It’s speaking in a baby voice.

It’s the tedious discussion over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie.

It’s the Duolingo owl telling you that by not practising, you made them sad.

It’s Instagram serving you an ad for “Fuck the Tories” earrings to buy.

It’s this Weetabix ad:

All of these things are variations on a theme that’s all around us right now, from Adrian Chiles’s headlines (“Dear Santa, please bring back the plastic lids on yoghurt pots”) to established journalists on podcasts answering questions with “Because reasons”, to the woman in that video on twitter who talks herself into a rage over the foil-to-paper change in Quality Street wrappers. (I don’t have twitter anymore but maybe someone can supply the link).

It’s all a bit twee, and current discourse — about anything: pop, property prices, politics — is inundated with it. Once you start noticing it, you’ll see that it’s everywhere. And you, like me, may find it increasingly grating.

That’s because I believe it’s more than an affectation or short-lived fashion. It may actually be at the heart of a contemporary mode of being that gives us permission to disengage with the world while feeling switched-on as hell. But I’ll come to that. First, let me try to define what this twee thing is:

Twee and Reverse-Twee

At the core of twee discourse is an element of acting dumber or more naïve than you are, or simplifying complex things against your better judgement. It’s always used for effect (though I believe that people often aren’t aware they’re doing it). The purest example of Twee is somebody speaking in a baby voice, either to appear more naïve than they are, or to belittle the person they’re talking to.

But there’s also the opposite — “reverse-twee”, if you like. When something simple or someone naïve is presented as complex. Think of the (frequently parodied) parents claiming their toddlers spontaneously spouted profound wisdom. Or the American influencer posting a video of her precocious 5-year old daughter rolling her eyes and delivering a jaded “I really can’t do drama today”.

Twee’s effect works best when it’s juxtaposed to something that’s considered extremely serious — like war, or workers’ rights (think “crywank”). But because the speaker usually doesn’t want to come across as disrespectful to noble causes, they elevate them to an extreme level of abstraction. The most recent example of this that I saw was a man on a dating app whose profile said he was “fighting Capitalism whenever I can”. (It was, I’m not even joking, underneath a picture of him and his mates in Brewdog).

Of course, the category jump from banal to serious or vice versa is a common comic device, and it doesn’t have to be Twee. The formula just works really well as the punchline in a joke. For example, someone who’s known for their posts about psychology recently tweeted “I’m asking for privacy during this difficult time because I’ve just started rewatching the entirety of Grey’s anatomy”.

It’s also a reliable rule-of-three (or more) kicker, like in this poster, which you can find in the ladies’ loos at the Prince Charles Cinema:

While this is not necessarily Twee, it’s definitely Twee-adjacent. It might make you smile or it might make you think a little less of the PCC’s comms style (I just find it a bit cheap) — but that’s ultimately a question of personal taste, and not why I’m writing this essay at all.

Twee Discourse “gestures broadly at everything”

I’m writing it because this is also feels distinctly Twee: Elevating a simple matter of taste (often on a pop culture phenomenon) to the status of a serious debate and creating a mock controversy around it. For example: I have a good friend and fellow good-food-enthusiast who I love dearly and respect immensely; but whose earnest attempt to start a discussion over her thesis that “lemon juice is the only acceptable topping for pancakes” left me puzzled and questioning the common ground I’d always assumed we had. See also eternal tweets about “jam or cream first” on a scone. Of course we can talk about this for a bit, but I just don’t see what else there is to say after everyone has stated their preference. This is simply not the stuff of debates.

I understand if you’re reading this and thinking I’m being unnecessarily weird about something that’s really quite harmless.

But I don’t think it’s harmless. The individual occurrence, e.g my chat with my mate is harmless (though tedious), yes. But it’s everywhere. Twee is being commodified, like in the Weetabix ad above. And even in the existence of “Fuck the Tories” jewellery that I can buy off Instagram.

