Minor Post #2 (including group post) - Josh Martin

This is a very short response thinking through some of the ideas raised in both Eileen's minor post and Lewis' core response, which I find to be in dialogue with one another in productive ways. At the heart of each set of questions in these responses, implicitly or explicitly is the notion of cringe, an emotion that could be provoked by a book on Amazon selling novel cardboard sign ideas and Elizabeth Warren puns for "Craftivists" or an earnest deployment of the term "girlboss" in 2023. Especially in (terminally) online circles, one strives to avoid becoming cringe at any and all costs. Cringe is a sensation primarily associated with unabashed earnestness; unsurprisingly, as accusations of "cringe" become more prevalent, many have commented on the recent shift to earnestness in contemporary film and TV, a pivot from Deadpool to the return of Cameron and Cruise. Even a quintessentially postmodern text like Everything Everywhere All at Once is now at the forefront of the pivot to earnestness, suggesting, in its multiversal chaos, that kindness will save us all. Cringe, indeed -- an accusation that I levied at the hyperactive film plenty of times during spirited debates this awards season. Yet if we're being honest, it is no more cringe than Top Gun: Maverick, a gooey, sentimental film I love... that is shamelessly earnest about its function as a glorified commercial celebration of American military might and the one-of-a-kind death drive of one Thomas Mapother Cruise. At a time when every click and every glance is a potential commodification, to what degree is "cringe" so bound to personal limits so as to become a useless barometer? Yet of course, within this paradigm of earnestness/irony, Lewis' evocation of "detachment" as a "cultivated defense" against the increasingly apocalyptic social atmosphere gets at the heart of it in a really clear way. One stakes their claim and digs in their heels; commitment to one's own earnestness or cynicism, on a case-by-case basis, is almost an extension of committing to a bit (this is what I hope to be the case of anyone in the TradCath movement). But I also concur with Eileen's assessment that this cycle of earnestness and detachment is bound to repeat -- and also, perhaps, to be selectively applied based on the viewer's own tastes and problems. 

Perhaps the more defined emotion of the postfeminist moment is a type of inscrutability -- an inability to parse whether one is being earnest or ironic. An anecdote to tie it together: at the start of the Spring 2022 semester, which began on Zoom, we screened Singin' in the Rain in CTCS 190, as is customary. In the post-screening discussion, students began to vociferously defend Lena Lamont (Jean Hagen), the film's caricature-like archvillain. As the discussion accelerated and more students came to Lamont's defense, one student typed in the Zoom chat, "I think Lena is actually a girlboss." Was this student being serious? Were they primed by the shows that Eileen discusses to find pleasure in this character type? Or was that an ironic remark meant to call attention to how quickly the discussion had unpredictably spiraled? I haven't the slightest clue.