If Klosterman turns into a mannequin, all hope is lost.
The critical reaction to Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, Klosterman’s newest release, has been predictably divided. Fans love him for his humor and quirky acumen. Critics often gently disapprove, though one can feel they want to say more, perhaps because he’s popular enough that many fans would discount a negative assault as blind arrogance. Troy Patterson’s recent review in TheNew York Times , however, doesn’t pull any punches.
Though he peppers the review with a few uninspired positive notes, Patterson aims his critical pickaxe at both the book and Klosterman himself. (“To which I ask: Chuck, are you high? If so, what on?”) He attacks Klosterman’s choice of subject by rejecting the idea that pop America is enjoying a “pirate renaissance.” That may be a goofy description, but Klosterman’s certainly not wrong. Besides the popular films, someone recently stapled flyers around my neighborhood announcing that September 19 was “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” Patterson also dismisses Klosterman’s writing itself, noting his “sloppy” paragraph compositions and “lazy” transitions.
Klosterman publishes in the New York Times Magazine, and Patterson ultimately sounds like a bitter office gossip. He whines that Klosterman has the “the clout to overrule his editors even on matters of basic grammar” and calls him “a famous writer who may or may not be able to handle his drugs.” I mean, c’mon, that last nudge is a bit harsh.
It’s only fair to note, however, that Patterson’s review does in fact transition seamlessly between paragraphs.
Little distinguishes the Times review from the dozens of other reviews available in all corners of the blogosphere. Nevertheless, Klosterman is popular for the same reasons that Patterson’s review doesn’t enlighten. Klosterman is becoming an icon of our “postmodern culture” (Patterson’s words) for at least two reasons: He writes the way his readership speaks and thinks (or at least the way they aspire to speak and think), and he creatively examines pop iconography so as to draw from it a greater meaning about American culture. He’s the contemporary King of Pop Semiotics.
The slew of supermarket-line magazines that have once featured articles about or interviews with Britney Spears is vast. But few of those publications would print a piece that took as its thematic arc an evaluation of how self-conscious Spears might be of her embodiment of “the Madonna/whore dichotomy.” Nor would a majority of supermarket-line readers find acceptable a writer who refers to Spears’ “vagina,” “naked ass,” and “secret garden” on the same page. And precious few writers would have the platinum huevos to ask her about it (the dichotomy) directly.
Klosterman had a reason for doing all of the above, of course. He’s interested in the function of the celebrity as a metaphor in our culture. And he examines the spaces between 1) the human being who is a celebrity and the celebrity-symbol and 2) the celebrity-symbol and the individual consumer of the symbol (the “fan”). He also tries now and then to reconcile all three, celeb-human, celeb-symbol, and human-human.
The Spears article, published in 2003, deserves its place at the book’s front. Klosterman concludes that Spears-the-human is a casualty of her own fame, that she didn’t have a full comprehension of what was actually happening to her. He surmises that were she to “even casually admit that she occasionally uses her body as a commercial weapon,” the façade would crumble. As it turned out, her body admitted it for her, and the façade has in fact crumbled.
Klosterman-bashing is easy. Personally, I’m bothered by some of his leaps of logic because I wonder if the audience questions his assertions. In “McDiculous,” for example, he warns that “Food hates you” (a sweeping generalization) before arguing that the documentary Super Size Me is misguided, faux-scientific grandstanding by a borderline socialist with a vegan girlfriend. He claims that attacking the health effects of the Big Mac is inherently flawed because McDonald’s “is a publicly traded capitalist venture; its function is to earn as much as it can by giving people a product they want.” Fundamentally, Klosterman’s argument means that Enron’s CEOs weren’t wrong to try to inflate energy prices, but they were wrong to lie to their shareholders.
Klosterman’s argument is partially buffered by personal experience: He once ate nothing but McNuggets for a week, and his cholesterol actually went down. I asked a medical professional about this, and his answer was that one week wasn’t long enough to cause any testable changes. Plus, Klosterman admits that at the week’s end he felt like his body was coated in petroleum jelly. So there’s that.
Coated in petroleum jelly or not, Klosterman is probably one of the most significant young writers today. Though he may not always follow logical imperatives, he’s an exceptionally creative thinker who questions the cultural phenomena that’s thoughtlessly consumed by successive MTV generations. He manipulates the glamour of celebrity and rock stardom into morsels of mythology attractive enough for a culture suffering from Anorexia of the Idea to bite into.
Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually (more than they already do). I’m not arguing that a North Dakotan with a stack of KISS albums and a bong is going to single-handedly change the country. But he might be an enzyme for some sort of progression. And I assert as much knowing that Klosterman analyzes the significance of Morrissey’s Hispanic fan base, Val Kilmer’s uncanny politeness, and the reasons Goths annually coagulate in Disneyland (bingo players “gather”; Goths “coagulate”).
One interesting twist to all this may be Klosterman’s own melee with celebrity. Chuck Klosterman IV will serve as a benchmark on Klosterman’s own celebrity arc – he’s that much closer to the falling action on this ride to success. What personal crisis must follow? What could becoming a celebrity mean to someone whose purpose is to decipher the spaces inhabited by celebrities and their metaphors? According to his own measures, he’ll soon become a signal describing some cultural message. He’ll eventually come to exist as a living opposition, some breathing contradiction between his outward, abstract meaning and the guy who ties his own shoes every morning – a man antagonized by his own shadow.
His fate necessarily leads in one of two directions. Either: He successfully breaks from the abstraction (i.e., dies a fiery death in a Chevy Vega that swan dives from a Cuban bridge at sunset; Klosterman IV is reissued by Penguin Classics). Or: He successfully reconciles with his contradictory condition (i.e., becomes a conservative radio host; procreates with the urgent fury of Britney Spears’ secret garden).
I can’t say which is more likely. Something’s going on with Klosterman, though. In “The Mannequin Appropriation Project,” Klosterman details a shopping trip to the Gap, in which he bought the entire outfit a mannequin was wearing: blue sweater, collared shirt, jeans. (He wears it in the photo on the book’s front and back covers.)
When he wore the outfit to work for the first time, he knew it would cause a stir. “I can tell that everything about my life is instantly reinvented,” Klosterman says. “I feel like a mannequin…I’m instantaneously projecting my fictionalized assumption about how it feels to be an inanimate object onto myself.” When one coworker warns that Klosterman will have to start listening to Superchunk, mannequin-Klosterman fires back, “But this isn’t a statement about social class or personal iconography…Don’t you get it? I’m a mannequin now.”
Does this sound like the behavior of a celebrity at ease with his metaphor? Burn out, Chuck. Don't burn up.
Between the Covers is a biweekly book review and publishing analysis.
