Everyone gets to be a snob about something.* You can certainly be a snob about more than one thing, but it’s easier to limit yourself to one, and when we identify the One Thing in another person, we should accept it as part of their personality. Like the right to speak freely without worry of violence and the right to worship whatever gods you wish are enshrined as basic human rights inherent to all people, so, too, is Being a Snob About Something.
Before I get into what I’m a Snob About, I’ll discuss what I’m not a snob about. For one, music. My list of most-recently listened-to songs is made up of music I heard in commercials, on tv shows or in movie trailers. For instance, my most recent Favorite Song is Cosmo Sheldrake’s Come Along, which I first heard in an Apple commercial: https://youtu.be/d8LJXcQhD0k
I like Metal
A friend once asked me what music I was listening to lately and I said “metal,” and he, being a fan of the genre, interrogated this further. I listed mostly Megadeth and Metallica music over 20 years old, and he laughed at me. I don’t know if he’s a Snob about metal, but I’m definitely not. I know that there are people who would not consider the “metal” I like metal at all, or at least a very old and dusty version of it. I have listened to what metal fans listen to nowadays and I can affirm that what I heard is not for me.
I am also not a snob about food. When someone asks me where I want to eat, I rarely have an opinion. I have yet to encounter a restaurant where the menu did not include at least one dish that piqued my prandial curiosity, so I’m agnostic about, for instance, where we’re going to eat tonight. I don’t care. You pick. I really don’t care. I’m not being difficult. I won’t shoot down the first thing you suggest. My claim that I do not have an opinion is true. Pick a place and I will go there, with no complaints. I will not blame you afterward if I don’t like it, because by surrendering the decision to you, I have also surrendered my right to complain. I understand this is a fact of basic social arrangement. If I have a preference, I will state it. Tonight, for instance, I crave the fast casual Indian food of Choolaah, and stated that preference to my partner. It is up to her to state whether she wants it or not, and negotiations can progress forthwith.
Gimme the Garbage
More important than accepting what Someone is a Snob About is accepting what I will call accepting what Someone is Extremely Trashy About, though I don’t want anyone to think that I’m denigrating Trash. Trash is beautiful, wonderful, delicious, amazing. Artificially cultivated trashiness is often detestable, because many of the people who would do so also look down on actual trash as beneath them. I am here to say that trash is not beneath any of us and that we must think about our own visceral reactions to what we consider “trashy” and ask ourselves whether we’re missing something that somebody else might enjoy.
Here’s a for instance for you.
My friends were once enjoying the outside air of Pittsburgh and encountered a small family, obviously tourists, who asked where the closest Olive Garden was. They were told about the incredible delectable delights available at the International Food Festival occurring mere blocks away from their current location, full of authentic Italian food from families that probably still spoke Italian in their homes and definitely would never use a microwave or reheat frozen pasta, as Olive Garden does. But this family was completely disinterested in the Festival or authentic food. They wanted the Olive Garden. How trashy!
Indeed, I understand the instinct to reduce these people to hick tourists from across the rivers who probably lived in the suburbs, of all places, and had such unsophisticated palates that they could not enjoy the authenticity of actual Italians producing actual Italian food. That was my first instinct, also. But that interaction has stuck with me, much like the Rule of Snobbery, and thinking about it made me think about how snobbery and trash are simply social codes for how we relate to what we consume and the value we place on them.
Tell the man looking for Olive Garden that Toyota trucks and GMC trucks are basically the same (a perfectly valid opinion for someone who has no use for a truck), and you’ll probably find out that this person is actually capable of an informed, nuanced opinion about something. It just isn’t about Italian food, or maybe food of any kind.
The family looking for Olive Garden isn’t looking for a challenging dining experience. Their relationship to food is different from mine. They don’t really care about how authentic their dinner is, or how Actually Italian their Italian food is, they want a familiar experience. They’re traveling and are probably not in a comfortable emotional space, so the familiarity of an Olive Garden is an oasis of easy expectations. They don’t have to worry about choosing the wrong thing, or making some social faux pas, or accidentally being rude to a culture unfamiliar to them, or stress about navigating streets they don’t know. They just want some breadsticks and some soup and pasta that probably has a lot of butter in it. Can I really blame someone for seeking comfort when they need it? Never.
The unironic enjoyment of trash is a freeing step to take. Remove the idea of “guilty pleasures” from your mind and simply enjoy things without guilt.
Enjoyment is not binary.
Siskel and Ebert used such a scale for their movie reviews, and sites like Rotten Tomatoes continues a version of that tradition, but it does not work as well in practice. I propose a scale.
At the top of the scale of enjoyment is Snobbery, an indelicate term for an indelicate perspective. I am a snob about science fiction and fantasy. I have a high basic expectation of stories in those genres and I will judge harshly a story I find lacking. I can’t simply turn my mind off and enjoy a bad or unoriginal science fiction or fantasy story. It has to have something redeemable to me, as a snob, in order to enjoy it.
