There’s a first time for everything. For all the other books, albums, games, episodes, singles, shows, and movies I’ve reviewed for this blog, I have always finished them. I feel like I owe it to you and to myself to be as informed as possible about whatever it is I’m discussing. Cutting corners feels like it would be cheating. Maybe it’s OK to “cheat” once in a while.
Truth be told, I suppose this is not the kind of book one reads from cover to cover. It’s a collection of essays from the author and it spans 1946 to 1954. He died in 1955 and the original edition of the text dates to 1962. I wish I could tell you where and when I added it to my reading list. I can at least tell you why I did so. I was excited about the idea of reading a book about pop culture commentary from well before such a practice became commonplace. My impression when I learned about the book was that Warshow was one of the first to treat pop cultural artifacts with the respect they deserved. I took that to mean he was a fellow nerd. That he would have made a fanzine about comics or movies if he could have.
That’s not the case.
Turns out Warshow was an accomplished writer who just happened to focus his lens on the stage and the screen as well as the panels and gutters of the Sunday funnies. Even though The Immediate Experience is not what I thought I was signing up for, I’m still glad to have engaged with it. I do plan to finish it, mind you!
Let’s start with a searing riff on the kind of pieces Warshow sees when he reads The New Yorker. He begins a review of E.B. White’s The Wild Flag (itself a collection of essays!) by claiming, “The New Yorker at its best provides the intelligent and cultured college graduate with the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict.” He then goes on to write, “The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.” Can you imagine writing like that? It’s a dream of mine. That must be why I closed the book and went to sleep upon reading it. After having struggled through the author’s preface and the first essay on “The Legacy of the ‘30s” in film and culture, I was not sure this book would be for me. It was like I had given myself homework and I wasn’t liking it. The scintillating brilliance of Warshow’s words on White forced me to shut my eyes lest I go blind.
I’m in no position to evaluate the truth value of his claim about what The New Yorker was publishing at the time. All the same, I’m able to recognize an accurate diagnosis. There is value in having the “right” opinion or attitude to have about a text borne not of engagement with it, but from consulting with trusted sources who may also not have engaged with it. Warshow is recognizing the bullshit artist by calling out the tricks of his trade. The idea of feeling “intelligent without thinking” (p. 75) is exactly what generative artificial intelligence’s large language models aim to do. To have the “right” take without any insight into why it is correct.
Reading and re-reading the opening paragraphs of that essay was enough to motivate me hundreds of pages further into the book. I have little to no background knowledge of the media environment Warshow inhabited and he does not always do a great job of giving me as a reader enough information on the topics or subjects he’s discussing. That’s where my struggle to enjoy the text came from. I simply hadn’t seen (or read) the movies or plays he was analyzing. He did not give even a cursory summary of their plot or themes. I resigned myself to not being able to fully grasp the meaning of each essay while also being on the hunt for passages that might catch my attention in other ways. I cringe to think of what Warshow would say about how I’m reading him.
Those who have read theories of reading surely know about Rosenblatt’s (1978) aesthetic and efferent stances toward a text. To oversimplify it, you are either reading to enjoy a text or to learn from it. Hold on, that’s too simple. You are likely somewhere between those two extremes when you read. When I select books to read for fun, I can calibrate my expectations based on those two factors. I incorrectly assumed that Warshow’s collected essays would provide a helpful framework for reading comics or watching movies in a new way; I had an efferent stance. Instead, I am finding that I am enjoying the writing as writing; I have switched to an aesthetic stance. I don’t need to make a list of all of the movies, plays, and comics he’s discussing and then go to the library and chase footnotes until I go dizzy. I don’t need to know every fact about every cultural artifact that has even existed. That’s OK. My goals as a reader can be modest.
As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I am taking some of Warshow’s insights in a different direction than he could have imagined. Take this one from an essay on Westerns and gangster films. In contrast to the heroes of Westerns, Warshow writes that “The gangster is lonely and melancholy, and can give the impression of a profound worldly wisdom. He appeals most to adolescents with their impatience and their feeling of being outsiders, but more generally he appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the ‘normal’ possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the ‘no’ to that great American ‘yes’ which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives” (p. 106). The way Warshow connects “the impression of a profound worldly wisdom” to adolescent impatience rings true. It’s another way of understanding the appeal of genAI LLMs, especially for gangsters such as the U.S. president—the kind of person who takes shortcuts to success and makes the rest of us suffer for the damage he leaves in his wake.
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