Author: Andrew Sullivan

@JohnLithgow as Lear tonight: amazing. Shakespeare: not good. No stakes, not relatable. I think I’m realizing: Shakespeare sucks.

— Ira Glass (@iraglass) July 28, 2014

Rebecca Mead tut-tuts those who, like Ira Glass, would relate to art rather than identify with it:

Identification with a character is one of the pleasures of reading, or of watching movies, or of seeing plays, though if it is where one’s engagement with the work begins, it should not be where critical thought ends. The concept of identification implies that the reader or viewer is, to some degree at least, actively engaged with the work in question: she is thinking herself into the experience of the characters on the page or screen or stage.

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

But Freddie suggests that Mead’s concerns about contemporary self-absorption are misplaced:

Selfies are the opposite of solipsism; they are the creation of a perspective that is entirely alien to the person taking them. None of us can naturally see our own face. We build mirrors precisely to get outside of our own perspective. We use the camera to put ourselves in the position of other people. Call that what you’d like, but it isn’t solipsistic.

Complaints that we’re all self-obsessed are evergreen, but I think that they badly miss the point in our current technological moment. Rather than being obsessed with our own point of view, I think we are instead in an era in which we are obsessed with the gaze of others. Yes, we are watching others watch us, and so there’s a second order sense in which we are still the subject of our own drama. But rather than being uninterested in the point of view of others, I think we have constructed an immense digital apparatus to focus on little else.

Meanwhile, Alan Jacobs wonders just how much “relatability” differs from “identification,” asking, “Is wanting the work to be a mirror really so different from wanting it to be a selfie?”:

People, especially young people, used to say, when explaining their dislike of a book, “I just couldn’t identify with it” or “I just couldn’t identify with the characters.” Now they say, “it just wasn’t relatable.” Both of these are just shorthand ways of saying “This work bored me and I think it’s the work’s fault, not mine.” …

I think what the language of relatability and the language of identification typically, if not invariably, connote – and they do this whether used positively or negatively – is weakness of response. And this is why the terms remain so vague, maddeningly so for those of a verbally critical bent. When people really love a work, or really hate it, they enjoy explaining why. When they sorta kinda like it, or sorta kinda dislike it, they say that it was or wasn’t relatable, or that they could or couldn’t identify with the characters. “Relatable” and “identify” are words that ought to come with a shrug pre-attached.

On a skeptical note, Derek Thompson warns, “If you don’t like relatability, you’re going to hate the history of American theater”:

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is nearly autobiographical and, famously, scarringly relatable to any family that has suffered from a form of addiction; Angels in America and The Normal Heart took on the AIDS crisis at the height of the AIDS crisis. A Raisin in the Sun? Death of a Salesmen? These aren’t exactly Mesozoic dramas. The Crucible might be the most famous American play that isn’t about contemporary American life, but as a metaphor for America in the Cold War, its politics couldn’t be any more current for its contemporary audience.

The point isn’t that great art has to be about contemporary life. I’m not sure great art has to be anything. But so much wonderful theater has served, historically, as an exaggerated mirror held up to a country at a specific moment in history that it’s shocking to see a writer blast the idea that “[a play] be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer.” Ira Glass did not invent the idea that great plays ought to reflect their times.

Meanwhile, Alyssa Rosenberg makes sense of “relatability” in light of the politics of representation:

For certain classes of people, consuming mass culture is a constant exercise in empathy. If you’re anything but a straight, white man, action movies are an opportunity to exult in the strength and persistence of people who look nothing like you. Cable television has taken people of all backgrounds into a journey through the troubled mind of the middle-aged man that is well into its second decade.

Demands for “relatable” stories or characters can, in these circumstances, be a cry of “enough!” If traveling into someone else’s mind and experiences through fiction is meant to be morally improving work, we must acknowledge that sometimes that work can be tiring.

On Fox News Sunday, Ron Fournier made the rather banal observation that the GOP “cannot be the party of the future beyond November, if you’re seen as the party of white people.” In response, while talking with Laura Ingraham, Republican Congressman Mo Brooks went overboard:

This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.

Fournier defends himself:

I do feel compelled to remind Brooks that nothing I said should surprise him, because his party leaders agree with me. If I am part of a war on whites, so is RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and the 2,600 fellow Republicans interviewed for the “RNC Growth Opportunity Book 2013,” the so-called GOP autopsy.

“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” the report reads. “It does not matter what we say about education, jobs, or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.” …

What I said is indisputably, if uncomfortably, true. Unless a broader swath of the GOP community learns to accept and adapt to the fact that the United States will soon be a majority-minority nation, the Republican Party is doomed not to lead it. Finally, sir, bury the straw men: Blanket amnesty and wide-open borders aren’t the price for political relevancy. For starters, let’s try compassion, wide-open minds, and compromise.

Chait snickers at Brooks’ comments:

Brooks is characteristically fuzzy on both the motive and the mechanics of the current War on Whites. On the surface, you might find it silly to imagine that the Democrats would antagonize the majority segment of the American public. Democrats definitely need white people (whites supplied 56 percent of Barack Obama’s vote in 2012; nonwhites supplied just 11 percent of Mitt Romney’s votes). White people have other uses for Democrats, like providing campaign donations, filling cabinet roles and Congressional seats, and so on. From a pure strategic standpoint, launching a war on white people would seem like a bad idea.

Steven Taylor adds:

One thing is for sure:  Brooks does not understand (or does not wish to acknowledge) the way in which certain factors tend to align (such as race, economic status, and policy preferences) and he, like many conservatives of his ilk, have no self-awareness of how the structure of US historical development might have sorted persons by color into certain economic strata.  He certainly lacks a tremendous amount of self-awareness if, in a multi-paragraph manifesto of how there is a “war on whites” he can say “I don’t know of a single Republican who has made an appeal for votes based on skin color.”

In general, I want to say something intelligent and helpful in terms of maybe getting some readers who really don’t get how problematic these views are, but really all I can think are various insults (and the ones in Spanish are the most fun, given the context).

Weigel joins the conversation:

What will the fallout be for Brooks? Nothing—his district, which hugs the Tennessee border, voted by a 2-1 margin for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. No Democrat bothered to run against him this year. Honestly, there’s less to Brooks’ “war on whites” riff than the headline suggests. Other conservatives, most notably Stanley Kurtz, have described the Obama administration’s urban-focused transportation and energy policies as a “war on the suburbs,” ways to get the people who fled the cities (white people, though that’s not made explicit) to come back in. And the politics of welfare and food stamps have always tracked with opinions about race.

But Brooks wasn’t saying any of that. He tried to coin a phrase—like “war on women”—insisting that accusing Democrats of waging this fight was calling out racism.

Kilgore sighs:

I dunno: it strikes me as entirely consistent with the twisted logic we hear all the time about the only racists being race-card-playing liberals that demonize conservative white folks who are “color-blind” in their hostility to anything black and brown folks deem highly objectionable.