Klosterman & Me
The first thing I’ve ever read by Chuck Klosterman was his essay This is Emo, from Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs. It is the first essay in his most renowned collection, so these circumstances are most likely far from being unique or weird. This is Emo is (by far) the most discussed essay in the wildly unsuccessful essay collection Chuck Klosterman & Philosophy: The Real and the Cereal, which means it is probably the beginning and the end of many, many people’s relationship with Klosterman’s writing.
I don’t have any hard evidence of this. But if you talk Klosterman with anyone, the discussion will invariably turn around This is Emo and his sporadic appearances on the Bill Simmons podcast. This is how he exists culturally in the minds of people who don’t care about who he is.
This is Emo is an essay about how romantic comedies featuring John Cusack are setting impossible standards for men to live up to in relationships. It is cute, absurdly dated and far, far from being the best thing Klosterman’s ever written. It doesn’t even crack the top 30 of his most fun or pertinent essays. But This is Emo altered the course of my life anyway. My first thoughts were : “This guy gets it. Actors like John Cusack exert a lot of control over our lives. He creates a desire for something that isn’t even real.” This reaction is perhaps even more unoriginal than getting acquainted with Chuck Klosterman’s writing by reading This is Emo first.
But then it started happening. I started thinking about my own relationship to romantic comedies and why I didn’t like many of them. I thought about it a lot and these thoughts became clearer and clearer. These movies almost all have the same major flaw: they end when the protagonist finally kisses their love interest for the first time or reconquers a love interest who wasn’t with them throughout the entire movie.
Romantic comedies teach you what to desire, how to conquer it and satisfy your needs, but they don’t teach you how to love. I understood right there and then something that most people never get the privilege to understand: love and desire are two very different things. Romantic comedies (and popular movies at large) still don’t understand that today, so our generation never had a chance to.
Our relationship to culture
Chuck Klosterman is my favorite writer. Dead or living. Fiction and nonfiction included. I don’t have much of a favorite anything at this point in my life, but I do have a writer and a critic who I love considerably more than their peers and they are the same person. If you’ve read this site for a little while, I’m sure you already noticed.
I do not know any other writer (or any other person) who can temporarily lend their audience what makes them special through what they do. No matter how much I like him, James Ellroy did not make me a better writer. Marilyn Manson did not make me a better musician or a better goth. They are important figures in my life, but I merely enjoy how they make me feel.
Because of Chuck Klosterman, I understand and appreciate the world I live in better. Not a little better. A lot. I understand how the culture I grew up in shaped my worldview and that every piece of media has the potential to do so. It’s not because of him I started Dead End Follies, but it is because of him that it is how it is today. Reading him is like instantly acquiring a skill
I wanted to do a retrospective of his work in 2020 because my relationship to his writing evolved with every book I read. It was slightly adversarial at first, like I was confronted by a more brilliant classmate than me. Back then, I was finishing a master degree in comparative literature and I could not tolerate not being the smartest person in the room. Academia had bruised my ego and while Klosterman’s fun and unscientific approach reconciled me with my intellectual side, it also confronted me to how emotional I was about my own ideas.
He quickly won me over, though. By the time I read IV, Downtown Owl and Eating the Dinosaur, he convinced me of three things:
Every choice we make in regards to culture matters. It matters your personal life and then if a piece of culture is popular enough, it will matter socially and culturally. People are won over one by one.
Most of us make these choices unconsciously, when our buttons are pushed by marketing campaigns or savvy utilisation of media.
Deconstructing these to understand better what their meanings are in our lives is not only fun, but it gives us more agency over our relationship to culture.
Our relationship to culture is important and deserves our conscious attention. There are some things that are more urgent, like social justice issues, the state of global pandemic we’re living in and whatnot. But culture is what shapes our personality: music, films, television, etc. It shapes what kind of person we want to be and what kind of person we want to gravitate towards.
Take Taylor Swift’s example. Everybody on the planet knows who she is. Even the people who don’t know her name (i.e. my parents) have seen her on television and on the cover of magazines. Everybody has an opinion on Taylor Swift, which is often extremely positive or extremely negative. There are also people who pretend they do not care whatsoever about her music and her media savvy, but these people are merely trying to categorize themselves as people who are too deep and emotionally complex to like anything popular. The number of people who understand why they feel the way they feel about Taylor Swift is very small, though.
She is not popular only because she’s a country singer. She is not popular only because she had a beef with Kanye. She is not popular only because she writes passive-aggressive songs about her own failed relationships and that people relate to them because everyone has a metric fuckton of those. It’s a towering construction that includes all these pieces and more, which makes her culturally important. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. Whether you understand it or not is a whole other ball game.
Chuck Klosterman’s writing made me see the world differently. It changed who I was as a person.
Chicken-or-the-egg thing (but not really)
Pop culture writing has evolved tremendously over the last decade. Criticism is crawling up from the grave and countless young, fun and pertinent critics are popping on the internet every day (mostly on YouTube) to help us understand our culture better. But no one does it like Klosterman. One of the goals I had with this retrospective was to understand the formula. How does he do it? Is there a method to gaining these analytical superpowers on a more permanent basis?
