PEMDAS for cultural analysis
Make commentary great again
If you’re like me, you consume cultural texts and their analysis in roughly equal amounts. For example, after watching a movie I often like to read an essay analyzing it. When it’s sharp, cultural analysis can be as enlightening as the text it deconstructs. But when it’s bad, analysis can be more insufferable than even the worst movies, books, and music themselves.
I don’t have much of a taste for a lot of contemporary movies, books, TV shows, and especially music, but I have even less of a taste for contemporary cultural analysis. To analyze culture today is less about deconstructing aesthetic and thematic choices and more about engaging in petty culture wars, litigating worn out political disputes, and, for lack of a better term, “virtue signaling.” Perhaps the main function of cultural commentary today is communicating to all your peers that you consume and like all the right media with sufficient fawning. One must obsequiously stan Taylor Swift and Marvel Comics, lest they appear snobby, or worse, conservative. Like everything else in life, cultural criticism has become thoroughly political, leaving us un equipped to evaluate art using anything but heavy handed metaphors for good vs. bad, liberalism vs. Trumpism.
At the risk of replacing one intransigent analytical framework for another, I humbly offer a sequence of critical orientations that I believe produce more insightful analysis than today’s played out political filters. To present this framework, I borrow from elementary school arithmetic. Remember PEMDAS? The handy acronym that tells us the order in which mathematical operations should be executed to produce the correct answer to a multidimensional equation? Cultural analysis, I believe, would benefit from following a similar order of operations to produce a more “correct” (read: insightful) analysis of art.
The PEMDAS of cultural analysis is not nearly as elegant an acronym: EIMIPP. It stands for Economics, Irony, Metaphor, Ideology, Phenomenology, Politics.
Let’s consider one of the most widely discussed and popular texts of recent years: 2018’s Black Panther. I thought the movie was just OK, as far as movies go, and quite good as far as Marvel movies go. But the analysis surrounding it, however, I found utterly insipid. If we apply the EIMIPP order of operations to Black Panther we can see how thoughtfulness atrophies as we move from Economics to Politics, where most commentary unfortunately sits today.
Economics: the central tension of the film is that Wakanda contains secret troves of the world’s strongest and most valuable metal, Vibranium. Using this fictional resource war as a mirror to reflect on our own resource wars — whether oil, water, rare metals, etc. — and the textures of nationalism and global supply chain complexities inherent in them would be, I think, a fascinating piece of commentary. It’s hard to go wrong with straight economic analysis, which is why it comes first. Base determines superstructure, and an analysis of the material realities of even the most fictional worlds will always offer some amount of insight applicable to our own lives.
Irony: I think the best art always contains at least a dash of irony, since oppositions define the human condition. For Black Panther, the obvious irony is that the villain is maybe not so bad after all, while the hero stands in for a ineffectual, arguably evil status quo. That’s actually not so interesting as ironies go, so perhaps the real irony worth analyzing is the complex relationship between this wildly profitable film and Black success in America. Are we interested in the latter only insofar as it results in the former?
Metaphor: Making a text’s metaphor the focus of your analysis is always a bit risky. Art is by definition metaphorical, so you run the risk of stating the obvious, but a careful deconstruction of artistic metaphors can also be profound. It really depends on the end goal, since a metaphor is chameleonic, an empty analytical vessel that takes on the characteristics of whatever context you surround it with. In the case of Black Panther, most commenters chose to discern a mildewed political metaphor in which the Wakandan establishment represents the sober, realistic politics of the technocratic center-left with its Obama Foundation-style Oakland Social Outreach Program while Erik Killmonger represents political radicalism. OK?
Ideology: This is where the EIMIPP order of operations starts to reflect the significantly less interesting analytical frameworks, the operations that should be saved for last. Ideological analyses can be insightful, but the whole concept of ideology has become so fraught and overdiscussed in our culture that we see, in Black Panther itself, how the film very consciously and clumsily attempts to tackle the concept directly as plot fodder. The ideology in question is western colonialism, which very heavy handedly gets turned into corny one-liners about “white boy colonizers.” Ideology is kitsch in the Black Panther universe, and so is commenting on its cinematic depiction. It’s not that’s it’s untrue, its just that the writers and commenters focusing on it come off as tryhards by elaborating on themes so obvious they’re fumbled by the movie itself.
Phenomenology: Phenomenological analyses of fictional characters in narratives is almost always just a chance for the commenter to project their own neuroses onto individual characters. Not that the interiority of characters doesn’t matter, but I’m not sure there’s much interiority to characters nowadays anyway. Maybe I just don’t like it because this is how fan-fic begins.
Politics: Wow, Erik Killmonger….brocialism much? LOL good luck arming and liberating the global subaltern, you Marxist bro.
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