Blush: An Introduction, or, Where's The Beef?

Warning: The following contains rambling. Maybe even self-indulgent rambling. Maybe even boring self-indulgent rambling. I really can't tell from where I'm sitting, so...be warned?

There's a few sayings about critics. Those who can't, do it is one. Everyone being one is another. Some people were more creative; Shakespeare called them 'a wretched race of hungry alligators'. Generally, there seems to be a belief that critics are critics because they can't actually create and hence are jealous, or that they don't know how to do their jobs and just do them to be mean, or feel better about others by tearing them down. It's somewhat understandable, as a lot of criticism is not something you can really 'learn' or 'train'. On a few levels, the viewpoints of the late Siskel and Ebert are about the same as some random internet yahoo screaming into a camera; you can evolve presentation, but it's all opinion in the end. There's also this quote at the end of Ratatouille...

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

-Anton Ego

And the character of Ego was a food critic, which actually requires some degree of talent to do. Just about anyone can criticize pop culture. So therein lies the question; how can anyone's criticism, beyond overt exceptions, have meaning?

More to the personal point, for this series of articles I want to do, some people could very much see it as the pot calling the kettle black, as I mainly wish to address fictional works which I feel poorly, and badly, utilize the concepts of 'realism' and 'shades of grey' to the overall detriment of the story. In other words, I want to complain about cynicism, when I at times have gleefully attempted to inject cynicism into creative efforts, half the time where it wasn't needed or wanted at that. That's the very thing I want to discuss and criticize, so how can I be in a position to do it?

Well, first, I thought I'd talk about why I do it, and perhaps by some small extent, why  I think anyone does it. Why does anyone like bad things? The world has enough real, actual troubles; how can anyone get a taste for it and want to see the same things in their fiction? There's no real answer, of course. Tastes are made of a thousand arbitrary, sometimes random things; it's not like a math formula where A equals B, ergo C. I do, however, have my own viewpoint, beyond the arbitrary navel gazing.

I recently extensively quoted a bit from Alan Moore, from his assessment of the 9/11 attacks, in a shared work, and his initial words have stuck with me recently. As he said.

"This is information. Matter is energy. Energy is information. Everything is information. Physics says that structures, buildings, societies, ideologies, will seek their point of least energy. This means that things fall. They fall from heights of energy and structured information into meaningless, powerless, disorder. This is called entropy."

It was that professed concept of thoughts and their processes following along the same rough lines of entropy that I think provides the answer to why people like cynicism in their works. Cynicism is, at heart, a reason to not expend effort, to innately head towards a point of least energy. All negative thought processes are; the reason most people will never change is changing is not only terrifying, it's hard. Cynicism is mild compared to some other 'isms and 'ogynys and so on, but it's part of the same boat.

So why enjoy cynicism? In the way of being drawn to the point of least energy, whatever someone has to do to avoid expending effort causing enjoyment makes sense. If everything innately heads towards entropy, then it could definitely be argued that to go along with it would be pleasing. After all, you're doing 'what's natural'. There was even some study I read once that thinking about doing something is almost as pleasing as doing it, ie, thinking about it releases almost the same amount of happy chemicals in the dopamine and serotonin fields as actually completing the task (which is why procrastination is a problem for some). Another article I read about 9/11 conspiracy theories speaks of the same things; it basically pointed out the theorists were not really concerned about 'the truth' about the attacks, but constructing a narrative where they were smarter and better than the rest of the world without expending any effort whatsoever to be better. Looking at, or crafting a bad situation, and then going 'But that's how it is' and getting a buzz out of it, just might be part of the nature of existence. If there's going to be any sort of solid answer for why anyone likes cynicism in their fiction, that's really as good as any.

But if fiction is like a fine course meal, tell me, when was the last time you had a great meal that consisted of a steak, hamburgers, bacon, and a side of beef jerky? And even if you did enjoy something like that ONCE, how many times would you have to have a meal in that vein before you got sick of it? Here's a better question; how do the people who would never get sick of it think?

