A Persistent Flattening and Polarizing Impulse
(for peachespig)
Two and a half years ago, I posted a short essay called A Stubborn Romanticizing and Eroticizing Impulse, which I still think more worth reading than pretty much anything I've ever posted. From the introduction:
What does all this have in common? Sexualizing, that's what. Taking something that was intended (or possibly intended) as non-sexual, and layering sexual feelings, expectations, and interpretations over it. In my opinion, this procedure, and the results of this procedure, is a mainspring of the whole "fandom" phenomenom. We take the energy of literary appreciation and creative endeavor and combine it with the immense energy of our sexual drives, fueling a very strong motivation to spend time and effort on Harry Potter. Certainly there are exceptions, but for a large portion of the fandom, their participation is continuously fueled by "warm" feelings for a certain pairing, a certain character, or even a certain actor or actress. I, it must be said, am NOT an exception.
Today I want to write about a different impulse, one I see as similarly strong and widespread, but one for which I feel a good deal less sympathy and complicity than I do for the impulse to romanticize and eroticize. I'm talking about the impulse to transform the subtle and complex into the simple and moralistic, to take creations drawn in continuous shades of gray and view them in black and white, to flatten the three-dimensional and polarize your response (to a character, a subplot, a theme, a pairing) into either unconditional love or unrelenting condemnation.
narcissam (and lydaclunas?) uses an icon that I have long admired, which conveys this phenomenon better than any words of mine [1]:
Any of us, I think, can easily come up with examples in the HP fandom where we see this impulse at work -- from ancient Snape vs. Sirius squabbles on the HP4GU mailing list to the demonization of scriptwriter Steve Kloves to the polarization of opinion about Rowling's writing ability after HBP to the recent editorial at Mugglenet arguing that Ron is not only unsuitable for Hermione or not the kind of person the essay's author cares for, but actually fated to abuse Hermione. Even more recently, maple_clef has posted a lucid essay about the post-HBP excoriation of Tonks. Most of us tend to see this tendency in others more than in ourselves, thus the frequent charges of "bashing," "hating," "worshipping," "fangirling" (or "-boying"), and all the other words we use to insult those we see as having an unjustifiably one-sided opinion. Most of us prefer to describe our own reactions as balanced and nuanced. But not all of us.
There are plenty of people who will proudly proclaim that they "hate" character X or author Y or subplot Z or pairing A/B and happily explain why, either at stunning length or with terse brevity. Drawing from the two fandoms I am currently most interested in, House and Harry Potter, here are the kind of things I see people say:
I understand that people individuate themselves by asserting their personal tastes. I understand the temptations of hyperbole. I even understand that a bias works wonderfully in generating humor and snarkiness. Elizabeth Bennet expresses this well:
"And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty."
Once you have established a dislike of something -- Cameron's crush on House, Harry's self-pity, the Weasleys' patronizing attitude toward Muggles, or Chase's lousy dress sense -- you can always make a joke about it, make it a running gag. It's easy, fun, reliable... and I have no problem with that.
But... there is a point where having a stance, a preference, a bias goes so far that it flattens and simplifies the original work until it loses all its human subtlety and moral complexity. It's a paradox -- we are attracted to creative works because of their rich complexity and careful shadings of moral ambiguity, but in the process of enjoying them we tend to transform them into flat melodrama -- the kind of stuff we would scorn to read or watch in the first place. It's like the writers give us more than we can handle.
The writers of House gave us six main characters -- all presented as protagonists, all of whom (by and large) like each other and get along, all of whom are given both positive qualities and flaws. But, apparently, for many people six is too many. They can't like six whole people -- some of them are going to have to be made into bad guys. If, say, Foreman and Chase are put into conflict on the show, the writers can maintain sympathetic treatments for both and the two characters can forgive each other and remain friends, but some viewers are never going to forgive one or the other guy for the bad, bad thing he did or said. And yet, these same people would probably say that they love the show because of the House character -- and they don't come much more gray-shaded than that!
Or... take the Harry Potter universe: Rowling has lavished her universe with moral shadings and ambiguities. Several of the good guys are explicitly shown as bullies, Harry has attempted the Cruciatus curse twice and cut Draco Malfoy open with Sectumsempra. Harry's beloved wizarding world is rife with corruption, prejudice, and injustice. The best characters have flaws and the worst characters have qualities or circumstances to elicit our sympathy.
