There is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open up bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.
– Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
Lists are categorically stupid. Maybe naïve is a nicer word. Books to read, films to watch, groceries to buy, chores to do: they’re personal, built around an individual’s needs or desires. This acquisitiveness points to a lack—of groceries, sure, but also of knowledge, of culture—and this is why they should remain private. It’s fine to lack, and laudable to aspire to read more, to see more, to be more. In a way, this is one of the core aspects of a good life: making lists and scratching things off of them. But their context is entirely dependent on the person who makes them, and when they cross paths with those who don’t situate that context (or can’t), they become meaningless. They invite stupidity.
One of the most willfully stupid things I’ve ever read in my life appeared not long after Sight & Sound published its updated list of the “Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time.” In the Atlantic—ostensibly a real magazine—staff writer Marina Koren admitted that, despite being an “outer-space correspondent,” she had never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey (no. 6 on the list). She decides to rectify this, and what follows is an article (?) that reads like a live-tweet thread from someone who is also folding laundry, looking up actors on IMDB, dancing out a TikTok, and thinking about what to cook tomorrow. The first thing, of course, that Koren complains about is the film’s pace: “Some people had warned me that 2001 is pretty slow-moving, but it is slooow-moooving. We’re a few minutes in when my partner, sitting next to me on the couch, asks if we can watch this at 2x speed.” She then describes the film’s action—of which there is notably little—and concludes, once the film ends,
That’s it?!? I am completely befuddled and unsatisfied. I was expecting 2001 to be a movie, consisting of those elements that make movies great: plot, character development, and, you know, a decent amount of dialogue. 2001 is two hours and 23 minutes long, slightly shorter than the usual modern-day superhero movie; for comparison, the run time of 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War is two hours and 29 minutes. But 2001 has just 40 minutes of speaking, whereas the superheroes are a chatty bunch. And what am I supposed to do with that ending?
Koren’s reaction, of course, echoes what many have said about the list’s top pick, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—that it’s slow, that it’s difficult, that it’s somehow—to use one of the most frustrating words people resort to when talking about art—“inaccessible.” This is the film version of “Nobody really likes Ulysses”—the implication that one would only add Ulysses1 to their own private list of favorite novels, or even “greatest” novels, because they feel some public pressure to do so, to show others that they too have taste. It occurs to me now how similar this idea of artistic accessibility is to the way some call the ethical assertions of others “virtue signaling,” as though no one really believes that wealth, say, should be redistributed, or that unhoused persons should have free housing, or that borders should be demilitarized and dissolved. Taste, like ethics, is assumed to be pretense, something to show off to others the way you might take a picture of your “I Voted” sticker and post it to Instagram. No one could (not does, but could) derive pleasure, this kind of talk suggests, from a film as difficult as Jeanne Dielman. Before long, any film or book or album or TV show that doesn’t present itself as recognizable, as assimilable, becomes pretentious, not something that anyone truthfully likes. Even more puzzlingly, these so-called unlikable works of art become “elitist.”
That Koren compared 2001 to a Marvel movie says more than I assume she’d like it to. Since Disney acquired the studio in 2009 (and Lucasfilm in 2012), the company has spent an incomprehensible amount of money creating a vast network of interrelated, structurally identical films in about three or four emotional registers. Characters are often introduced in supporting roles, explored at length in their own enormous stories, and ultimately exhausted. Famously, Marvel invites fans to sit through fifteen minutes of credits for a thirty-second scene where another character or conflict is flippantly tossed at the audience like slop into a pen of pigs. Disney has extended this strategy to the Star Wars franchise as well, and so transparently that one of the final scenes in the atrocious, committee-assembled mess that was The Rise of Skywalker is a character wondering aloud where they came from, and another character, all but winking at the camera, saying “Well let’s go find out”—a teaser for a new series built within the film itself. In 2021, The Book of Boba Fett built a drawn-out, tedious narrative around a character with about three lines in the original Star Wars trilogy, a character who was long beloved by fans because he only had three lines—because he was, in a word, mysterious.
Fans—and some idiot critics—like to point out that these films are our Greek tales, our American “shared mythology” (as if the real mythic fiction weren’t America itself—more on that some other time). But myth is contradictory and fragmented; it’s useful because it’s adaptable, interpretable, incomplete, spare. Boba Fett, for example, used to be a mythic character; knowing nothing about him was a precursor to inventing one’s own stories about him—in other words, a mystery that made it possible to play. By exhausting characters, Disney offers instead the opposite of play: it delineates and disbars, excludes and confirms. It’s Will Ferrell gluing Legos together in The Lego Movie. It disinvites interpretation, flexibility, even fan-fiction. Characters are deprived of their mystery. In particular, villains—the only interesting characters Disney has ever created—are assigned “origin stories” in which they’re painted hamfistedly as victims. “Hurt people hurt people,” as this evil corporation2 would like us to remember.
