On The Taste of Wet Cement

And why you should not let people enjoy things.

When one reviewer was asked to criticise attachment theory, he started by mentioning how Bowlby and Ainsworth failed to mention what inspired them to undertake their investigation. At that moment I felt a pang of guilt in my chest; my conscience accusing me that I had left unsaid the origin story of how I came to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame 27 years after it first appeared on the big screen. 

For it is an interesting, yet brief story. It was a bright day when as I flaneured the noisy streets of that Agora called X (whose rightful name is Twitter), I saw a captivating sight. I watched, from a poster I cannot now remember, an embattled Judge Claude Frollo wrestle his lustful desire via the heavenly melodies of Hellfire. I thought to myself, “This is real anguish; and real evil; and the real condition of sinful man.”

His eyes burned, his voice trembled, the song soared, his conscience argued, the Latin Latined; God was merciful—He provided a means of escape. Yet, his sin won. I saw in that common monster of a man the contorted posture of all mankind; the anguish of man when he is caught in the battle between good and evil which rages within himself; all rendered in passionate singing. Then I decided that for a four-minute rendition so moving, I must like Moses, turn aside and ‘see this great sight.’ The rest they say is history.

a teenage boy eating wet cement from a mixing bowl

Now this story is important for many reasons. But it is compelling for one. That a song which lasts for fewer minutes than you need to boil an egg stirred my interest towards the entire movie. That a song, unaided by the context of the movie from whence it was plucked and thrown into the wild, could hold its own, and at the same time, invite interest towards the movie from which it was taken, is the type of thing that qualifies great art. This contrasts what happened with Wish — another Disney movie that premiered in November. 

While Hellfire turned my attention towards the entire movie, This Is The Thanks I Get turned me away from Wish. While Hellfire stirred a holy curiosity in me, This Is The Thanks I Get killed my curiosity and put wind in my legs to flee from it. It didn’t get me to care. Or, it got me to care in a negative hateful manner. In other words, in thinking of what makes great art, This Is The Thanks I Get fails. Both as an independent soundtrack and a song in the movie. For it fails to capture its character’s motivation.

Nonetheless, this is not the first time a track in a movie fails. However, it came at a time when a piece of art with such obvious poor quality can be increasingly defended. A time where folks would have you debating the possibility that Hellfire and This Is The Thanks I Get can be equally enjoyed. “Just enjoy it,” they say.

Perhaps you can equally enjoy them….if you have botched your sense of taste. And seeing that taste is nothing other than judgment, any bold assertion that both songs stand shoulder to shoulder as musical peers and villain songs should attract quizzical eyebrows.

So, reader, this is my lament: not that we are starved for quality—which has been the malady of mankind in all era, but that folks treat works of art which have the sensuous appeal of the taste of cement with euphoric wide-eyed wonder and they expect you not to judge. Judge not, Matthew 7:1 says. Yet to not judge will be a more treacherous act.

You may call me unfair for not giving Wish a better chance. But that would miss the point. And it will be you being unfair to me. For This is The Thanks I Get, like Hellfire, is the villain song. The song that paints the picture; that invites us for insight. Compare it to Hellfire and it fails. It paints a confusing picture, thus failing to invite you to explore the character, his motivation, or the entire movie. Rather than be menacing or revealing, the song—with its scant, poor, and teen-Bieber melody—causes us to sympathise, not with a villain, but with a petulant king who expresses himself like a nice janitor who just lost ‘it’ for a moment because he is taken for granted. It obscures; and misses. By an entire mile. 

It may be the case that Wish turns out to be a great movie; perhaps an even greater piece than The Hunchback of Notre Dame—although I doubt it. But it has surely failed to draw good and lasting interest. Since we have finite time and we cannot attend to everything in the world, it is imperative that we pick and choose; that must discriminate and discriminate well. We must, if we will remain healthy, avoid art that fails at its aesthetic duty.