So how do readers respond to this ambiguity? Often -- far too often, in my opinion -- they respond by denying it, by polarizing the shades-of-gray characters into the whiter-than-white favorites who can do no wrong and the deep-dyed villains draped in shades of unrelieved black. For some fans, this whitewashing tends to pretty much follow the emotional promptings of Harry's narration - Harry and his friends and Gryffindors and such are good good good beyond criticism, while everyone Harry dislikes (Malfoy, Snape, Voldemort, Umbridge, Zacharias, Marietta, Slytherins) is bad bad bad without any need for sympathy or rights as a human being. Some fans rebel against Harry's obvious prejudices and instead anathematize characters he likes such as Dumbledore, Hermione, and Hagrid. Still other fans seem to think that Rowling has created too many "good guys" and remedy this by hating about half of the positive characters, often for what seem to me the flimsiest of reasons. Ginny has had too many boyfriends, Hermione is too bossy, Hagrid's a lousy teacher, Ron whines too much, Sirius is too reckless, Molly is too fussy, etc. etc. etc. Somehow, these characters' flaws (and even their virtues) are transformed into unforgivable, reprehensible sins that eliminate any claim they might have to sympathy or liking.
The point is that neither Harry Potter nor House is a simplistic black-and-white melodrama. That's one of the main reasons we like them. As individuals and as a society, we tend to condemn works of art where the characters are either saints or villains, where the moral distinctions are easy and uncomplicated and our sympathies are unmixed. Here is Jane Austen expressing this sentiment two hundred years ago:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for.
...Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.
But in our fanfiction, our essays, our ship debates and rants and commentaries, we have a tendency to emulate Mrs. Radcliffe more than Miss Austen. Yes, of course we have a perfect right to hate Cho Chang if we want to. And yes, as the character-haters constantly point out, fictional characters do not have feelings and cannot be hurt. The only thing I would argue is that in hating a character -- in magnifying their bad points and dismissing their good points -- you are making an aesthetic decision. A flattening, simplifying aesthetic decision. And it is an aesthetic I do not admire.
1. I believe the icon was created by lydaclunas lizbee as a satire on criticism of synaesthete7 for allegedly treating the characters of Severus Snape and James Potter in just such a polarized manner. Or I could be misremembering. Anyway, the icon has always struck a chord with me.
Two and a half years ago, I posted a short essay called A Stubborn Romanticizing and Eroticizing Impulse, which I still think more worth reading than pretty much anything I've ever posted. From the introduction:
What does all this have in common? Sexualizing, that's what. Taking something that was intended (or possibly intended) as non-sexual, and layering sexual feelings, expectations, and interpretations over it. In my opinion, this procedure, and the results of this procedure, is a mainspring of the whole "fandom" phenomenom. We take the energy of literary appreciation and creative endeavor and combine it with the immense energy of our sexual drives, fueling a very strong motivation to spend time and effort on Harry Potter. Certainly there are exceptions, but for a large portion of the fandom, their participation is continuously fueled by "warm" feelings for a certain pairing, a certain character, or even a certain actor or actress. I, it must be said, am NOT an exception.
Today I want to write about a different impulse, one I see as similarly strong and widespread, but one for which I feel a good deal less sympathy and complicity than I do for the impulse to romanticize and eroticize. I'm talking about the impulse to transform the subtle and complex into the simple and moralistic, to take creations drawn in continuous shades of gray and view them in black and white, to flatten the three-dimensional and polarize your response (to a character, a subplot, a theme, a pairing) into either unconditional love or unrelenting condemnation.
narcissam (and lydaclunas?) uses an icon that I have long admired, which conveys this phenomenon better than any words of mine [1]:
Any of us, I think, can easily come up with examples in the HP fandom where we see this impulse at work -- from ancient Snape vs. Sirius squabbles on the HP4GU mailing list to the demonization of scriptwriter Steve Kloves to the polarization of opinion about Rowling's writing ability after HBP to the recent editorial at Mugglenet arguing that Ron is not only unsuitable for Hermione or not the kind of person the essay's author cares for, but actually fated to abuse Hermione. Even more recently, maple_clef has posted a lucid essay about the post-HBP excoriation of Tonks. Most of us tend to see this tendency in others more than in ourselves, thus the frequent charges of "bashing," "hating," "worshipping," "fangirling" (or "-boying"), and all the other words we use to insult those we see as having an unjustifiably one-sided opinion. Most of us prefer to describe our own reactions as balanced and nuanced. But not all of us.
There are plenty of people who will proudly proclaim that they "hate" character X or author Y or subplot Z or pairing A/B and happily explain why, either at stunning length or with terse brevity. Drawing from the two fandoms I am currently most interested in, House and Harry Potter, here are the kind of things I see people say:
- Draco is a racist, period.
- I wrote Foreman off when he was going to let Clarence die. Ever since then, I can't stand him.
- With Book Six, J.K. Rowling has set back the cause of feminism twenty years.
