On Snobbery
Learning to love my own pride and prejudices.
If I had to name the defining complaint of this blog, a central motif to my fragmented longform cultural critique, it would be the agglomeration of reading-watching-listening into "consumption," and the way consumption has morphed into a competition. I embody a constant contradiction in this regard: I am, of course, documenting all the media I "consume" as one. I use tracking websites to monitor what I'm reading and watching; I give myself challenges. But my participation in these activities is something I'm constantly fighting, an eternal (I suspect) battle between my opposed desires to be part of mainstream culture while also existing outside of it. I also feel a lot of shame: because I have constant access to what other people are reading and watching, I begin to believe that my own meagre "consumption" is inadequate; that I am not "well-read." Because films are quicker and easier to "consume" than books, I'm starting to catch up, and so I have a healthier relationship to films than I do to books. I see people boasting about reading over fifty books in a year, meanwhile I'm struggling against the weight of the Great Backlog, the history of all literature I'm yet to experience. It makes me feel like I'm wasting my time. The only thing stopping these futile comparisons from leaving me totally miserable is the knowledge that many of the books read en route to completing those challenges could be more adequately described as being "consumed" — either they are read hastily, with little depth or reflection, or they are contemporary books which are almost designed to be part of challenges like these, part of the churn of trend-conscious publishing.
This brings me to another contradiction that's been on my mind: my complex feelings around snobbery. On the one hand, I like to think I left it all behind: as a teenager I was the worst sort of Extremely Online prescriptivist. But at the same time, I was regularly borrowing popular thrillers from the library, so how deep could my conviction really have run? As I grew and learnt (sorry for the cliché), I realised I wanted to become someone open-minded, and that meant (among other things, such as getting over my juvenile revulsion towards spelling errors) accepting that many people would read, and even love, the sorts of books that I considered trite beyond redemption. Yes, even John Green-esque purple prose YA; even Twilight. But the current media climate has forced me to once again rethink my stance, and even acknowledge that, under the surface, I didn't really change as much as I thought. Reader, I am a snob. It's time for me to accept it. The thing that's really pushed me over the edge — because of course, popular media has in a way always been "bad" — is the YA takeover of the publishing industry. When I was growing up, "young adult" meant "stories about teenagers which explore difficult issues in an accessible way for young readers." These days it's not quite clear what YA means, except the equivalent of a PG rating, because it certainly isn't only marketed at teens anymore. From Booktube to Bookstagram to Booktok, YA has been bled dry of any substance; all while borrowing a sheen of progressiveness from the representational paradigm of engaging with storytelling, and of course, the #ownvoices movement. Many people have written about how #ownvoices has mainly served to tokenise non-white authors; it's also contributed to a market where a novel can be sold solely on the diversity of people it represents. Because it is all just marketing. There is no effort to engage with the complexities and intersections of the various identities in these selling-point checklists; their presence is supposed to be enough. Of course, none of it is enough: it's an endless parade of flavours of the month, variations on the same theme all landing at once; the fanfic-ification of genre literature. (Though perhaps that's harsh on fanfiction.) Creativity sacrificed at the altar of capital.
One of my 2024 resolutions is accordingly to avoid "new release" fiction entirely. I'm defining that loosely. I suppose I might read a book released in the last five years if it had already been on my radar, but certainly nothing brand new. I'm shoreing up my back catalog, hoping to maybe chip away at some of that insecurity about not being well-read enough; and I'm also actively trying to resist the hype machine. I'm certainly not reading anything that could be even remotely classified as young adult. This particular bit of snobbery is one that's dogged me all my life, that I've alternately embraced and fought against. At twenty-two, well and truly an adult, I gave into the trend cycle and read The Raven Cycle. (Ask me about how much I hated the ending.) At fourteen, a teacher awarded me full marks on an essay because I had chosen Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South as my related text and provided analysis sufficient to communicate that I had indeed read the entire book. One of the first works of literature I read as a kid — if not the very first — was Pride and Prejudice. In fact, my mother read it to me as a bedtime story before I was old enough to know how to spell the title. I feel as though this tells you all you need to know about my family background: of course we engaged with a degree of popular media (Pride and Prejudice counts, to an extent), but the bar was high. In this sense I'm lucky: I was born into snobbery. I didn't come by it honestly. My critical thinking muscles would still take some time to develop, of course, as everyone's do, in a cycle of growth and revision of ideas and opinions. But I'm a product of my upbringing, and that means I take media seriously: and just as nothing is too obscure for me, neither is anything above critique.
