Letting Go of Your Problematic Faves in Pop Culture
Photo by Rhii Photography on Unsplash
(This story was originally published on Medium).
For years, I have watched the 2007 film Stardust about a man named Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) and his fantastical journey to retrieve a fallen star and give it to a woman in his village named Victoria (Sienna Miller). The movie was something I repeatedly watched during some of the darkest moments of my life. In high school or college, whenever I would have a particularly bad day, I would put on Stardust and get whisked away to the kingdom of Stormhold.
Stardust is a work I nostalgically love, but it has also aged terribly. The film doesn’t treat the women in it particularly well. Victoria is portrayed negatively as a woman who is simply “using” Tristan for his possessions. The shooting star, which in the land of Stormhold turns into a woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes), is chained up by Tristan. He still intends to bring her to his love Victoria as an object even though Yvaine clearly has sentience. Stardust also has a cross-dressing character named Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro), who I have begun to perceive less humorously as I have acknowledged my own gender dysphoria.
I criticize films a lot as a culture writer, which generates a fair amount of defensiveness. People can get attached to the products they consume, and I am no different in that equation. There are films that I love, which produce a lot of anxiety in me once I realize how problematic the text is or how malicious their creators were to those around them.
How do you love a film like that?
The answer, like a lot of things in life, comes in embracing the dissonance. You have to accept your feelings for the text, while also recognizing that it is deeply hurtful to those around you. I think once you accept this tension, not only will you figure out a lot of strategies to feel less anxious, but you’ll open yourself up to new creators and works of art.
When texts are discovered to be “bad,” there tends to be a lot of strict lines drawn in the sand between whether someone can continue to enjoy that thing or not.
There will be those who say that you should be able to separate the text from its original environment and authorship. This approach is sometimes referred to as “Death of The Author” after the essay La mort de l’auteur by critic Roland Barthes.
Others allege that such a separation is impossible. Some will go even further and assert that by supporting a problematic author’s work, you contribute to the material oppression of those they discriminate against. This argument is especially compelling when the author is still alive and actively harming communities who are marginalized.
When the movie Ender’s Game came out in 2013, for example, there was a major call to boycott it by pro-LGBTQIA+ activists. The author of the book Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card, had been overtly discriminatory towards the LGBTQIA+ community for years: he wrote an op-ed threatening to “destroy” the government if it legalized same-sex marriage; he alleged that most gay people were the product of grooming, and so much more. Given that the movie increased the sales of Card’s novel (Ender’s Game sat on the New York Times best seller’s list for weeks in 2013), many were understandably not convinced by the Death of the Author argument. They encouraged people to cut ties with both the author and the text.
The problem with the “cutting ties” approach is that it doesn’t honor our emotional reality. As much as we might want to banish all things problematic, the feelings we have for a text do not go away simply because we have started to see the dilemmas it creates more clearly. This difficulty compounds when it’s not merely about the products we consume but also a core facet of our identity.
For example, countless people invested years in the Harry Potter franchise by the now problematic author J.K. Rowling: these fans organized annual parties, wrote fanfiction rooted in the world, and even ran organizations and nonprofits themed around the Harry Potter-verse. The divestment question becomes very difficult in these circumstances because if it is an all-or-nothing proposition, then groups like the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) have to undo years of organizing that, before this moment, might have been doing a lot of tangible good.
It’s not as simple for everyone as just reading another book. This dissonance is why many fans of problematic works push away all criticism and instead draw on the “Death of the Author” theory as a source of comfort. They are looking for an excuse that lets them still love their problematic favorite, but what they really need is an off-ramp.
Itcan be emotional to cut ties with a problematic work because the bad we see in it seems so pressing and overwhelming. In the case of J.K. Rowling, many would argue that ignoring the author’s bigotry is unacceptable and that you, as a consumer, have a moral imperative to boycott her work. Rowling is currently spreading very toxic transphobia, and every purchase you make of her work increases her ability to continue to do so.
This road can seem scary because if we care about stopping bigotry, it becomes very easy to spiral about all the things we must do. We start to cut ties before we have really processed why or how.
However, I would argue that starting the process of divestment does not have to be a binary choice. There are ways for you to start building yourself an off-ramp with a problematic author or text while still going back to it for the sake of nostalgia.
Some practical examples include:
Stop buying the book, especially popular ones like Harry Potter and Ender’s Game. These works have sold millions of copies worldwide. I guarantee you that a copy is sitting on a friend’s bookshelf somewhere or that you can rent it out from a local library.