There are simple, obvious problems with Disney: its near monopoly on cinema houses (especially after its 2019 acquisition of most repertorial favorites with 20th Century Fox); its tendency to shift talented actors and directors away from other ventures with multi-year projects; its reluctance to portray queer characters beyond acknowledging their existence; its tax status, and so on. But more sinister than all of that, Disney—with its “MCU approach” to filmmaking—asks no questions. It has no curiosity. The content that fans generate because of these films—YouTube videos, articles, tweets—are not interpretations; they are almost exclusively lists. Here are 43 things you missed. Here’s how this character relates to this other character. Here are four ways the next movie might include the Purple Clown. By disinviting interpretation, these movies have created and trained a shockingly passive, distressingly unengaged audience—an audience that no longer wonders, that no longer thinks, but merely reacts. Was it close enough to the canon? Or did it err unforgivably? That Disney has found such overwhelming success in these endeavors is a terrifying warning: that it is entirely possible to use propaganda to extinguish not only the will to resist, but even the wish to resist—to extinguish the imagination itself. To create something, there has to be a space for it. A cinema for children (let’s be honest) that eradicates the space between stories, the long gaps in a character’s life, the mystery behind their motivations, is a cinema that eradicates the space for play itself, for building one’s own stories—which means understanding oneself as a person. In the products of Disney, fans are disinvited from their own inner lives.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell riffs on Franco Berardi’s distinction between connectivity and sensitivity. (I wrote about this in relation to bodies last year.) Connectivity, she explains, “is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units… In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.” Sensitivity “involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous—and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in.” Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Disney’s approach to cinema—and the way its audience reacts to it—is rooted entirely in connectivity. The primary goal of a Marvel film in particular is that you pay for it, assimilate it, and advertise it.
“What the attention economy takes for granted,” Odell goes on, “is the quality of attention, because like all modern capitalist systems, it imagines its currency as uniform and interchangeable.” This is what a “criticism of lists” aims to achieve, shunning sensitivity in favor of a connective form of culture—the tech dystopia of culture as data. The literary equivalent of this, as more and more sensitive outlets for thoughtful, intelligent criticism like Bookforum go under, is a consumer-based criticism of star-ratings, relatability, popularity, good looks (especially on Instagram), and, of course, year-end lists. Amazon and Goodreads are the pinnacle of the tech industry’s campaign to turn literary culture into literary data, like cranking a ballerina through a meat grinder and expecting her to keep dancing.
In this regard, difficult movies and books carry a revised importance. A difficult film is a sensitive film: it asks you about yourself and invites you to ask questions of your own. It wants you to walk away changed, and if you’re lucky, you will. There’s nothing elitist in this at all. There’s nothing inaccessible either. There’s no bar, no gate, no password, just as there’s nothing physically stopping a person who reads tweets to sit down and read Ulysses. A difficult film or book wants to give you something; a connective product wants to use you as walking ad space. Tell me which sounds more elitist, more inaccessible.
Thank you for reading! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ve noticed this letter is now called Entertainment, Weakly. Since social media seems so much less stable than it was a month ago, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell. Talk to you again soon <3
Don’t ask me about Ulysses; I’m only using it as the ur-example of the difficult novel.
“But what about Disney expanding representation in mainstream film?” Indeed, these films and TV shows have done a lot to include characters of color, characters with queer family dynamics, and so forth, but I invite you to close your eyes or read the script and try to determine who is Black, who is queer, or who is in any way marginalized without visual cues. All characters in these films are interchangeable. Now compare it to, say, any of the recent Star Trek iterations, where each character’s marginalization informs who they are, what they know, how they approach conflict, what they can teach others, and how they enjoy life. Who they are as a character and how they treat others is intricately related to their identity.
I took great pleasure in reading “Connectivity Error.” Your writing encourages questing and questions. Thank you kindly :)
The only trouble I had here was your transfer of Berardi's connectivity/sensitivity pair from what I understood to be an interpersonal realm to the relationship between film and viewer. A "difficult film" may indeed have you ask questions about yourself, but it's not a two-way street, you're not in dialog with a thing that might change in response your interaction with it, as you yourself may indeed change.
At any rate, I loved the withering critique of Disney and Marvel movies, none of which, I am proud to say, I have ever seen or wanted to see, likely for precisely the reasons you so well describe here.