Still, you might argue, you don’t have to buy it, and you don’t have to talk that way, or about these things. Agreed. But the abundance of Twee in everyday, in pop culture, and even in political discourse enables a mechanism that feels dangerous: it gives us permission to dismiss difficult moral, political, social issues for the sake of effect (“gestures broadly at everything”). We end up talking about broad-stroke themes (“Capitalism”; “The patriarchy”) without specifics, making them sound overwhelming and ultimately unchangeable for us. This is not angry or subversive. It’s complacent.

And: it deflects serious discourse in favour of a banality. By “debating” the correct order of scone toppings we feel that we’re deeply engaged in relevant discourse while discussing simple matters of taste, instead of complex matters of value.

This extends to MPs losing their shit over Easter eggs appearing in shops right after Christmas — but also to topics where I personally believe we can’t afford to do this: like when a huge amount of discourse about Luigi Mangione, the man who shot the CEO of United Healthcare, was about “how hot” he was, thereby implicitly applauding the fact that he had killed a man.

I’m not writing this to point fingers at anyone. I’m guilty of twee-posting as much as anyone. I’m just trying to understand. I wonder if the Cultural Studies programmes of the early 2000s are to blame? It was an amazing time to be a humanities student, because anything could be your subject. I wrote literature papers on Michael Almeyda’s Hamlet, discussed De La Soul’s similes in seminars on Postmodern American poetry, and quoted the Simpsons everywhere. Don’t get me wrong: l believe that it was hugely important that academia opened up to pop culture. It acknowledged that pop culture is a carrier of meaning, values and attitudes. But a side effect of this was that it made people think that literally everything was worthy of serious discussion and dedication — including sneakers and pancakes. And I really don’t think we can afford to do that right now.

I just finished Le Perfezioni, a short novel by Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico, who, like the novel’s protagonists, is based in Berlin. I read it on the recommendation of Ryan Ruby (@ryanruby), who you should follow for his literary criticism, if you like your literary criticism astute and thorough and witty. (For starters, you could look up his review of Ian McEwan’s latest novel “Lessons”).

I really enjoyed Le Perfezioni, but I don’t share Ryan’s enthusiasm. Not because of its subject matter. It’s a novel about a time and a place and a certain type of people in it. Tom and Anna are a couple in their 20s who have moved to Berlin from what I assume is Italy (I’m not sure the Southern country is actually ever specified). They live the Berlin expat life of the 2010s. They work in creative jobs, go to art shows with other expats, attend sex parties they find intriguing and never actually go through with any of the opportunities they find there. It’s definitely a “Berlin novel” if ever there was one, about what’s more or less my generation, and there were plenty of moments of recognition for me, regarding working in a commercial creative job, and being an expat (I’m a native German based in London, I work as a copywriter, I spend a lot of time in Berlin).

But it left me oddly dissatisfied. Despite its sharp prose, the cinematic quality of its images and its spot-on observations, the novel denies its reader the pleasures many of us go to fiction for. Often, its narrative stance and make it feel not like a novel and more like a sociocultural and -economic stocktake by a less-than-benevolent analyst.

This is largely down to a narrator who isn’t interested in his characters as people. Tom and Anna only exist as a couple, not as individuals. They‘re an indistinguishable unit: freelancers in a graphic design/web development job (it remains unclear who does which or if both do both), who do everything together. Work on the same projects, go the same places, share the same circle of friends, eat the same things, take the same drugs, feel the same way about the sex parties they attend.

But it’s not really a story about coupledom, either. It’s a novel about a demographic segment that finds itself in its generation-defining moment — where life feels good because it revolves around being in the right place and behaving in the right way, surrounded by the plants and crockery that are currently fashionable. “Tom and Anna” are representatives of a certain generation of foreign-born, reasonably well-educated twenty- and thirtysomethings who live in Berlin by choice. It’s a demographic that is relatively specific and niche, but presented as a homogeneous group that fills its days with the same activities. Until they don’t, and fall pregnant, become lecturers in Wuppertal, or go back home to a country where they can navigate the health system.

