[...] pop culture teaches best when it isn’t so conscious of its teacherly role, when it doesn’t underline every point five or six times. (It has this in common with, well, any sort of culture.) The low-budget shock filmmaker George Romero taught the audiences of his own period far more powerfully, and with much less fuss, simply by featuring Black characters in heroic roles and by listening when the actress Gaylen Ross said, during the shooting of the 1979 zombie epic, Dawn of the Dead, that she didn’t think her character would scream. We might say that Romero rode his mind at a gallop in pursuit of making a frightening movie, whereas our popular artists live betwixt and between, now trying to emulate the artworks that they love, now trying to impart a Very Important Lesson.

Why have we settled for this strange cultural compromise—lowbrow genres, done with middlebrow earnestness, in pretend revolt against a thoroughly defunded highbrow regime? The answer is simple and depressing. We have accepted the idea of the democratization of culture—we have accepted, rightly, that, say, opera is not inherently worthier than jazz, that superhero comics are not inherently dumb, that ancient epic poetry is not automatically loftier than rap (with which it shares some features), that all of these things can be done well or badly and that they serve different ends—without accomplishing democracy. I mean this in a dully straightforward way. We are not all equally in control of our lives, and we are afraid of what becoming so would entail, of the costs of democracy, of the mess of it. We are divided by class, race, and gender and united only in being the objects of a ceaseless corporate effort to accomplish our commodification. Having lost the economic battle to economic and political elites, we celebrate, again and again, our victory over the mostly imaginary cultural elite that would scorn us for watching 90 Day Fiancé. What you can’t do practically, you do symbolically, until it becomes a neurosis.