notes on cheese

thesublemon:

Sincerity is uncomfortable because sincerity is vulnerability. In the context of art, sincerity is taking a stance–about the things you like, the beliefs you have, or the notes you’re going for. And if that note seems wrong or childish or too intense, then it is treated (or experienced) as embarrassing the way any sort of exposing failure is. Like asking someone out and having them turn you down. Sincerity, badly done, makes us want to avert our eyes. I’ve been thinking about the word “cheesy” lately, and why it’s almost always used in a pejorative sense. Art can be sincere without being cheesy, but nonetheless this embarrassment of vulnerability seems key to why people find cheese so aversive.

Sarah Perry talks about something similar in “Cringe and the Design of Sacred Experiences.” She describes “cringe” as the reaction to a failed attempt to induce the experience of sacredness. She also mentions Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” where she says camp is defined as essentially “failed seriousness.” But Perry also suggests that sacredness and seriousness gain much of their power, when they have power, from the same vulnerability that causes cringe. To create an experience one first has to create, which inevitably leaves one open to failure.

So we could say that the deprecating use of ”cheesy” is deserved. We could say that, like with camp, people are correctly observing that an attempt at sincerity has failed. That if camp is failed seriousness, then “cheese” is something like failed emotionality. Perhaps failed bigness: a dramatic kiss, a climactic battle-cry or a well-timed explosion could all be cheesy in context.

But the difference between cheese and camp (and cringe) is that I don’t know that cheesy things are, in fact, failures. If you woo someone with a sonnet, that’s kind of cheesy, but the person who receives it will only be embarrassed on your behalf if the context is wrong. And even in that case it’s not the cheese, not the idea of writing a sonnet in general, that is the bad thing. Because even if the context were “correct” and the recipient was charmed, the sonnet would still be cheesy. It still wouldn’t be a dignified thing to do. It’s just that the indignity would be okay.

This is the essence of cheese, I think. Cheese isn’t just sincerity. Cheese is sincerity that opts out of dignity. That doesn’t treat dignity as a concern. Jack and Rose at the tip of the Titanic is cheesy because it runs the risk of looking silly in its quest to hit an exultantly romantic note. Every James Bond quip is cheesy, risking buffoonery as it does in its quest for a cavalier, larger-than-life cool. Titanic and James Bond are still ridiculous, but it’s that distance from realism that makes them fun, that gives you the big, movie-going joy. And in the case of the sonnet, it’s the inherent vulnerability of the sincerity (the very fact of indignity) that actually gives the act its greatest power to charm. I am willing to embarrass myself for you, is part of what a sonnet says.

Cheese isn’t the same as deliberate camp or winking meta-textuality, because those things are ironic. They don’t opt out of dignity; they opt out of trying. They might be trying at something, but not, the vast majority of the time, what they’re winking at. Cheese isn’t cheese unless it’s sincere.

Cheese is considered middlebrow because it’s obvious. It’s legible. It’s interested in having an effect, and so people that like being affected will flock to it. When it’s bad, cheese opts out of trying as much as anything else. Cheese is the safe choice when you’re afraid of seriousness, or forms of subtlety and weirdness that appeal more to the intellect than the animal.

The point is that it’s not cheese that’s bad. Neither is irony, New Sincerity, scatology or self-reflexivity. It’s the unwillingness to make unsafe choices. To quote “Cringe and the Design of Sacred Experiences”:

This is not to suggest that all failure to evoke sacred experience result in cringe. In fact, mere boredom may be a more common failure mode, and probably results in the absence of a brave (but failed) attempt to evoke sacred experience. A strong cringe reaction may be a good sign, compared to mere boredom: at least the attempt to evoke the sacred experience was recognizable in the case of cringe.

Cheese is artistically useful because big emotions, as we feel them, are basically as ridiculous as cheese feels. It’s not particularly dignified to be in love, or to be easily manipulated by a swell of music. But we still want to be in love, and we still enjoy the music. So how do you talk about love, or give people those musical experiences, unless you’re willing to be undignified yourself? How do give people experiences bigger than reality unless you’re willing to go big? How do you get your art to affect people, on the most basic, non-cheesy level unless you’re willing to get called “cheesy”?

In other words: cheese isn’t good or bad, but people and cultures that are afraid of cheese run the risk of being creatively crippled by it.