- Jesse Spencer is not only the worst actor on the show, he's the worst actor in primetime television.
- When Ginny insulted Hermione, I wanted to slap her silly. The only thing that can make the seventh book worth reading is if that slut dies a painful death.
- Putting one of his own employees -- a doctor without tenure -- over House? That's it, the show has jumped the shark.
- I'll never forgive Dumbledore for humiliating the Slytherins at the end of Book One.
- I can't frigging stand Sela Ward. It's the eyebrows.
I understand that people individuate themselves by asserting their personal tastes. I understand the temptations of hyperbole. I even understand that a bias works wonderfully in generating humor and snarkiness. Elizabeth Bennet expresses this well:
"And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty."
Once you have established a dislike of something -- Cameron's crush on House, Harry's self-pity, the Weasleys' patronizing attitude toward Muggles, or Chase's lousy dress sense -- you can always make a joke about it, make it a running gag. It's easy, fun, reliable... and I have no problem with that.
But... there is a point where having a stance, a preference, a bias goes so far that it flattens and simplifies the original work until it loses all its human subtlety and moral complexity. It's a paradox -- we are attracted to creative works because of their rich complexity and careful shadings of moral ambiguity, but in the process of enjoying them we tend to transform them into flat melodrama -- the kind of stuff we would scorn to read or watch in the first place. It's like the writers give us more than we can handle.
The writers of House gave us six main characters -- all presented as protagonists, all of whom (by and large) like each other and get along, all of whom are given both positive qualities and flaws. But, apparently, for many people six is too many. They can't like six whole people -- some of them are going to have to be made into bad guys. If, say, Foreman and Chase are put into conflict on the show, the writers can maintain sympathetic treatments for both and the two characters can forgive each other and remain friends, but some viewers are never going to forgive one or the other guy for the bad, bad thing he did or said. And yet, these same people would probably say that they love the show because of the House character -- and they don't come much more gray-shaded than that!
Or... take the Harry Potter universe: Rowling has lavished her universe with moral shadings and ambiguities. Several of the good guys are explicitly shown as bullies, Harry has attempted the Cruciatus curse twice and cut Draco Malfoy open with Sectumsempra. Harry's beloved wizarding world is rife with corruption, prejudice, and injustice. The best characters have flaws and the worst characters have qualities or circumstances to elicit our sympathy.
So how do readers respond to this ambiguity? Often -- far too often, in my opinion -- they respond by denying it, by polarizing the shades-of-gray characters into the whiter-than-white favorites who can do no wrong and the deep-dyed villains draped in shades of unrelieved black. For some fans, this whitewashing tends to pretty much follow the emotional promptings of Harry's narration - Harry and his friends and Gryffindors and such are good good good beyond criticism, while everyone Harry dislikes (Malfoy, Snape, Voldemort, Umbridge, Zacharias, Marietta, Slytherins) is bad bad bad without any need for sympathy or rights as a human being. Some fans rebel against Harry's obvious prejudices and instead anathematize characters he likes such as Dumbledore, Hermione, and Hagrid. Still other fans seem to think that Rowling has created too many "good guys" and remedy this by hating about half of the positive characters, often for what seem to me the flimsiest of reasons. Ginny has had too many boyfriends, Hermione is too bossy, Hagrid's a lousy teacher, Ron whines too much, Sirius is too reckless, Molly is too fussy, etc. etc. etc. Somehow, these characters' flaws (and even their virtues) are transformed into unforgivable, reprehensible sins that eliminate any claim they might have to sympathy or liking.
The point is that neither Harry Potter nor House is a simplistic black-and-white melodrama. That's one of the main reasons we like them. As individuals and as a society, we tend to condemn works of art where the characters are either saints or villains, where the moral distinctions are easy and uncomplicated and our sympathies are unmixed. Here is Jane Austen expressing this sentiment two hundred years ago:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for.
...Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.
But in our fanfiction, our essays, our ship debates and rants and commentaries, we have a tendency to emulate Mrs. Radcliffe more than Miss Austen. Yes, of course we have a perfect right to hate Cho Chang if we want to. And yes, as the character-haters constantly point out, fictional characters do not have feelings and cannot be hurt. The only thing I would argue is that in hating a character -- in magnifying their bad points and dismissing their good points -- you are making an aesthetic decision. A flattening, simplifying aesthetic decision. And it is an aesthetic I do not admire.
1. I believe the icon was created by lydaclunas lizbee as a satire on criticism of synaesthete7 for allegedly treating the characters of Severus Snape and James Potter in just such a polarized manner. Or I could be misremembering. Anyway, the icon has always struck a chord with me.