James Mangold is Wrong. We Need Irony Now More Than Ever
Before we get started… I have a book coming out in August. It’s the book of my heart, and I’d be so grateful if you pre-ordered it. Lessons in Magic and Disaster is about a trans woman who teaches her mother to be a witch. And about the mother’s past as a queer activist in the 1990s, and how she created her own queer family. And about a mysterious novel from 1747 that hints at a long-buried scandal. It’s got magic and dark academia and love and grief and healing. You can get it anywhere, but if you want a signed/personalized copy, get it from Green Apple.
Also, this Saturday, I’m hosting another Trans Nerd Meet Up at Zeitgeist on Valencia St in SF. It goes from 12:30 until whenever.
Actually, James Mangold is right about a lot. Just not about irony
The other day, director James Mangold (A Complete Unknown) was accepting a Trailblazer Award at the Sundance film festival, and he called for more overt emotion in movies. He started out talking about how he goes to Sundance looking for films that move him, and then added:
Most of my artistic generation, my peers, have been generally fascinated by irony, by detachment. That’s kind of the world of independent film I came up in: post-modern intellectual constructions. And I never felt completely at home in that idiom, because I found those things generally really cool and clever, but not necessarily moving.
So I looked for films from past decades, prior to our current time, where earnestness… had not become uncool… movies that put their feelings on the line, that wear their hearts on their sleeves, move me. And we’ve become slightly hostile, sometimes, to movies like that. The way we talk about them, the way we use words like “melodramatic,” or “chewing up the scenery,” or “too much.” …
In this time of irony and snark and internet nightmares, we need sincerity and earnestness more than ever. That doesn’t mean that every film has to be a history lesson, or depressing, or weepy, or political, or provocative, or wear its issues on its sleeve. It just means that we shouldn’t be embarrassed to feel shit and show it.
Needless to say, I mostly agree with Mangold — my whole creative trajectory as a writer has been toward putting more emotion into my work, even at the risk of seeming too sappy or over the top. I live for that shit.
Here’s his speech in full:
Still, I found it interesting that Mangold pitted irony against feeling. I feel like this is a false dichotomy that’ll lead us down a bad path.
I actually wrote a whole essay about how irony and strong emotions can go hand in hand and strengthen each other, which became a chapter in my book Never Say You Can’t Survive.
The notion that irony means disdaining powerful and sincere emotion feels like it relies on a very limited definition of irony. As I explain in the essay linked above, irony isn’t just a means of stripping meaning from anything — it can also be an exercise in juxtaposition, to reveal the truth rather than saying there is no truth.
In the 1990s, everyone was super upset about irony
In any case, Mangold’s speech sent me down the rabbit hole, especially the part where he references the world of independent film that he came up in. Mangold got his start in the 1990s with movies like Heavy and Girl, Interrupted, during a time when the role of irony in cinema was being hotly debated.
The rabbit hole I went down led me to this fascinating essay in Screen by Northwestern University professor Jeffrey Sconce, about “Irony, nihilism and the new American ‘smart’ film.” Sconce talks about a whole wave of 1990s directors who brought an ironic, detached sensibility to film, experimenting with tone rather than with structure or style “as a means of critiquing ‘bourgeois’ taste and culture.”
Sconce talks a lot about Todd Solondz, Neil LaBute, Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and a host of other hot new 1990s directors. He observes that where art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s was concerned with power relations and corrupt institutions, the 1990s “smart cinema” was mostly “concentrating, often with ironic disdain, on the ‘personal politics’ of power, communication, emotional dysfunction and identity in white middle-class culture.” Rather like a lot of literary fiction of the era, in fact.
I like a lot of the films that Sconce is talking about here, though it’s fair to say that Solondz and LaBute were making sadistic films that showcased the worst of human behavior. I have no idea how well a lot of these 1990s films would hold up, though I think Rushmore would probably be still pretty great.
And in these films’ defense, Sconce rejects the notion that their irony meant that they were “apolitical” or “amoral.” He insists that behind their posture of disaffection, “many of these films are extremely politicized and even rather moralistic.”
(It wasn’t just films. Sconce references Gen-X memes, plus popular TV shows like Seinfeld, Beavis & Butthead, Mystery Science Theater 3000. But if there’s a reference to Alanis Morissette, I missed it.)
Anyway! There was a huge backlash to this wave of irony. Sconce starts out by quoting a rather histrionic 1998 essay by Kenneth Turan in the L.A. Times. Turan manages to compare the films of Solondz and LaBute to Piss Christ, the popularity of “extreme sports,” comedian Sandra Bernhard, and the invention of the atomic bomb. It’s… a lot. As far back as 1989, Spy Magazine warned about “the Irony Epidemic” in popular culture.
This all feels relevant to the world of 2025 in a whole new way, because Sconce goes on to link the debate over irony to the Culture War, which has since grown to devour all of reality.
Begun, the Culture War has!
As Sconce explains, a lot of the early Culture War rhetoric warned about moral relativism. Good Christians believe in unshakable moral values, but elite secular humanists believe that everything is up for grabs. And the “Irony Epidemic” came to be seen as a severe symptom of this moral decay, because one (limited, dumbed-down) version of irony is that nothing means anything.