To me, sometimes enjoying cynicism is like a proper meal. You need the fiction to have a variety of aspects, just like a good meal will have meat, and vegetables, and soups and salads and variety in general. Even if you might deem to eat an 'all-meat meal' (ex: reading something by Cormac McCarthy), you should you know what you're getting into. To me, any time I try and introduce cynicism is because at the moment, I want a steak. Sometimes I want spaghetti too. It's probably fitting, come to think of it now, that my first quote was from a fictional food critic. Back to the point, how do the kind of people who would happily eat all-meat meals over and over without getting tired of it think?

Well, it seems to me they really don't. Their thoughts are singular; 'I like meat, you must be wrong to not like meat' and just stop there. This is where the allegory for my issues that I'll be raising shakes apart, as people can just make their own food if they want. But consuming fiction, my complaint...is basically the people who don't recognize this. Who insist on serving an all-meat meal because darn it, that's what they like, what kind of dumbass wouldn't? And that because they have the 'power' to 'control the menu', they end up losing what little insight they had, if they ever had any to begin with. This leads me to one last meat factoid; spices used to be as valued as precious metals once upon a time because in the days before humans developed food preservation techniques, spices could be used for a variety of issues, one of them covering up the bad taste of food that had spoiled. The point being that even if the bad taste is covered, the meat is still rotten, even if you can't see it. And it might still make you sick.

Maybe I should stop talking about food. So, another quote. What does this sound like to you?

"It breaks hope -- it crushes what makes us decent and steals what little honor remains. You have... no idea what is coming." 

 What does this sound like to you? Maybe a line from an ultra-cynical work, like Warhammer 40,000? Maybe something a villain would say, or someone victimized by something terrible, who by the basis of their suffering, has a rather twisted and altered viewpoint? Can you think of places (ie pieces of fiction) where a line like this doesn't belong?

Now that you have, can you think of how things could be presented so that it could belong? 

I bet there's a few you could think of. I bet you could also think of a few where it just wouldn't work. Square peg, round hole. Now the next question: what happens when you feel compelled to cram the square peg into the round hole, not for the sake of a story or a vision, but for the sake of the opinions of another?

Like I said, if thought processes are as prone to entropy as physical ones, the fact that people can end up in the boxes I am going to discuss, and in a lot of cases lament and get aggravated by, makes sense. That doesn't make the end result any less rotten. Pile on all the spices you want, the meat's still bad. And one of the main reasons comes from the namesake of these columns; why is it called 'Blush'? Mainly because I feel the core root of the problem matches this quote by C.S Lewis;

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” 

Why am I writing these things? Because in my field of interests, I have begun to perceive more and more people for whom 'blushing at being childish' is their worst nightmare, and they're willing to do anything to be seen as doing so. But like I've already said, the meat is still rotten, and no amount of spice isn't going to make it fresh again. So therein lies my goal. For someone who likes their cynicism, I will talk about when I don't like cynicism, and why. And while I may just be some yahoo on the Internet typing instead of yelling into a camera...well, need I repeat myself more?

Coda: One point I'd like to make.

There are obvious things that are bad, that you should know are bad without actually doing it. One does not have to jump off a cliff to KNOW it's going to end badly. I expect people to be aware of these obvious things. That being said, never let anyone tell you what to like, or not to like.

I once read a critic review of Freddy vs Jason that trashed the film, calling it 'vile' and the usual epitaphs. I greatly enjoyed the film when I saw it. Perhaps by the viewpoint of this critic, I 'failed', but what does that matter? In the end, outside of the obvious, if you enjoy something, that doesn't mean you can't not enjoy it. Sometimes you can see past the flaws, or live with them. I will not lord over anyone that 'I am right, you are wrong'. These is just my own assessments, be they ever so small and lacking a point. Too much critical analysis of work, I find, gets bogged down in pointless 'You should like what I like, and dislike what I like, and if you don't, YOU'RE BAD' nonsense. Like what you want, no matter how bad people say it is. QED.

...I actually have no idea if I'm using QED correctly. Oh well.

Coda 2: I'll be getting to the source of that 'breaks hope' quote eventually. Next, though, I'm going to look at something famous that I myself think is, and was, very good, and how unfortunately, sometimes the best things can only be told once.