Hail the Gatekeeper

Janus was the Roman god of transition. It's a strange thing to have a god for, at first glance. But anyone who's studied anthropology will recognize why he's needed. Any beginning or ending, any movement from one state to another, is fraught.

We've arrived at the annual moment where our culture recognizes this. And for me in particular, the transition into a new year, with its accompanying look back at 2013 and expression of hope for 2014, is an especially rich story of beginnings and endings.

I'm spending this last day of 2013 interviewing the 84th subject for my research into the prayer shawl ministry, and reviewing and tagging a transcript from one of my earlier interviews. It's hard to remember that eight months ago I had yet to do a single interview. I was nervously anticipating the inauguration of this new project, looking back with some regret at the phase of textual research -- a process I know how to do! -- that I was leaving behind for uncharted waters. One of the most unexpected rewards of this research has been learning that I am good at these qualitative interviews, and that when I'm doing them I am a better person -- a more empathetic person, a better listener, a more attentive and responsive dialogue partner. Another surprise: Just when I'm most concerned about how much I'm asking of those kind enough to agree to an interview, they tell me how much I've given to them, by prompting them to think, by valuing what they say and do, by opening a space for them to speak.

Now the trepidation moves to 2014, when I have to leave the data-gathering phase behind and produce the written analysis. I am optimistic, but still, the unknowns of the process are daunting.

In 2013, I started leaving behind the world of pop culture criticism that I have pursued, in some form or another, since college. I hit my high point in terms of audience and influence in the process of that exit, with my reviews of the last season of Breaking Bad for the A.V. Club. In 2014 I'll review the last 11 episodes of How I Met Your Mother and write an overview of the series for the A.V. Club's 100 Episodes feature. And then I'll be done.

I'm looking forward to exiting that grind and focusing on the grinds that are more directly related to my academic goals as a teacher and scholar. But I'll miss the push to reflect critically and to appreciate expansively. I'll miss the readers and the community of TV critics.

It's almost hard to remember how I fit it in, but the other thing I did last summer was compile a massive four-volume application for promotion to full professor. That rank represents the top of my profession. As of this moment the application has successfully wended its way through two committees and two administrative reviews, and awaits action in 2014 by the provost and the board of trustees. I expect to remove the "associate" from my title this spring, just in time to also remove the "dean."

I'll never get used to this process of looking back and forward. When I turn my gaze to the things already done or set in motion, I can't believe I found the time and energy. When I imagine what current efforts will look like when complete, I can't picture myself as the source and the agent. It's a pleasant shock, though, to glance back and be flummoxed by what you managed to accomplish, and to peek forward and get all excited about what it will feel like to glance back this time in 2014. I hope all of you are having similar feelings on this day -- Janus's Day Eve.

A new season

Tomorrow I turn 48 years old. You know, as long as there's a four in that tens column, I still feel young. And in two years when that changes, I'll probably feel young anyway.

I haven't written much in the last year. A post a quarter, maybe two. It's because I've been busy, of course; in my down moments I haven't felt like doing much other than knitting, sitting, watching TV, hugging my daughter. But it's also because this past year has been All About Me, and even though this is my blog, I've never been comfortable treating it as a therapist's couch. I haven't wanted to show up every few days and repeat the same stuff about my mid-life crisis.

But you know what? I think that's finally over. I made the decision to leave administration, and despite some lingering backward glances at the extra money, I'm happy about that every day. I couldn't be prouder of Noel and the awesome work he's doing at his brand new publication. I'm bringing to a close a period in my life where I practiced weekly television criticism, and reclaiming those evenings as time to do something other than work. And I've gotten an immense, humbling outpouring of praise for that work as the series I cover come to a close -- a thousand times more readers than I ever could have imagined, and hundreds of people saying nice things about what the work has meant to them. My promotion application for full professor is making its way up the chain of command. I've even gotten a couple of recent invitations to speak at conferences, related both to my theological work and my criticism. My research excites me, my book is underway, and there's a stack of other projects I hope to get to someday. It feels very much like I've made it to where I wanted to be when I started out.

Maybe it's the end of weekly writing about television that has prompted me to come back here. I've learned a lot about writing from blogging every day for years; I put much of it to use writing on short deadlines two and three times a week. I wouldn't like to see those muscles atrophy. (I'll need them for all the books I have to write.)

And while I've been away, my kids have been growing. I love to write about my kids. They are endlessly fascinating. People tell me they like to read about my kids -- well, about Archer particularly. He's done amazing things while I've been writing elsewhere. I don't want to miss the chance to get the stories down, and to share them. (I'm inspired here by amonthofson.com, Matthew Baldwin's lovely project about how his classically-autistic boy interacts with the world.)

