Reaction Shots: Regressive Criticisms
From Hannah Gasdby to The Good Doctor, whate exactly are we supposed to understand about them?
I wrote an obituary in The Critic Magazine’s Artillery Row of the comedian Barry Humphries, who passed away at the age of 89. I made the point that Humphries was the last of a specimen that is beloved by many Australians, which is the larrikin. Judging by the 28 years that I have been in this country, it’s safe to say that it is just a myth. And it’s perpetrated by a cultural malaise, being spearheaded by its critics.
One of these critics is Hannah Gasdby, a stand-up comedian who is a talisman for the direction that comics are normally pushed. When I watched public broadcast television, Gasdby was a regular on some of the comedy programs that they normally show. Her dry sense of humor is not my taste, but it’s something that I recognize that other people find funny. But it was when she released the special Nanette on Netflix that made her broke into the mainstream. It was critically acclaimed and often framed as a triumph of the oppressed. To give you an idea, here was Matt Zoller Seitz’s glowing review, comparing it to the stale meanness of Bill Maher.
We did laugh, though; Gadsby encouraged us and gave us permission. But thanks to her follow-up, which takes the joke apart like a sculptor dissembling an armature, we also understand the hidden intent of its construction. Which means next time, the laughter sticks in the throat. Or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, Gadsby got a laugh out of us, while also making us wonder why we laughed, and what larger social-conditioning role our laughter plays.
Reading it, it sounds like she’s giving people the license to laugh at things. If she is the DMV, then the test to obtain the driver’s license is whether or not the thing you find funny was really funny at all. It’s saying the quiet part out loud but twisted into an intellectual exercise.
Gasdby is releasing her new special, as well as a curated show at the Brooklyn Museum inspired by Pablo Picasso, which was a major inspiration to Nanette, presenting him as a deep misogynist genius. Unlike Nanette, the feedback it received was not as enthusiastic.
There is a backlash to her from people who wouldn’t be supporting her positions either way, but slowly, critics who have been sympathetic are getting bored by her rhetoric. But their reason why seems very odd. Take, for example, Ruby Stevens, a writer published in Roger Ebert dot com, who states that Gasdby’s critique is very reactionary. And she wasn’t the only one to raise this concern.
Labelling her as that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me or anyone else with a cursory glance of the term. Are they referring to large institutions giving her a generous position that they don’t have? People understand that a term would need a cause and effect for that to happen, which is why I was confused by this improbable angle. I have written about what it means for art to be labelled as conservative, which has fewer negative connotations compared to the R-word. These critics do not want to own the fact that Gasdby would have something in common with them, but it’s just the manner in which she goes about it.
This critique implies that for something to be truly ideologically good, it has to speak its specific language, otherwise it’s completely divorced from their beliefs. For them, it is a roundabout of semantics where the perfect becomes the imperfect and vice versa. First, the thing gets critically beloved for calling out as many ‘isms’ as possible. Then, the pushback from the non-intellectual crowd becomes louder, but is dismissed by its champions as ‘noise.’ Later, an enlightened minority on Twitter adds to the backlash by putting the product into the hands of the crowd, even if they have absolutely little in common. It is made with the pretence of stepping away from groupthink, even if it actually upholds it so that they don’t need to die on this particular hill.
Gasdby has little to do with conservatism (if you’ve seen any clips that detail her experiences, then you’ll know why), except for critics using her as a pulley for their approved tastes. There is a frustration that the anticipation surrounding her comedy does not meet the high bar that critics set in the past before people get the chance to watch it.
The most unlikely defender of Gasdby is Joe Rogan, who is often pushed as a politically incorrect jokester holding most positions that the everyman would also hold. In the most neutral stance he’s ever taken, Rogan says that she’s engaging in the form as any other comedian would do while dismissing the idea that she’s deconstructing comedy. Ironically enough, it is far more open-minded than this kind of critic would ever be. That Rogan showed to be more mature than either Gasdby’s champions or detractors says something about the square peg inside the circle-shaped box of a narrative. The Occam Razors is that Gasdby refuses to tell a joke, not even an unconventional one. I can’t imagine a modern-day version of The Emperor’s New Clothes looking like more than this.
The Good Doctor and the Silent Majority
If Pauline Kael wasn’t famous for her film criticism, then she would be known for her quote of not knowing anyone who has voted Richard Nixon in the 1972 election. That year was also when the term ‘silent majority’ was coined to describe this base of people who did not feel to speak out about voting for Nixon, because it was culturally unfashionable to do so.
