Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth

by A.O. Scott

And it takes no effort at all to peg you, my friend, as a Gen-X baby in the throes of middle age, flailing between the Kubler-Ross stages of denial and acceptance as you mourn your lost youth. You grew up in the backwash of the baby boom, with educated parents who subscribed to the New Yorker and bought the well-reviewed novels of the day. Gore Vidal. Erica Jong. Watership Down. As for movies, you got to the 1960s New Waves and to ’70s New Hollywood a little too late: your touchstones were Saturday Night Fever and Star Wars rather than Mean Streets and Nashville. In many cases, you read the MAD satire long before you ever saw the movie, if you ever got around to seeing the movie at all. You saw Breathless in college, probably for a class. You saw Bewitched in reruns. Punk rock saved you from feeling late for everything, and then a little after that hip-hop freed you from the nagging sense that you inhabited a stale, small world of provincial whiteness. You read those Vintage Contemporary paperbacks with the watery aquamarine quasi-surrealist covers and then graduated to the bright monochrome University of Minnesota Press Literary Theory volumes so you could feel cooler than your friends. That was the same reason you went to foreign films and listened to old-time music; the same reason some of your peers fetishized horror movies and comic books; the same reason others professed an “ironic” affection for the kitsch and crap of earlier pop-cultural eras. Your life is college ...