Outline

Introduction

Why even criticize media?

Different forms of media criticism

Death of the Author

Conclusion

Introduction

It was around this point, when I had run through the events of the episode in my head and spun out the full list of the story’s sinful writing tropes that I had to just stop and ask myself.

What the fuck am I doing?

Dexter’s Lab was the show that helped me get through middle school. I was bullied a lot, I didn’t have to many friends, I was somehow more awkward and more creepy around girls than I am now and that’s saying something. But the one thing I did have was good grades. Dexter’s Lab helped me build an identity around being smart and liking math and science when my peers hated it and made fun of me for liking it.

It was a flimsy, superficial identity that still makes me cringe when I think about it, but it was one that gave me some sort of semblance of self-confidence and pride in who I was and, for a middle school kid, that’s not so bad.

I take a break from real life responsibilities and politics to go back and watch a childhood favorite cartoon for two fucking seconds and suddenly I’m all “problematic this” and “racist that”?

What the actual fuck am I doing?

The experience pushed me to a kind of limit. I found myself asking myself the one question I normal hear from my critics:

Aren’t I reading into things?

I mean, it’s a kids show. It’s a comedy. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. Dexter’s Laboratory started airing in 1996. It’s not exactly relevant to the modern media landscape. Maybe I should just… let this one slide?

Maybe I don’t go and write a whole Treatise on six tiny minutes of animation from the 90s?

Well I ended up making the sane and rational decision to not to a Treatise on it.

Dexter’s Laboratory isn’t an anime so it can’t have possibly ever been Treatise-worthy. This is clearly Hot Take material instead.

Why even criticize media?

I mean, it’s a seemingly basic question. It’s basic enough that I’m sure plenty of people don’t figure to ask it themselves. I’ve asked myself this a lot in the past few days. I wouldn’t consider myself enlightened in any way; I’m interested in the question’s answer from a selfish, existential point of view. If I’m throwing all this time into doing this, into making “Medium media critic” a part of my identity, it’d be nice to know the trouble is worth something.

(Photo by Daan Stevens via Unsplash)

I’ve written about how I conceptualize storytelling in a series of essays I honestly haven’t gotten around to finishing.

At its core though, I argue that a story is simply a list of events placed end to end by a narrator. And that media are the vessels in which these stories are packaged for us to read, watch, and listen to.

The thing about stories is that the ordering of events that compose any given story, and even which events are allowed to exist in the first place, is not random. Stories are always the deliberate creations of people. Stories reflect the truths or untruths held by the person making them. Stories challenge or affirm the truths or untruths held by the reader.

Through events and framing alone, a story can assert general truths about the world. Through the reach of media, stories can pass these truths through a society and influence our culture. Not every assertion a story makes is all that important, but, as long as stories have this power, media is always worth criticizing.

Stories are generally more effective at changing minds than facts and research papers are. Consider the story of the welfare queen. One woman, Linda Taylor, living in one city, in one of 50 US states was able to convince Americans that cheating the US welfare system was a systemic problem and that cuts and reforms needed to be made to stop it.

The facts, meanwhile, showed, and continue to show the opposite. The facts show vast amounts of inequality between white and non-white communities in the US, and that government investment in poor communities helps them, not the opposite.

It’s hard to appreciate how powerful stories really are. We often focus on stories as entertainment so much that we forget that it’s stories that get politicians elected and whole social movements to rise and fall.

The important thing I’d like to stress is that nowhere in this discussion does genre or purpose come into it. Things aren’t immune from criticism, or any less dangerous, just because they were made for comedy, or for children, or for both. In fact, I’d argue that comedy and children’s entertainment are even more important to scrutinize than others.

(Photo by Denise Jans via Unsplash)

A Nazi propaganda film makes its intentions and potential harm exceedingly obvious, and its obviousness makes it less likely to impact society in any meaningful way. However, an artsy webcomic that spends half its issues being apolitical and blurs the line between comedy and political activism is, far, far more dangerous.

Comedy in particular does two things. Comedy builds trust between creator and consumer. If something makes you laugh, you’re more likely to associate that thing with “good things” and trust it, even as that thing pushes sinister messaging onto you.

The second component of comedy is a social shaming dynamic. When you find people laughing at something, there’s an instinctive desire to disassociate yourself from the object of mockery. A comedy piece about people who talk during movies (guilty) may be inconsequential, but a comedy that mocks entire regions and cultures is less so.

