i want art to feel EARNEST. this disgusting, near pornographic level of tongue in cheek meta humor is making me sick to my stomach. i don’t know how many more movies i can take about clever subversions and the movie winking at you to say “we know it’s a little silly, but…” where is the whimsy? why can’t we believe in the pretend you’ve created? why don’t you have enough faith in it? in my ability to believe?
My (scalding) hot take here is that this is a byproduct of artistic cowardice in the face of unrelenting criticism.
It doesn’t just plague mainstream media; this kind of tongue-in-cheek self-referential, self-deprecating “I know this isn’t that good wink wink” is all over indie media too.
So many creators are deathly afraid of being criticized for their creative choices, so terrified of an increasingly volatile online audience, that they feel compelled to sell themselves short on what their intentions are, just to plant that tiny nugget of plausible deniability: maybe if I create the illusion of not taking this all that seriously I’ll be more insulated from criticism.
If the thing they’re doing actually *is* good and becomes well-received, then they end up looking like accidental geniuses who had a moment of inspiration amid a sea of shitposts, and if the thing they’re doing is panned they get to laugh it off and go “well I wasn’t taking this that seriously to start with! You’re the one who’s making a big deal out of it!”
If no one thinks you’re really trying or that you don’t wholly and fully stand behind your creative decisions, then anyone who tells you that you could be doing your craft better looks like an idiot, and that’s the whole point.
A lack of earnestness is the perfect “get-out-of-criticism free card.”
the irony is that creating with an audience that will laugh at and mock you in mind selects for an audience that will laugh at and mock you. people who earnestly like things don’t like it when the things they earnestly like tell them to their face that actually, they shouldn’t care that much because the thing they like is dumb and silly
I’ll go one step further with this and say that the audience is not supposed to be a creative partner in any capacity, and the only reason the audience has *become* a creative partner is because the internet has given audiences a terrifyingly amplified presence. We’re so scared of alienating fans and supporters that some of us will bend over backwards to keep them, even if it means selling ourselves short, creatively.
If a creator is ideating based on what sort of audience reaction they think they’ll receive, they’ve already lost. It is our job as creatives to assert and maintain that boundary.
Steve Shives did a video about how Fan Service creates Fan Entitlement at the end of last year and he goes on about this exact topic.
My favorite is when he quotes Writer/Director Nicholas Meyer:
“With all due respect, I don’t care what you (the audience) think, only because you don’t know what you think… You don’t know what you love until you get it.”