Some Notes on Hate-Watching

feat. Ignatius Reilly, clown and prophet

On the topic of twentieth-century media inadvertently predicting the future, let’s look for a moment at John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and its protagonist Ignatius Reilly (catchphrase: “Oh, my God!”).

The quixotic and crapulent Ignatius is like a degenerate muppet exiled from Sesame Street and made to live among the humans of New Orleans. He resides with his mother, doesn’t have a job, extols the philosophy of Boethius, and imagines the world would be a better place had the advance of technology and culture permanently stalled out around the start of the High Middle Ages.

Despite his pretentions to theology and geometry, Ignatius is altogether full of shit, and would rather grouse about how people ought to study and contemplate The Consolation of Philosophy than abide by its ethos himself. But a comedic novel must have its clown.

In addition to composing long jeremiads that nobody will ever read, Ignatius enjoys spending his idle time at the movies. “I must be at the theater on time,” he dismisses his mother when she talks to him about getting a job. “It’s a circus musical, a heralded excess which I have been waiting to see for some time.”

Though Ignatius is a regular patron of the local theater, he would take umbrage at the insinuation that he likes cinema.

Then the screen glowed in bright, wide technicolor, the lion roared, and the title of the excess flashed on the screen before his miraculous blue and yellow eyes. His face froze and his popcorn bag began to shake. Upon entering the theater, he had carefully buttoned the two earflaps to the top of his cap, and now the strident score of the musical assaulted his naked ears from a variety of speakers. He listened to the music, detecting two popular songs which he particularly disliked, and scrutinized the credits closely to find any names of performers who normally nauseated him.

When the credits had ended and Ignatius had noted that several of the actors, the composer, the director, the hair designer, and the assistant producer were all people whose efforts had offended him at various times in the past, there appeared in the technicolor a scene of many extras milling about a circus tent. He greedily studied the crowd and found the heroine standing near a sideshow.

“Oh, my God!” he screamed. “There she is.”

The children in the rows in front of him turned and stared, but Ignatius did not notice them. The blue and yellow eyes were following the heroine, who was gaily carrying a pail of water to what turned out to be her elephant.

“This is going to be even worse than I thought,” Ignatius said when he saw the elephant.

To the best of my knowledge, these passages in A Confederacy of Dunces contain the earliest literary treatment of the now-familiar practice of hate-watching. (If I’m wrong about this, I’m prepared to claim that they’re still the most entertaining.)

For a while Ignatius was relatively still, reacting to the unfolding plot with only an occasional subdued snort. Then what seemed to be the film’s entire cast was up on the wires. In the foreground, on a trapeze, was the heroine. She swung back and forth to a waltz. She smiled in a huge close-up. Ignatius inspected her teeth for cavities and fillings. She extended one leg. Ignatius rapidly surveyed its contours for structural defects. She began to sing about trying over and over again until you succeeded. Ignatius quivered as the philosophy of the lyrics became clear. He studied her grip on the trapeze in the hope that the camera would record her fatal plunge to the sawdust far below.

On the second chorus the entire ensemble joined in the song, smiling and singing lustily about ultimate success while they swung, dangled, flipped, and soared.

“Oh, good heavens!” Ignatius shouted, unable to contain himself any longer. Popcorn spilled down his shirt and gathered in the folds of his trousers. “What degenerate produced this abortion?”

“Shut up,” someone said behind him.

“Just look at those smiling morons! If only all of those wires would snap!” Ignatius rattled the few kernels of popcorn in his last bag. “Thank God that scene is over.”

When a love scene appeared to be developing, he bounded up out of his seat and stomped up the aisle to the candy counter for more popcorn, but as he returned to his seat, the two big pink figures were just preparing to kiss.

“They probably have halitosis,” Ignatius announced over the heads of the children. “I hate to think of the obscene places that those mouths have doubtlessly been before!”

“You’ll have to do something,” the candy woman told the manager laconically. “He’s worse than ever tonight.”

All the people who watched the first season of Velma all the way through, grinding their teeth and rolling their eyes and bitching about how bad it was episode after episode—each of them is Ignatius Reilly.

A distinction must be made between hate-watching and a hep appreciation for kitschy, extraordinarily inept, or bafflingly miscalculated culture product. Fans of a “so bad it’s good” movie like The Room watch it with their friends and go to Saturday night screenings because they like it—although not for the reasons the filmmaker(s) had hoped. With hate-watching, the viewer’s sentiments never click over into fondness. Hundreds or thousands of people watched the first seasons of Velma, High Guardian Spice, and Star Trek: Picard from start to finish, in spite of their loathing. The first episodes offended them; there was no reason to suppose the shows were going to improve; and yet, week after week, they hunkered down to watch the next episode anyway.