Different forms of media criticism

Alright, so it’s important to scrutinize stories.

How is it done? How should it be done? Is there really an answer to that second question?

If there’s one thing I hate it’s a trend I’ve taken to call pop criticism. I don’t think I’m the only person to use this term but to me it’s the most apt and, as far as I know, it’s pretty obscure.

The brand of pop criticism that exists mainly on YouTube (and — gasp — on blogs like this one) is focused on two things: entertainment and reinforcement.

YouTube channels like CinemaSins have basically figured out how to make media criticism, or at least, some version of media criticism, entertaining and profitable. Upfront they’ll admit the point is not actually to start an honest discussion of the media object being criticized, but to turn the process into a laugh.

In this way, pop criticism shares a shocking similarity to reality TV. The purpose of reality TV ins’t to capture reality at all. The purpose of reality TV is entertainment. Reality TV needs characters, character arcs, character development, a plot, and, most importantly, reality TV needs narrative. These are created in a number of ways, from hiring actors to asking leading questions to cutting together dialogue to taking clips out of context to adding music to change the character of a scene entirely.

The “reality” in reality TV is just the kernel from which these narratives and arcs are created. The fact that it’s called “reality” TV of course doesn’t make it real.

Likewise, pop “criticism” is made for entertainment. Pop criticism also needs arcs and a narrative. Except, this time, the narrative is metatextual. The critic in this case becomes a character, and his/her antagonist becomes the work being “criticized”. The antagonist is boiled down to a list of key flaws that are jovially dismantled by the protagonist, the critic.

The “criticism” in pop media criticism is just the kernel from which these narratives and arcs are created.

Pop criticism also exists for reinforcement. That is to say, pop criticism does not seek to challenge people’s opinions on a topic, but to reinforce an existing opinion.

Turns out there’s a huge market for people who feel certain ways about certain things without logically coming to that conclusion and are looking for someone to work backwards from that conclusion until the facts match.

Maybe you don’t like the fact that a popular film studio is pushing female superheroes into the limelight. It’s not that you’re sexist or anything. Of course not! You’re just uncomfortable “for some reason”. So you go up and search on YouTube for voices who share your point of view.

Pop criticism is here to help! Now we’ve got a bunch of videos about how “every SJW character is a Mary Sue” and how “every woman, black person, trans person, and gay person to ever exist in media just loses companies money”*. Now your “mysterious biases” have a perfectly rational explanation! Cool!

(By the way, including more diverse characters in your works is just expanding your work to a new market. Expanding your consumer base is basic capitalism and almost always leads to more profit, not less.)

(It’s also pretty exploitative, using various marginalized identities to make money without actually helping them all that much)

(Also, society will repackage social movements and resell it as “diversity”, now lacking the teeth to make any real social progress.)

(I’ll stop with these now.)

I try not to be pop criticism

I’m not… immune to its influence. I mean if I stripped all the entertainment value out of these they’d be painful to read and write, and I couldn’t do that to me or you.

I put on a character when I write these too, not because I’m trying to be disingenuous, but because it’s easier to connect with you that way. There’s no way I’m this confident in real life (but I’m definitely this obnoxious).

But what I do think I try to do, and what I know awesome creatives like Zeria, Shaun, Lindsey Ellis, and the Pedantic Romantic (do click on these links, please!) do, is challenge biases.

It’s nice when someone reads my work and tells me that I’ve put into words what they’ve always known was true in one way or another. That’s alright. Pretty good. No lie no B.S. I like hearing stuff like that.

But at the same time, I think my work, the work of more rigorous media critics, and certainly the work of those who do this sort of thing professionally in academia, are writing to the reader that disagrees with them.

It’s not changing someone’s mind I’m after but engaging that mind. “I don’t agree with everything, but you had some good points” feels way better than “I’ve always thought this was the case, thanks!”

Death of the Author

There’s a common misconception about media criticism that I’d like to at least try and address.

I’ve seen a lot of media critiques dismissed out of hand with something that more or less sounds like “You bring up some interesting points, but I don’t think the authors meant to do that. I think that’s just a coincidence.”

David Sanberg released a short video describing what he calls the “problem solving of filmmaking”. Watch it if you want. It’s good, it’s insightful, and it’s short.

He talks about a few scenes in the film that people have commonly pointed out as “illogical” and goes into the behind the scenes details that most movie-goers don’t think about that contribute to how that scene ended up the way it is. He makes the argument that, when filming a movie, nothing goes as planned and many key decisions are made simply to get the film out the door on time, and not for any storytelling reasons.

