‘The Queer Art of Failing Better’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
The cultural essay is as ubiquitous as it’s ever been, but in my mind it’s become a much more challenging genre. Art is consumed and analyzed and produced all at once at a dizzying rate. Memes, gifs, hot takes—if you’re even just a semi-regular Twitter user you’re likely to get a clear idea of, say, a movie when it’s barely a week old. And by clear idea I mean nuanced emotional resonances and hilarious/ironic detachment.
Timing is crucial. Sort of. There’s something of a shelf life to Internet Discourse. If you’re a pop cultural essayist, you usually have an intuitive sense of “ok, now it’s time say my piece on this thing.”
With the large caveat that a lot of the above is my own projection, Laurie Penny’s essay in The Baffler about the TV show Queer Eye seems to strike that near impossible balance of looking at the show itself, how it’s perceived, and what it is and isn’t capable of.
In their own way, though, these men [selected to receive make overs] are quietly drowning, and a lot of the people who love this show the hardest have spent years of our offscreen lives trying to serve as—or at least to inflate—the life-rafts.
And later:
Inevitably, when men take on work traditionally performed by women thanklessly and for free—from cooking to prizing open the calcified clamshell of the male heterosexual emotional mindscape—it is regarded as art, rather than duty. The trajectory of Queer Eye would be almost identical if you substituted the Twink Upgrade Action Team for any five randomly selected women on the street, but it wouldn’t work as entertainment; that’s just life. That’s just what women do; we don’t get a cookie for it, let alone our own show. I’m happy to let that go, though, because it’s just so damn satisfying watching men sort one another out for once.
So much is happening in this essay. The author is bringing multiple and even conflicting lenses to bear on the subject. The result is an essay about so much more than a just a TV show.
Most grueling of all is episode five of season one, which stars a Christian father of six who works two low-wage jobs, usually sleeps two and a half hours a night and, unsurprisingly, doesn’t have a lot of time left over for personal grooming. He tells the Fab Five that he considers the state of his too-small house evidence of “not being enough” for his wife and children. It should be apparent even to the most unblinking neoliberal believer in the power of positive self-talk that the deficiency is not in this man’s soul, nor his self-confidence, but in his salary. His deficiencies have a dollar value, and culture has convinced him that that is his fault.
This essay affirms joy as well as criticism without offering empty equivalence between the two, and it’s well worth the read regardless of what you feel about the show.