvation.

This argument might seem ridiculous if Star Wars was just another media franchise, but it isn’t. There are people all over the world who have a massive personal investment in this fictional universe. For many people, being a “Star Wars fan” is a form of personal identity every bit as strong as a religious identity. It’s simply not acceptable for them to allow just anyone to experience Star Wars however they want because that would diminish the value of their fandom. They also want to be able to claim a form of scriptural authority. To have someone, especially someone who doesn’t conform to their image of a “true believer”, dictate what is legitimate canon and what is not is the ultimate offense. It’s as if instead of heresy festering at the margins of the Catholic world, it’s being handed down by the Holy See itself (perhaps the controversy over the Second Vatican Council of 1959 would have been a better analogy, but that’s a deeper cut that would take longer to explain and the Culture Tsar isn’t about to rewrite this entire damn post).

And for the true believer, there’s only one way of dealing with heresy…

Star Wars is the most obvious example of this phenomenon, but it’s by no means the only one. Perhaps this is an idea the Culture Tsar will explore in later posts, especially if this little thought experiment manages to generate some controversy. For now though, he’s happy to provide eager readers with an opportunity to make relevant use of all that history they had to learn in school about Martin Luther’s 99 Theses, John Calvin’s Geneva experiment, and the causes of the Thirty Years War.

And if those references mean nothing to you, well, maybe you should put down that dumb Expanded Universe book about the Yuuzhan Vong and catch up on some history…