For the Love of Mindless Chatter
I could say that my childhood ended when I finished reading It by Stephen King. It’s 1200 pages long, and I’d moved through it slowly over the course of many months, during which I’d graduated from grade school, got my first period, and started junior high. The characters were my age: I’d slogged with them through the sewers of hell, and we’d accompanied each other into young adulthood — in ways that sometimes upset me in hindsight, but which meant a lot at the time. And then they were gone, and I was bereft. Like most private experiences one has in adolescence, it would have been easier if I could have only debriefed.
When an aesthetic experience comes to an end, it feels a lot like waking up from a dream. That sounds trite, but what I mean is that it creates the longing to linger. After a compelling dream — not necessarily a good one — you don’t want the day to begin: you want to bask for a while, and delay reacclimatizing to the world as you know it. You don’t need to be a fan to recognize this desire. It’s the urge to visit the Wikipedia page of the movie you just watched, if not to keep hanging out in the world of the movie, then to process the experience of having been there. To debrief.
I seek a real connection in the art I consume, but connection is connection, and I also seek it in other consumers. Not that I’m trying to meet fellow fans, per se; neither of us have to have liked the art. What’s important is that we want to talk about it. We don’t need to agree, and maybe it’s better that we don’t. More than ever, I appreciate the thrill of arguing about aesthetics, which might be my favorite form of play. It’s not as though these arguments are inconsequential. The opposite is true: they’re deeply moral, and deeply political, if not always explicitly; but they encourage a receptivity that is hard to accomplish otherwise. Talking about art, it’s OK to yell, and be yelled at, to be open to being persuaded.
During a lot of the late 2010s, and early 2020s, I felt a little sheepish getting worked up about topics whose stakes were minor. My priority was less conversation than discourse, though I would never have said it that way. In discourse, I felt guarded, almost paranoid — about being misunderstood, or suddenly exposed to somebody’s awful opinions. On social platforms — where much of the discourse was taking place, and which shaped the discourse — it often felt like the most important thing was to be clear about where you were coming from; any topic was fodder for the restatement of one’s values.
Restating my values made me feel allied, but not exactly connected, least of all to people with whom I shared values. The more we needed to agree, the less we seemed to communicate. Today I feel refreshed by mindless chatter. Because it’s thrilling to just connect, and because chatter is never mindless.
I’ve been watching Succession since its first season. The world has changed a lot since then, and the Roys are pretty much the same. I’m invested in the show, although I wouldn’t say I’m a fan: I’m not particularly bonded to the characters, and I don’t even care much what happens this Sunday, when the series comes to a close. I’m invested in the spectacle: I read the recaps and the power rankings. I lap up those columns decoding the fashion and deciphering billionaire mores — which feel less like social critique, to me, than excuses to keep hanging out in the world of the show, as putrid and beguiling as it is.
After years of isolation, what I’m really craving is shared aesthetic experience — those experiences we opt into, and enjoy, even when we hate them. What I want the most in my leisure is joyful, uninhibited, delighted, and enraged conversation that is low stakes, in that it happens for its own sake. Of course, these conversations aren’t low-stakes at all. They’re how we move from abstract notions into the immediacy of other people, how we renew our commitments to life and to each other.
Lately I’ve been listening to the podcast Normal Gossip, which was hatched in the dark days of Covid, when most of the news was terrible and casual contact was rare. This created a need for gossip: information that was light and pleasurable, and which indicated a world where normal stuff was still happening. Gossip elicits the sort of judgment that makes you feel human, still — that doesn’t exclude you from the fray. So-and-so’s a bitch, but you’re kind of a bitch, too, for gloating about it.
The show’s heart is storytelling — about the messy entanglements of people you’ll never meet — but it’s also a sustained argument for the importance of gossip itself, which isn’t frivolous at all. It brings people closer, upholds and upends social conventions, and grants a kind of power to the powerless, by way of knowledge about the powerful. But it doesn’t need to do that to be fun.
Gossip and crushing are similar pastimes, and not just because they’re both coded as childish, indulgent activities for girls and women. Both are vulnerable to malice, of course, but in their best and most basic forms, they’re ways of connecting: of thinking about and enjoying other people, for no reason other than that.