That does not mean I don’t enjoy trash in those genres, because I do! There is nothing original about the movie Soldier, but I still love it. It features mid-career Kurt Russell as an obsolete super soldier discarded to a planet of garbage, where he finds himself finding new purpose as a defender of a community of marginalized refugees. I love the movie with no shame and will happily defend it, but I freely accept its flaws. It’s probably Trash. There is nothing original about the story, but it is executed in lean, myth-like segments. The journey of the main character is telegraphed and predictable, and this is what I enjoy about it. I admire a good story told well, and Soldier fits the bill. https://youtu.be/4g2G5POuZCY
I had the opposite reaction to 2009’s Star Trek movie. While exciting and well-made, it had nothing of what I love about Star Trek while also emphasizing aspects of Star Trek that never belonged in it. Star Wars is about fathers and their legacies, but Star Trek is not. The 2009 movie included James Kirk’s father, and had a character lament that he was not more like his father. The biological destiny implied by My Father Was a Great Such and Such So Therefore I Must Also Be is a sad remnant of feudal, middle-age thinking that has no place in the optimistic, egalitarian futurism of Star Trek. That is just one of its many sins that I won’t bore you by writing about.
These themes, as I said, are perfectly apt in Star Wars, which is steeped in fairy tales and Arthurian myth. I liked the second movie in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi, because it subverted and deemphasized familial legacy so common in fantasy stories and added a little note of the much more exciting and modern idea that Anyone Can Be Great. Both ideas can coexist in Star Wars, and that movie was full of new ideas for Star Wars while also rhyming with bits and bobs from the movies that preceded it.
Finally, Here is the scale I propose:
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I’m a Snob About This
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I Love and Defend This But I’m Flexible
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I Have No Strong Opinion About This, But I Usually Like It
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This is Fine, I Guess
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I Have No Appreciation For This But That’s Fine If You Do and I’m Interested in Hearing You Talk About It
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I Don’t Like This At All But I’m Glad You Do and Please Don’t Try to Get Me To Like It, I Already Know I Don’t and I Don’t Enjoy Hearing Anyone Talk About it, But Please Don’t Take it Personally
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This is Terrible and I Hate It
This scale is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many thin layers between these discrete levels, and some of these layers might be different for different people. For instance, one layer I could add to the above would be “Talking About This Around My Sister Will Make Her Leave the Room,” and “I Like This a Lot But Please Don’t Tell My Cool Friends.”
Also note that this is not meant to cover political opinions or things that matter to you on a different level from what you consume for entertainment. Those values might factor into what you’re a Snob about, but this scale isn’t meant to cover anything you might vote about.
Relationships
I touched upon this briefly earlier, but I think it bears further examination. An additional aspect of the scale of snobbery is the idea of one’s relationship to the object in question. It’s important to acknowledge these tendencies in ourselves so we can see them in others and, I think, gain a better understanding of why someone might like something we consider Trash. For instance, my relationship to Marvel comic book superheroes goes beyond whatever surface qualities might exist.
I began reading about those characters as a child, and carried a love of their stories into adulthood. My relationship to a character like Captain America goes beyond the simple, escapist enjoyment of his adventures. They were my companions through the most difficult and the most joyful times of my life, and some of some of them helped me process aspects of my life that were too complicated or nuanced to wholly encompass with my little mind. Captain America, for instance: while you might see a goofy ultra-patriot with an A on his head, I see the best parts of my dad and the values important to him: honesty, honor, truth. It’s not as simple as “me like when man punch other man.” I’m bringing my own beer to the party.
When people ask me my opinion of something like the newest Marvel movie, I give my most objective opinion possible, but with the caveat: I cannot judge these movies objectively. I’m going to enjoy watching Spider-Man fight Mysterio, full stop, so don’t rely too much on my opinion to figure out whether or not you’re going to like the new Spider-Man movie. My relationship to these superheroes is such that movies about them can commit many crimes that I will happily overlook because there is a loud, boisterous child in me that can’t stop bouncing up and down in his seat just at the sight of Spider-Man fighting Mysterio. I have a childish glee about the Marvel superhero movies, but I’m not a mindless consumer. I can excuse a lot of Trashy aspects of the things I love, but only if the soul of it is intact. The 2009 Star Trek movie was Trash, but it also showed a lack of understanding the very things I love about it.
Finally,
Writing these newsletters is always very illuminating to me. I learn more about myself when I write each one. Self-analysis is an important part of being a functioning human in our society, I believe. It’s important to check our biases and preconceptions. Sometimes we need to stamp them out, sometimes we need to embrace them, but we always have to give ourselves permission to have them.
This is the first newsletter I’m publishing in the new year, but I wrote most of it piecemeal over the last few days. I’ve always been skeptical of traditions based around arbitrary dates, but I have also come to the conclusion that everything, in the end, is arbitrary, so why not celebrate one? So while I still eschew the New Year’s Resolution, I will happily celebrate the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. My fondest wish for you and for myself is peace, joy, beauty and understanding.
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Footnotes:
1. When I was much dumber, I used to read Penny Arcade a lot. It also used to listen to ICP. Enjoyment of either one was not ironic in any way, and I’ll defend my liking them both at the times I liked them as Better Than You Think but definitely emblematic of my headspace when I liked them. I feel an intense need to defend my liking the things I like, which is a sideways way to approach the topic at hand: being a snob. My theory is based on the idea I first read about in something Penny Arcade wrote or drew, but I can’t find it anywhere. Anyway, I wanted to make sure that they were sufficiently cited as first tossing the idea into my head, where it has rattled around for years and I am only now examining.