Tynan's Anger

Dear Mr. Hitchens,

I was very pleased to have encountered your book Letters to a Young Contrarian. I was especially greatful to have encountered it this year, when I am 23, as opposed to 18, when it probably would have been the kind of book to change my life. No doubt, Mr. Hitchens, your views on being a contrarian are well formed by years of experience, dealing with both the social, political, and psychological pressures of being a contrarian. My question to you, Mr. Hitchens, is the following: why?

No doubt, there is significant value to being contrarian in many instances. If Mother Theresa has had some questionable, perhaps horrific political views or effects, it should be pointed out. Considering the social and political assumptions about Mother Theresa's immaculate reputation, it would probably be a full-time, all-consuming task for an individual. My question is this: do you think anyone would naturally want to be the guy who rails against Mother Theresa for a living? And would you want to be in the social company of the guy who rails against Mother Theresa for a living.

Nonetheless, I understand your motivation for doing so. The unspoken, but often forced silence against Mother Theresa's hardline views represents something of an injustice. In an ideal world, those actually effected by Mother Theresa's views, should be able to voice their concerns. While they mat lack the proper voice and advocacy to do so, is it really your job to speak for an entire people you otherwise have no connection to? In that case, doesn't it become less about social injustice and more about your professional reputation?

Nonetheless, your letters to a young contrarian provide an invaluable resource to understanding how contrarianism works when necessary. In particular, I appreciated your juxtaposition of Vaclav Havel's "as if" policy in an oppressive society with E.P. Thompson's "as if" principle in a free one. The fact that your letters were written and published right around 9/11 have only made the comparison more appropriate, and with less restraint than both you and Thompson displayed.

Nonetheless, Mr. Hitchens, not everyone has the luxury you do of being a professional contrarian. In most cases, people stand up for certain principles that they feel they need to be contrarian about. Being a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian is less of a social justice and more of a method of drawing personal attention (which you have accomplished with remarkable success this decade). Nonetheless, the fundamental problem is this: if a mistake is made in the perpetual search for contrarianism—as in, you take a contrarian view to a just policy-it can damage both the personal clout the contrarian has built. Most dangerously, it can lead to the replacement of a just policy with an oppressive-even if, as a proper contrarian, one looks for an unquestioned injustice.

The ultimate problem is this, Mr. Hitchens; not everyone can be a professional contrarian such as yourself. The reason may be less one of means (journalism, political freedoms, economic means, etc.), and more the fact that, as a contrarian, you are forced to speak for a group of people who want nothing to do with you. The fundamental problem is that contrarianism is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. Skepticism is always to be recommended, contrarianism just leads to personal rather than intellectual ends.

Sincerely,
X

Labels: angry young man, christopher hitchens, ep thompson, letters to a young contrarian, mother theresa, politics, radicals, Social justice, tynan's letters, vaclav havel

I walked into Watchmen particularly nervous that it was going to suck. In addition to being a fan of the comic (though not as blindly devoted as some of my friends), I had defended 300 upon its release more than I probably should have, going so far as to call it one of the best movies of 2007. Back then I was responding to cries of fascism by 40-something critics who couldn’t detect the light-hearted, comic book framing of deep political issues that eventually overshadowed the excellent if imperfect qualities of that film.

Yet, from the moment I saw the spoof of the McLaughlin Group in the opening scenes of Watchmen, through the opening credits which focused on a mix of historical and alternate historical footage to the backdrop of “The Times They Are-A-Changin’,” I could immediately sense that director Zack Snyder was not just making a cool comic film, but was tapping into something artistically culturally significant that I could have in no way anticipated before seeing the film. Rather than meticulously reproducing a dated piece of literary history, Snyder was exposing a crucial and almost farcical element of our culture that no one who lived through the 1980s could appreciate. For the generation currently in their 20s, those who have college degrees and adult wits but never lived through the height of the culture wars, Snyder was reducing one of the seminal texts of the culture wars to what people of my age perceive it as: a comic-book, fairy tale story they’ve seen in passing. For people who didn’t live through the culture wars, they may as well have been the Persian Wars. 

The reviews of Watchmen have been decidedly mixed. They were similarly mixed with 300, but that film’s supporters were eventually drowned out by the film’s fiercest critics who saw the film as a fascistic, right wing, Iraq War-supporting vision of ancient Greece (and Frank Miller, 300’s creator, certainly held those beliefs). Those complaints have followed director Zack Snyder to Watchmen, but both movies proved to be remarkable box office successes. What was less expected among Hollywood types, and caused Snyder's detractors to be even more aghast, was that not only did young people go see the two films en masse, but more often then not, they also liked it. A lot. That the opinions of people in their 20s differs so much from those 20 years older is as good a sign of any of a generational divide in taste, as well as how they treat the American cultural imagery of old.

