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Recently,
I was at a show with some friends; we came to see another
friend's band, and stayed to see the following band since
we'd never heard of them, and you never know if a band might
be good. The band took the stage with their thrift-store Caiso
VL-tones and their hundred dollar messy hair, their clothes
a mix of American Apparel and Urban Outfitters. They proceeded
to play banal songs with whispered vocals and lyrics that
referenced lost love and political oppression. They seemed
to be very satisfied with themselves. I turned to my friend.
"They
have quite a sense of entitlement," I whispered. "They deserve
beatings."
"Yeah,"
he said, "these people reek of parents who raised them with
too much self-esteem."
This
sort of banter is what I think of when I think of snark: funny,
sarcastic, satirical, maybe a little mean, but the meanness
comes from the black bitter soul of the oppressed (whether
the oppression is real or imagined) looking enviously at people
who obviously have something the snarker wants. You'll have
to rely on my definition of snark, since David Denby doesn't
supply one in his new book, Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal,
and It's Ruining Our Conversation. I guess he just knows
it when he sees it.
 According
to Denby, "The platonic ideal of snark is something like this:
Two girls are sitting in a high school cafeteria putting down
a third, who's sitting on the other side of the room. What's
peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side
of the room is their best friend." What's really peculiar
about this event is that what Denby thinks of when he thinks
of snark is high school girls, indicating perhaps a too-keen
interest in Gossip Girl.
Another
platonic ideal of snark—perhaps a more likely one—would
be Groucho Marx saying he'd never be a member of a club that
wanted him as a member. Or anything written on Gawker. Or
most of The Daily Show and large swathes of Tina Fey
and Amy Poehler-era Saturday Night Live. Snark is satire
from outsiders perpetually looking in, and as such has become
the modus operandi of Gen X and Gen Y, two of the most
oppressed generations in modern American history. With
these groups being squeezed by the Me Generation baby boomers
on one side and the massive buying power of their offspring
(the millennials) on the other, it's no wonder that the people
in the middle feel like auslanders. Sure, we had our
brief moment in the early '90s when Nirvana was god and Sonic
Youth was on MTV, and Daria was everyone's favorite gal.
But soon
The Mickey Mouse Club took over—literally. Britney,
Christina, Justin, et al became the stars du monde.
They didn't have to be dumbed down and baby-ized for the giant
market of young kids with their $50 allowances—they were
young kids themselves. And once more Gen X and Y were locked
outside. And let's not forget the constant chatter from the
media telling us that we are the first generation of Americans
who will be worse off financially than our parents. Go, us!
Denby's
main thesis is two-fold: 1. snark, the main form of communication
and journalism on the internet, is bleeding into real journalism
and intellectual discourse, and 2. the cruelty of snark has
gotten out of control. It's true that snarky commentary proliferates
online. It's also true that the majority of the snarkers tend
to hide behind anonymity, and lash out in juvenile ways. But
saying that it's ruining our national conversation is like
saying that cell phones should be banned because people stage
whisper "I'M IN A THEATER," during screenings of The Seventh
Seal.
Getting rid of snark means getting rid of much of the western
canon of the 1990s— Ren & Stimpy, Daria,
The Simpsons, Seinfeld, all of Mark Leyner's
fiction, important characters in David Foster Wallace's Infinite
Jest like Pemulis, Richard Linklater's classic films Slacker
and Dazed and Confused, the music of Weezer and Nirvana,
Peter Bagge's iconic comic book Hate, every character
ever drawn by Dan Clowes, Wanda Sykes, Stephen Colbert, Amy
Sedaris and her big brother David. I could go on, but do I
need to? Denby's lack of explanation of what snark is conveniently
allows him to exempt people like Colbert, Jon Stewart, and
any satire that he personally enjoys, but I really can't let
him get away with that.
Denby
is just the latest in a long line of writers who dislike snark,
especially on the internet. Author Heidi Julavits wrote a
relatively famous manifesto
for the first issue of The Believer decrying the snarky
book review. The main examples she cited were "snarky" reviews
written about her friends and associates, mainly Zadie Smith
and Rick Moody. Julavits focused part of her essay on a review
of White Teeth by James Wood in The London Review
of Books as an example, though her comments were not about
snark but about Wood's hurting her friend's feelings with
criticism. Julavits was decrying the loss of politeness more
than the proliferation of snark.
Ironically
enough, within the context of the editorial, Julavits applauds
critics Anthony Lane and David Denby for their snarky movie
reviews:
Maybe snark was a critical attempt to compete, on an entertainment
level, with the Anthony Lanes of the world, critics who
write witheringly and hilariously about movies that will
nonetheless go on to sell millions of tickets and win
twelve Oscars. Lane and Denby make us feel like cozy ex-pats
in a country of higher standards; we are the giggling,
minuscule minority. We also see those movies.
Julivits
tried to show the differences between good and bad snark,
but ultimately it seemed like good snark was snark with which
she agreed, and bad snark made fun at the expense of her friends.
 |
| Author
and The
Believer
editor Heidi Julavits. |
Like
Julavits, Denby never really gets to the heart of what is
good in snark and what is bad, making it seem that all snark
should be avoided. But Maria Bustillo, author of the upcoming
Dorkismo: The Power of the Dork (Accidental Books)
says that the difference is easily definable.
"Real
snark clarifies a position with humor and a touch of mercilessness.
