On the Hate-Consumption of Media (Odd Columns #12)

A numinous image with no clear provenance, found by looking for “television” on the wikimedia commons. Going off the file name, it was uploaded by someone named “Alex Jacobi” and is used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

It’s a familiar phenomenon. There’s a book you hate and can’t put down, a show you put on when you want to zone out, or a video game you boot up and play for hours even though you’re neither good at it nor enjoying the experience. The question of why this is never really occurs to many of us: why do we compulsively sign up to experience media that we hate?

I’ve put forward a theory of cringe (that is, artistic cringe – when considering the social experience, I think Contrapoints has it pretty well nailed,) but there’s still a wrinkle that I’m trying to iron out. In my theory of art – the Complex Pleasures hypothesis, as I frame it – there’s still room for the hate-consumption of media. I think that hate-consumption is fundamentally different from cringe, and it’s a fascinating phenomenon when you look at it.

Now, I could get all political here, and talk about how people secretly long for what they hate, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. While hating this media is part of the experience, I don’t think that we enjoy this experience because it’s what we hate — at least, not usually, — I think we do so in spite of the fact that it’s what we hate.

I will say, I did enjoy the art direction in YIIK, and I’ve heard they’ve done a number of updates — but if I do a review of an updated version of anything, it will have to be Disco Elysium.

The reason that this has come up for me is pretty blasé: I was pretty nonplussed by the experience of playing through YIIK: A Postmodern RPG a while back, but I’ve still been thinking about giving it another shot. I brought it up with Edgar, and we started talking about the phenomenon of hate-consumption. We discussed Edgar’s binge-watching of American Horror Story in college, a show that repeatedly touched on themes that they had a visceral negative reaction to, yet which they watched several full seasons of.

Then the realization struck: as soon as Hannibal became available, they dropped American Horror Story altogether. In effect, Hannibal replaced American Horror Story, and we could quickly identify why by examining the similarities between the two: they shared a certain aesthetic sensibility, what I would call a syntax, expressed through the way that they were shot. However, Hannibal lacked the elements that Edgar found most objectionable, and the end result was a show that scratched that particular itch without leading to the distaste that gave birth to hate.

With this realization, I was able to understand my own stance: I didn’t actually want to play through YIIK (though I may still give it another shot at some point,) I wanted to experience a certain sort of contemporary fantasy that is just not available most of the time – a sort that I encountered first through the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games, but which are simply not found from western producers outside of hobbyists using RPGMaker (the upcoming game She Dreams Elsewhere, from Studio Zevere, seems like it will satisfy that particular craving, at least for a little while, but it’s only available in demo form at the moment.)

Because of the rarity of stories that use fantastic elements to explore a psychodramatic plot, balancing the prosaic and the mythic, but which don’t make themselves beholden to the established tropes of folklore, I’m stuck bouncing between a narrow set of largely Japanese-produced or Japanese-inspired games. This means that, once I’ve completed all the accessible ones that I don’t hate, if I’m looking for more of this kind of thing, I’m stuck hate-playing a game.

Image of the cast of Hannibal. Though I’m not writing this to sing the praises of the show, depending on your tolerance for gore and copaganda/copization, it is worth watching.

I don’t mean to use this to talk up Hannibal or to talk trash on YIIK, I mean to bring this up to explore the hate-consumption of media, something that I think a large segment of the population does (and it may be a generational thing – I’m not sure if older people engage in this practice much.)

It might be best to call this “negative enjoyment” rather than “hate-consumption” – because, oftentimes, there is a kind of schadenfreude to it. You’re looking at something and seeing how thoroughly the people responsible have ruined what might otherwise have been a good idea, or you’re seeing how deeply they can dig themselves into the hole that they’ve identified as theirs to dig. However, I’m going to continue to use the lens of consumption here – not in the sense of consumer goods or commodities, but in the sense of a food.

Though talking about “negative enjoyment” makes me think of Libidinal Economy, and as I’ve mentioned, I’m not tackling that until after A Thousand Plateaus.

Allow me to dive deeper into this with a metaphor. This isn’t my own idea, mind, we often talk about media as if it is a thing that we consume to sate a hunger, like food. It makes a certain amount of sense: just as you take in food to fuel your body, you might have a psychological need for certain kinds of stimulation: music, film, books, games, that sort of thing. These things give us pleasure of one kind or another – whether we’re simply being reassured or whether our minds are being blown, this is a species of enjoyment. We desire this.

Don’t think of desire as a lack, though: Edgar and I talk about Deleuze and Guattari a lot, and one of their central ideas is that desire doesn’t represent a deficit – it’s a motivating force. You desire something, so it’s like the potential energy of a bow drawn back, waiting to be released and fling the arrow in the direction of what it’s pointing at. In short, your desire provides direction and momentum in your day-to-day life.