Yet, one objection remains. A final objection, which blazes with all the intensity of a supernova — for it is the last attempt produced by the throes of decadent taste: that some people enjoy it all the same—like that is all that matters. Which, sincerely, I cannot object to. I cannot object to you enjoying This is The Thanks I Get (TITTIG for short) just as I will not object to an anaemic girl who enjoys eating wall paint. I am somewhat indifferent to the subjective capacity of your palate. What I can object to, and not condone, however, is the now common tactic of equating one’s subjective enjoyment of a thing with its objective quality. You may convince me that you enjoy eating cement for breakfast. But you cannot convince me that cement tastes good. De gustibus non est disputandum—I cannot dispute with you that you enjoyed TITTIG. However, I dispute that TITTIG is a work of art worthy of, not just mine, but any rational being’s aesthetic interest.

This points us to a larger problem: we fail to distinguish between “what I enjoy” and “what is good.” It seems as if something —an inflated sense of self I believe— whispers to us that if we enjoy something, it must be that it is good. That whatever we enjoy is good. Thus making our “self” the measure of all things; making it hard to dispute on the matters of taste. For if it were not so, we would utter “art is subjective” much less than we currently do. Because for the common mind, “art is subjective” is pretext for “art is relative; my judgment of it is as good as yours, therefore nothing is true about it” Which is an attempt to evade truth and judgment.

And should the common mind be paired with an appetite for numbers and quantification, you will get cement slurpers charging at you with lancets of numbers —“those of you complaining about The Marvels, I just want you to know it made 34 stumillion dawlers in cinema”— as if this changes what garbage the production was. 

Consider that some of these poor productions which do well at box office belong to franchises which have built a lasting reputation from (or on) movies of great quality. Certainly, the banner of promise and the benefit of the doubt must hang over this new member of the family that will, because it lacks the quality of health that preceded it, flop. Yet, the common mind cum the quantitative posture bandies this about like it paints the true picture. Contrarily, for all purposes and on such occasions, these numbers paint two different pictures from the ones cement-enjoyers want it to: primo, that people can endure as well as enjoy bad things; secundo, that the common mind—a la “art is subjective”— is vacant of good taste and has only one means of judgment—pecuniary success. Indeed, nihil sine poena est. 

I once sat through Almighty Thor—that satanic production. All because I had heard and read of Thor without getting the chance to see the real thing. So I fell for the first likeness of it. Yet, despite my hunger —or maybe because of it,— I recognised that it was unfit for the eyes of a noble person. Certainly, my two hours of viewing time helped to boost the final numbers. And the producers may have jollied away to the bank. However, much more lay beneath the thin crust of those numbers. How much then, we must ask, can numbers and figures account for the quality of a movie in cinema or streaming? Does greens equals good? No.

Yet this tattered scarecrow of “facts and figures” bobs its head in the event of another release. I presume that the common mind thinks this way: “If it wasn’t good, people won’t pay to see it.” But that thought skips a step: you must have paid to see it before you can perfectly determine whether it was good or not. After all, the YouTubers and Twitch streamers who because they must review the movie, have to see it—even though they might hate it afterwards. How then is money and viewership an indicator of its quality? (Indicators which are easily explained by marketing.)

They say “Just enjoy it,” and you sit there puzzled, calculating how anyone enjoys Wish, The Marvels, Gremlins 2, etc. For charity sake, you make excuses in your head for them; giving the movie the benefit of the doubt; you know, in the sense of “maybe I missed something the first time,” or “perhaps I reated you too harshly.” Or the grand excuse: “perhaps it will grow on me.” But friend, can the taste of cement ever grow on anyone? Garbage may be recycled. But who can redeem the taste of faeces? Then you sigh deeply and accept your fate that you are stuck in this world with people who love the taste of wet cement. Even more arduously, you remind yourself that you must love them. Yet, you must consistently remind yourself and others that to love the taste of wet cement is not to say that wet cement tastes good—an age that will survive rot must not let it slip from their repertoire of truth.

You might love the taste of wet cement. It will not translate to wet cement tasting good. But it is especially hard to live in a world where wet cement lovers insist that it is. That we must judge not. That art is subjective. A truly rational mind will say, “I enjoy this thing; but is it good?”

Vale.

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This March, I bestow on you the divine right to not let people enjoy things. Where “things” is a stand-in for garbage, degeneracy, and wet-cement