Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting... Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility.Hirschorn's article classified many things I hold dear as "quirk," namely:
- This American Life
- Arrested Development
- Napolean Dynamite
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Rushmore*
- The Royal Tennenbaums
It’s the sound of Austin, Boulder, Berkeley, Red Hook, Madison, Cambridge, Adams Morgan**—of people who tend to think of themselves as engaged, aware.Oh the humanity! Oh the italics!
Hirschorn, by contrast, is a man of the people. You can tell because he enjoys Knocked Up and reality TV.
Upon reflection I realized I'm probably guilty not only of patronizing this unmoored quirk, but of propagating it: see my blog entries on signs for dogs, recording examples of risible punctuation, and roller-blading in a parade while dressed as a car.
Upon further reflection I remembered that This American Life does do devastatingly "important" shows, including some great recent ones on the Iraq war and habeas corpus. And I thought about the some of the pretentious schlock I've seen that came out of someone's earnest attempt to make something that mattered (see Crash, Babel), and concluded I'd rather have spent those couple of hours on some meaningless piece of engaged, aware quirky escapism. Because what's wrong with that, really?
*cited as an example of good quirk
**this is where I live
3 comments:
There's honest quirk and there's quirky for quirk's sake. The latter is as tiresomely pretentious as the earnest pretentions of Babel, Crash, and Traffic. These at least are honest about their pretentiousness.
Pretentious quirk wants you to think it's engaged, aware, cool while smugly professing that it doesn't care. True honest quirk really doesn't care.
And I'm guessing you think Napolean Dynamite falls into the quirk-for-quirk's-sake category? What else?
I haven't seen Little Miss Sunshine, The Life Aquatic, or Rushmore and I've only watched snippets of Arrested Development, so I can't comment on them. The Royal Tannenbaums is on the borderline. Garden State is as honestly quirky as its creator.
And I beg to differ with the author: truquirk is hard to achieve. It's easy to be odd, but hard to be endearing.
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