Latronico makes a point of introducing the couple via precise images of the spaces they occupy — the plant-filled apartment in an Art Nouveau building, the restaurants they frequent, the trips financed by the money they make Airbnb-ing their flat. While Tom and Anna are defined by their location (and the conventions and fashions of the particular time and place), they soon lose the initial safety of being in exactly the right time and place — and start to look for new places that can define them. Images play a key role here — the images they share on social media, the ads of their flat on Airbnb, the graphic designs and website layouts they create for their clients.

Their tragedy arises from the fact that they’re ultimately unable to shape the locations they’ve chosen, contribute meaningfully, or exert any influence — beyond the regurgitation of the dominant styles, fashions, and conventions. They rely on pre-existing networks and structures, and the functioning of the rulebook they know. As the novel develops beyond its initial state of bliss, the couple’s circumstances become increasingly less-than-ideal: a lack of language skills stops them from becoming more deeply involved in refugee aid initiatives (there’s a poignant moment when the stylish phrasebook they designed for the newcomers remains untouched: all the refugees use their phones to look up necessary vocabulary instead); a lucrative contract is cut short half-way by the client; a temporary move to Lisbon makes them painfully aware of their lack of a local network; plans to create a Berlin-like atmosphere in a remote part of Italy fail because the place has already been claimed by the luxury tourism industry. In short, there’s always something not quite right (that’s what I take the title to mean: their desire to optimise, to perfect their lives), and Tom and Anna’s inability to adjust, evolve, or create something new leaves them increasingly unhappy and restless. And increasingly, while they’re able to continue to produce images that make their lives look enviable, they start to sense the discrepancy between appearances and what that life feels like. They grow dissatisfied and start to feel like frauds. Their images have become clickbait.

The novel’s observations about that slice of life felt spot-on. I recognise that city, I know people like that, I “felt seen” to some extent. And yet, I found it somewhat grating: while the narrator analyses Tom and Anna’s life situation and growing sense of unease, they leave plenty of ambiguity around how aware the couple are of the root causes themselves — beyond a general dissatisfaction and desire for change which sets in in chapter 2. And that leaves us with a narrative voice who I couldn’t help but feel was claiming all the smarts while not having a ton of sympathy for the clueless pawns they’d created.

There is something disingenuous about presenting the reader with schematic undifferentiated characters and a narrative stance that denies them individuality and an inner life — and then building a narrative around the fact that their lives are characterised by a sophisticated superficiality. If I can only know them through the narrator’s lens, then, I feel, surely that lens can’t give me both the skewed data and the analysis based on it. There was whiff of sociology study about it that felt old-fashioned, agenda-driven and patronising to me.

The reason for that may be that, as Latronico mentions in his postscript, the book was inspired by Les Choses by Georges Perec, known in English as “Things — a Story of the Sixties.” I haven’t read that book but a quick bit of online research reveals that Le Perfezioni takes its formal structure and a lot of its themes from that book (both are split into 4 chapters named after grammatical tenses, treat the couple at the center as unit, etc). In both books, the couples work in the fashionable field of their time (market research/opinion polling and graphic/web design). The “things” that motivate Perec’s characters are replaced by the “images” that take center stage in Anna and Tom’s lives. According to Wikipedia, Perec’s “the story ends abruptly with a pessimistic view of their future happiness” and “the epilogue concludes with a quote from Karl Marx on the means and ends of searching for truth and meaning.”

Latronico’s book ends differently, and, without wanting to give anything away, depending on how you read the novel, you’ll form your own judgement on whether it’s a happy or pessimistic ending. I suspect Latronico intended the latter — but that might be because, despite enjoying it, and recognising its world, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat lectured by this book.

