Pleasure Without Guilt
Like What You Like, And Like It Hard
by Rick Paulas
In the movie High Fidelity, John Cusack’s Rob Gordon turns to the camera and says, in the film’s most important moment, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records-films, these things matter.” Most everyone walked away from the movie with that lesson. But the cool aesthetics of the moment — cigarette smoke wafting, the iconic John Cusack himself delivering the message — disguised the clearest truth of the flick: Rob Gordon’s an asshole. Don’t be like him. Whether or not something’s “good” doesn’t matter. All that does matter is if it makes you feel good. Guilt has no place here.
At this point in time, it’s probably best not to dip one’s toe in the fight between irony and sincerity as it relates to the work of David Foster Wallace. The seabed has been dredged, the gold has been harvested and polished, and the only remaining junk left over is shells and sand. A quick Google search for “David Foster Wallace irony” throws back 268,000 hits. The older results are more inclined to agree with Wallace’s take on being ironic (which is: don’t be), while the more recent tend to detail why he’s wrong, argue that irony has its place, and claim there’s not enough cynicism in our culture.
Like the things you like, without apology.
Which…fine. You’re right. You’re all right. There’s too much irony, yet not enough, all at the same time. The two concepts, after all, are not binary enemies. But there is an ancillary issue that Wallace took great pains to rail against, and that’s the rightful place that “guilty pleasure” has in our pop culture world. In short, nowhere. Like the things you like, without apology.
In a scene from The End of the Tour, Wallace urges his friends to forego the more “appropriate,” (i.e., “serious,” i.e. “foreign” flick) The City of Lost Children, and go see John Woo’s Broken Arrow because, frankly, he wants to see things get nice and blown up. He gives no tongue-in-cheek reasonings, no pulling-of-the-punch excuses, or arm’s-length dismissals. His point is that if you want to like something — and action movies such as Broken Arrow are specifically constructed to be liked by large groups of people, no matter the demographics — then like it.
Wallace lays out the concept a bit more thoroughly in the movie’s source material:
“These really — the really commercial, really reductive shows that we so love to sneer at, are also tremendously compelling,” he says to David Lipsky in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. “[I]t gives you a sense of order, that everything’s going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won’t in any way challenge you. It’s like being wrapped in a chamois blanket and nestled against a big, generous tit, you know?”
The way to experience this junk pop art isn’t to watch it with a wink, letting everyone around you know that you know just how valueless it is. Because that’s not true. There is value in junk, though it may just be a comforting mechanism. But by watching it with ironic detachment, you’re removing that value — arguably the only value, that the piece has. It’s like going to McDonald’s and ordering a salad. If you’re already making the trip, make it worth your goddamn while.
Rick Paulas has written plenty of things, some of them were serious, many of them not. He lives in Berkeley and is a fan of the White Sox.
