It would take a certain amount of energy and emotional strength to produce a full consideration of David Denby’s piece in today’s New Yorker, which swiftly traces the lineage of the last seven years of American micro-independent film up to and including Joe Swanberg’s upcoming SXSW and IFC VOD debut, Alexander the Last. I currently feel that this variety of strength and quantity of energy are resources that I cannot access, and if I could, I’m not sure the best target to point them at would be a piece that has already been declared late to the party by two reliable sources.  However, in case it seems imperative to take up this task at some point in the future, here are the vague bases I would try to touch in such a consideration:

• Prior to this, David Denby has produced two notable works in the past six months (in this case, we’ll take “notable” to be equivalent to “provoking of blog posts and/or mocking on The Daily Show“; if there is another definition of the word here on Planet Earth in 2009, I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it). Most recently, there was Snark, a polemical book in which the film critic argues that “snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter,” and goes on to cite with no apparent humour intended the nine elements that make snark so dangerous.  A short time after Snark was published, Denby wrote off The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — a film which might rightly be considered to embody the bloated sincerity that finely calibrated snark so successfully deflates –– with the witty rejoinder, “who cares?” Denby then went on to point out, clearly without “bad feeling”, that “many people in Hollywood endlessly have ‘work’ done to put off aging, and here’s a movie that begins with a wizened baby and ends with physical perfection, a progression that may encapsulate both the nightmares and the dreams of half the Academy.”
• Up until this point, about once a year, every year of this decade, someone somewhere declared something an example of The New Sincerity. Radio/podcast host Jesse Thorn once called it a “cultural movement founded by yours truly.” As described by Thorn, The New Sincerity is all about “a willingness to earnestly appreciate something even if it’s bigger than something someone would earnestly feel comfortable earnestly appreciating. Even if it means taking the risk of someone thinking it’s ridiculous because, ultimately, it’s more important to be awesome than to be cool.” This desire for sincerity pops up in various corners of the culture every now and then, usually as a self-conscious reaction to what was called in the 90s “irony”, and only became “snark” after everyone said that after 9/11, irony couldn’t exist. For whatever reason, The New Sinceritists have failed to embrace Denby’s attack on snark, which has not often been described as either “awesome” or “cool,” as far as I am aware. However, I will admit that the most intensive criticism of Snark that I’ve consumed has been that blogged/vlogged/Twittered by Ana Marie Cox, who took exception to Denby’s comments about her former blog Wonkette, and who described the book as one “about getting kids off his lawn.”
• Emily Gould, former editor of Gawker and, in some circles, the poster girl for snark without substance, memorably eviscerated Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs in concert with its premiere at the IFC Center. In that review, Gould refered to Hannah as “megahyped” and generally sold the fiction that that the film was some kind of corporate ploy to sell her generation back to itself, and that it got that representation wrong; she specifically complained that a scene in which one character remarks on another’s blog-to-book deal “made the movie seem at least two years old.” This was before Gould had a bit of a scandal involving boys and blogs, which she funneled into her own book deal; she now says that when she edited Gawker, she “really did not ever think of the person I was writing about sitting there and reading what I’d written. I sincerely thought that the kind of people who got written about were somehow different from me.” One wonders what she might think of Hannah on a second viewing after all that has happened to all of us since that heady summer of 2007. But let’s just confine this argument to that moment: in that moment, Emily Gould was New York media’s highest profile snarkist, and of Joe Swanberg, she didn’t approve.
• So if there is an imaginary line in the sand between snark and sincerity which informs much of our contemporary conversation and most of our popular culture, then anti-snark crusader Denby is now only pointing to what we may have known in our hearts for awhile, which is that a handful of filmmakers and their slightly larger number of fans are on one side of this line, and the tastemakers of young adult media consumption and most of the consumers the trickle down to are irrevocably on the other. It’s maybe a no brainer which side the David Denbys of the world gravitate to. Are these films, which strive for a certain realism regarding life as a twenty-something today (and, in many cases, I think, achieve it) fundamentally at odds with what really real people of that generation accept as either art or entertainment? And if the whole point of working on a small scale is to be able to do things and say things that they wouldn’t be able to do if their creative decisions were dictated by demographic research and corporate synergy and the financial passions of fifty-somethings — well, isn’t that the point?