Kael’s sentiment is being echoed by peeps on Twitter discovering that a lot of people watched The Good Doctor, a free-to-air TV show, rather than Succession, House of the Dragons and The White Lotus. While these shows are critically acclaimed, The Good Doctor, a show about an autistic surgeon, is viewed by more people, particularly those in the over-50 demographic.
You might have seen this clip from The Good Doctor, a show I have heard of through seeing clips of it at my local gym but have never watched. Shaun (Freddy Highmore) tells Dr Han (Daniel Dae Kim) that he’s a surgeon after he was told about his demotion into pathology, following his remarks to a trans child that she used to be a boy. The meltdown, along with Dr Han’s silent reaction, inspired countless memes of Highmore’s overacting, and subsequently, the Internet’s discovery that it is far more popular than they’ve ever imagined. Why would someone watch a show that has this much hammy acting over something that is far more sophisticated?
An Occam’s Razor could be applied here. Cable channels and streaming services cost a premium, but free-to-air is still King because it has none of the obstacles or the efforts to get past that. But I would argue that, for as much as the landscape of commercial TV is saturated with undemanding reality game shows and formulaic procedurals, these people need something comfortable from their daily lives and The Good Doctor, however, you feel about it, is a possible remedy. Succession and Ted Lasso inspire conversations, and that could bring more eyeballs, particularly if your professional experience is adding your perspective to the discourse through TV recaps or think pieces. But the experience of watching these shows, with the adage of talking about it, is more taxing, as it relies on heavier themes and cinematic realism, compared to the lighter sermons of an autistic doctor learning valuable lessons, following a socially awkward mishap. These people live in different worlds, away from the demented social pressures of Twitter and other platforms. For the people baffled about the popularity, it’s understandable because they don’t take up these privileges of being blissfully ignorant every day.
(I am planning to write something longer about Succession because frankly, I’m getting mixed results watching the final season. But the contention is that Succession is the talk of the town and whether it deserves to be if everyone else is paying attention to another thing is a valid discussion.)
If Kael doesn’t know much about the Nixon voter, that’s a problem she had to figure out, not someone who would use her as the punching bag of the ignorant inner-city liberal. So why should I feel bad that my viewing habits do not match with the so-called silent majority? Are people going out of their way to watch Blue Bloods to prove that they understand the Real America? What we need to learn from this is that there’s a digital divide, and while we can be bewildered by what kind of things we enjoy, it’s the kind of thing that we should live with and accept.
You Must (Memorize) This: Ctrl + Alt + Delete
This is a classic video essay from Harry Brewis (otherwise known as HBomberguy) about why bad art exists. Here, he looks into a shoddy webcomic called Ctrl Alt Delete, and its most famous panel Loss, which has been memed on the Internet since its publication in 2008. This is also aligned with Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, whose badness overshadows the authenticity of its story. It’s a bit of a stretch for me, but the rationale for Brewis’s thesis is a solid one. Bad art comes from a culture that can be dismissed through easy targets, while good art can be susceptible to the same problems and the cycle continues. Harry’s politics are suspect (he’s part of the Breadtube movement after all) and there are skits here that are a bit indulgent in the creator’s vision. But I can’t lie that when he does videos like this, it justifies whatever his talents are and I can put my differences aside to appreciate that art is still art, no matter the quality.
The Kino Around The Corner: A Face in The Crowd
What I find fascinating about A Face in the Crowd isn’t just Andy Griffith’s bravura performance as Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes, or that his character tells a brutal truth about corporate media relying on someone to sell their own products that warps said, person. But look at the contrast between Griffith and Patricia Neal as Marcia Jeffries, a radio journalist who initially interviewed him before he broke out. Rhodes is charismatic and entertaining. Marcia is calm and nuanced and she was happy for the star to burst out before fame reshaped his head. This is a nuance that I felt was kinda missed by Elia Kazan, a satire that could blame both Rhodes’ behaviour and the corporate hands perpetrating the low state of its medium, but where is the accountability for Marcia Jeffries, who seems to let the devil out of the cage. Nevertheless, A Face in the Crowd is a fascinating character study of how our empathy to the most ordinary person in the world meets its limits, once they have their fifteen minutes of fame. A worthy predecessor of Network’s Howard Beale and Nightcrawler’s Lou Bloom, Kazan also delivers some of the greatest endings I’ve seen in Hollywood cinema.