Enough people are doing this to prompt a few members of the chattering class to seek an explanation, and their findings are more or less what you might expect. Strong emotional responses of any flavor, it turns out, coincide with the release of feel-good secretions like serotonin and dopamine; the state of the hate-watcher is one of umbrage, aversion, and roused engagement. Ignatius Reilly in the theater doth protest too much, but not too too much: his disgust is genuine, but on the sub-rational chemical level he’s enjoying himself. (Just because someone grimaces and makes noises after taking a shot of whiskey doesn’t mean they’re not looking forward to the next one.) The egoistic and social dimensions of hate-watching are no less intuitive. Ignatius might admit (however equivocally) that he appreciates the opportunity a matinee provides to revel in his self-perceived intellectual superiority and moral rectitude; and perhaps if other people in attendance were as outraged by the movie as him, and for the same reasons, their shared enmity might serve as the basis or a reinforcer of a social affiliation.

In the grand scheme of things, this is all trivial. Nevertheless, I’d like to submit a few observations and ideas on the subject of hate-watching:

1. Every novel social practice, at the time of its emergence, was informed by preexisting ones; history reconstructs the narrative of hundreds of generations successively working with what was already known to them. The cursory examination of electronic media takes for granted the concatenation of historical developments which transformed the primitive ritual enactment of myth into the festival pageant, and the festival pageant into the secular spectacle. In the West, the growth of the Renaissance drama out of the medieval mystery play, and its transplantation from the church to the theater, was a process of formal subsumption; the cultural and economic marginalization of the playhouse effectuated by radio, film, and finally television culminated the real subsumptive process. The intercourse between entertainer and audience in all three cases expresses a social relation endemic to the organizational form of that society. We can tentatively characterize the relations instantiated in the “tribal” performance, the early modern playhouse (or concert venue), and the screen as community, segmentation, and alienation.

2. “Primitive” spectacle is an oxymoron. To be a spectator is to remain passive, and the storytelling occasions and performative rituals enacted by an “uncivilized” primary oral culture involve listeners/watchers as a Broadway show or an episode of a Netflix series cannot. Rather than a sharp delineation between “performer” and “viewer,” there were different modes of participation, all simultaneous, immediate, and interdependent, and “ownership” of what we’d call the performance’s “content” was held in common. This is to say that the requisite detachment for hate-watching didn’t exist in a pre-literate, pre-modern milieu. (Such groups grow increasingly scarce.)

3. The professionalization of writing and performing in plays, the private ownership of the playhouse, the disjunction of the play from the festival calendar, and the variable admission fee were manifestations of the gradual but inexorable bourgeoisie revolution in Western Europe, and of the contingent displacement of culture’s “production” and enactment from the church and the commons. (The notion of producing or manufacturing culture as though it were a roll of textiles or a bunch of nails would have baffled pre-modern peoples.) The “groundlings” of Shakespeare’s day were slow to catch on; their reputation for rambunctious heckling, lobbing food at the actors, and occasionally climbing onstage might be understood as the actions of a bunch who didn’t get (or couldn’t read) the memo and were under the impression that they were still meant to be active participants in cultural events instead of idle spectators. Managerial innovations such as the claque and the relocation of the cheap seats from the front of the house to the rear served to control their behavior and minimize their influence on the event, but the playhouse remained a powder keg for the rest of its useful life.

4. With he arrival of electric media, culture at last completed its transformation into into an impersonal, multitudinous ambiance generated by remote agencies and nonreciprocally operating upon its “consumers.” The possibility of hate-watching was a late and obscure consequence of this development. By disintegrating the public performance into millions of isolated but identical occurrences of the same event, electric media made hate-watching safe, and manufacturing content that appalls the sensibilities of a dispersed and passive audience (whether by accident or design) became a big business. Velma attracts an impressively large audience because it’s “the most hated show on TV,” not in spite of the fact, and there’s little danger of its audience members whipping bottles at the cast or brawling with each other.

