The Life of the Mind

Yes, they are misunderstood. No that’s not the set up of a joke, or some irony playing off the fact that hipsters love irony. It’s true. The internet has done to hipsters exactly what it did to cats. No, I’m sorry, no cat has ever asked for a cheeseburger in broken English. And not every mid-twenties white guy with a beard and a hobby is a hipster.

People who live in the mid-west who only receive cutting edge culture years later and through second hand sources like MTV don’t really get eccentricity as much as someone from a big city would. And the concept of a hipster, due to a misunderstanding of people from smaller areas seeing hipsters on the internet, has become a sort of amalgamation. Now anyone with an interest in art and a few odd affectations becomes lumped into the all encompassing stratosphere of the hipster. Ride a unicycle? Hipster. Pickle your own cucumbers? Hipster. Roll your own cigarettes? Play the fiddle? Prune bonsai trees? Play Hearts competitively? If you’re twenty-five, have tattoos, and do any of these things, you will now be perceived as a hipster. When in reality, these activities could be done by anyone from any walk of life. And in a city like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, or Seattle, you’ll find millions of subcultures where you might pick up a little quirk here and there. And after a few years of moving city to city these will combine. And before you know it, you make pizza out of quinoa, draw your own tattoos, and wear corduroy pants. Whereas just a few years ago this made you interesting and traveled, now you’re an object of scorn because some guy from Wisconsin saw people like you mocked on Portlandia.

The guy riding the unicycle and the guy who pickles tomatoes aren’t the same. They might even hate eachother. Wearing a knit hat in June and drinking a latte doesn’t actually mean what it is now perceived to mean. There are true hipsters out there. Mustaches, dollar store neon sunglasses, loafers. They’re real. And they are douchebags deserving of a little mockery. But to assume anyone wearing glasses and holding an iPhone is in this massive group, is about as accurate as seeing a guy driving a truck and assuming he has a Confederate flag above his bed. You might be right, but it’s a total stab in the dark.

This was the first thing that popped up in a Google search, but he’s probably a really nice guy with an interesting story about playing the banjo.

In a twist that should surprise NO ONE, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is called pretentious and self indulgent. Pretentious, when used to describe a film usually means to me: smart but I didn’t like it.

Malick’s film is now joining the careers of Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Michele Gondry, and just about every other filmmaker making creative imaginative films during the rise of the hipster. So eager to be anti-hipster, it has become even more cliche to call something pretentious. How can one keep up?

Films like The Tree of Life, Synecdoche, New York, or The Fountain have received a lot of scorn from snobby suburbanites. I suppose it could be attributed to the films being more about visual creativity and thought provoking notions than about answers and storytelling. But in any other medium, such an effort would be respected in it’s own right. For example, out jazz.

I would be willing to bet my life that if Synecdoche, New York were a Japanese film, the same suburbanites would be showering it with praise for examining human existence, and dissecting life in an almost surreal way. They would fall over themselves in discussion, and lament the fact that American cinema could never deliver such a thing. They would point to Transformers 3 as an example of the shallowness of Hollywood.