To give you an example: for leftists who remember Nixon as a president, the prospect of an unchallenged essential President-for-Life Nixon is utterly terrifying. I can sort of sense why that would be, but keep in mind my first experience with Nixon was a picture book of American presidents I read when I was six, and my parents pointed out on the Nixon page that he was a very bad man whom everyone in our family hated. Later, my experiences with Nixon imagery came solely through films like Dick and Frost/Nixon, and, less directly, in his spoofed image on shows like The Simpsons and Futurama. Currently, the strongest image of Nixon in my mind is the head of Nixon attached to a monolithic robotic body terrorizing Earth after winning the year 3000 election in Futurama. That’s a depressing thought to those who followed Watergate, but an almost inevitable one among the generation who didn’t; I’m sure the number of people who have the same primary image of Nixon in their brain is larger than you’d think.

But even if I were to study every piece of  newsreel footage and objective documentary on Nixon with the same fervor I consumed The Simpsons, the effect would essentially be the same; Nixon would not be a danger to my life, he’d just be an intellectual curiosity — a relic from the past that seems baffling to me today. The imagery that comes from the culture wars is no less absurd to viewers of my age: Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Patty Hearst, and Stokely Carmichael seem too ridiculous to believe. As Adam Sternberg noted in his point-perfect rebuttal of David Denby’s Snark, the real generational issue is not the tone our generation takes, but the fact that the people we see on TV seem completely preposterous and insincere, and the popularity of The Daily Show and Wonkette display a growing appreciation of the undressing of the punditry’s façade. 

Watchmen is probably more popular today than it ever was. The core audience of the film is not people who appreciated the comic upon its 1986 release, but those in their 20s who read the comic in high school. For some, inevitably, the main appeal of the comic is the Nietzchean nihilism expressed either with The Comedian’s Bill Hicks-like sense of humor or Rorschach’s humorless vigilantism. The view of the world as a dark, senselessly violent, hopeless enterprise with no God to save it has attracted millions of adolescents over the past century, and a few legitimate fascists as well.

But the sources of Rorschach’s nihilism — crime-ridden streets and moral depravity — are not what people live to in today’s word where New York is comparatively crime-free and Girls Gone Wild is a cultural institution. Today, the more pressing depravity in New York is among the urban developers who claim they are doing good for the neighborhoods they are kicking poor people out of. Thee also include the hypocritical crooks like Madoff, Spitzer, and, at the highest level, Bush and Cheney. The audience is the same as those who laugh at the cries of the stimulus bill as “turning America socialist” (a reference that also elicits laughs in the Watchmen movie) and who have no idea why Bill Ayers would matter to anyone.

The larger issue with the coverage of 300 has now come to fruition in Watchmen: while the culture wars from 1964-2004 saw American society as a battle between the far left and the far right, the main conflict in American society today is not ideological, but generational — between those who lived and felt the culture wars and those who didn’t.

The biggest complaint about the movie, even (or perhaps especially) among its supporters, was its use of music. The score featured every clichéd '60s rock song you can think of, from “The Time They Are-A-Changin’’” to “Sound of Silence” to “All Along the Watchtower.” Snyder is too slick a filmmaker to be blind to the ineffectiveness of his use of soundtrack. My best explanation is that Snyder was intentionally introducing a disjointed element into the film to point out, however crudely, the larger significances of the era of Watchmen, and, more importantly, the younger generation’s cultural consumption of the era of Watchmen. If in the end the soundtrack hurt the film, it ended up depicting Snyder as a more astute auteur and cultural commentator than even I had previously given him credit for.

In the press leading up to the Watchmen movie, Snyder has depicted himself as an utterly devoted fanboy, obsessively detailed in his rendering of Alan Moore’s vision, down to the brand of coffee. But though Snyder, 43, lived through the 1980s, his overgrown 15-year-old boyish tendencies have incidentally given him more significance with millenials than few people over the age of 30 can properly understand. Moore’s denouncement of the film is not so much a rebuke of Snyder as a reflection that the vantage point of Moore, one of the most deeply cynical cultural figures of the 1980s, cannot be reconciled with the fact that Snyder is presenting an era that drove people to paranoia to people who see that paranoia as comical.