I found the answer. Kind of. To be completely transparent, he explained it himself in this video.
While the majority of critics will analyze a piece of media for what it is in itself and in the cultural context it stemmed from, Chuck Klosterman will read the same media from the audience’s point of view. He basically does it backwards. He doesn’t tell you how culture shaped media, but how media is shaping culture. I know it sounds like a chicken-or-the-egg thing, but it’s not.
For example, singers like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish were inevitable. They come from a generation who grew up on dumb pop music and it was inevitable that smart kids were listening to it in their bedroom and told themselves: I love how that sounds, but I can probably do it better. If Britney Spears and Christina Aguillera shaped who they are as artists, what they do is shape a generation of young girls to be more mature, self-aware and better equipped emotionally.
Taylor Swift came from a cultural context, but she creates another with her music. She is like a Pokemon evolution of Spears and Aguillera. Swift will have her own heirs who will be smarter or dumber than she was, but my money's on smarter.
Of course, it takes something culturally significant in order to break down how it affects our lives. I love the black metal band Mayhem as much as I love my own life, but there is not much to say about them. They have little to no cultural influence outside of the fact that they once burned churches and were very, very violent. As much as I want to write pages and pages about them (and I did), it will always turn around their violent history, their multiple lineup changes and the fact that it is crazy they’re still touring today, in non-COVID circumstances. Taylor Swift has cultural influence. Mayhem doesn’t.
I won’t lie. Chuck Klosterman has kind of a gift for it. It is easier and it feels more intellectually honest to stick to how a piece of media came to be, but HE can do it properly. Find the proper angle. Align the personal, the cultural and the universal like cosmic chakras. That’s why he is who he is. That is why he still sits on the throne of pop culture critics today. Most of us are out there trying to fit a circle into a square every day because we need to push content and stay relevant. Klosterman doesn’t speak up until he has fit the pieces together and you won’t notice whether they are matching pieces or not.
A Tale of Two Anomalies
The last thing I wanted to find out with this retrospective was why do I feel such an emotional attachment to Chuck Klosterman’s work? I mean, by design it isn’t emotional writing at all if you don’t count some of his fiction. Why did I feel borderline Misery Chastain-ish doing this retrospective in the first place?
It almost didn’t happen because I felt like too much of an obsessed weirdo fan for doing it. I decided to do it after asking myself this question: If Klosterman was dead, would I still do it? Absolutely. That’s when I realized that I was doing this for me, first and foremost. That if I had no one to impress, I’d still do it. But again, it begged the question: what the fuck am I trying to find here? What am I after?
I found the answer. Kind of. My therapist helped me with that one.
Although my parents will argue until their last breath that I had a normal, privileged childhood, it was not the case. I was not abused at home or anything, but my childhood was pretty fucking weird. I come from a small town where I didn’t have that many friends because of my introverted nature and weird, niche intellectual interests and because of that, I have spent an inordinate amount of hours in front of my television during my formative years. I quickly became more interested in developing a relationship with culture more than with other people. Because culture beat me up less, I suppose.
For my parents, the idea of great parenting was to set me up for a successful life: insisting that I went to college (and even paying for it), getting me to open a bank account and start saving at 12, putting clothes on my back, not repeating the few mistakes they did with my sister, etc. My mom turned me into a serious reader by borrowing books on her own library card for me and putting them on my desk week after week until I started reading them. And I did. Not much to do in my hometown.
It worked wonderfully for the most part, but I spent my childhood and teenage years developing psychologically via television, video games, novels, sports, etc. It’s a cliché thing to say, but television raised me. Lisa Simpson taught me more things that all of my high school teachers.
The circumstances that made Chuck Klosterman who he is today are not that different. He comes from a farming family with older parents and adult brothers and sisters. He spent a lot of time on his own. Listening to music, watching sport, television series and doing the things that are available to do to an intellectual child on a farm. I believe that is the link that binds us. Well… that binds me to his writing. Not creepy at all, Ben. Not creepy at all.
We’re both rare specimens who grew up in rare, but similar circumstances. I recognized that instinctively then. I understand why now.
Chuck Klosterman is my favorite writer, because he’s one of the very rare people who thinks more or less the way I think about the world and he does it much better than me. That is why I feel a kinship to him. I might very well be his biggest fan, but my reasons are not obsessive or (too) irrational. If we’re two guys who were raised by culture, it’s only normal one learns to understand the other (and himself) through mediated means.
Don’t take it the wrong way, but if no one reads this article entirely it wouldn't be the end of the world. But if you did, you should read Chuck Klosterman. You really should. You don’t need him to develop a conscious relationship to popular culture anymore. Perhaps you never did. But you still need him to understand the role you play in it. If you’re interested in reading my entire retrospective of his work, the links are below:
