The blockbuster season is upon us and there is already consensus on which film represents the summer's cool choice. With its surveillance state subtext, wintery subtitle, and echo of paranoia thrillers from the 70s, Captain America: The Winter Soldier “feels downright subversive”, is “an intelligently subversive blockbuster”, and is even “the most political (and subversive) superhero movie ever made,” according to various reviews.
The best a pop culture artefact can hope for these days is to be a subversion of its corporate gatekeepers’ intentions. Thus The Lego Movie is praised for its “subversive” humor, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is called “a subversive, exciting sci-fi epic”, and José Padilha's Robocop is “a sleek but subversive remake”.
As Carl Wilson writes in Let’s Talk About Love, his terrific book about learning to love Celine Dion:
Subversion today is sentimentality’s inverse: it is nearly always a term of approval. To show the subversiveness of a song, TV show or movie is tantamount to validating it, not just in pop criticism but academic scholarship.
Wilson’s book was first published in 2007, by Continuum, in a slim edition that looked more like a Brodie’s Notes booklet. That didn't stop it gathering a small, quiet cult reputation, and it has been republished, by Bloomsbury, with a new subtitle: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. It now has supporting essays from the likes of James Franco and Nick Hornby, although its cultural-studies-on-the-cheap cover design still gives no hint of the glories within. It’s probably the best book on taste since ... well, people don't really write books on taste any more, do they? The very word summons up a world of fusty connoisseurs in Matthew Arnold whiskers bearing brandy snifters discussing the golden mean or the Rule of Thirds.
In today’s hyper-mediated, mass saturation culture, the nose-twitch of the “snob” has been replaced by the grazing of the “omnivore”. Our taste judgments are more numerous, instantaneous and dismissive. Arnold never had to deal with My Heart Will Go On tinkling at him through speakers in the back of a cab. Celine Dion’s music, writes Wilson, “can only make me dorkier if I listen to it, so I push away hard and fast”.
Wilson is Canadian, so there is some element of national chagrin to Dion’s globe-infiltrating success: he felt the lyric from the South Park movie's Blame Canada (“When Canada is dead and gone, there’ll no more Celine Dion”) in his bones. A rock critic for the indie press, he spent his time championing knotty experimentalists – art rock, psych folk, post-funk, free jazz – full of caustic self-portraits and corrosive rage. In the early 2000s, his marriage had just broken up, and while this does not form a big part of the book, it clearly played some role in his mid-life inventory which the book records: “An experiment in taste, in stepping deliberately outside one’s own aesthetics,” he calls it.
A hundred pages later, and he has seen Dion's Vegas show, squeezed back the odd rogue tear, played her music at top volume from his apartment (“the worst part was feeling ashamed to feel ashamed”) and sat down to write an engaged, lively review of her album, Let’s Talk about Love, without recourse to camp enjoyment, or irony, or any other of the shortcuts by which he might have put his finger on the scale for the sake of his book.
But isn’t life too short to spent time with art you hate? Wilson’s response is that life is too short not to. Also, it gets to the very heart of modern taste, which these days is almost indistinguishable from hatred. “Tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgusts provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the taste of others,” concluded French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his 1979 study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, which surveyed thousands of French public on what culture they liked. He found two things: that they stratified along class lines, with the working class liking “low-brow” culture, the middle class middle-brow, and so on. Perhaps more interestingly, the higher up you went, the grander the reasons they gave. To quote the Tarkist Tuna ad, the working class respondents were more likely to say simply, “It tastes good”; the higher up you went, the more likely they were to say something was in “good taste”.
Bourdieu saw aesthetics as heaving with class warfare, and taste as primarily a means of distinguishing ourselves from our fellows – primarily a pursuit of distinction. It is not enough, in other words, that I like Lady Gaga. It is essential that my Republican father hates her, too.
If Wilson’s book rang true when it was first published, it rings more true today. The internet – that bubbling cauldron of pet peeves, cultural dislikes and moodswings – has give shape to our hatreds. Pre-emptive strike, instant dismissal, has become our chief operating mode, if only to put a buffer of a few seconds' precious ignorance between us and the 24-hour noise machine. And we prize “subversion” above all else because it tells us that we are not alone, although as Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter observed in The Rebel Sell, the values of the counterculture – transgression, satire, idiosyncrasy – are now the high octane of consumerism. We are sold TV shows that are “raw, uncompromising, gritty”; we listen to “dark, edgy, angry,” pop lyrics. Even the new Sonic the Hedgehog reboot is promised to be “dark, edgy”. The cutting edge is as crowded as a piece of Malibu beachfront.
That’s why it feels more radical for Wilson to make such a plea for cultural clemency on behalf of someone like Celine Dion. “Middlebrow is the new lowbrow,” he writes. “Mainstream taste the only taste for which you still have to say you’re sorry.” It may be the last cultural shock we have left in us.