Writing in Salon in September 2001, David Beers says:
Clearly irony is a vague enough concept to have been freighted with a wide collection of negative connotations. The word seems to represent, in the current public discourse, the nihilistic shrug of an irritatingly shallow smartass… Somehow, irony has come to be a handy shorthand for moral relativism and self-absorption, for consuming all that is puerile while considering oneself too hip to be implicated in the supply and demand economics of schlock. With numb and glib.
If any of this does bespeak a kind of ironic stance, it is one of severe ironic detachment.
You might have noticed the words “September 2001” above. Yeah, about that...
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the angry debate over irony in pop culture reached a fever pitch. Vanity Fair editor (and Spy co-founder) Graydon Carter proclaimed that “There’s going to be a seismic trend. I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” Writing in Time Magazine, Roger Rosenblatt said that American intellectuals had “insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously… The ironists, seeing through everything, made it difficult for anyone to see anything.” For the good of the nation, we had to abolish irony! (Isn’t that ironic?)
Back in the fall of 2001, I remember feeling as though these condemnations of irony were aimed at preventing us from stopping to think. Our country was responding to a horrific attack by rushing into a host of foolhardy decisions, including two evil, pointless wars, and the only way to be patriotic was to turn your brain off entirely.
Beers, in his excellent Salon essay, said something similar:
I’m happy to join in the chorus of goodbyes to the über-smartass, the kind of "ironist" so detached that heart and head were all but amputated.
Which, hopefully, now opens the way to a golden age of irony. The real stuff. The kind of irony that drove Socrates' queries, the irony that lies at the heart of much great literature and great religion, the irony that pays attention to contradictions and embraces paradoxes, rather than wishing them away in an orgy of purpose and certainty.
A proper sense of irony that looks at the disconnect between what you expect and what you get, Beers writes, might note America’s history of imperialism against the Islamic world. It might also point to the danger of civil liberties being taken away, and of war-mongering that could (and did) end up making the world a less safe place.
In other words, after 9/11, we needed irony more, not less. We just didn’t need the weak parody of irony that people complained about — that unfeeling, meaningless snark.
Irony is what we need right now
Which brings us back to the present, and Mangold’s complaint that too much current cinema is “fascinated by irony [and] detachment.” If you see the war on irony as a subset of the Culture War — and Sconce’s essay convinced me that’s a super valid way to see it — then this statement makes me nervous.
We’re once again in a moment where we’re being encouraged (or bullied) to turn off our brains and to distrust intellectualism and elite sensibilities. Once again, fear-mongering is driving public policy. At the same time, Mangold is correct that “internet snark” has cornered the market on cheap irony, the kind that insists that nothing means anything and therefore you can say the most awful things with no consequences.
At the same time, Beers was right: we need the real kind of irony — the kind that points out the disconnect between what people say and what they do. The kind that points out the unintended (or maybe secretly-intended) consequences of people’s actions. The kind that skewers hypocrisy but also reveals the things that really do matter.
So I hope that everyone listens to Mangold, and we get more unabashed displays of emotion in cinema. (I would especially love to see more straight white men crying on screen, please and thank you.) But I hope that we also get a new flowering of irony in its truest form. Some of my favorite recent films have had no problem delivering both of those things. Take Anora, for example: the final scene is emotionally devastating, but that film also packs plenty of ironic reversals that point to the true nature of power and privilege. I’d also point to I Saw the TV Glow as a film that’s dripping with emotion and suffused with irony.
Let’s give a shit. And let’s critique shit. We can do both!
Music I Love Right Now
Keziah Jones is a Nigerian musician who plays a style of music he calls “Blufunk.” I figure that means a blend of blues and funk, but I’ve always heard a lot of folk influences in his music. He blends acoustic and electric guitar styles together in a way that layers a lot of lyricism over a really crunchy dense groove. Anyway, he’s just put out a new live album called Alive & Kicking, which was mostly recorded at Clout Africa Studio in Lagos.
My only real complaint is that he doesn’t include any songs from his most recent studio album, 2013’s Captain Rugged, which I love dearly. Alive & Kicking also includes a few new studio songs, which I like a lot so far.
All in all, though, Alive & Kicking makes for a great introduction to Keziah Jones’ music — and a crash course in why he’s one of my fav artists. He includes a lot of the most excellent songs from his back catalog, including “The Wisdom Behind the Smile (Cash),” “A Million Miles from Home,” and “Afrosurrealismfortheladies”. There’s also a spiky song called “1973” about the nairu, Nigeria’s national currency, and the issues with it.
The guitars play loose soulful chords and twisty melodies over tight, pocket-heavy drums and bass, and a lot of these songs have new breaks or solo sections that weren’t part of the studio versions. All in all, it’s just utterly gorgeous. It ends with Jones’ blistering version of a Rick James song he’s been covering in concert for years, “Below the Funk (Pass the J)”. I strongly encourage you to hunt down a copy of Alive & Kicking if you need some sharp songwriting and virtuoso guitar playing in your life.