As I’m writing this, it’s 5pm on Thursday afternoon. The results of the Sight & Sound 100 Best Films poll are due to be announced at 7pm tonight. And I’m actively trying to avoid the discourse on Twitter. All the talk, build-up, and speculation about this decade’s “definitive list”: I find it actively annoying. So I decided to try and articulate why this revived interest in canon definition feels so odd to me, and especially in this day and age. Here we go:

1. The desperate desire for consensus. Twitter may be the place where this is most pronounced, but it’s all around us. This world is obsessed with “the hot take”. We love to throw out unpopular opinions and create some good old controversy. And it feels so odd that all of a sudden people are so desperate to find some sort of centre ground that will connect them around a selection of films that everyone agrees is fantastic. Does that mean that all this hot-takeism is merely performative?

2. Even inclusive canons are exclusive. Lists like “The 100 best films” are meant to establish a canon of films that are worth seeing. That are objectively good. By definition, such an exercise will exclude marginal voices. And make the films that have been excluded marginal by definition.

A film critic friend of mine object to this argument by saying that while the last couple of times the poll was done, the list looked more or less the same — because the poll had been sent to old white men — this one would be interesting as the group of people that have been asked to contribute is so much more diverse. This time around, there are so many more women included, so many more people of colour, so many more LGBTQI people, different cultures and age groups. So, he said, we might be in for a surprise.

Call me a cynic but I doubt that.

I still find it hard to hard to see how the people who are now in a position to be asked by Sight & Sound to contribute, haven’t been brought up on the previous canon. What the people before them judged to be good will have shaped the way they think about films. It will take generations to erase that legacy.

3. It’s not even about the canon. So far, the discourse hasn’t really felt like an exercise in redefining that list (This might change after publication, to be fair). Instead, each person’s selection (that they’re all dying to share on twitter) says more about the compiler of the list than it says about film history.

It’s an expression of personal preference. I get that. And it’s fine. It’s a way of saying “I’m the sort of person who likes these films”; “watch these films if you want to understand who I am”; or even “This is the sort of person I like to think of myself as being”. But while this works well on a personal level — or even if were looking for people whose taste in films I’ll share — it doesn’t work collectively. And from looking at many people on Film Twitter, their interest in the poll seemed to be less driven by a desire to listen, discover, and potentially expand their film knowledge, and more by an opportunity to talk about themselves and their own selection. That’s not collective canon re-definition.

4. I don’t get this weird obsession with ranking things. Of course, I’m not saying that canons are completely useless. If you’re new to film, or maybe beginning to study film, and you’re looking for some sort of guidance as to which films you should watch to educate yourself and train your eye, then it does make sense to have a bunch of films to point people to. That will help them see what different genres and variations there are, and what good acting looks like, and editing techniques and directing styles etc.

But if you’re going to submit the 10 greatest films of all time, or the 100 greatest films of all time, why is it so important to people that we rank them? That we have a best film of all time, that we have a number five, and a number 50? I really don’t understand the reasoning behind that. Again, it comes down to why what why does any film make it to number one? It will be because it’s a self perpetuating prophecy, isn’t it? The more people have seen a film, and rated highly, the more people will talk about this film at the expense of other films that they haven’t seen. And they will rewatch Citizen Kane again and again and it will keep ending up at number one. Or it might end up at number five, but why does that matter? Why is that so important?

Let’s posit that we can agree on 100 films that should be on that list. Depending on whether you’ve seen a film in your 20s or your 40s or your 60s, it will impact you differently. You might appreciate it for entirely different reasons. Ranking them feels like such an unnecessary exercise — because it only makes sense if you look at a piece of art in depth — not when you just list its title on a page. Give me a selection of five horror films and ask me to rank them. I can do that, no problem. I’ll come up with my own reasoning for ranking them in a particular order. I’ll come up with a logic, and I’ll explain how I made my decision. But then the interesting thing about that will be the reasoning. It won’t be the ranking itself. A number means nothing without context.

It’s almost 7pm. Sorry for the braindump and not-very-tight editing. But I wanted to publish this before the big reveal. Think I might watch the football tonight instead.

I’ve been out of uni for a long time, so forgive me if this is somewhat outdated, but: when I did my degree, cultural studies was everywhere. It translated into film and literary studies by complementing close readings with psychoanalytical takes, post-colonial takes, queer takes etc.

