Against Enjoyment

Some thoughts on contemporary criticism and "letting people enjoy things," or how I learned to stop worrying and love total shit.

Photo by Niranjan _ Photographs on Unsplash

There is a popular aphorism that people use to defend popular products from being criticized by popular critics: let people enjoy things. It’s a spuriously noble sentiment. After all: joy is the operative word within a word here. What is the use, both ethically and in a greater sort of socially conscious or whatever way, in corralling the joy that others derive from the movies, the music, the books, the video games, the fashion, the food, the theme parks, the TikToks, the hardcore porn, the Tide Pod-flavored desserts, the neo-Nazi manifestos, the torture of small woodland creatures, and the raping and pillaging of enemy villages that people engage with every day? God forbid I or anyone else impede someone’s sense of fun!

I want to make it clear that I am here to kill fun. To drive fun to an abandoned ravine outside Newark and shoot it in the back of the head. I’m here to tell you what sucks and what doesn’t, who deserves your time (and money!), and who deserves to serve time for their crimes against their audiences. Killing joy is the basis of criticism, because only once someone’s piss-poor idea of what is fun, what produces mirth or catharsis or introspection, is dead and buried can real joy finally be born. Too many people want the freedom to enjoy the crap they enjoy, and I for one have had enough! The critic’s plight has never been more crucial, poptimism is a scourge, and you are wrong and should feel embarrassed about liking garbage.

I mean, not really. Obviously. I’ve taken a few deep breaths. I had some chamomile tea. I’m all good now.

Look, I get it. It’s hard out there. Wars rage, viruses proliferate, Canada’s on fire, JK Rowling hates trans people and your phone just did that weird thing again where it gets all glitchy and stupid for, like, no reason. These are equally difficult things that we all have to deal with every day, so why is it such a problem if I want to watch and laugh at The Super Mario Brothers movie after a long day of—ugh—life? 

It really isn’t a problem. We all take pleasure in certain cultural products that are, shall we say, rather philistine. One of my favorite movies is The Benchwarmers (2006), a deadbrained Adam Sandler-produced comedy that currently sports 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. I sobbed at Moulin Rouge on Broadway, I guzzle Starbucks flavored lattes almost every day, and I find myself rather frequently getting down with my bad self when a Meghan Trainor song comes on at the supermarket. Sue me!

But I understand that these things are bad. They are idiotic, insipid, intelligence-shrinking corporate commodities designed to hook the lowest common denominators within our species, to purely engage the pleasure receptors of our minds and bodies but skirt the prefrontal cortex altogether. They are psychoactive, pharmaceutical-lab-created drugs masquerading as entertainment, meant to synthetically narcotize our woes or shoot some short-lived bliss into our veins. We should all be aware of when we like terrible products, terrible art. If we’re not aware that they’re terrible, how will we know good art when we see it?

Let people enjoy things. No, I don’t think I shall. The problem is that when people uncritically enjoy bad things, more crap gets made (think about your own digestive cycle when you eat Taco Bell, for instance). The conversations around the binaries of art vs. commerce, high culture vs. mass culture, the political and the personal, are old and boring and irreconcilable. But one truth is that the tastes of the masses tend to dictate what material gets beamed into all of our eyes, ears, or mouths these days. We think that our algorithms protect us, that because Spotify knows I only listen to Scandinavian indie folk-rap and TikTok is aware that I only want absurdist queer comedy and videos of cats befriending turtles we can avoid crummy popular cultural products easily. That’s just not the case. The apps can only burrow so deep, can only provide us with such a niche selection before they run out of recommendations. They will eventually give up and try to connect us with content that loosely orbits our pre-examined interests, as if to yank us back into the collective these platforms know so well. They will always bring us back to what’s trending, what’s new, what’s popular. 

And popular things don't necessarily have to be bad! Critic Dwight McDonald, who popularized the theory of Midcult vs. Mass Culture and High Culture, always maintained that works that qualify as esteemed art need not be informed by their popularity (or lack thereof), just as today we can pinpoint torrents of artistic and creative merit in the movies of Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig, the music of Lana del Rey and SZA, and the novels of Sally Rooney and Steven Rowley (a more discerning reader might object to any one of these examples I’ve listened, and to them I say, Okay that’s kind of the point and totally not the point of this article. Just hear me out for a little longer, then attack me in the comments). Things that sell well can strike a marketplace nerve due to their beauty, originality, and creativity, and things that sell poorly can very easily do so because of their lack of these features. Most bighearted critics want the best art to be popular because great art, when viewed by the most people, has the potential for radical change. But when we let everyone enjoy everything and Mass Culture cannibalize High Culture until there is only one Culture, all the ineffable qualities that constitute good art get squeezed out in service of demographic-spanning appeal. This is why we need an established criteria. This is why we need critics.

“Critics just look for bad things to say,” “They’re so negative about everything,” “They all have an agenda.” You’re damn right we do! Of course we have an agenda, and of course we’re depressed as fuck. Every real critic you’ve ever read is an over-caffeinated and under-medicated curmudgeon who can’t help but find fault in everything they encounter. And we need them exactly as they are to do the work they’ve been assigned to do.