So let's see if we can meet here more often, shall we? Teaching, writing, television, kids, theology, movies, sports, and the occasional self-indulgent state-of-the-Donna report. Hope it turns out well for all of us.

Awards season

Noel and I have come home from a rare evening out for dinner together, and we've turned on the Golden Globes. People who know that we write about film and pop culture usually assume we care a great deal about year-end awards. They're right, and they're wrong. We care far less about the awards as an actual indicator of quality, but we care far more about them in terms of analyzing every category and microscopically nitpicking the presentation than the average viewer.

I think a lot of serious cineastes profess to hate the glitzy Hollywood awards. But those of us who stand somewhere in between the highest elite of film lovers and the general public -- often trying to communicate the concerns of one side to the other -- have a love-hate relationship with them. On the one hand, this is the one moment when ordinary Americans get exposed to some of the more esoteric films and cinematic elements, the ones that we really love and care about. On the other hand, it's a popular art -- things like star power and box office really matter in the sense that they distort the landscape and determine what gets made and what gets seen.

I confess that the award shows have come to mean more to me over the years. I enjoy seeing old and new faces in the inimitable stage, mic, and statuette context. As shallow as it might seem, the fashion is more interesting to me than it was decades ago. It's always fun to root for your favorites and moan over the poor taste of the various voting academies and the public.

And most importantly, these events capture a moment in a particular populist perspective. These arts are about instants frozen in time -- what we care about now, what we want, what we fear, what we think is funny. No matter how tarnished the tinsel surrounding these problematic honors, their relevance for dedicated students of popular culture can't be easily dismissed.

Defining taste

Last night I watched The Greatest American Dog, the latest CBS reality show clogging up the summer airwaves. It was seriously low fare, all dysfunctional relationships and delusional dog owners, with a few salt-of-the-earth types sprinkled in for salubrious moral contrast.

But even with all its horrors -- Nathan Rabin at the A.V. Club's TV Club gave it an F -- I didn't want to turn my back in disgust. In fact, I asked Noel to record it again next week. When Nathan asked me in the comments to his review why I would watch it again, I wrote:

Actually, the whole performance thing is going on here, which is part of why I watch so much reality TV. Can you get this creature (which, as the judges point out, really means yourself) to perform under pressure? "Dog" kind of externalizes that whole question, which makes it interesting enough for me to watch. (The contestants' despair over dogs that indicated in rehearsals that they would be unreliable -- that's what fascinates me. What does that say about them -- them more than their dogs?)

There's nothing so enlightening about one's own taste than trying to figure out why you enjoy something that lacks quality. Whatever it is that you enjoy there has something to do with what interests you, with what pushes your buttons, with what tickles your pleasure centers. It's not about educated taste, which is the recognition of quality; it's about who you are underneath that education.

If you can figure out and articulate what attracts you to crap, then you're a long way toward knowing yourself -- which will help you better understand your relationship to the whole spectrum of quality, as well as avoid being bamboozled by products engineered to your particular brain receptors. It's easy to confuse personal pleasure with the presence of real value in what engendered the pleasure, and it's helpful to know that the effect of enjoyment is not as intimately or directly connected with the cause of quality as we might like to imagine.

Embracing the disreputable

I'm just back from the presentation to the incoming Honors students, and we had an excellent (if inconclusive) conversation about how to assess film quality. I'm too bushed to write much about it, but I just want to note that the strongest reaction was to "The Start Of Something New" from High School Musical -- and it was a huge groan as soon as it came on the screen, followed by a chorus of "no" to my question "is this good?" after it was over.

I remember what it was like to be 18 -- liking the right things and disliking the right things was a matter of life and death. It was almost impossible to have taste of your own. You borrowed your taste from other people -- at that age, from peers that you looked up to. And clearly, despising Zach Efron and Disney tweener culture is de rigeur among those who have recently left the target demographic. I'm not denying that people genuinely dislike High School Musical, but I sincerely doubt that the unanimity and public vehemence of the reaction spring entirely from individuals making their own independent judgments.

More and more, I want to push students to look for quality in unexpected places. I know it's embarrassing for academics to mount serious classes on popular culture -- "The Semiotics of Madonna" and all that. But if academia does nothing but reinforce the ironclad distinctions between high and low culture that are so real to students at their age, then we haven't helped them develop taste at all -- we've simply become the new place from which they borrow.

If a student made a good argument for the quality of something I've dismissed -- Adam Sandler movies, Alan Jackson songs, Rob Liefeld comics -- I'd consider that the definitive proof that the message had gotten through. But at this age, all you can do is plant the idea that the line between what's worth experiencing and what's not might not be as bright as they thought -- that the imperative to expand one's taste goes in both directions, higher and lower.