Desire isn’t the emptiness, it’s the motivation to fill the emptiness. This is why depression is marked by anhedonia (referenced here). The problem isn’t necessarily that you don’t want something, but that you don’t know how to productively fill the emptiness, or you can’t identify what’s missing to go out and get it.

What’s important to understand is that there isn’t always an appropriate target. If you’ve got deficient potassium, you may desire a banana. However, if you’re broke and you don’t have bananas on hand, but you do have turnips for whatever reason, then you can satisfy the physical need for more potassium. The psychological desire for the banana will remain, though. This may lead you to walk or drive to a store or farmer’s market and go and buy a banana, even if you’re full and the nutrient shortage is dealt with. This no doubt seems like a strange analogy, as if I’m describing something familiar like it’s completely alien (also, who has turnips on hand? What do you even do with turnips?) but it’s a very important point in this analogy.

You are desiring something unfamiliar that feeds something inside of you, that fulfills a desire. You’ve reached the point where nostalgia doesn’t cut it anymore, so you turn to hate-watching, or hate-reading, or hate-listening and it’s got the nutrient you need but it’s bad. It’s the turnip in this analogy. What you really want is a banana, but you haven’t got any bananas, so you’re stuck gnawing on a turnip.

Definitely not cavendish bananas. I don’t know, maybe some other cultivar would grow here. I’m not a banana scientist (image taken from wikimedia commons, uploaded by Augustus Binu and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)

The solution I propose, though, doesn’t work with this analogy. Personally, I live in the midwest: we can’t exactly grow bananas here. However, if you find yourself hate-watching, and you are any kind of creative, I think that you should take that as a motivation: you should use it as motivation to create the kind of media that fills the gap you’re trying to fill. Or perhaps the analogy works just fine: perhaps you don’t always have the base of experiences and emotional connections to produce what you wish to experience, and perhaps that mismatch just leads to a slide into dissatisfaction.

If this is a purely aesthetic experience – if you’re looking for a particular visual that scratches the itch, and you’re not a visual artist, then you may be out of luck, but if it’s in an art form that you enjoy practicing, then I see no reason not to leap wholeheartedly into making your own, untarnished version of it.

This, I think, is why one of the most popular kinds of “transformative media” (read: fanfiction) is the fix-fic. This is a type of fiction that only exists in relation to other works of fiction, a sort of hauntological fandom where the writer identifies where things might have gone otherwise and steers their version of the narrative off the established course and explores this alternate possibility. Maybe you think that a character made a stupid choice that didn’t match their character as established, maybe you feel that something wasn’t foreshadowed properly, maybe something that is painfully obvious was just ignored. Why not just write it out and stick it up online?

I may never have really done fanfiction,, as mentioned, but Edgar and I did first meet through fictionpress, which began as the original fiction section of fantiction.net.

There are plenty of reasons to do things this way. While I never really did fanfiction, it’s a great way for writers to find an audience (other fans of the same media will be more likely to engage, for example,) and hone their skills. Also, for some people, it’s exactly the level they want to be at: while I’m inclined to see it as a developmental step, I know there are people who view it as a separate and distinct form of writing – and, besides, most of the “western canon” is basically Bible-and-Homer crossover fanfic, to the point that saying that hardly constitutes a radical statement.

As an aside, it does apparently constitute a declaration of affiliation with a particular school of thought that seeks to see a continuity between what pre-Modern (or at least Pre-Romantic) creators were doing and those who author works of transformative media. If a story isn’t owned in a monopolistic fashion by a single individual or agency, but held in common, then it is added to a shared stockpile of mythology, a cultural commons that others can draw from. Discussion of that, however, is a piece meant for another time.

All of this boils down to something simple: you have a desire, and this thing you hate is the closest match. If you’re willing to sit through multiple seasons of a show that makes you feel uncomfortable or read hundreds of pages of fiction that leaves you seething, why not use that as motivation to go off and make something of your own that doesn’t leave you feeling gross and weird? Or simply bored and disengaged, other than that one part?

This of course raises the issue of identifying what in the media you’re hate-consuming you’re drawn to, and what in it makes you feel upset, which requires developing other tools, but that’s something that you can do (it sure as shit is something that your English teachers, if they were worth anything, were trying to do.) You may protest that you are simply too tired or not skilled enough, or something.

Look, the “western literary tradition” began with fanfiction and propaganda. Virgil (pictured here in a 19th century drawing by an unknown artist,) is remembered because he did both at the same time and did it well.

Consider, though: creating something new, tinkering with something that may become beautiful if you work hard, is not only relaxing but a way to grow skills that you never really thought that you possessed.

You can sit on your couch, hate-watching, or you can start writing something or filming shorts or playing music, and something beautiful might happen. Which do you think you’re going to feel more satisfied by?

I think the answer is simple, but I’ve always wanted to be a writer. You’ve reached the end of nostalgia. All that is left is to re-experience things you despise – or create something new. It’s an obvious decision, in my mind.

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