Let people enjoy things. When directed at critics, it is a statement built on a foundation of hegemony that is faulty and outdated. It assumes a children’s cartoon level of good vs. bad morality. The artist, the producer, the content creator? Good. Their audience, their supporters, their “stans”? Also good. But the critic, the meme-maker, the snarky Twitter tweeter? They’re the enemy. They’re the surly Grinch trying to rob the residents of Whoville of their God-given enjoyment of things, their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of a nearby showing of Ant-Man 3. They’re the ones who hold all the cards, while the meek and defenseless Swifties and Colleen Hoover-heads and Disney adults are left to merely pack stadiums, break book sale records, and propose to the loves of their lives in front of Cinderella’s castle inconsolably, for their capacities to enjoy have been so mightily thwarted by a freelance writer at an online magazine that hasn’t turned a profit since the Bush administration. A travesty, truly, to love an artist or piece of art that’s been criticized so much that the only people who can relate to you are the millions of others who feel the exact same way. The world is so cruel sometimes.

Let. The use of this word in the phrase always tickles me. Let. As if by nature of criticizing a derivative, spineless, pernicious piece of art, the critic is somehow stowing an audience’s sense of enjoyment in an underground vault somewhere, chained up and starved, only feeding it classical music or artsy-fartsy foreign language films now and then. We use the word “let” in cases of emergencies: “Let my people go!” or “For God’s sake, let me into this Barnes & Noble bathroom!” Letting implies permission—but exactly who holds the key? My brother in Christ, when you read critics’ takedowns of the media you love, the only person who is determining whether you’re allowed to enjoy that media is you.

And this is the real problem. People don’t want to just enjoy things—they want to be certain they’re enjoying the right things. The world is spinning out of control, the sky is melting. Everyone’s on their phone all the time. No one knows how to talk. No one knows thy neighbors’ names. There are no jobs available, or there are too many openings. Our government is overturning our freedoms and ignoring pandemics and endorsing genocide, and our cries of protest do nothing. God doesn’t exist.

So we consume. And consume, and consume, and consume. Because we don’t know what else to do, how else to find community, how else to reclaim our bodies and minds and situate ourselves in a country that doesn’t seem to care whether we live or die. And the more we consume and the deeper we place our interests in that which we consume, the more we become what we consume. When we tie our identities so closely to the pieces of mass culture we so desperately covet—when we create Twitter fan accounts of celebrities and devote hours upon hours to cultivating public-facing profiles whose passions subscribe to an identifiable set of morals and trademarks we hope connote that we’re cool, unique, intelligent, empathetic, au courant, correct—we shorten and ultimately obliterate the distance between ourselves and our favorite products, a distance we don’t realize we actually really totally need to maintain a skeptical eye, a healthy balance of the real and unreal. We lose our ability to look inward as well as outward, and so any attack on The Product becomes an attack on us. As they say, we are what we eat. 

So we turn to let people enjoy things. It’s a defense mechanism, a tactic used to deflect our internal struggle and assuage the notion that what we like isn’t always what we ought to like. We know, deep down, that it’s not normal to have our blood boiling over a Metacritic score. We know that there’s a fundamental disconnect eating away at our social fabric when a box office hit becomes a critical laughingstock. We secretly know that even as we decry that critics are pretentious snobs who don’t understand why normal hard-working ‘muricans like the things they like, critics’ opinions carry weight—they may not always directly affect how a piece of art or media performs financially, but they affect how it’s regarded artistically and culturally. And that matters. It’s something that can’t be measured, can’t be translated into material worth. But that’s why we lust after it so badly. When everything else about our identities consistently gets stripped from us and transmogrified into market or strategic value by faceless corporations and marauding politicians, we double down on our desire for our favorite pieces of art to claim territory in that most elusive, immaterial dominion: cultural import.

The thing is, people want to agree on things. We all want to live in a world of harmony, one in which we can recognize the same undeniable truths—like that racism is abominable and the final third of Oppenheimer was a tad dry—so that we can erect a functioning democracy and social stratosphere that enables everyone to thrive together. We all want peace.

Or do we? Is it maybe just human nature to be selfish, to want everyone to concur with one another on our interpretations and judgments of the world—as long as those interpretations and judgments are the same as our own? Are we not just all angry, selfish little goblins looking to fight with the nearest body who dares say that Kendrick sold out and Kanye’s misunderstood? Are we not desperately in pursuit of discovering the pieces of art we love and discarding the ones we don’t? Are we not all human? Are we not all critics?

Oh, and one last thing: you don’t have to listen to me. You don’t have to listen to any critic, honestly. You can scroll past the Pitchfork review that gave your favorite pop star a 4.5, and you can tune out what Richard Brody has to say about Wonka. If you really want to, you can always put down the newspaper or magazine (who am I kidding, you can exit out of Twitter) and just sit back, press play on the latest season of Love Island, and enjoy.

I give you my permission.