The Long Take: Why Do We Hate Film Bros Again?
Hey guy who watched his tenth Michael Haneke film! You're An Incel! Apparently.
Bad writing often goes viral and they stem from a problem that is less urgent than it really is. That’s what I suspect an essay about ‘film bros’ in Little White Lies, the youthful British film magazine, is trying to achieve. In that piece, the writer describes her experience meeting a guy who likes movies as much as she does, before pontificating over the concept of guys being obnoxious about it. She believes that the ‘film bro’ all comes from the film industry, pandering to this audience, and with the emergence of a South Korean film like Parasite, there will act as a counterpoint to the canon represented by Fight Club, American Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange.
This has been a recurring argument among some people I’ve encountered, whether it’s on social media, or in real life who have seen more movies than I have1. They bemoan the doofus who goes to film school only ill-equipped with the likes of David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Martin Scorsese. That their oeuvre is male-centered, pasty in color, often at the expense of women and minorities, or whatever. These people are so incurious that their knowledge of cinema is limited to the IMDb Top 250, rather than Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Alternative Canon. The people they’re pointing fingers at believing that they watched Fight Club and American Psycho wrongly because they idolize the main characters. That’s why many similar pieces are appearing once in a while, that are published in Vice and many other smaller outlets.
I have no interest in refuting the article itself, considering that much of the substance is garbage. I also think that acknowledging and pushing back against the argument, adds to a cyclical effect to the discourse that goes like this2:
“I have decided that some guy who is obnoxious to be a bro”
“Whoa, that’s actually obnoxious of you. Usually, we men call ourselves a bro and it’s neither an insult nor a compliment, and even if it’s an insult, I could take it as a compliment”
“HAHAHA, what are you a snowflake? Look at this, my 1000 loud followers. He hates the fact that I mildly called him out on his toxic masculinity.”
That being said, I’m interested in why some people take a maniacal offense of other people’s pref, deduce it to a prejudicial status quo, and finally put it less than 2000 words so that a handful of people can say ‘hey that’s literally me’. Taste in artifacts certainly signals status and to push it further, it’s a substitute for one’s politics or personality.
I came across a paper on the inclusive or exclusive nature of taste co-written by sociologist Clayton Childress after he appeared on The Bulwark Goes To Hollywood podcast to talk about it. It found that high-status individuals are inclusive when it comes to genre and exclusive when it comes to object - meanings that the audience could convey meaning like film, TV, books, or food. Objects are far more symbolic, even if the meaning ultimately conveyed is open and ambiguous. Exclusivity refers to specialized knowledge, rarities, and obscurities. The paper notes that enjoying critically acclaimed things - Kendrick Lamar, The Wire, or Jordan Peele’s Get Out are some examples cited - can be distinctively aestheticized, to the point that they become institutionalized as such, where college courses circle them. Across genres, the same individual would be very open to comedy, horror, drama, and action. The chart below shows that those with higher social capital, education, and art, tend to match that level of criterion, while the opposite is true for object inclusive and genre exclusive.
Taste, as Childress’s study, suggests, acts as a mechanism for creating bonds and social ties. But it also shows that those who feel insecure about being lower caste will emulate those with better taste and status, without having to bring that much effort, because watching a movie has less material value than say, making a high income.
This thesis isn’t new. In 2019, Rob Henderson, a sociology graduate student at Yale, wrote about luxury beliefs many times, which contained little cost to middle-to-upper-class Americans, mainly political beliefs like anti-racism and feminism. He also cites the new French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who claimed that human beings will shape their desires and self-control that they don’t need. But Henderson also notes that material goods are getting less dearer, so a belief would certainly suffice.
In the case of film culture, streaming has made the idea of watching the film more convenient, cheaper, and vast, that a stereotype like a young man watching Uncut Gems multiple times on Netflix and having the poster in his dorm room, is quite archaic. Certainly, more millennials devote much of their spare time watching repeats of The Office and Friends than boomers are rewatching The Sopranos that they think Tony Soprano is a hero. Why single those people out on Twitter and Letterboxd?
In a way, pieces about film bros and people enjoying things for the wrong reason are a response to a thing getting popular, thanks to the notorious invisible hand called the algorithm. The algorithm represents a status quo; potentially a robust white Western cis-heteronormative patriarchy. I will note that the one interesting paragraph from the Little White Lies piece is this one:
We are also seeing a trend towards increased diversity both on- and off-screen. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a film deeply interconnected with Korean culture, wasn’t made for Film Bros; its success is so important because both neither its inherent values nor its widespread critical acclaim were dictated by white, cisgender men.
Parasite is a film I will happily say is one of (if not) the best films of the past decade. It has intricate plotting, ranks very highly on the IMDb Top 250, and earned a lot of respect and discussions pretty much everywhere on the Internet, whether it’d be video essays on YouTube or contrarian takes among economic bloggers. It is already popular with a lot of people, including critics, though the question of whether it reached a contingent that is not comfortable with subtitled or foreign language cinema, remains to be seen.
But there’s another film that’s released in the same year, and possesses all of these factors, as well as themes of class struggle: Joker. Despite earning many award nominations, it is a thorn among film critics, even to those who have reluctantly praised its craft and Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. However, it is very popular with audiences, because it riffs off familiar IP, but may have a creative advantage over Parasite, simply in effect, the rage against it is more authentic than an arthouse film that critics went gaga over, because of the prestige THEY think it deserves. Economist Robin Hanson notes, in his blog post about the two films, that the critics delude themselves into thinking that whatever they praised is far better than lower-class action.
The merit over Joker is debatable, but as I’ve said many times, it proves the ecunumerical openness among critics and writers does not match with the actual intuition of their personalities. Rather, they criticize things they THINK represent their own fears about people wanting to enter cinephilia, which is the lack of curiosity among large audiences, embedded by profit-motivated executives. Even their remedies to the problem end up simplistic and condescending, which is to mainly watch different movies much like Parasite, such as The Fault in Our Stars and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. That does not fix anything.
Ultimately, the reason why we weaponize taste is that the arts are monolithic that it doesn’t want to involve genuine outsiders. So it feeds whatever politics these individuals have. Given that film critics and awards shows whipping themselves for not being diverse enough, it’s no surprise that established institutions like to call themselves underdogs. That’s why pieces in a well-designed print magazine exist and go viral for the wrong reason. I really hate to say this, but let people enjoy what they like. Because you’re inventing a guy and making yourself mad about him for 1500 words.
As of writing this I have watched 2232 movies and seen 233 this year, according to my Letterboxd