DIARY
DAVID HARE Of all the right wing's most obvious propaganda techniques, nothing is lamer than its use of the word 'trendy' to denote ideas of which it disapproves. Whenever some bullet-headed government minister wants to characterise a bad teaching method, or to attack social work which he imagines gratuitous, then he attaches the word 'trendy' to the practice, without paus- ing to consider that in fact it is all the sim- plistic ideas of the Right which have been so markedly a la mode for the last 20 years. It's pure adjectival trickery, and everyone can see through it. The case for supposing that the welfare state needs to be cut back may fairly be called 'trendy'. You can also use the word to describe the notion that private enterprise always does things better than public. However, the philosophy that insists we have genuine obligations to the poor, or that we need to allow children to develop their own creativity, may seem to you flawed or even misguided. The one thing you cannot call it is 'trendy'.
Something of the same rhetorical pre- tence now disfigures most writing about pop culture, which seeks to pretend that fans of rock music or the stupider kind of American movie are somehow beleaguered and under constant attack from the much more powerful forces of high culture. What is tiresome about all this pop culture writ- ing — which is now everywhere, in every paper and magazine, every single day of the year — is that it represents itself as put- upon and radical. In fact pop culture is so wholly in the ascendant that this kind of mock-defiant chippiness reads as nothing better than a camp kind of triumphalism. At dinner I once sat next to an advertising executive who told me that 'the Sunday Times is a much underestimated paper'. This is the rough equivalent of saying that Jeffrey Archer is a much underpublicised author, or that Liz Hurley is a much under- photographed actress. So, too, writers about pop culture keep telling us that they have a grievance. Their favourite area of interest is always undervalued and misun- derstood. But nobody's fooled. It's just the sound of the powerful laughing at the pow- erless. To give you an example: on holiday I made the mistake of reading a whole book about Arnold Schwarzenegger by Nigel Andrews. It was called True Myths. Since Andrews works for the Financial Times he can't resist a self-regarding little introduc- tion in which he describes his friends' out- rage that, as the film critic on a supposedly serious newspaper, he should be wasting his time on a figure apparently as crude as Schwarzenegger, rather than devoting him- self to the Taviani brothers, or whomever.
But all you learn by reading the book is that his friends were right. All Andrews can find to say in 284 pages is that Schwarzenegger used to be a body-builder and that he speaks with a funny accent. In the meanwhile, he has the cheek to invite us to mock French intellectuals because they take Schwarzenegger too seriously. What this kind of book teaches you is that writing about popular culture is actually much more difficult than writing about high culture, because things which are already popular rarely need much explication. What they need is illumination, and that's much harder to provide. The audience instinctively feels it knows much more about the subject than the writer does. Andrews can tell you the plot of Terminator 2. He can even tell you what day his hero got married. What he can't do is hazard a guess as to why so many people like the films, and what that tells us about our- selves. There de, in fact, very few writers who have Nick Tosches' singular gift. Tosches can get hold of a bar-room enter- tainer like Dean Martin and, in a biography of sustained brilliance and first-rate research, reveal him as one of the great representative figures of his age. This needs a special talent. In a way, anyone can write about -James Joyce or Kafka, because there's enough obscurity to go round. But, as Philip Larkin said, no one bothered to write books about fiim because it was obvi- ous what his poems meant.
Now there are plans to relaunch the Modem Review, which aims to be in the vanguard of this kind of writing. Mercifully, this time it is to be run by Charlotte Raven who, to judge from her Observer articles, is
'So was that a Stealth jet or a mirage?'
one of the few people in the field who knows how to advance cultural argument beyond the level of prejudice. The Modem Review failed in its first incarnation because every piece began in the same way. The writer always displayed this awful self-con- scious defiance, asserting that his subject be it Bruce Willis, Gary Glitter or Larry the Lamb — represented a much more signifi- cant phenomenon than the films of Mer- chant-Ivory. He would then say 'much, much more significant'. He would then go on saying the same thing repeatedly for sev- eral pages without ever once stooping to telling you why. Whatever its ostensible subject, the .article then always had to end, like a piece of Soviet propaganda, with a ritual denunciation of the Hampstead novel. The magazine became like a series of whodunits, all with the same murderer. Whatever was wrong, you knew it was going to be Margaret Drabble's fault. Not surprisingly, the magazine collapsed under the weight of its own silliness. (The Late Show died for much the same reasons.) But it would be wonderful if a magazine which tried to work honestly in this area could succeed. The overlap between what is good and what is popular is endlessly fascinating but, sadly, for some reason, it encourages the worst kind of attitudinising. Even The Spectator has one of those interchangeable modern film critics who sneers as soon as any minority film is put before him. It's childish and what's more, it's cliched. As Pauline Kael — who now seems rather hor- rified by the cult of trash she unknowingly unleashed — once said to an adoring English acolyte, 'Yes, I can see you English are all infatuated with American pop cul- ture. But maybe that's because you've seen rather less of it than we have.'
Years ago, when we were young, we all worked out without too much difficulty that Raymond Chandler was a great writer. We were affronted by Auden's ludicrously patronising statement on the back of our green Penguins that, 'Chandler's novels deserve to be read as literature'. What on earth did he think they were? Fish food? We all took to reading John Le Cane with a passion we were never to show for Henry James. But we didn't then make the mis- take of thinking that everything that belonged tb a genre must therefore be superior to everything that didn't. In an ideal world, of course, it barely needs say- ing that different kinds of culture ought to be allowed to coexist. But at the moment, in the way things are received, the balance seems bewilderingly wrong. Pretentious- ness is prosecuted as if it were child murder while triviality gets off scot-free.
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