Describe Your Turf

Reviews of the fifth season of The Wire–a show that was critically invincible throughout its first four segments–have all said roughly the same thing: "Everything about the streets, the police, and city hall is still pitch perfect, but this newspaper business is just a little off. Surely things can't be that bad. Surely David Simon must be obsessing a little, hm?" They said it here, here, and especially here, where the reader is cautioned against confusing Simon's "searing vision" with reality.

The argument against Simon's Sun newsroom hinges on small details. The banter is too saturated with jargon. The characters are too boldly drawn–the Marimow stand-in is a fairly unambiguous bad guy, while Gus is a saint. Simon, who has been out of the journalism business for years, ignores the real concerns of newspapers in 2007. He is just too bitter, too angry.

A couple of other things dovetail with this line of critique in interesting ways.

While J. Hoberman's critique of the denial of female free will in Juno–and Knocked Up, and Waitress–seems right, much of the venom hurled at this year's big-little-indie hit has targeted the film's faux-childlike naiveté and alleged hipster pandering. In real publications, it has been called "deceptively smug," desperate to establish itself as "the chick Rushmore or Garden State," and saturated with "lookatme! snark." In blogs, the invective has been less civil. Sasha Frere-Jones enthusiastically directed me to a review of the film's soundtrack written by someone named Ian Cohen, who writes that the disc–and, by association, the film–goes "beyond interesting, beyond cute, into empty and nauseating self-absorption."

Consider also the response to Vampire Weekend. While their debut's catchy, shimmery tunes are almost reluctantly praised, many writers have gone out of their way to go after the group's smarmy, ivy-league know-it-all-ness. This has become the point, to a certain extent, of writing about Vampire Weekend and their new album. How forcefully can you distance yourself from blue oxfords, afro-pop appropriation, and undergraduate humor?

It may be that all three of these lines of critique actually have much more to do with the people writing them than they do with the works being discussed. How ridiculous it is to go after David Simon because his newsroom hits a few wrong notes when that's the only group that most critics have any experience with. Are you telling me that these same writers who think Gus' dialogue should ease up on the slang actually spent time verifying the slang-to-non-slang speech ratios of Baltimore drug dealers? Did they hang out with dockworkers before passing judgment on the second season? In fixating on Simon's representation of the newsroom and journalists, critics are largely writing about themselves, their workplaces, and their coworkers. On behalf of their respective publications, they are reacting to the fifth season of The Wire in the same way that Baltimore's mayor reacted to the first. It's a forceful if subtle turf move, and it has little to do with discussing the fifth season on its own terms.

Likewise, it's interesting that those with the greatest dislike for Juno–bloggers, Sasha Frere-Jones in particular–are the same people who have invested the greatest amount of personal and cultural capital in indie rock, a genre of pop music which for years has exhibited exactly the same things that are found to be most damning within the film: faux-naiveté and a willful retreat into the warm embrace of childhood. Frere-Jones probably received a bit too much criticism for his piece on whiteness in indie rock last year, but he was right to express the feeling that indie had settled into a kind of cozy self-indulgence. Why indie's worst characteristics had to be identified and dissected in the context of a film rather than an indie rock album, however, is maybe an interesting question.

The best response to Frere-Jones' article on indie's whiteness was written by Carl Wilson, who argued persuasively that class and education have more to do with indie's more hermetic tendencies than race. Indie's associations with the upper middle class and liberal arts education are well documented, and Vampire Weekend's ivy-league origins seem to have provoked defensive maneuvers from all manner of over-educated blogging and newspapering sorts. I think this New York Times interview with the group, which loudly but passive-aggressively advertises its disdain for the band's preppy fashions and games of conversational one-ups-manship, is of particular note. Remember, this is an article which appears in the New York Times, a publication which writes almost exclusively for a liberal, educated, upper middle class readership.

And so these writers identify and obsess over those elements of different works which are of huge concern to writers and critics and of little to no concern to anybody else. What strikes me most of all is how little is at stake. The Wire is no less compelling and vital for the occasional heavy-handed exchange (it's not like Simon hasn't been writing those all along, and anyway it's a work of narrative fiction, not a stenographer's report). Juno may have problems, but they have nothing to do with hipster jargon and everything to do with the fact that women have been poorly served by abortion films that won't say the word "abortion." Vampire Weekend may be slight, forgettable, and boring, but they are not some horrifying manifestation of preppy elitism. When criticism contents itself with an amplification of personal neurosis or pet peeves, it's not criticism. It's the unintentionally confessional autobiography of critics.