I've been finding it interesting lately — I guess being thirty has made me introspective — which parts of me have changed, which are still emerging, and which have been with me all the time. I've been rewatching more than I usually do, pushing back against the nagging voice in my head that reminds me of all the gaps in my knowledge, insisting that I only "consume" things that are new. And so it was that I came to rewatch Pride and Prejudice 2005, the Joe Wright adaptation, only to discover that my good opinion, once lost, is indeed lost forever: the film annoyed me in all the same ways it did when I first saw it at twelve. I had the conflicting experience of enjoying myself — the story is practically part of my genetic makeup; I'll never not love a retelling — while being constantly critical of every misstep, a contradiction familiar to anyone who has ever hated an adaptation of their favourite book. (I suppose I should be thankful they've never made a movie of The Secret History.) Just as I had recognised at twelve, Keira Knightley is a terrible Elizabeth. She is alternately too coy and too passive — the events of the story seem to happen around her rather than because of her stubborn pride, her misguided faith in her own judgement. Meanwhile her changing feelings towards Darcy are unconvincing, because she has flat out zero chemistry with Matthew Macfadyen, who is gamely holding his own in what could have been a star turn if Elizabeth had been played by, say, Keeley Hawes.
Then there's the visual incoherence of the film itself: the shocking modernity to how Knightley is styled compared to every other actor, looking like she's just stepped out of the boho section at Topshop, straight out of 2005. There was a bit of a fuss when the film was first released over how Wright made Regency England seem "dirtier" — more "real" than the hyper-mannered elegance of the typical bonnet drama vernacular. But in hindsight there's nothing iconoclastic about this departure from the norm; it just looks messy and at times amateurish. The visual language of bonnet dramas exists for a reason: these stories hinge on transgressions of order in a rigid, mannered society. Those transgressions are even more powerful when they break something visual alongside the intangible social compact. Think of Autumn de Wilde's 2020 adaptation of Emma, how compelling it is to see Johnny Flynn's face red and puffy with tears in the role of Mr. Knightley. That film is aggressively stylised, like Merchant-Ivory dialed up to eleven by way of Wes Anderson — and it works, because the prim, manicured visuals make space for the emotional messiness to really shine. Wright's Pride and Prejudice could have been an interesting statement against this kind of stylised directing, perhaps, if he'd fully committed to it. After all, the Regency is no more real to us than outer space: I suppose I appreciate the attempt to bring it back down to Earth, but then it must be done with the conviction of grimy high fantasy. Wright's lack of consistency paired with a complete unwillingness to allow Knightley to embody anything that might be read as "ugliness" (or at least the absence of beauty) by a contemporary audience leaves the vague gestures at a more "real" world dead in the water.
Speaking of Merchant-Ivory — last night I rewatched their 1986 adaptation of A Room with a View. I haven't actually read the book (and I'm trying not to be embarrassed about admitting that), but I first watched the film when I was very, very young. I remember it vividly as one of the first "grown-up" films I ever watched. And though I can't comment on its strength as an adaptation (though I'm sure it's more than solid), it's inarguably a brilliant film. The visual language of the period piece is not only intact, but masterful; even the scene of socially unacceptable skinny dipping, which has a glorious and animal element to it, still manages to leave the bathers spotless. Even the shocking sight of blood that ruptures Lucy Honeychurch's innocence is stunning, akin to the dash of red that enlivens a Constable painting. Of course, everyone is beautiful — but they're beautiful in the historical style. I don't feel like I'm looking at a time capsule from the 80s, the way Wright's Pride and Prejudice is so embarrassingly of its time. The leads have chemistry; the women have agency and personality beyond flirty glances. There was only one sore point for me in A Room with a View: Daniel Day-Lewis as the objectionable Cecil Vyse. Of course, Day-Lewis can't help but perform a role to its logical extreme; when Vyse is cruel, he makes your skin crawl. Conversely, his moments of pathos are just as easily felt. But what really struck me is that Vyse is the snob of all snobs, and I could easily see myself as someone who would laugh along at his mockery of a popular novel. That gave me pause. By allowing myself to embrace the snobbish side of my personality, was I really just as bad as this bastard, who wields his opinions with classism and cruelty?
Well, obviously not, but it seems a little pathetic to write so boldly about imposing standards on my own media consumption only to turn around and say, but I'm not like those other snobs! I'm not mean about it! I think that if I'm going to incorporate a turn-my-nose-up attitude into my cultural commentary, I have to accept that some people will think I'm a dickhead. I'll also note that Cecil Vyse's snobbery is not positioned as the opposite of anything: our dashing hero George Emerson is also well-read and cultured. He's an existentialist, preoccupied with deep questions that many people would see as ivory-tower-esque. But he's having fun with it. That, of course, is a much closer model for what I'm trying to do with cultural criticism. Maybe this makes me the kind of person you wouldn't want at parties, but my idea of fun is dissecting a narrative, unravelling themes, analysing visual symbolism. Being a snob doesn't need to be antithetical to having a good time. I can try to be accepting and open-minded while still acknowledging that I have very strong opinions and many of them are in line with a worldview that preferences literature and cinema perceived as "highbrow," and that I have pretty much always been this way. And then I'll go watch The Simpsons or read some pulpy sci-fi to remind myself that I have always contained multitudes, too, and there's nothing wrong with being a little contradictory.
