Hey, ya'll. Wanna read a good rant? Here's one I don't actually recommend, though I enjoyed it very much.

I just finished a new book called A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations by Cintra Wilson. It is a diatribe, a rant, a jeremiad, a vitriolic all-out assault on all contemporary popular culture. It's also brilliantly written and very funny, and so relentlessly ad hominem I don't recommend it at all. She's not at all moderate, she's extremely judgmental, and as hip and funny and liberal and f-bomb-droppingly post-modern as Cintra (I feel like we're on a first-name basis, so immediate is her prose) is, she's also, I was astonished to finally suss, in the old-time anti-theatricalist, Plato-to-Northbrooke-to-Collier-to-Medved tradition. We're drowning in Hollywood filth. We're all being numbed by an obsessive quest for celebrity. Celebrities themselves are uniformly self-obsessed, and worse, untalented moral midgets. In a desperate quest for Celeb status, women are turning into self-loathing masochists, fawn! ingly agreeing to their own objectification, even agreeing to invasive surgical techniques in an effort to facilitate objectification. And men are all becoming drug-glazed-over porn addicts. All pop culture, with only the rarest of burned out exceptions, is corporatized and commodified and immoral and obvious and vile. Yadayadayada.

It's just enough true to not be completely dismissable. I hold no brief for Celine Dion, but I do think calling her 'the world's most repulsive female,' as Cintra does, is a trifle, uh, harsh. At the same time, I do think that an absurd quest for celebrity has unbalanced too many young people, filling their heads with unhealthy dreams and unholy ambitions. I think the quest for celebrity has destroyed lives; I've even seen it among my students. Fair enough. Given my well-known objections to morally (which becomes too easily judgmentally) based criticism, I'm very troubled by Cintra's book. But it's an entertaining read, and of course, not necessarily uniformly untrue.

Here's what's really interesting, however. Amidst this entire rant, I found the consistent use of the word 'Mormon' as an adjective. 'Mormon' is used to imply a certain aesthetic stance which Cintra particularly loathes. 'Mormon' artists, in Cintra's context, has nothing to do with artists who happen to be Mormon. David Copperfield, Barry Manilow, Karen Carpenter and Celine Dion are all referred to as objectionably 'Mormon.' No, 'Mormon' means white bread, safe, namby-pamby, middle-brow, beige. 'Mormon' means pop songs about troo luv. 'Mormon' means sit coms chock full of Family Values. 'Mormon' means mind-numbing, dull, conformist art. 'Mormon' may not mean Baywatch, but it does mean Touched by An Angel, both of which are equally corrupt and false and inherently pornographic. (Pornography, in Cintra's sense of it, means work which causes us to wallow in untrue and unhealthy emotions, whether violent, sexual or sentimental.)

Okay, like her or not (and I like her very much, while holding her ideas at arm's length), Cintra is, at the very least, a bright and perceptive observer of the contemporary scene. She's anything but dumb, and she knows a lot about a lot. And that's her perception of us. That's 'Mormon' art, as far as she'd concerned. How far off is she?

Not too far off, is my dismayed and distressed response. I mean, this issue surely something we've raised a time or two on the List. We're not a very edgy culture. And we don't much support our edgier artists.

Look, I'm not going to get into the whole 'why does edgy mean good; isn't there room for both kinds of art' thing. I agree that life has dark and lighter shadings, and that art can and must reflect both. I have my likes and dislikes. I prefer the Who to Barry Manilow. I also don't judge those who have milder tastes.

But can I tremulously suggest that there does not, in fact, exist a single 'Mormon' aesthetic, and that work that is in fact dark and edgy and cruel can actually reflect, in the deepest and most spiritual ways, the values of Mormonism? And that among the many many things Cintra Wilson gets wrong (and amidst the other things she surely gets right) is her use of 'Mormon' to reflect a certain aesthetic found, to be sure, in Mormon culture, but other places as well?

Eric Samuelsen