5. The recent “literature” on hate-watching closely associates it with hate-following: keeping up with the social media activity of a person whom one detests. The main difference between hate-watching and hate-following pertains to the type of business model: a cable network, streaming platform, or film distributor doles out and profits from content one way, and YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok do so another way. The apparent immediacy of the parasocial experience conceals the actual immediacy of the relation between the viewer/follower and the firm which feeds them content.

6. Think of the internet-famous figure or distant acquaintance whose social media activity you routinely follow, in spite of the resentment and nausea they arouse in your guts. Now imagine that person as your roommate. As your semester-long lab partner in a chemistry course. As your coworker. God forbid, as your boss. All of those execrable but fascinating qualities shoved up in your face, their morbidly amusing pathological behavior affecting you directly, their fatuous and/or vile remarks uttered to your face with the expectation of a reply—day after day. It would be too much, too close to home, to be anything other than insufferable. It’s the peculiar character of the detached simulation of involvement which electronic media enables that makes hate-following the bilious pleasure that it is. Hate-watching is no different; it depends on the convergence of estrangement with false propinquity.

7. How popular was “hate-reading” at the height of the print epoch? I haven’t been able to track down any studies on the topic, but I’m disinclined to think it was as visible or deliberate as hate-watching is today. Imagine somebody saying: God, that Herman Melville is such an asshole. I read all five of his books, and all of them made me wish he would just fucking die. Did you hear that he just published another one? Today I’m going to walk a mile to the bookstore, buy his new six-hundred page novel, and try to hold back the vomit as I read it cover to god damned cover. It’s hard to get much roused by an unpleasant experience when effort must be expended in order to generate and prolong it. Literature asks for involvement; spectacle demands it.

8. It’s probable that during the explosion of serial fiction periodicals, some untold but massive number of readers made a point of reading the latest chapters written by an author they strongly disliked—and this would be a point of contact with hate-watching in that (1) we recognize it as something one does habitually (2) the habit becomes more easily ingrained when its object is free and accessible. The reader of Weird Tales who never missed an issue and had a hate-boner for HP Lovecraft wouldn’t deign to spend his hard-earned money on a collection of Lovecraft’s stories (if one had existed at the time), but as long as the magazine he’d already bought was in his lap, he might as well save “The Dunwich Horror” for last, and then hold his nose and peruse it while mentally composing a letter of complaint to the editor. Similarly: how many people would hate-watch the entire season of a given reality show if they had travel out of their way to watch it in a private booth somewhere at a cost of $10 per episode?
   

9. For the last few years there’s been an ideological theme to the noisiest complaints coming from the most demonstrative hate-watchers: namely that this or that hoary franchise has “gone woke.” For the aggrieved ideologue, there is no clearer admission of political powerlessness (i.e., the inability to influence his social environment) than the critique of ephemeral culture product, and no stronger indicator that the spectacle has fulfilled its function by obfuscating the agencies truly responsible for his discontent and hoodwinking him into directing his anger and energy where it will make the least difference. (I suppose it’s much the same for the Real Housewives viewer who gets a dark rush of ressentiment from watching miserable, petty people leading lives of shameful abundance while they work full-time, can’t afford to buy a home, and won’t have their student loans paid off until they’re in their late forties.)

10. It’s different for a professional critic like (for instance) the Critical Drinker, who makes what looks to be a handsome living watching big-budget media productions and uploading his diatribes against them to YouTube. For all his (no doubt genuine) distaste for modern Hollywood, he is himself a minor stakeholder in the general spectacle, and something of a useful idiot for the major stakeholders. His admirers in the comments, chiming in to say that they too watched every episode of She-Hulk (or whatever) and god what an embarrassing wokeist travesty that show was, can only boast of having experienced the pleasure of parasocial association on the grounds of sharing someone else’s disgust for the shit slurpee they all willingly induced themselves to suck down.

11. “For rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life,” McLuhan writes in Understanding Media. This is to say that viewers who hate-watched the entirety of Velma’s first season as it aired may not have done so if they couldn’t expect the weekly surge of memes, tweets, written and streamed reviews, message board chatter, etc., all agreeing with and articulating their displeasure after each premiere. Ressentiment, like dancing, is more pleasurable in a group (or in a simulation of one).

12. John Kennedy Toole wrote Ignatius as a fantastic conflation of Don Quixote and Falstaff, a figure too outsized in his ridiculousness to be believed. In the movie theater he is—as he is everywhere else—a freakish outlier. In hindsight, he wasn’t a freak, but a forerunner: a mutant fortuitously pre-adapted to a world where Disney+, YouTube, and Twitter already exist.