Kitsch v. Kitsch

I consider myself a legitimate fan of The Onion, but their critics, located at the A.V. Club, are infuriating. They fetishize on the obscure, ranking their tastes by imagined uniqueness, not quality. The more unknown the artist, the more worthy of praise.

So, I was pleased to read one such critic, Erik Adams, putting this opinion of mine into cold, hard reality with his own words:

My Garden State experience has just as much to do with age—my first extended period of time in my hometown since leaving for college was coming to an end, and I could’t believe that a movie could capture the way my familiar corner of Michigan suburbia suddenly felt so alien. When the film became a hit, however, it came to my attention that it managed this because—like the ability to enjoy the easy, breezy indie-pop of the film’s soundtrack—that feeling is universal.

I would never dream of defending the obnoxious Zack Braff. He is the living embodiment of kitsch, as perfectly defined by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

For Braff, it's not dressing-up like MC Hammer that is, itself, funny. Rather, how funny it is that I, Zack Braff, have decided to dress like MC Hammer? It's self-referential meta-humor, never to be enjoyed as funny, but to be appreciated as the sort of thing we should think is funny.

And this leads nicely into the problem with the Onion review. Braff's movie was meaningful and important until its message was recognized as nearly universally experienced. And this, too, is an expression of kitsch. It's meta-appreciation that soured Mr. Adams on the movie, not the production itself.

This is an incredibly odd, and in many ways very sad, approach to art, but it seems even more pathetic coming from someone who has chosen aesthetic appreciation as their profession. I'm not sure how many people on planet Earth enjoy the compositions of J.S. Bach. Having an answer to that question wouldn't affect my enjoyment of his music in any way, and what's more, how awful if it did. I can't imagine watching a movie, and before writing my opinions, investigate how it was received to insure that I haven't, gasp, agreed with others.

Popular art has always relied on image cultivation. The music is to be enjoyed, certainly, but it's far more important that one feel good about enjoying the music. This is why all counter-cultural music since the 60's has been so amusingly transparent: "You want to be seen as an individual, your taste in art is a great way to express that individuality, so please, come join all of us..."

But there is a certain poetic justice in Braff suffering at the hands of a fellow kitsch fanatic. It's as though the two do battle entirely in the ether, detached from any actual creation, making sure that they have properly gauged how people should feel about what they're doing.