The general idea — and I’m massively simplifying here — is that there are underlying forces at work in any text or work of art that these approaches will expose. And they’ll tell us something about the social and cultural and power dynamics, assumptions and norms within which the work of art was created. And which may still in large part shape our perceptions. And that’s worth thinking about, and it’ll help us challenge our own assumptions, and ideas of normativity, as well as the discursive forces inscribed into the work of art (deliberately or not), and see the work, the world, and ourselves as recipients of the artwork, in a new way. So far, so good.

And indeed for me, the most interesting part of doing film and literary studies was when I’d read an article on a work I was studying that opened my eyes to something I hadn’t seen. And because I’m a white heterosexual cis woman who was privileged enough to go to uni and study film and literature, there was a lot that my life experience had stopped me from seeing (for instance that I was a white heterosexual cis woman who was privileged enough to go to uni to study literature, etc). I’m grateful for that. And so I’m not saying that the cultural studies approach, or the psychoanalytical approach to film studies is useless, or invalid, or anything like that.

What I am saying is: sometimes, it’s so self-referential that it loses its connection to the subject it’s supposed to enlighten.

The cultural studies approach is one that, when done badly, can become utterly recursive and self-perpetuating. One that approaches works of art with fixed ideas of what it’ll find in them (e.g. misogyny, heteronormativity, incestuous desires, colonial othering, etc).

There are, of course, good examples of the genre, that genuinely make the lightbulb above your head go bing. But the bad ones make it really hard to take the entire analysis seriously. One of the prime examples I remember that made me go “oh come on!!!” at the time was a psychoanalytical reading of Hitchcock’s Psycho that tried to establish a connection of the film to Freud’s theory of the anal phase of childhood development. Because the crime is like faeces that must be expelled. Because Hitchcock had chosen a license plate for the car that has an “O” in the middle, which makes it look like an anus. Because the car ends up in a swamp, which is like a big loo. There were more examples. These are the ones I remember. (I know I’m doing the article injustice by quoting it from memory. If you recognise it from this description, please point me to the essay. I might be misremembering this. But I still know on which shelf in my uni’s library the book lived).

This felt ridiculous. It seemed to want to show that Hitchcock had neatly inscribed Freud’s theory into his film (by using some clunky-ass, excuse the pun, symbolism), deliberately, or not. But that didn’t really help me understand Psycho, or Norman Bates, in a new way. Let’s face it, a psychoanalytical reading of a film called “Psycho” isn’t exactly the hottest of takes. And surely, the reason we’re doing a psychoanalytical reading of a film is because we want to understand the film better, not merely see it as another instantiation of, or proof for, a framework outside it.

Ignoring Stella Dallas

That was a bit of a long preamble for what triggered me to write this in the first place. Here it comes:

I’ve only recently watched the glorious Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas for the first time. I was blown away by her performance in it (and the blast she seemed to be having playing Stella), and the nuanced storytelling. It made me want to read up on the film.

And I found something in an essay that I’ve come to detest. It’s a writing style in film criticism, and in academic writing on film, that tries to get away with the most tenuous connections and allusions to meaning — and this seems to happen a lot in readings that lean on psychoanalysis. Here’s a page from it:

If you don’t know it, Stella Dallas is the story of a loud, ambitious, up-for-fun and slightly manipulative working-class woman who marries Stephen, a rich-then-poor-then-rich-again, uptight, not-so-fun and very proper man, has a daughter with him, and soon finds out that they’re a terrible match. They eventually separate, reasonably amicably. She wants the best for her daughter Laurel, who loves her mother but has her father’s temperament and sense of decorum, and ends up living with him and his new wife. The film ends with Stella in a crowd of onlookers, standing in the rain outside their house, watching the grown Laurel’s society wedding through a window. She walks away, with both tears and a smile on her face.

