As many of the comments note, this post on “10 Movies Hipsters Need to Get Over” is stupid, but it’s also more than a little weird. It’s one thing to say such-and-such a movie is overrated; it’s another to say, as the author, Judy Berman, does over and over, that a film is actually really good but that you should still stop liking it. And for no other reason than you happen to like it. Is there even a word for somebody who tells you to stop liking something, and for no other reason than that you like it? “Sadist” doesn’t really cover it, as a sadist takes pleasure in the pain of another, not in another’s … what? In their absence of liking something? I guess “mean-spirited” is the closest the English language comes, but the post itself isn’t extraordinarily mean, at least by internet standards. It just kind of tells you to stop liking something. Why? Because it’s tired of you liking it.
And here’s another weird thing: normally I would say, well this is just part of the general assault on the hipster strawman, that wan, shadowy figure whose only defining quality is that he likes things hipsters like. But, again, usually the assault on the hipster strawman is an assault on a certain kind of movie, band, article of clothing and on a kind of person who professes to like those things not out of a genuine affection for them, but out of some kind of pretentious posing. Berman is assaulting the feeling of genuinely liking something, which is just the kind of thing (“Oh, you still like that movie?”) you would expect the most obnoxious piece of hipster trash to say.
Ok. Done.
Wait, one more thing. No French New Wave? No Italian Neo-Realism? No Charlie Kaufman? Berman misses most of the staples in the hipster film diet. Perhaps she had trouble viewing the hipster in its natural habitat, or maybe, Sasquatchian in its elusiveness, it skittered away before she could accurately assess its tastes. Either way, if you’re going to indulge in cliché, do it right.
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