And then you get to work helping them to appreciate what's already widely accepted as having quality, which is the main line of work for a couple of years, at least. These smart, ambitious students at least accept the premise that there's something to high culture, that they should know about it and be able to analyze it, that it's not all an elitist conspiracy to keep people from having any fun. That makes it easier. (Well -- at least until they become sophomores.) I think it might be possible to get back to the idea of embracing the disreputable in their final semesters, and I'd dearly love them to go out into the world with that spirit. I hope that when they write their seminal defense of the music of Britney Spears, they send me a copy.

AssumptionBusters

Later this week, eighty of our incoming Honors students are coming to campus for summer orientation and registration. We always do some kind of academic presentation for them on the first evening. For the last few years, I've talked about movies -- specifically, about making judgments about the quality of movies.

I ask them: What makes a movie good? They invariably come back with criteria about plot and character. Realistic stories, characters you can relate to, believable dialogue. Then I start hitting 'em with clips from movies that don't fit those criteria -- musicals, mostly. I ask if they're good, and those who think they are have to explain how they can be good despite their lack of realism, outsized characters, and stylized dialogue. Gradually I lead them away from human stories altogether, ending up with animation, art films, and the avant-garde. All the while, we keep asking the question: is this good? And we try to figure out along the way what we would need to know to fully answer that question -- about genre, about the filmmakers' histories, about references or allusions the film makes to other pieces of culture or films, about the intentions behind the movie. The aim is to complicate the notion of quality in popular culture, and to show how deep and wide the field can be, rewarding lifetimes of study and humbling our snap judgments.

I've used a pretty stable rotation of film clips for this interactive presentation: Moulin Rouge (to illustrate high stylization and mashup culture), High School Musical (reexamining the disreputable), Singin' In The Rain (the elements of traditional style), Dancer In The Dark (the effect of untraditional methods), Lagaan (how does the wider culture affect the presentation?), Fantasia 2000 (the "Pines of Rome" sequence -- mingling abstraction with character), Gerry (breaking almost all the rules about story and character, not to mention editing and music), Eye Myth (the Brakhage short -- almost completely abstract).

I might add Sweeney Todd this year, since we have a copy -- right after Singin' In The Rain, to talk about the Broadway pedigree of the film musical form and how changes in that parent genre affect how to understand current film.

But I'm always looking for ways to update this presentation and make it new, fresh, and interesting. So movie nerds (and other gentle readers), I ask you: If it were your job to bust up these teenagers' assumptions about hallmarks of film quality, what movies would you be tempted to show?

The fabric of our lives

Read all about my week knitting baby bibs -- instead of buying them 3 for $5 at Target! -- at Toxophily.

Now I'm off to compose a defense of my iconoclastic #1 film on my 2007 critic's ballot. Out of more than 100 critics polled, not a single one, other than me, had this movie in their top slot. What is it? You'll have to wait and find out with the rest of the internet when the results are posted ...

The critic's life

It's the time of year when people start asking us about the big prestige movies that haven't come out yet, and we admit that we've seen them on screener DVDs sent to us by the studios. And then they say, "Wow, tough life, watching movies for your job!"

Yes, it's wonderful to have seen Atonement, a movie genetically engineered to plug into my critical fireworks receptors, before it opens in theaters (and before it was nominated for seven Golden Globes, putting it suddenly on the average Showbiz Tonight-watching American's radar screen. Yes, it's fantastic to get a jump on The Kite Runner, or to be able to talk up The Orphanage before most people even know it exists.

But just as the good is the enemy of the great, seeing a selected portion of the well-regarded, important, or heavily-hyped movies of the year just makes you realize how many you don't have time to see. Critics have a professional and probably also temperamental drive for completism. How can we make our top ten lists, for starters, let alone put the culture of our day in its larger context, without seeing everything? Or at least most things?

Even if the studios and their publicists were in a mood to indulge our compulsive fear of missing out on something -- which they are not unless your last name happens to be Ebert -- there's no time. Noel watches a couple of movies a day, most days including weekends, and he's still not close. I'm down to less than 50 movies a year since the kids were born, barely enough to keep my union card.

However, my selectivity has gone way up. I see movies, for the most part, that I'm pretty sure I'm going to like or love. This year I saw only one movie that I wouldn't recommend -- a movie I thought was bad. Having to sit through stinkers is usually part of the job description, but as a critic only when I choose to be, I get all the benefits with none of the drawbacks.

Well, almost none. I'm still infuriated by all the movies I didn't see. When I learn to let go of my anger at all the books I'll never get to read and all the movies I'll never get to see -- and they keep making more every day, darn them to heck! -- maybe the secret of happiness will be revealed to me. Meanwhile, like King Midas, I find the riches that surround me hard to enjoy because they are not all the riches in the world, and I suspect many critics feel the same.