Divest from the author. Please don’t amplify their platform: unlike their public profiles, unsubscribe from their channels, and cancel their newsletters. These actions will go along way in reducing their influence.
Stop buying official merch. There are plenty of indie creators who are selling fantastic things under that author’s IP, and they need your money more than a problematic creator (see the vendor Man up). For organizations, this also applies to licensing agreements with the main IP. You do not need to support branding that bolsters the resources of a bad creator or text.
Look for better work. Your favorite author did not invent many of the tropes you enjoy. Someone out there has made a work that isn’t so cringeworthy.
And finally, stop making excuses for the author and the problems people point out in the text itself.
These are only suggestions, and it’s best you pick the ones that work for you rather than trying to accomplish all of them at once. However, in starting to give yourself this space, you are learning to process a life beyond this work. This allows you to grieve for the loss of an identity that is now transforming.
When you recognize that a text is problematic, what you realize is a tension that usually has always been there. For example, while J.K. Rowling is being called out for her problematic opinions now, that subtext has existed in the Harry Potter-verse for a while. She has repeatedly been called out for how her characters’ often fit bad stereotypes (see Native American wizards, Nagini, etc.). As Shubhangi Misra wrote in The Print:
“The wizarding world first created by Rowling is of, for and by White people. I don’t think there’s much to argue there. The few non-White characters she does introduce in the books are underdeveloped lazy additions that highlight her prejudice.”
This recognition can be painful because it forces us to embrace the reality that our devotion to this text has harmed other people. Countless people have consumed an American classic only to witness stereotypical representations that make them feel lesser than for watching it. We, the fans, helped perpetuate that pain, and reevaluating a text is, in many ways, grappling with that reality.
The defensiveness that comes with shouting down criticism is usually, in part, from a kneejerk reaction to preserves someone’s sense of purity. They think of themselves as a “good person,” and, by acknowledging that a thing they like is “bad,” they are being pushed to embrace a complexity that challenges that sense of self. In Naomi Slater’s fantastic essay about decoupling white maledom from open-source tech culture, they framed this identity crisis as a battle between an in-group and an out-group:
“This is about who these people believe open source is for, and by extension, their own self-identity. Indeed, when people are challenged to explain themselves, you get nonsense and cognitive dissonance. People are being openly hypocritical, with no apparent awareness. The closer they get to confronting the truth, the more likely they are to break down in anger and confusion.”
She uses this to talk about tech, but this can apply to really any subculture, especially nerd culture, which thoroughly intersects with tech. Criticism generates these responses because it asks people to expand their group to others who have been historically excluded, and by extension, to acknowledge that their previous identity was (and probably still is) exclusionary.
However, if you want to have a relationship with a problematic text, then it means that you have to embrace that dissonance and accept that these new truths are valid. You have to start recognizing the flaws in the work, and as you do this, you will strangely become less interested in how this work makes you a good or a bad person.
The text just is.
The good news is that the deconstruction of its flaws, ones you had, and hopefully are learning to shed, creates the space for new art. We learn to see what was wrong with the earlier work and strive to do better. We strive to have a wizarding novel that actually validates its queer romances in the text (e.g., Carry On, In Other Lands); a magical epic that doesn’t rely on played out racialized stereotypes (e.g., Children of Blood and Bone, Black Leopard, etc.); and a story that embraces the trans characters J.K. Rowling scorns (e.g., Dreadnought). We break tropes and create new ones — all in the hope that the next iteration will be different.
And soon, you can hardly remember the last time that you have gone back to consume that old, flawed, beloved title of your youth because your love for it has transformed into so many other things.
I forgot to watch Stardust last year. It was the first time in a decade that I had not watched it during Halloween, but skipping the film was not part of a concerted effort to watch another movie. I just started consuming other things because criticizing Stardust gave me the incentive to look for better art that didn’t frustrate me when I consumed it.
I don’t feel like I am a “bad” person for mining enjoyment in the past from this deeply flawed movie. I have started to see my love for cultural products less like a dichotomy and more like a spectrum that waxes and wanes over time. You can both grow to dislike a text and simultaneously embrace that it had a major impact on your life — one that you still think back on fondly.
In the end, you love a problematic thing with open eyes as you put it down at your own pace.
For some people, it’s the first time a problem becomes perceptible. For others, it’s more gradual. You watch it over and over again, noting flaw after flaw until eventually, you don’t want to do it anymore because something even more precious has taken its place.
It has exploded like a shooting star in the atmosphere, shattering to the far corners of the Earth for all to admire.