Just from this synopsis alone, you can tell that the film negotiates some hefty themes. From “what’s expected of a woman and a man in a relationship?”; to “how are these expectations and behaviours handed down and perpetuated over generations?”; “what makes a relationship successful?”; ”can it work across class divides?”; is it wrong for a woman in 1937 to want to be more than a wife and mother — and be fully aware of it?”; “is it immoral to be up for a laugh?”; “what does sacrifice mean — in marriage and motherhood?”; (and what, exactly, is Sasparilla?).

But back to what bugs me about the psychoanalytical reading above. While the film starts with a domestic scene involving Stella and her brother (she’s expected to make his lunch as he’s off to work in the mill), there is really, in my reading of it anyway, no suggestion of an incestuous relationship between them; nor is there between Stella and her father, or Laurel and Stephen. “Aha!”, you might say, “that’s exactly why the ‘prism of incest’ might provide a useful lens that could uncover underlying dynamics in the story”. And you might be right. But for me, this sort of reading has the opposite effect. It feels tenuous — and utterly beside the point. Because, instead of diving head-first into one, or several, of the rich themes that the film offers, it chooses to talk about something else. That’s like when someone gets up during an audience Q&A, says “this is more of a comment than a question”, and starts talking about their gap year.

Because seriously, isn’t this all a bit much? The brother’s dirty hands alluding to incest? What are the hands of a mill worker supposed to look like? If they were clean, would that make him someone who shuns work? Or someone who puts excessive emphasis on his appearance? Asking the question “what is sibling play fighting?” without anything deeper to back up the insinuation feels like a prime example of gaslighting. And so is implying that “come on to your uncle Ed” is a prescient anticipation of future language usage — while admitting that this is an after-the-fact take. Even the expression “uncle Ed” becomes charged with implications of incest. I have a godson who calls me “auntie Irene” — does that make me a paedophile?

All of these examples work on the same principle: imply some dodgy subtext, admit it isn’t really there, and walk away from the argument having half-retracted your take but left a lingering aftertaste. A bit like accusing your partner of something they did in one of your dreams.

And that just doesn’t feel good enough, because it’s not really engaging with what’s there. And that’s a shame because I don’t fundamentally disagree: there’s a lot there that makes the uncle Ed character dodgy, without having to imply incest. He’s a jolly, and un-subtle, loud alcoholic — an interesting contrast to the loud-and-lively, but Sasparilla-drinking Stella. Both of them behave in ways that are frowned upon by Stephen and others — but neither of them are ever unkind. And indeed, the scene in which Stella encourages teenage Laurel to change into a new dress in front of uncle Ed is deeply uncomfortable — it’s uncomfortable because Laurel is embarrassed while Stella is not. There’s a deep divide in class, and sentiment, and sense of propriety between Laurel/Stephen and Stella/Ed at this point in the film, which can’t be bridged anymore. This is all stuff that’s there, and interesting, and done with great subtlety.

The “lens of incest” is the opposite of subtle. In my mind, it does nothing to add any interesting layers of meaning to this. All it seems to do to me, is create a self-referential spin-off analysis based on flimsy arguments that don’t open my eyes to anything — except the fact that there are people who like to spot incest everywhere. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And interestingly, the way this is written even seems to acknowledge that it’s all a bit of a game (and wouldn’t work on less “robust” films).

So why am I so upset about this? Maybe it’s because it’s always been hard to find truly insightful writing on film, and about specific films in particular. Maybe because the quality of academic writing on film isn’t generally that good. Maybe because, if all the low-hanging analytical fruit had already been picked, it’d feel less outrageous. As it is, it feels like a dreadful waste of good brainpower to go off on a tangent and put all your energy into spotting incest in Stella Dallas when pretty much all the other big topics that have shaped relationships in the 20th century, and beyond, are right there. And when we could really do with some quality writing about that.

To be clear: I don’t mean to knock the quality of Andrew Klevan’s article or book here. It’s full of detailed observations about Stella Dallas and Stanwyck’s performance. I personally just don’t feel the ‘lens of incest’ is one of them.