Fiction is 'That Deep' and I'm Going Swimming
Critical thinking, reviews, and a silly little thing called 'depth'.
Hello and welcome to another episode of your favourite substack, ella has thoughts™. I figure that since saying things over and over makes them feel more true, perhaps one day this will actually be someone’s favourite substack, and then I’ll finally be able to retire.
This week I had thoughts™ about critical thinking and the response “it’s not that deep!”
The argument “it’s not that deep” not only misunderstands the point of critically engaging with the media we create and consume, but also places all blame for the impact of said media on the consumer. It’s interesting to me that this is more often said in response to reviews and discussions people perceive as “negative”, because if you can be moved to tears, or find a character so relatable as to see yourself reflected in them, or become so invested in a franchise that you deck out your bedroom in merchandise and memorabilia, why is it any less real, valid, and legitimate to have a neutral or negative experience and critical discussion of the same media?
Why is “it’s not that deep” such a common response to one experience and not the other?
I can’t help but wonder if this response is at least a little rooted in the perception that critical discussions are inherently negative and emotionally driven (since “sensitivity” is a common co-accusation too), therefore seeing media as “not that deep/serious” is almost a superior moral position that only those who can emotionally regulate and see the difference between fiction and reality are able to achieve.
Which is, on its own, kind of horrible—but it’s made worse when you recognise that critical reviews and discussions on media are expected to justify or explain themselves, to back their opinions up with pulled quotes and evidence, much more so than positive reviews and discussions which often get away with saying a one-sentence tagline of very little substance: it was soooo good! It seems to me that the expectations media literate critical reviewers must fulfil in order to be taken seriously are the same expectations that end up serving as evidence of their inability or unwillingness to be “reasonable”.
Media literacy is a term that refers to the application of critical thinking to media. We use it to understand and decode messaging, the systems in which said messaging originates, and to consume and create media thoughtfully. I believe that media literacy and critical thinking are important parts of media consumption for several reasons, one being something called “media socialisation” which is defined by Genner and Süss (2016) as:
“... a process across the life span through which individuals acquire and interact with values and social standards of a specific society and culture. Media are considered a powerful agent of socialization, responsible for shaping an individual’s socialization process.”
If media helps condition us, and we create media, then a cycle exists and perpetuates whatever we put into it.
One glaring example I can think of from my own life is seeing “you throw like a girl” in a movie at school, and then hearing it parroted in the playground, and then seeing it parroted by children of the people I played with on said playground. Another is “boys will be boys”, which I saw and heard in movies and from the adults around me. Oftentimes it feels like a chicken & egg situation. Which came first?
My first attempt at writing a novel had me writing dominant alpha males who repeatedly crossed boundaries, a fact that didn’t make the MC distrust him but rather find him hotter—and even as I was writing it I knew where I’d gotten the idea, and I really felt like I had to write it that way because that’s what was popular at the time, and don’t all women want hot and controlling men? How many high school classes have I sat through analysing the ways in which advertisements and speeches and campaigns use covert and overt means of sending messages to us? How many conversations have I had with friends about relating to characters because they deal with or suffer through the same kinds of oppression, inequity, and harmful behaviour as we have?
I believe that choosing only to look at media as though it is produced in a vacuum is like viewing a blue and red 3D image and only seeing the blue, because it fails to acknowledge the wider context of history and the many forms of socialisation—what people have said and are saying both intentionally and unintentionally—and thus results in a limited view and understanding of both the text and the world it originates from. Because critical thinking isn’t just about seeing something, it’s also about asking why it’s there, and why the creator made that choice.
I don't think "Fiction" and "Reality" are as binary and purely antonymous as one might think, rather, the two are more in conversation with each other than they are counterpoints. Fiction is a means of telling us something about reality, of exploring things we don’t necessarily agree with or like in the real world.
“From my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard.” — Ursula K Le Guin
Now I’d like to introduce you to It’s Not That Deep’s brother, ‘You’re Just Looking For Problems”.
He’s seven-foot-fourteen, has skin, eyes the sky blue of green moss, likes long walks on the beach and getting caught in the rain. His favourite colour is blackish-white, and he really respects women.
Being someone who lurks through bookish spaces on social media applications such as TikTok, a reaction I’ve witnessed time and time again when it comes to less-than-favourable opinions about books has been “you’re just looking for problems”, which is sometimes paired with the whole “it’s not the deep” reply, giving us a hunky everything Bagel of Misattribution of the real problem at hand.
