Pleasure Vs. Pretense

Lately I’ve been feeling a peculiar yearning to watch the Truffaut film Jules and Jim, and a number of nights have passed with me thinking about queuing it up on Netflix instant watch, only to pass on it for something else, but the insistent tug I feel towards watching Jules and Jim has me thinking about why I watch what I watch, why I read what I read. If I had to locate my ambitions somewhere along a spectrum, the two poles would be this: Pleasure and Pretense. I think a spectrum is more honest than a dichotomy since almost everything has layers and complications.

That being said, if I was to concoct a media scenario that would be closest to the PLEASURE end of the spectrum, I would have to go back a number of years to my Junior High era when I was reading the Robert Jordan books for the first time. In those days, I would retreat to my room after school, lock the door, and then proceed to drink Mountain Dew, eat Bagel Bites, and read until I fell asleep. These binges would usually last three days or so, periods of epic indulgence that would leave me seeing pages turning after I had passed out on The Great Hunt still thinking that I was reading about Rand al’Thor whooping some Forsaken ass. To be honest, I don’t think that kind of pleasure is possible for me anymore. It has something to do with being older, and having read too many similar things, and also with being more grounded in reality than I used to be. I’m not sure I have the ability to completely lose myself in a novel anymore—when I was reading Voices from the Moon, by Andres Dubus, and Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, by Michael Chabon, I certainly wasn’t paying attention to the passing of time, but neither was I imagining myself in the world of the novel, and I didn’t leave those novels with the drug addicts craving for more. They were good books, great books, but they were still books of which I have now read many.

I kind of killed two birds with one paragraph there, because the most recent “pleasure” experience I’ve had with reading was Chabon. I need to backtrack because I’m making myself sound like a world-weary academic when really, Kavalier & Klay was devastating at times—I had to set the book down and recover at times—as well as inspiring. It was an emotional experience rather than intellectual, but I never felt the unadulterated greed for more that I felt when I was thirteen As for other media, I just finished season two of Breaking Bad. It was great. I couldn’t stop. Now, supposing time isn’t a factor, why should I watch Jules and Jim instead of diving right in to Breaking Bad season three?

I’ve said before, and I still believe, that with literature pleasure needs to be the driving engine—but pleasure must evolve. Thank god I’m not a twenty-seven year old with yellow teeth and a hankering for microwave snacks putting down my Orson Scott Card novel (I don’t know what’s cool in the fantasy world anymore) only to play with myself while watching HBO’s Game of Thrones. In the beginning, my definition of media pleasure was entertainment, escape, comfort. Fantasy novels, action movies, and a strange Junior High period when I kept replaying the songs “What if God Was One of Us” and “Sonny Came Home” on a mixtape I made by recording radio songs. Now, those qualities of comfort and escape can sometimes leave me restless. And pursuing media mindlessly becomes problematic.

I’ve had conversations circling these ideas with my composition students, and there always seems to be a resolute core who want to vehemently defend the idea that they watch movies purely for pleasure—Saving Private Ryan is a title that came up, which I liked because it was an easy one. Why would they enjoy watching men shot and killed storming Normandy, men screaming in pain, and a plot based around every brother in a family being killed? Well, okay, they don’t enjoy that, but it gives insight into what the battle might have been like. They like history. They had relatives in the war. It has great acting. The cinematography is amazing. And suddenly there’s this Oh, moment, when they realize they’re defending my point of view. Historical perspective. Appreciation of art and craft. A simple, profound exercise in human empathy. So sometimes, it’s simply a matter of articulation. My students weren’t watching purely for pleasure, they just didn’t know it, or if they did, they didn't want to say it. Because it’s pretentious to watch a movie for reasons other than entertainment (unless it's a documentary) right? I’ll come back to that. Something like The Hangover is a bit more difficult, because I do think there comes a point where rationalization runs out of gas, and you have to ask yourself why you’re laughing about a character who loses his grandmother’s holocaust ring, or why meth-heads having sex with their friend’s corpse in a ditch is hilarious. (Confession: I laughed really hard at that part. Sometimes my sense of humor lags behind my ideals).

