cultural snow: irony

Showing posts with label irony. Show all posts

Monday, July 07, 2014

Irony as a valid lifestyle choice

If there’s really a culture war between clear-eyed sincerity and arch, ironic snark, I know which side I’m on. It’s a pity, then that Worst. Person. Ever., Douglas Coupland’s salvo against this so-called “epidemic of earnestness” is so lame. The central character, Raymond Gunt, is self-centred and monotonously priapic but isn’t even the most ghastly character in the book – that honour belongs to his hideous mother – and ultimately comes over as Coupland’s attempt to concoct a composite Martin Amis monster from the 1980s when these things mattered (and so did Amis).

If we’re going to take on earnestness, let us do it with elegance. Our manifesto could be taken from Christopher Shevlin – a writer who, unlike Coupland or Amis, hasn’t been around long enough to disappoint me – in The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax:

They seemed to feel that discussing actual things was beneath them. Their conversation was an odd, semi-surreal mixture of deliberate banalities, light ironies and playful banter. Jonathon felt at home with this. In a world that obstinately refused to make any sense at all, Jonathon had always felt it was presumptuous to talk as though it did.

But I haven’t read far enough into the book to work out whether this is meant to be a good thing or not.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

American Psycho: perfect skin

When I first heard that American Psycho was being made into a musical I wondered on what elevated level of irony we were working. Was the whole thing a wry joke, or are there people out there who take Patrick Bateman’s evaluation of Huey, Whitney and Genesis as legitimate music criticism? OK, the blurb describes the show as “a satirical commentary on capitalism” but Oliver Stone said much the same thing about Wall Street and plenty of punters walked out of that movie determined to become bankers.

Of course, such responses may be ironic in themselves. So I’m prepared to be charitable about Karen Dacre’s article in the Evening Standard, which focuses almost exclusively on the sartorial aspects of the show. After all, when someone comes up with a sentence like

Bateman’s preoccupations — sourcing the right suit, maintaining perfect skin, looking his best — are the same worries faced by Londoners today and explain why Easton Ellis’s tale remains so compelling 22 years on.

...she has to be joking. Right?

Right?

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Christy Wampole and the decade that perhaps never happened

Christy Wampole’s interesting article about ironic hipsterdom in the New York Times includes this paragraph, suggesting that in the last decade of the 20th century, sincerity ruled:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.

Now, I’m a little older than Ms Wampole, but I’m not yet quite so senile that I’ve forgotten that decade completely. And my 1990s may have included a bit of grunge earnestness at the beginning (incidentally, Wampole seems to have overlooked Cobain’s wit, and that of the smarter punks), but it was also about the pop postmodernism of The Modern Review and the raised-eyebrow laddishness of Loaded (before it became just another vehicle for tits), the louche poses of loungecore, Jarvis Cocker vs Michael Jackson, Madonna when she was still funny, the Young British Artists ditto, Tarantino in his trash-referential pomp, Trainspotting, the hilarious implosion of John Major’s government, Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt. Irony wasn’t just a desperate pose to fend off the reality of economic and environmental omnishambles by growing a moustache. It was just how it was. With great big air quotes around it.

So is this divergence between Wampole’s memories and mine a matter of age or gender or nationality? Or was everybody’s decade just entirely different? In my book about the Noughties, I suggested that it’s very difficult to find a generic image that sums up the 1990s, which distinguishes it from the preceding decades (mini-skirts and flowers; flared trousers and picket lines; power suits and Filofaxes). I even posited the idea that the decade never happened at all, existing merely as “a history-free buffer zone between the ideological polarities of the 1980s and the socio-religious anxieties of the Noughties.” So there. And lest I be accused of even more egregious touting of my wares than is normally the case, I’ll balance it by recommending John Robb’s excellent tome about the 90s, aptly subtitled What The F**k Was All That About?

But anyway; how was it for you?