Is the real problem that someone may have gone looking for problems, or that there were indeed problems to be found?
When I watched Morbius (2022), I did not enter the cinema with the goal of being offended or feeling uncomfortable. However, I was uncomfortable when I found the movie to be yet another example of a particularly harmful and common narrative: disabled people who desire to fit the standard “normal” body type are punished by the story and turned into monsters, physically or metaphorically, or both. In Morbius (2022), the two disabled characters not only become blood-sucking vampire “monsters”, but one also becomes a sudden homicidal murderer the instant he’s able-bodied (or super-bodied). He becomes a not-so-disabled villain who desires revenge for his mistreatment, and truly believes the best way forward for them is to not care about the lives they take as vampires because being a serial killer is better than being disabled, right?
It may not have been the intent of the writers, but it felt like the characters’ disability was being exploited, that it was being used to explain their “evil” (not unlike Bond villains with facial differences and disfigurements), and that it was arrogant and bad of them to wish to fit the able-bodied “normal” standard, when, let’s be real, we’re literally conditioned to think that way! God forbid we actually fall for the ableist messaging we’re fed since childhood.
When I watched movies such as Bad Moms (2016), 22 Jump Street (2014), Back to the Future (1985), and Bruce Almighty (2003), which all feature “jokes” pertaining to rape and other forms of sexual assault of men, I felt uncomfortable, and my discussions of those movies reflect that. I don’t feel that in sharing “negative” experiences of certain moments in media, people are being unreasonable. I also don’t believe this is “looking too deeply” or “taking it too seriously”. In this example, these “jokes” are reflective of a very legitimate real-world issue, and as part of popular media, they are now part of the perpetual cycle of reinforcing that issue. What is the punchline, exactly?
Regardless of what the creator’s intentions were, those intentions don’t delegitimise the impact.
If you step on my toe without meaning to, you still stepped on my toe. I’m still going to think “ouch.”
Being critical in my media consumption is not setting out to be offended, it’s about approaching a body of work (be it one that I am creating, critiquing, or consuming) with an open and sensitive mind, one that looks at said media through what feels to me like a compassionate lens—compassion for myself, as well as the wider context of the world and people around me. I’m almost inclined to make the argument that critical thinking feels like “compassionate thinking”, but that feels like a very personal feeling or goal when it comes to critical thinking, and I don’t want to imply that any one way of thinking is inherently morally “better” or more valuable than another. What makes critical thinking and engagement such a priority (and a joy) for me is the knowledge that we are conditioned by the media we consume, the things we hear from our parents, friends, and wider society, and our culture, all of which contribute to our understanding of the world.
"Thinking affects social practice; it is never detached. Descriptions of the world do not rest, they do not retreat to a sociological easy chair. They are part of the commerce of the world; as they define it, they change it. Thinking is always a major strategy in the cultural battle." - Joe L. Kincheloe. “Making Critical Thinking Critical” (2000)
With all that in mind, is there any context in which “it’s just fiction” or “it’s not that deep” is a true and valid response to critical discussion?
I think that there is an undeniable interplay between the world and the people within it, and vice versa, and that critical opinions shouldn’t be received with offence and responded to with dismissal. Attempting to trivialize, shut down, or delegitimize thoughtful critique and discussion about our favourite media only minimises our ability to see and learn about the messaging we’re being fed—whether we agree with someone’s perception, identification, or interpretation of the messaging or not. These discussions should be discussions, open dialogues, and conversations with different points of view, and it doesn’t feel right to me that the response to opening a dialogue or sharing a critical opinion is to shut it down because “it doesn’t matter”.
Messages are more effective when repeated.
Seeing the same messaging (whether it’s covert or overt) in media is one way we learn to see them as “right”, and often dismiss their legitimacy, weight, seriousness, and impact. For example, the process of coming to view disabled characters as pitiable is usually invisible and covert, but it’s invisible mainly because it aligns with and upholds the view of the current dominant power system and doesn’t challenge the status quo. Pop culture uses certain kinds of representations for specific effects, and we may not want to believe that our favourite creators are out here consciously making insensitive or harmful choices —in fact, due to socialisation and messaging, it’s likely a lot of them aren’t—but that doesn’t negate the fact that those choices were made and that those choices mean something. The thief being a black man. The spice runner being Latino. The villain being disabled. To what extent does saying “it’s not that deep” not only absolve people of any responsibility to think, but also disempowers us by trying to make us think less? To see potential “problems” as non-issues?
