If I could collect a fee for any one stock response to a criticism — typically of some mindless piece of fluff like Ikki Tousen — it would be all the variations I hear on the following line: "Aw, what're you getting so uptight about? Can't you just turn your brain off and have some fun?" By the end of most any month, I'd have enough to pay my mortgage — my old mortgage, the one with the crushing property taxes.
Once, whenever I heard such words, I'd get red to the ears. Now, I've reached a point where I know all too well no insult is intended, because the vast majority of the time the speaker isn't offering that response as a genuine counter-criticism. It's a line people typically recite when they are sincerely in the dark about what a critic is, what she does, or why she does it. It also speaks volumes about how people have radically different notions of fun, or entertainment, or appreciation of same. But the first and principal point worth making is this: brains don't have off switches.
Fun for fun's sake
Anime is entertainment: it's made to be enjoyed, and it's created by people who by and large make it their mission to create something enjoyable. Deeper meanings, higher artistry — all those things are convenient by-products of what happens with anime, not necessarily the point. The times when it is the point are the exception, not the rule. (There are good reasons we only have one Studio Ghibli, and those reasons are split between the scarcity of the talent needed to produce craft of their caliber, and the sadly dwindling market for it.)
All this I'm reconciling with another insight that crossed my mind recently and refused to leave: the idea that all entertainment is art whether or not it was devised to be that way. Someone, somewhere, takes very seriously something things other people find silly or think of as nothing more than a good way to pass the time. After hearing from any number of people (female and male alike) how formative something like Sailor Moon was for them, it's hard for me to dismiss the idea.
To my mind, that's all the more reason to engage one's intelligence with the work you see — to see whether or not it was devised by people conscious of such a responsibility. This to me is a standard that creative types ought to hold themselves to whenever they can — to ask themselves if they're using their ability to entertain for well, or for ill. But that's a standard a creative type should hold only themselves accountable to, and not others — certainly not audiences. If an audience craves dumb fun, who am I to take it from them? The point, though, isn't to take it from them; it's to find a way to see things where even the flaws are important.
This is where the no-off-switch thing comes into play. Once you get into the habit of thinking a certain way about everything that lands in front of you, it's hard to stop doing it.
But the first contact we have with something typically isn't with our brain anyway; it's with our gut and our heart. Brain comes in later, after the fact. I enjoyed Shangri-la moment by moment as it was unfolding, even when I "knew" full well it was riddled with shortcomings. None of that stopped me from letting it happen to me in the moment. Noir I enjoyed as it unfolded, but on reflection I realized many of the things I had enjoyed the most about it were likely to be sticking points for modern audiences, and I couldn't let that pass without comment.
The trick, then, isn't to entirely suspend one's critical faculties, but to let them take back over when the time and place are right. Yes, half the fun is in taking something apart and seeing what makes it tick, but the other half is in watching it tick to begin with.
Switch on, switch off
Without practice, though that kind of mode-switching can be difficult to do — or, at the very least, it seems from the outside like something only undertaken by people who can only lose themselves so much to their pleasures.
Isn't the point of popular culture to enjoy it, not analyze it? Isn't all this energy ultimately misplaced? Shouldn't we adopt a point of view more akin to the one bandied around by movie critic Pauline Kael, who defended enjoying the movies when they were great trash because they were so rarely great art to begin with?
The vast majority of anime certainly fits that bill. It was never meant to be great, so why try to demand greatness from something that wasn't really built to deliver it? It's a valid point of view, and I subscribe to it myself — but only up to a point.
Kael's essay is worth talking about at length on its own, but I will briefly note how one problem I have with it is how it falls, perhaps not consciously (but that's scarcely what matters) into substituting one kind of snobbism for another. A world where the movies are at best great trash, or where the most "honest" way to approach them is through such a lens, is just as reductive as one where we have to demand nothing but Masterpiece Theatre-level experiences from our entertainments.
When I look at something critically, I'm not just trying to assign it a star rating or a ranking and be done with it. Yes, a lot of shows are mediocre or outright awful, and that is reason alone for many people to shrug them off. Peel back the skin of even a boring show, though, and you can find things worth talking about — not merely about the show itself, but about the circumstances that produced it, or the audience that responds to it (perhaps despite itself).
Is there more fun in that than "just" watching a show? For me, there is. But none of that is something I take up for the sake of proving other kinds of enjoyment are wrong. Very rarely is there a valid case to be made that the act of enjoying a particular thing is bad — and when there is (maybe Eiken? maybe Queens Blade?), it's something you still have to build an argument for.
Once engaged, someone's critical consciousness is hard to shut off, but that's not something that can or should be used to lord it over other people who simply watch to have a good time. I've fallen down on the wrong side of that divide more than enough myself, and I'm all the more conscious of how analysis can seem like prescriptive advice. But nowhere, no-how, will I let myself be commanded to turn my brain off.
