They say about Chuck Klosterman that he’s a cultural critic, which I think is a way of insulting him to haggle his status as a writer or deny him entry, depending on the clubs. To me he is a superb essayist who pays a lot of attention to pop culture and has written glowing pages on elitism, taste and memory. His latest book is called The Nineties, and while I haven’t figured out what it’s about or where it’s going to take me, I really enjoyed its ramblings over a decade that started – damn it – as a kid and ended in my twenties Years.
Klosterman devotes a lot of space to television and hits where it hurts the most, namely intellectual prejudice. As with football, a lot has changed. The smart people of every city have gone from boasting about having no television at home to proclaiming themselves scholars, almost cathodic theologians. Even today, I find some writers who pretend they don’t know what they’re talking about when someone calls MasterChef or blows their bangs when someone gossips about Save me, but those are rare specimens. In the ’90s, they were the norm.
Since the book is talking about the United States (I refer to Juan Sanguino’s book Cómo hamos cambiado for a Hispanic perspective on the same period), he cites Frasier as an example of this attitude. It was the comedy that won the most Emmys because it was about snobbish characters who despised the only character watching TV. Television could only be culture if it disgusted itself.
Today the pendulum swings in the opposite direction, and now Frasier’s character would be a cultural critic delivering lectures entitled Whitebait as a Jungian Archetype or Ruperta’s Pumpkin in Native American totem tradition. In my house, one such bore was told to shut up and was told sit down and watch.
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