Hello once again from my local Tsutaya where I am renting a dvd for the first time in a dog’s age. Because, as it turns out, the movie my family wants to watch is not available on any of the four streaming services we have nor any of the on-demand rental options. What is available? Middlebrow mundanity.
As culture flattens around us, the concepts of highbrow and lowbrow art are blurring. The idea that some art is somehow more engaging of the higher mind and some is mere trash for the masses is classist nonsense. Art that entertains is no less valuable than art that evokes strong emotion or intellectual engagement.
But if we can agree that both high and low art are valid, why are so many of the options available to us stuck firmly in the middle?
Look, I love bad movies. Ever since I was a kid, I have happily, greedily snarfed down every Troma movie I could get my hands on. The gore, the TNA, the oddly intriguing but totally weird ideas, love ‘em. But the catalog of terrible movies has more than just low-budget gore. It’s got more genres1 and interesting experiments than the middlebrow pablum at the store. Same for art movies. For every Kubrick you get a Jess Franco.
Books, music, art, all the same. I’ve read the American canon. I’ve also read the American pulp. I studied Fitzgerald in Lit class but wrote about Raymond Chandler for Composition. Beethoven and the Misfits. Monet and Sorayama. Your catalog is different. As it should be. We’re all allowed to love what we love, the only qualification is that we actually love it.
What I mean is, next month, those two artists I mentioned are going to be side-by-side at museums near Tokyo station. I plan to go to both. Not because I’m so erudite or because the only art I like are sexy robot ladies, but because both artists challenge me on an emotional level. That’s what art should do at both the high and low end of the scale.
And yet. Bookstores, streaming sites, even art is being overwhelmed with “good enough,” or, even worse, “everybody kind of likes it.” This is a problem because the line between highbrow and lowbrow shouldn’t be middlebrow - a place on the human face that just doesn’t exist. It ought to be one cocky, smug eyebrow raised high while the other one squints condescendingly at you, you little pipsqueak.
Our race to the middle has left culture with a monobrow - not middle, nothing with peaks and valleys, just a straight, flat ridge that erases everything expressed by Kubrick and Franco, by Monet and Sorayama.
The Criterion channel is arguably as high brow as cinephilia gets and yet it’s hard to get access to. Netflix, on the other hand, admits that it aims for the middle to grab as many viewers as possible. And that…look, nothing should be made to grab as many eyeballs as possible. With that as a goal, both the most refined and the most crass art we can make gets smoothed and filtered and anesthetized until there’s nothing left but interesting ideas poorly executed.
And, of course, the boring, practical reason Netflix does this is money. The advertising model does nothing for us; when we decided that ads would be the optimal way of supporting media, we gave up the ability to filter for taste. Because nobody runs ads just to recoup their operating costs; ads are made to make a profit. If you want to break even, you sell your product at a set cost. If you want to lose your money, time, and sanity just slowly enough to make it impossible to stop, you offer a subscription2.
High art demands patience, examination, analysis, interpretation, maybe even emotional disclosure to yourself if no one else. Low art demands you engage with your worst nature and confront the weird, sticky little corners of your psyche that make you giggle with glee when mild-mannered Melvin Junko gets transformed into the Toxic Avenger. But middle-of-the-face middlebrow does nothing. It just…exists.
The beautiful thing about art, in all its forms is its subjectivity. But you know what you’re engaging with. You know what challenges you, you know what makes you wallow in prurience and decay and schadenfreude. And, most importantly, you know what you’re taking in just because it was the next video in the endless scroll.
If there’s a way out of the cultural mess we seem to find ourselves in, it’s to both celebrate the things we love, high and low, and to encourage others to do the same. Meet someone’s challenging watch with a horrible book recommendation and dare someone to read something cathartic and joyous in exchange for the worst art they’ve ever seen. Just get out of the middle, there’s nothing there.
My favorite category of bad movie is “the ones that tried too hard.” These movies are so heart-breakingly earnest that it becomes hard to take them seriously: Popeye, Club Paradise, Toys - and that’s just from Robin Williams’ filmography.
And I want to offer a personal thank you to each and every subscriber to this newsletter. You look amazing and smell like angel farts.
This made me think of all things AI, which by design can only produce middlebrow schlock. It takes a human being to produce something wonderfully bad.
high and lowbrow is referring to the consumer not the art. so no matter what you consume it's going to be fantastic boo