At the end of the video, Sandberg states,

Working with movies has kinda ruined video essays and film analysis for me because you just never know if something was part of a brilliant plan or just happened to turn out that way because a problem had to be solved on the day.

I don’t do this to try and punch above my weight class or whatever. I don’t watch many movies or know much about film-making other than how to format a movie script. But this sentiment is a clear example of what I’m talking about here, so we’ll go with it.

The author’s intentionality doesn’t play a role in the truths that stories assert.

Well, it matters a little but not that much. Let me explain.

In his super famous essay that I bet you haven’t actually read, The Death of the Author, post-structuralist French philosopher Roland Barthes argued that the author enters a kind of “death” after a work is published. The “modern author,” he wrote, “ is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now” (Barthes 3).

Meaning is not dictated by the people who make a medium because, when a medium is consumed, the creator is not there to give meaning to the consumer. Meaning is joint effort, it’s what’s on the page combined with the reader and the context that reader brings with them.

Death of the Author does not mean that everyone with a blog and Hot Take is right just because they say so. But it does mean that we ought not pay any special attention to what the creator of a work say they intended or didn’t. It’s more useful to understand how media make us feel and look into the text to help explain why.

The author can certainly shed light into possible valid interpretations of a work, but the point of interpretation is not find what the author “meant”. Like, knowing H.P. Lovecraft was a massive racist means it’s more likely than not that his weird fish breeding stories probably stem from his fear of miscegenation. Still, it’s not because Lovecraft held those views that his stories can be read that way. Lovecraft’s stories can be read that way by reading the text alone.

The phrase “Death of the Author” gets thrown a lot mainly as a way of dismissing problematic or otherwise unwanted views authors have injected into their work. But the actual significance of the term is far more broad.

Perhaps in high school English class we’re taught to try and guess as what the author “really meant” when they made all the curtains blue. The reality is that it’s not interesting to ask what the author “really meant” by doing anything. The better question is if the color blue is linked to other themes of the story, and what that might mean for the character, the reader, and society at large.

The “high school English class” mode of thinking about media far too often makes it impossible to study how stories can reinforce harmful ideas, and how the perpetuation of these ideas can make society worse or otherwise impede progress.

Conclusion

Dexter’s Laboratory may not be “relevant” in the media landscape, but criticisms of the show and other shows like it brought into the modern conversation will be.

Got Your Goat could have been an opportunity to educate kids about various South American cultures through comedy, but instead spends around six minutes reinforcing white supremacist, colonialist attitudes. These issues become even more relevant in the wake of the rise of right-wing populism and violent extremism in the United States and Europe. These issues become more frustrating to think about the more you factor the role the US has played in impoverishing Latin American countries, the same poverty that the show mocks Latin American people for.

Children’s entertainment has extra responsibilities that media for adults don’t have to worry about. Children’s media have the responsibility to, if not instill good values in its viewers, at the very least, not teach bad lessons to kids. It’s easy to say Got Your Goat is just a fun adventure of kids so don’t worry about it, but it’s these types of shows that create adults that are ignorant of the world outside the West.

If all one saw as a kid of South America, or Africa, or Asia, were huts and “primitive” peoples, and all one saw of the US, Canada, and Western Europe was “civilization”, what do you think that would do to people’s perceptions of these places as an adult?

Yes, people would maybe understand that “South America” isn’t one big place and there are countries in it, and yes they’d maybe understand you ought not take those shows too seriously. Nonetheless, the fundamental assumptions about which countries are “shitholes” and which countries are “civilized” is bound to stick with them.

Maybe they’d internalize these stereotypes until they learned not to mind when their country locks up by the thousands men, women, and children from those exact parts of the world in for-profit facilities where occupants live in overcrowded cages, are denied adequate food and water, are routinely harassed verbally, physically, and sexually, and are punished for speaking out against all this. Maybe, after years of consuming TV in the vein of Got Your Goat from childhood, they’d start to be more bothered by whether or not said detention centers count as “concentration camps”, and less bothered by the fact that they exist in the first place.

At the end of the day, media is important. The stories we tell each other perpetuate values throughout our society. We ought to be able to decide what kinds of ideas our stories should promote, and what kinds of ideas are best left to the past.

“Reading into things” will never kill anyone. Failing to address the ways in which stories can do harm might.