If we come up against an opinion we don’t agree with, it’s worth interrogating why we disagree. It’s also worth interrogating our own position in relation to the discussion: Do I as a white woman have any right to deem a text “not racist”? Should able-bodied readers argue “the disability rep in this was good” if they don’t have any experience with disability? It takes a radical kind of openness to release our attachment to our own viewpoint and not rule out other people’s perspectives simply because they do not align with ours.
Another part of critical thinking is approaching ideas with the intention to understand them, not just observing the most visible surface-level truths presented.
I think truths could be exchanged for claims, here. A book may tell me a character is smart, but if they’re consistently failing to pick up on what feel to me like obvious clues, I’m no longer able to accept the surface-level “truth”. A fantastical military body at war may train its soldiers through life and death scenarios, its surface-level truth being “our training is brutal and we kill people to inspire others to perform better”, but isn’t that a waste of human labour and resources, and aren’t you shooting yourself in the foot by not training them to defend you properly and thus win the war? A female character may be strong, the surface-level truth being that she’s “empowered” and the narrative is “feminist”, but if that empowerment is only shown through a willingness to enact violence (something patriarchy values) and being endlessly desirable to all the men, is it really, actually, and truly an empowering feminist narrative? A fae woman absolves any abuse (or worse, doesn’t see the abuse) she’s suffered at the hands of her love interest with an empathetic “he was traumatised”, but does that mean I too then have to absolve the abuser of all wrongs and not question why trauma is being used as an excuse rather than an explanation, or why it’s an excuse for one character but not another?
Am I supposed to take a narrative at its word and ignore any holes, faults or contradictions in the premise or the delivery? Am I supposed to agree with what’s being said just because it’s being said? Why?
I understand some consumers’ lack of interest in applying scrutiny to what they read — and don’t get me wrong, I’ve definitely read stuff, noted it doesn’t quite hold up, and moved on. I respect the choice to do so. But I think that approach to media consumption is that: a choice, and strolling into someone’s critical review and dropping an “it’s not that deep” in the comment section feels kind of like saying “I don’t swim” to a random stranger getting their daily backstroke in at the pool. You may not swim, and you may think it’s boring as hell, but what was the point in telling them?
To begin tying up my whole swimming metaphor, I like to think of all books as pools with a shallow end and a deep end, and how and where you choose to swim is up to you.
Is there anything wrong with thinking fiction Is That Deep?
If it wasn’t already obvious, I don’t think so, but I’m open to hearing your thoughts!
I think that to think critically about a book is to recognise it as a body of work and respect it as such. This isn’t to say passively consuming it is disrespecting it, but I do want to make it clear that critical discussion about a text is not an inherent insult to it—in fact, it takes time and effort and consideration to reflect on and talk about it—whether this critical discussion is motivated by a love of the text or a dislike of it.
I don’t want to condemn passive enjoyment in fact, I think the ability to switch your brain off and relax can also be liberating, empowering, and fun, and I don't think it's wrong or unnatural at all to want to seek joy from media. However, critically thinking about media is just as valid, and is also a source of joy for many! I find it endlessly interesting to hear and read other people’s points of view on media we’ve both consumed—we each come to media criticism with our own lenses, and there’s something extremely beautiful in the sharing of those lenses.
Fiction is a safe place to explore things we don’t necessarily like and want in real life. I do believe that readers are capable of separating reality from fiction and knowing the difference between the two, and as I mentioned earlier, I believe the two are in constant conversation with each other.
I’ve seen tiktoks of people leaving abusive partners and starting to go to the gym after reading a book that featured a toxic relationship and an arc of physical training — why is it so unrealistic to think that if people can be influenced by fiction to do something positive, they can’t also be negatively influenced?
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” - Ursula K Le Guin
To conclude, in my opinion, fiction is that deep.
Fun fact about me, though? I don’t like swimming.
Let me know what you think! Also, if you see a seven-foot-fourteen man with eyes the sky blue of green moss, he peed in my pool and owes me $34,000 in legal fees. Thanks!