If you are Jonathan Swift or George Bernard Shaw, that is
a great thing because such guys are able to put a massive
sting in the tail of their criticism," says Bustillo. "The
extra wallop of negativity is a powerful weapon. It's the
salt and pepper of good satirical writing."
Denby
never says anything as concise and definitive as Bustillo.
Perhaps it's because he had to fill up an entire book. Instead,
Denby's Snark spends almost half of its 128 pages on
a history of snark, which he calls brief. Readers will learn
little beyond Denby's personal preferences. Snark has been
around for a long time: check. The British are really good
at snark: check. Heidi Julavits doesn't like snark: check.
There is an entire chapter and copious references to the Lewis
Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark," which Denby essentially
uses as a call to arms for the anti-snarkists (or pro-sincerists
for those who like a positive). In the Carroll poem, certain
Snarks, improbably unimaginable creatures, can make people
"softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again."
That's what the snarky are trying to do to the good thinking
people like Denby, you see. With their occasionally irrelevant
insults and off-topic taunts, the Snark is trying to make
her targets disappear. Cute, I know.
Once Julavits declared snark to be dead, others jumped on
the bandwagon. A 2008 article in The New York Times,
citing an n+1 article, noted that Gawker, the popular
media "news" aggregator site, had "jumped the snark." The
article said:
n+1, a culture journal, followed with a thoroughly
researched essay noting how Gawker's voice has changed
with successive editors, descending from a homespun blog
that smartly sniped about editors like Tina Brown and
Anna Wintour, whose prominence arguably opened them to
sarcastic comment, to its current state as a cruel behemoth,
eviscerating low-level editors and people's children.
There
is a lack of identification regarding these "low-level editors"
and "people's children." I would like to remind The New
York Times that we all are people's children. So, n+1
and The New York Times have decided its OK to be catty
about Tina Brown, but not about Neal Pollack's son, the "people's
children" being referenced. Gawker started writing about Elijah
Pollock after his father, author of Alternadad, began
blogging extensively about how adorable and precocious his
lil muffin-pants was. Pollock found that his son was interesting
enough fodder for blogging, but then got angry that people
who didn't share his love for his tiny mop-top made fun of
him. Gawker's critics cited this as a prime example of Gawker
going too far, never understanding that the snark was aimed
directly at Neal and not his loin-fruit. Won't someone please
not think of the children?
"We
should make a clear distinction between effectively sassy
criticism and mere posing like a jaded teenager; and let's
face it, the latter abounds where the former does not, though
it's all commonly referred to as 'snark,'" Bustillo says "On
the one hand you've got Anthony Lane, who is snarky as hell
but it's always in the service of a greater point, and then
you've got most of the writers at Gawker and even some of
the guys at Salon, who literally have nothing to say and appear
to be thinking they are at some kind of cocktail party where
being mean and halfway funny will be enough to amuse people.
It's almost like a form of playing dress-up, where a 13-year-old
girl can look 25 in the right clothes and makeup, but what
you've really got under there is a vulnerable little kid,
even if she's managing to project world-weariness at Dietrich
levels."
Despite calling out the middle school girls as his platonic
ideal of snark, Denby manages to devote an entire chapter
to New York Times writer Maureen Dowd. In line after
line, he tears, with precision, into the main problems with
Dowd's editorials. She's against everything, offers no solutions,
and tends to hyperbolize. It was Dowd who spread the rumor
that former vice president Al Gore claimed to have created
the internet, when she knew full well
 |
| New
York Times
writer Maureen Dowd. |
that
Gore only claimed to have been involved, which he was. Her
editorials on Hilary Clinton bordered on irrational hatred,
and after Clinton lost the primary election, she set her sites
on her formerly beloved Obama. Dowd, like a petulant two-year-old,
just wants to tear things down. Personally, I think Dowd is
just an angry iconoclast and kind of a lousy writer, but Denby
calls her, unironically, "the most gifted writer of snark
in the country."
"There's
a real danger in assuming the censorious pose too readily. Snark
can come to calcify an otherwise able mind," Bustillo notes.
"Where it becomes a reflex, snark clouds and inhibits the judgment
rather than clarifying it because you no longer bother to ask
yourself whether something has merit or not. You get out of
the habit of making complex judgments, or defending a passionately-held
view. By this means, snark has become far more commonly a sign
of laziness than a sign of discernment, because disdain is the
easiest and most risk-free of all poses to adopt."
The Dowd
chapter is perhaps the only relevant chapter in Snark.
In other places Denby asserts that "feminist" author Camille
Paglia didn't become cruelly snarky until 2008. This will
be a shock to anyone who remembers reading her Salon columns
insulting the looks of Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky when
the Bill Clinton scandal broke. He claims that it's mean to
be snarky to Tom Cruise because he's "in a difficult place
in his career." A man who was just given half of a movie studio
is in a difficult place?
Most
of Snark just states the obvious—that the power
afforded by the internet should be used for good, not evil.
No one likes to be slandered. But that doesn't mean that snark
doesn't have value. I don't want to have to make nice while
complaining about the Wall Street I-bankers who are running
around buying condos with my 401K money, and the celebrities
who complain about being celebrities while they bank oodles
of cash for doing nothing other than walking through a party.
Snark can be useful, and more importantly, it can be empowering.
(March,
2009)
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