"Don't Read the Comments" Doesn't Work When it's All Comments
How "comment section culture" and having to be noticeably correct on the internet have destroyed our ability to appreciate art
Looking back, I believe I lost my faith by reading the comments section.
I’m not talking about religious faith, though the comments from that realm often distress me very much. No, I’m talking about my general faith in humanity. And the comments I was reading were in the burgeoning online version of my local paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
They say that all new media is just a remediation of existing media (I learned that in grad school!). And so I suppose that the infamous comment sections attached to newspaper articles are best understood as an “advancement” of the old “Letters to the Editor” section of the ink and paper versions of those same institutions.
A letter to the editor was always a stark window into the terrifying minds of your unhinged neighbors. And those were presumably filtered through an editor before seeing print. Oof.
Then the mad internet god came along and leveled the playing field and took away the gatekeepers and installed true democracy and did all the wonderful things that the techno-utopians promised would make us all more freer than we was yesterday. Our benevolent internet created the comments section, looked upon it, and said that it was good.
Now, of course, we know that it wasn’t good and many news outlets have eliminated the comments altogether. The comments section famously became a space that not only gave voice to our seedy collective id, it somehow cultivated and encouraged the pubic distribution of vile sentences. As it turns out, creating a space for opinions didn’t just “fill a market demand.” There weren’t opinions floating around out there, looking for a home. The comment section didn’t fill a desire, it created the desire. It is a creative engine. It compels opinion-giving as an inventive act. And in this marketplace of “being heard,” the incentive structure rewarded explosiveness and controversy.
I will always love Cleveland very dearly, but the comment section of its local paper was a regional humiliation.
And yet the reward incentives of the old comment section have prevailed and now drive the bulk of our internet discourse. Passion and moralistic indignation battle with scathing satire and public shaming in the fight to be noticed online. And we all absolve ourselves of the guilt of helping to perpetuate these vicious cycles because we’re so sure that our side is the righteous one.
Art in the Culture War (in which I blame you, the reader)
This culture war has made us functionally dysfunctional as a democracy and collective culture. I am old enough to have seen so many “biggest moment in American history’s” come and go that I am far less caught up in the apocalyptic drama than I once was. Some might accuse me of taking a cowardly, perhaps privileged way out, but I have embraced art more passionately and deeply than at any other time in my life.
That love of art is what this newsletter is all about. It was started as my humble attempt at the naïve old clichéd practice of “art appreciation.” Lately, events have led me away from what I thought I’d be focusing on — the last several posts have been a bit more polemical than I’d intended.
But here’s the thing: as I check the stats for each post, the angrier, more polemical ones are my most popular and have corralled the most new subscriptions. I’m happy for the company, but was hoping that I could get you as excited about The Menu as I was. Recently I wrote a glowing retrospective about the great Rodney Crowell’s 1988 album Diamonds and Dirt and didn’t even think of posting it here. I was grateful that PopMatters published it because I was really proud of my gushing positivity in that piece.
When I wrote a rant about Glass Onion, I got some negative feedback online (as expected, though I don’t think I damaged any relationships with it), but got several new subscribers out of it too. That’s kind of the last thing I wanted when I started this endeavor. That essay was basically my own version of the hideous (and despicably popular) “everything that sucks about this movie” genre of internet brand-building. I truly wrote what I felt, but I want that approach to be the exception, not the rule of my writing. (Though my attitude about Rian Johnson is still raw, so I will hold off on watching Poker Face for a while. It’s supposed to be good and I want to give myself a fair shot at appreciating it).
But that’s where we’re at, isn’t it? It seems that the entire internet is little more than a remediation of the OG comments section.
Experience Art for Yourself
I started thinking about this whole thing the other day when a former student from my horror film class came up to me to discuss the forthcoming Scream movie trailer. We were both very excited to see the new movie. But then he said that he’d been going on YouTube and watching videos that broke everything down and evaluated it. I suppose there’s no inherent harm in that, but it reminded me too much of something that I see all the time.
So often, students will not watch a movie until they’ve watched the accompanying “explainer” video from their favorite influencer. And when we discuss the film in class, they parrot the “insights” they obtained from this trusted source. There’s no way for me to police this (and I wouldn’t even try if there were) but I go out of my way to discourage this kind of activity. I’m not at all worried about academic honesty or anything like that. I’m mostly sad. Sad for the young person who robs themselves of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The chance to experience a work of art with an open and accepting wonder. Instead, I have to listen to predictable and tiresome complaints about the David Gordon Green Halloween trilogy that some internet person spat into the world’s face.
These kinds of clever, assertive takedowns are irresistible to so many of my students because they combine the desire to fast forward to the “right answer” (which is what standardized testing has done to education) with the sanctimonious over-confidence of the comment section.
Of course, the “right answer” is very rarely right. Even professional critics have been hilariously wrong about great works of art over and over. Take a look at the critical reception of practically any John Carpenter film and compare it with that film’s reputation now. Critics are fools.
And now we’re all critics.
This may seem like a reach or perhaps a barely-related tangent, but I think that the phenomenon I describe with my students is deeply connected to the “comment section culture” focus of the rest of this piece. In both political hot-taking on the internet and in evaluative, vitriolic art-criticism, there is an assertion of absolute wisdom made with a vainglorious panache. This is the legacy of the comment section of the Plain Dealer.
Believe it or not, I do have several essays in process in which I gush about a piece of art. I have something about P.D. James’ Death in Holy Orders, a Regina Spektor/Keats comparison/contrast, something about a Willie Nelson song, and many others. Please do let me know if you have any interest in reading that kind of thing. And feel welcome to send in a request! That would actually be fun.
Also, if you share this one with others and ask then to subscribe, then that would be nice. I’m not too far off from 100 subscribers, which is my goal for the first year of this newsletter.
Great take... or, un-take! Perhaps it's only vaguely related, but I find myself incredibly intrigued by modern art and consistently made to feel bad about it because "modern art is easy" or "modern art has no meaning," yet I can't help but feel the opposite. Sure sometimes I have that reaction too, but context seems to be important here. Anyways, opinions on art aside, it's nice to be reminded it's okay to be myself amongst the anon-crowd of the internet, and I'm glad to see you're nearing your goal!