A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Cult of Cultural Correctness

 

Humans as we should know by now, well at least intellectual and scholars should know by now, are the product, as Charles Darwin told us years ago, of biology and environment, our biological, political, economic, cultural, and geographical environments. Humans are thus not only their DNA, though many still seem to want to believe that they are. They are also, and to a great extent, what they have been socialised to be, which is why so many of those socialised for conformity preach or parrot the gospels of “democracy”, right wing populism, liberalism, radicalism, capitalism, and exceptionalism in a core nation like the United States. 

One can readily see and hear such political, economic, cultural, and geographic correctness channelled in “reaction" videos on social media sites like YouTube. I was recently reminded of the interpretive power of socialised cultural correctness while watching and listening to a “reaction” video to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, and Martin Landau, a film considered a classic by many if not most film historians and critics, by a reactor who is clearly neither a film historian or a film criti who calls her “channel" Danielle Baggett after, one assumes, herself. In this “reaction" video Baggett and her father “react" to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest at the request of Baggett’s grandfather.

There is a lot to unpack culturally and ideologically in this nearly one hour “reaction” video. There is, for instance, the limited attentiveness of both Baggett fils and Baggett pere to the narrative and plot of the film. Both miss for example, the fact that Grant’s character, Roger Thornhill, is mistaken for the US government spy George Kaplan, who turns out to be a fabricated fake of one of the alphabet soup of US intelligence agencies in order to deflect attention away from the real government agent who has infiltrated a gang of spies in the film. Thornhill is mistaken for Kaplan because he calls for a page who is paging for George Kaplan at that exact instant setting in motion the Kafkaesque plot of the film, a theme—the wrong man theme--Hitchcock was deeply enamoured of and which is present in other Hitchcock films like 1935’s The 39 Steps. In this they are following a path well trod already by previous “reactors” to North by Northwest who also generally miss this critical and crucial plot point. 

While this limited attention to films is interesting and certainly raises questions about the nature of human attentiveness and attention spans, which, claim some commentators, have declined in the postmodernist age of fast paced television commercials, fast paced MTV commercials masquerading as music videos, Hollywood films that mimic the rhythms and lack of depth of postmodernist television commercials, and social media, which seems made to order for the the commercial style with its lack of depth and its associated limited attention spans, I want to focus in this essay on how cultural correctness over determines how these two “reactors" and by extension most YouTube “reactors” in general “react" to films, television shows, and music. These culturally correct “reactions”, one can compelling argue, tell us more about the cultural contexts of the “reactors” than they do about that to which they are “reacting” to, something I think that is clearly the case in the Baggett “reaction” video to North by Northwest. Before I dig into this, however, I should note that I don’t think the attention spans of most humans have ever been that long particularly since so much of what humans “do” becomes embodied and becomes, as a consequence, mechanical or rote. Just ask a cashier in a grocery store.

It should be clear by now to anyone who reads and watches reactions to films, including that of the Baggett’s, who reads polemical writings on films, and who listens to those who make films, including actors, talk about how they approach their roles in films, that the ideology of realism, whether physical or emotional, in cinema is one of the major if not the major polemical aesthetic approach to film that has been demagogued and polemicised for over the years. For many “reactors”, critics, and film personnel, films should be and/or feel real or natural. Note the normative nature of this polemic. This cultural ideology, which is a social and cultural construct, this notion that film and television should be realistic (which is different from real which film, even documentary film, can never be though it can be more or less naturalistic), is a debate in art aesthetics, of course, that has been going on for years and will be going on for many years more. Realists, for instance, argue that art, be it poetry, literature, painting, photography, film, or television, should represent visual or psychological reality while surrealists, to take an example of another approach to art, polemicise for an art that is more dreamlike and less linear and hence more truthful. It is also a debate that most social media “reactors” are blissfully unaware of inscribed within the film should be real cultural ideology that they almost always are. It is this culturally and ideologically correct baseline—that film should be “real”-- that undergirds the Baggett “reaction” video and most “reaction” videos on YouTube.

It is this socially and culturally constructed notion of “realism” that leads Baggett fils et pere, who have been socialised into a notion that films should and should only be realistic—the Church and Cult of Film Realism--to “criticise” North by Northwest for its representation of a romance between Cary Grant, who was 54 at the time he starred in North by Northwest, and Eva Marie Saint, who plays Eve Kendall the government spy who infiltrates the “gang that included James Mason and Martin Landau, who was 35 when she starred in North by Northwest. It is this socially and culturally constructed notion of “realism” that leads the Baggett’s and others like them—which is most of the “reactors” on YouTube-- to whinge and whine almost non-stop about petty irrelevancies like why would he, she, or they do that or that would never happen about something that is inherently unreal, film, which like all art creates its own multiple realities, rather than on how, for instance, the story of the film is constructed, on  the nature of the acting in the film, on the metaphors the film is playing with, or on how the film is an allegory of x, y, or z.

There are a number of things fascinating about this cultural correctness. While it is certainly historically and sociologically important to note that Hollywood did and perhaps still does have a tendency to pair older men and younger women in many of their films—think Funny Face with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn from 1957 or Sabrina with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn from 1954, just to name two examples among many—most reactors to do not emphasise the historical and sociological aspects of this tendency. They point it out for normative and polemical purposes. They point up such relationships, in other words, to note how dreadful or”eeeeew”--a “scholarly” term that is right up there in “critical" and “analytical" intellectual content with that other term commonly used by many “reactors”, "cheesy", many “reactors" utter in their “reactions”-- such relationships are.

There is, of course, a wonderful paradox in this culturally and ideologically correct criticism of the relationship between Thornhill/Kaplan/Grant and Kendall/Saint in North by Northwest and other Hollywood movies of the past, a paradox those who make what they think are realist “criticisms” generally ignore. In this instance, the fact they typically ignore is that there have been for millennia and continue to be relations between older men and younger women for a variety of reasons including cultural (the love thing), political (I want to have a relationship with someone who shares my political culture), economic (I want to marry someone with money), and geographical (geography, like class, limits one's relationship options). but we should never forget that demagogues and polemicists, which is what most social media “reactors” are, are rarely if ever interested in empirical facts. They want their normative cake so they can eat it too and far to often make you eat it as well because they, for the most part, believe that they are in the right and have god, whoever they consider that god to be, “sacred" or secular, on their side. 

Aren’t humans fascinating? I have been studying them for almost sixty years along with their contradictions and hypocrisies—the tendency for pots to call kettles black and vice versa—and they never cease to amaze me regardless of their political, economic, cultural, or geographic stripe. Welcome to life lived as if it should be a “theocratic" highway.