I’m a big fan of David Denby’s film critiques in the New Yorker, where he alternates with the equally talented Anthony Lane. (The two make an exquisitely well-balanced pair; while Lane plays the part of the quintessential public, discussing why he liked or disliked a film, Denby is the quintessential connoisseur, focusing on why you should like or dislike it.) I’ve only just heard about Denby’s new book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation, and I’m looking forward to reading it because it’s a subject in which I’m interested — both as an occasional dilettante practitioner and as a fortunate recipient of far less than my fair share. But having read some of the eloquent (and several snarky) reviews of the book, I can’t help weighing in with a kind of pre-review because they have already got me thinking about the subject.

Snark is said to be “irony’s brat” (or, by those who would cast aspersions on its parentage, irony’s “bastard child”). Attempting to home in on a more concise definition, people see in snark elements of “cruelty,” a tendency to be both “acid-tongued” and “disengaged,” to demonstrate “reflexive contempt” along with a “little curlicue of knowingness,” to strike “like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard,” even to exhibit “a higher form of dandyism,” evoking images of Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote floating around the edges of many a Park Avenue cocktail party.

Along that latter line, Denby, in a fine CJR interview by James Marcus, notes almost tangentially that in one of Wolfe’s famous early pieces (“These Radical Chic Evenings,” about the infamous 1970 Black Panther/Leonard Bernstein party), the snark is “just his taste against theirs.” I guess it’s appropriate that a film reviewer would spot that, but Denby’s passing observation made me pause and think hard.

Taste is very much an important component of snark, at least as I have seen it deployed in the online discussions that are today’s more democratic equivalent to Park Avenue cocktail parties. Taste is highly personal and notoriously hard to universalize. It’s something that enables you to know “it” when you see it, whatever “it” happens to be. I can’t find the exact quote, but a famous writer once observed that matters of taste are most loudly proclaimed by those whose sense of it is the least secure. And among those who are the most insecure in their tastes, condescension is the weapon of choice.

Condescension is the renewable energy source that powers the blogosphere’s hybrid engine. Examples abound wherever you look, from the barely-literate taunts that adhere to the bottoms of comic strip pages and YouTube videos like barnacles to the sweeping samizdats that effortlessly slay legions of straw men with nimble flicks of literary allusion. Condescension is an essential component of snark; to be snarky, we have to believe — and demonstrate (even if unconvincingly) — ourselves superior to that which has earned our derision. As a result, far too many “discussions” quickly degenerate into endless rounds of vertical flanking maneuvers, as participants try to claim the next high ground so that they can look down their noses on the people who looked down their noses on them in the previous post. Those who decry “elitism” are themselves above such behavior, naturellement.

All of which is to say that I hope that Denby touches on condescension in Snark, and I’m looking forward to reading it to find out. Like Denby, I am “all in favor of nasty comedy, incessant profanity, trash talk, any kind of satire, and certain kinds of invective.” That stuff is a lot more fun.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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