The Importance of Chuck Klosterman
So, I have a piece (subscribers only) in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard that reviews three essay collections that came out on the same day: Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt’s Superfreakonomics, and Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur. I didn’t have a ton to add to the millions of words spilled over Gladwell or the Freakonomics guys. Instead, I wanted to focus on Klosterman, who I feel doesn’t get enough respect — I honestly think he’s the most important cultural critic working today:
Now that David Foster Wallace has died, there’s no writer with a better understanding of pop culture and how it affects the American psyche. Given the dominance of pop—music, art, movies—amongst the masses, it’s fair to say that there’s no writer who better understands the American cultural landscape as the Baby Boomers recede into the distance and the Gen X/Millennials come to the fore.
I just want to defend my thought process of elevating Klosterman above the Steves and Gladwell. Whereas Gladwell trumpets his banalities (Luck and hard work both play a role in success! Fads happen!) as earth-shattering new truths and the Steves are more interested in making an intriguing argument than making an accurate one, Klosterman makes legitimate insights and puzzles his way through problems in a way that few others do. And he does so in the realm of pop culture, which is the single dominant mode of discourse in America today.
That’s the important part. If you understand pop culture, you understand America. I firmly believe this: We spend more time watching television and using celebrities as short hand for our own experiences than we do discussing legitimate literature or political activities, by a decent margin. Understanding the way we define ourselves through sports and movies and the Internet — and how those things intersect with, say, the Unabomber’s manifesto or why laugh tracks give us comfort — is no mean feat, and Klosterman does it better than anyone else. The connections are the key. There are better film critics, like Anthony Lane, and more articulate writers on culture, like Ross Douthat. But I don’t think anyone puts different pieces together as well as Klosterman.
Additionally, this pieces is part of my ongoing campaign to get people to take pop culture seriously. The incredible appeal of MTV’s guido-fest Jersey Shore means something about the state of the American scene, something that can’t be simply explained away by pointing out that we love laughing at people who make fools of themselves. If I had a little more Klosterman in me, maybe I could explain just what it means.