A Self-Examination of Taste

I love taxonomies and personality tests and theories that propose to make sense of everything—to circumscribe all truth into one great whole1, as it were.

I love them even when I believe that they are inherently flawed, that they are necessarily doomed to fail. I greedily complete any new personality test or system of categorizing and grouping people, eager to see what it reveals about me, perhaps, hoping against hope that this may be the one. The Thing that makes sense of the chaos of existence.

And it doesn’t. At least, not entirely.

Yet, I keep pursuing them. I’m an INTJ/Slytherin/5w4/Purple-reader/Upholder/White-Blue-Red2. (Incidentally, if you have a favorite personality test/framework, tell me about it!)

But I’m not here to talk about personality tests or taxonomies. I’m here to talk about taste. Specifically, mine. And to endeavor to provide an overarching, unifying theory of my own artistic tastes and sensibilities. An endeavor that is quixotic, doomed to fail even before it begins, and ambitious. Qualities that are fitting actually for an essay attempting to capture my taste3.

DIAL IT UP TO 11

My taste is, generously, described as eclectic. Or omnivorous. Less generously it might be labeled indiscriminate (though hopefully this essay challenges that particular label). A perusal of the latest iteration of my Top 100 Movies list will confirm. Something that characterizes my taste is an appreciation for excess or too much-ness, an over-the-top quality.

That is, when movies and music and books (though honestly this quality is harder for me to find/identify/think about for books) execute whatever they are doing to the nth degree. This is Everything Everywhere All at Once and also Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life. This is the quality that unites the music of Meat Loaf and Dragonforce and much of 90s third-wave ska in my heart.

I love a thing that devotes its entire self to being what it is being.

SWAGGER AND CONFIDENCE

And that’s perhaps the second feature. I am drawn to works that have a sense of swagger and confidence in how they hold themselves. Works that know who they are and are unafraid of being that thing (even when dialed up to 11!). This may be the Han Solo effect, that easy, seemingly effortless cool that I have always aspired to.

I think that this sense of confidence is key to being able to enjoy the too much-ness. Without the sense of confidence and self-assurance, that too much-ness can feel chaotic and scattered or like it is overcompensating for a lack of self-knowledge.

Relatedly, this confidence rids the work of apology or shame about what it is—unlike the “meta” humor that characterizes much of the media landscape today, and has for a good while now, which serves to distance the work from the genre it appears to be operating in or poke fun at itself or its intended audience in a condescending way (I’m looking at you Deadpool as perhaps the most egregious manifestation of this trait)—the works I feel drawn to show love and respect for what they are. Jupiter Ascending (and basically everything the Wachowskis do), Sinners, The Muppet Christmas Carol, and Heated Rivalry (the show) are all examples of this.

SINCERITY

This confidence then is also wrapped up in a sense of sincerity. I love works that aren’t afraid of sincerely expressing their own convictions! Sometimes this means being drawn to older films and books where a certain sentimentality was more common, other times this draws me to wild, weird, gonzo works that just have that pure-hearted, someone really means this vibe.

Obviously, “sincerity” is a fraught question when it comes to anything or anyone outside of myself! What may feel sincere and honest and therefore engaging to me, might be received as dishonest performance by someone else and that’s just the way it goes, I guess. I’m not sure exactly how I measure sincerity, but I do know that I resonate with things that feel sincere, to me. There’s maybe something else at play with the “sincerity” that has something to do with a particular way of optimistically/hopefully viewing human nature? Which maybe I should parse out more fully for myself. Things to ponder.

BUT WHY?

What forces conspired to create this sense of taste? Only God can say.

But that won’t stop me from at least taking a stab at it!

Some may date back to some of the earliest formative works in my life—Batman: The Movie (1966), Hook (1992), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954); your run of the mill assortment of 70s/80s classic rock—still have Styx’s “Come Sail Away” on my funeral program as a musical number; The Monster at the End of This Book; and then Speed Racer (2008), Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and ska, especially, Catch 22’s debut album Keasbey Nights4.

What unifies all of these eclectic works, besides my own love for them? I think the traits I just laid out. So, perhaps, it was loving this wide, strange array of things in my childhood, youth, and continuing through my early adulthood, that shaped my taste towards the sorts of weird, wild, big swings pieces of art.

Perhaps part of it is that I am a big ol’ weirdo. I’ve claimed “weird” as a descriptor for as long as I can remember5, not in a negative or self-deprecating way, but in an honest, gleeful way. And works that are characterized by this too much-ness are often, weird. I mean, what sense of self, dialed up to 11, isn’t?

Perhaps part of it is that my taste was formed in the fires of my deeply contrarian impulses—a rejection of anything “popular” as being bad and inferior to less popular alternatives. This was all relative of course. The only place where liking The Beatles could be seen as the contrarian, unpopular stance is perhaps at a south-eastern idaho junior high school in the mid-aughts. I delighted in liking things that everyone else hated (and almost certainly liked things just to spite the Man that deemed them unpopular). Though that should not be past tense. I still delight in liking things that others hate.

I still work to tame my contrarian impulses to not let my response to something be dictated by the responses of others6. But these sorts of too much, confident, wild, big swing works are often divisive, eliciting strong reactions, which helped me have an honest response to them and feel contrarian, no matter what I felt. Great place to test out and feel out my growing sense of taste.

I also love to love things, to almost devote myself to the work. I think this is easier with the confident, too much-ness works, because they have SO MUCH to love. There’s all sorts of stuff going on, so it’s easier to dig in and revel in the details.

I also wonder if these sorts of big swings have so much going on, almost too much, that is, that a single response or analysis or take cannot contain and make sense of everything that is happening. And as a curious, analytically oriented person, if that puzzle is a draw? I’m just thinking out loud—that at least is part of my draw to the Gothic, in a literary sense, and part of my preference for the supernatural Gothic over the Radcliffean Gothic, which wants to narratively foreclose the possibility of the supernatural and its excesses. It may also be something at work here in my taste.

This has me wondering if an alternative exploration of taste through a series of paradoxes could be fruitful, to capture the breadth and diversity of my taste and the ways it is perhaps at odds with itself. But that will have to marinate in my mind for a while to see if it has possibilities.

I think my theory makes some sort of sense, though it’s also my own sense of taste, so at some level, it feels obvious and like everyone likes these things (even though I know very well experientially that not everyone is as enamored with films of miscellaneous genres and tones that know what they are, and sincerely/open-heartedly execute that to the max). BUT I still feel like the language is a bit rough or imprecise, not quite capturing everything that I experience and want it to.

So, if you peruse my taste, or know it from conversations, etc., feel free to propose counter theories! Or to ask questions that stretch the bounds and applications of my theory! Or if you are reading this and thinking to yourself, “oh this sounds exactly like how I’d describe X”, gimme that recommendation!

Or otherwise engage with these introspective, meandering Monday thoughts!