I find lots of pleasure in art and media, so recalling traces of it in literature and film is easy. It’s more difficult for me to envision a scenario that I would equate with myself being a purely prentious bastard, because I’m still foraging ahead toward that end of the spectrum in my life. I think sometimes—often?—pretension is another word for aspiration, or ambition. Example: a while back, I started listening to a lot of folk music—Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie—and now I really enjoy it. It was a natural extension of my love for country musicians like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, and it’s fun to listen to while I drive. It makes me feel sort of like a vagabond. More recently, I realized that there was a whole universe of blues I might like but didn’t know anything about, so I bought an album by Son House, and some Lead Belly, and at first I had to make myself listen to it as opposed to, say, Bruce Springsteen, but now I’m glad I did. It’s opened a door to an overwhelming amount of music I can’t wait to explore. Next week, I’m going to check out some classical music from the library and listen to it while I paint balconies. I’ve never listened to it on my own, and while some people would consider this pretentious, ultimately, I’m curious about it, and I’ve learned to enjoy stretching my boundaries of taste. So while it may not bring immediate gratification, hey, it might, and if not, I’ll have learned something new.

Part of this goes back to how people define pretentious— I think it’s commonly used as a pejorative for people who are doing something for reasons other than pleasure, or for people who are actively trying to separate themselves from the madding crowd. People who don’t own televisions are pretentious. People who eat vegan are pretentious. People who pronounce foreign words with the appropriate dialect are pretentious sons of bitches! That’s the kind of social attitude I sometimes feel is floating around, and I think a lot of it simply insecurity, or people feeling threatened. What makes someone pretentious, in my book, is mien. I don’t think listening to classical music while I work because I’m curious, and want to learn more about it, is pretentious. But listening for twenty minutes and then bringing up my life-altering experience every day is. This blog post might be pretentious, because I’m fixating on something that I haven’t done. And I just used the word mien instead of attitude!

The poet Rebecca Wolff, founder of Fence Magazine, recently gave an interview about genre, and in a really short section of it she says this about poetry (I’ll bold the section I like): I tend to think that the “documentary poetics” mode is kind of a new genre—Fence has not necessarily been a host for it but we have participated in it, most notably in Jena Osman’s recent, deep and excellent The Network, and we think it’s interesting if not always productive of pleasure for the reader in the sense of “Oh, I fucking love poetry because it makes me feel so hot in the brain area.” More like “I love poetry because it can be so smart and elegant and makes me feel like thinking more.”

This struck me because it takes a certain amount of courage—okay, not much, but some—to admit to enjoying something for reasons other than pleasure, especially for a poet about poetry. Intelligence. Craft. It shouldn’t be pretentious to love something for those reasons as opposed to not wanting to think for two hours while watching Salt, or Transformers III, or reading the latest Clive Cussler.

This kind of hedges on another aspect of why I continue to survey the media swamp—David Denby’s perfect phrase—I’m a teacher, and I feel that accumulating a reservoir of knowledge is part of my responsibility. I don’t need to have the answers all the time, but I do want an informed opinion, an examined life and philosophy—and as a teacher in the humanities, I want to understand as much about art, and how art affects the way we live, as I possibly can.

I’m starting to sound like a nerdy ascetic, so I’ll just restate that the reasons I turn to media besides the thoughtless pleasures—intellectual stimulation, perspective, history, art, appreciation of craft, human empathy, mental health, and on and on and on—these are just other reasons. I've read some Clive Cussler. I saw the first two Transformers. I’m not against escapism, and forgetting about the world for a while, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. That’s a function of art, and a damn important one. I said in the beginning that pleasure should be the driving engine, and it's true. But, besides my initial argument that pleasure must evolve, I also believe in balance. Too much escapism and comfort is a rut. There is no change, no mental or spiritual growth, qualities which I think are important. Media can be a catalyst that keeps us curious.

I could list a dozen mediocre films I’ve made myself watch because they’re classics, or because I was curious about the hype behind a director, or because I wanted to know what 60’s French films were like, but I could list scores more that I learned to love. How did I wait so long to see On the Waterfront? It’s spellbinding. Why did I think the original Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner would be cliché, when it floored me? Why did I think I wouldn't like Mafioso? It’s hilarious. If I had followed my immediate impulses at the time, and watched Wonder Boys again, or episodes of The Office, I would have missed out on memorable experiences.

So, before I order Breaking Bad season three from the library, I’ll probably watch Jules and Jim, though I’m not sure what it’s about. A love triangle? Why do I have hazy ideas of cross-dressing? I don't know, but I’m going to find out.