The translation of young ideas from humorless paranoia to a cynical but strangely astute optimism is fully expressed in the revision of Watchmen’s ending, which I will introduce with the very millennial term SPOILER ALERT. In Moore’s comic, written before the Cold War ended, it seemed the only way to end the cultural bickering of people who fundamentally and irrevocably hated one another was either the annihilation of the human species or a happy accident that tricked humans into realizing their common bond of humanity. In Snyder’s version, the fear of Dr. Manhattan, who, among other character traits, is seen as the human personification of a soulless, nuclear military-industrial complex, was enough to do the trick. Ozymandias doesn’t resort to an otherworldly creation to scare humans into getting along as best as humans can, but instead uses the very entity that had been at the center of political and military strategy for decades.

In real life, what ended the Cold War was the realizing that no one wanted the world to end, and after a decade and a half of subsequent bickering, people are beginning to realize that Cold War mentalities have little place in the modern world. The world still has enormous problems; the economy is worse now than it was even in Watchmen’s '80s, and though no nuclear bombs have struck, New York and Moscow have both been victims to horrible attacks that have killed hundreds needlessly between 1986 and now. But, as corny as it sounds, the persistence of the human spirit proved to be larger than any nuclear weapon, and what those who only see Cold War paranoia in hindsight see as the most important tool in getting through today’s problems.

In Moore’s world, as in Snyder’s, even the Nietzchean übermenschen of Rorschach, of the Comedian, have moments where they break down and realize the redeeming qualities of humanity. Rorsarch and The Comedian represent the adolescent vision of Nietzche, the one that fills the seats in the movieplex, but the same kind that is so crude that it only appeals to bad followers of Nietzsche of all ages and levels of education. The most significant legacy of Nietzsche is not his nihilism, but his breakdown of a world of absolute truth, where perfect objectivity was impossible, and where the word of no God, philosopher, or political leader could be universally upheld.

That’s the legacy that became most apparent in the culture wars, and that’s the kind of good Nietzchean understanding that Moore works with in Watchmen. Just about all of the central characters in Watchmen have strongly-held viewpoints — the nihilism of Rorsach and The Comedian is no less fiercely maintained than Dr. Manhattan’s lifeless astronomical philosophy or Ozymandias’s Alexanderian vision of lateral thinking and a New World Order. Yet, while all of these viewpoints are hopelessly impossible to understand by their peers who disagree, they are all mostly internally consistent, with the inevitable contradictions of an all-encompassing worldview. But yet they all live together, and, even at some point in their lives, can be considered friends.

o;s all-encompassing viewpoint on others. Ozymandias’s view of a unified humanity resulted in him being as much of a mass murderer as Hitler, Stalin, or Genghis Khan. But the voice of reason comes from Dan and Laurie, who represent the voice of Generation X and every generation that has come since. What they can’t understand is the zealotry of their peers when their philosophy flies in the face of so much to the contrary. While Dan and Laure are by no means perfect or ethically sound, they do recognize their own individual flaws and try to live by as much of a code as they can. 

That kind of acceptance of disagreement and welcoming of those who disagree — reaching across the aisle, if you will — is increasingly becoming the political narrative of an era where the majority of people no longer remember the '60s. More and more, Americans care less about insincere extremism and universal consensus and more about the greatest good for the greatest many. Could Watchmen be the first film of the Obama era? History will judge, but if you can’t help but laugh at the blowhard talking heads and misplaced paranoia that come when watching the film but not from reading the comic book, don’t be alarmed. To paraphrase Watchmen at the rise of a similarly baffling new generational trend, this indicates only that you are still sane.

This was originally published on Blogcritics

Labels: 300, 60s, alan moore, comic book movies, culture wars, radicals, reactionaries, richard nixon, watchmen, zack snyder

Next week will be the 40th anniversary of the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Right before that ignoble anniversary, we get word of another riot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On one level, the socioeconomic tensions of the Williamsburg riot are the same as forty years ago. In both cases, young, privileged leftists were acting weird and unpredictably, which prompted the brutality from a blue-collar, lower class police force of the same age who couldn't understand why anyone would act that way.

The difference, however, is the purpose behind the two events. In 1968, there was an unpopular, pointless war, and even the weirdest of the radicals were politically driven in their weirdness. Today, we're in the same kind of war, and the purpose of the event that spurned a riot was to dress like pandas and be crazy.

Now can you see why I hate irony?

Labels: 1968, chicago, fucking hipsters, here's what's wrong with the world today., irony, pandas, radicals, riots, williamsburg