Virginia Heffernan: Arg! Chagrin!

Oh, Virginia. Once again you've made a complex mess out of a simple pancake recipe. When did this vaguely whimsical, surrealist lite take over entertainment viewers for the NY Times? The same way that so many entertainment/gossip blogs (Defamer, Gawker, et al.) seem to have all drank deep and heartily from the same well of tonal sarcasm do reviewers like A.O. Scott and Virginia Heffernan seem to have taken writing lessons from Frank Bruni's less successful writing professor brother-in-law.

A better, perhaps more succinct description might be impressionistic reviews. Take this sentence from today's review of the new season (or second half of last season) of Entourage:

This season is about how men love men, and how they hate themselves for loving men, and how they worry about loving men, and how they need to stand up to men so they can love women, or stand up to women so they can love men.

What? I--it--really?

It also becomes apparent in VH's review that she aspires to something better than critic for the New York Times. Something, like, say, a gossip columnist:

And then there’s Jeremy Piven. Honestly, in the off seasons he looks ready to lose it. Can he really continue playing Ari Gold, the jerk superagent, without getting delusions and landing in ego-disorder rehab?

Like, wow, Scoob!

Now you may not agree with me on this, but perhaps you can forgive me for constantly looking for reasons to hate her writing when you read her other article in today's Times about that Seven Minute Sopranos vid.

Heffernan first gained a foothold in the YouTube/viral video reviewing niche when she reviewed (is reviewed even the right word?) a few of those Brokeback Mountain spoof trailers from a few years ago. Cute. Since then she's balanced her work between reviewing TV pap like Laguna Beach and writing about web video for an audience who a) has already seen the videos under review and b) probably doesn't care.

So it was with this already in mind that I opened up the paper today and greedily devoured her write up about the latest viral-video from-two-weeks-ago-that's-already-been-milked-to-death like a junkie who knows the heroin is only going to hurt him, but can't help needling up first thing in the AM.

I read along almost happily, like Ike and Tina on a pleasant picnic, until I came to this:

And that point — the duet in a major key, followed by a breath — is especially affecting when Carmela reverses her enthusiasm for therapy in the next scene, having learned that Tony’s therapist is a woman. Standing on a balcony she rains a half-dozen black valises down on her husband and curses at him to leave the house. This is the first of several times Mr. Sabia and Mr. Gulyas use this scene. It becomes shorthand for Carmela’s indignation.

The repetition of this stagecraft has become many commenters’ favorite part of “Seven Minute Sopranos.” But it’s also where Mr. Gulyas and Mr. Sabia make clear that they bring a critic’s eye to the action of the show. But what statement are they making with the repetition? Something about the redundancy of Ms. Falco’s performance? Or perhaps the cyclical nature of Tony and Carmela’s marriage?

It's bad enough that Heff is even writing about this in the first place, but when she tosses in attempts to legitimately review a web video, I just about fall off my chair. On purpose. To prove a point, you know? What statement are they making? This is like anthropomorphism, only instead of non-human begins, we have two guys with a lot of time on their hands, and instead of the ability to speak the human tongue, they have a keen critic's eye and sly wit for web video critique.

Now, I am more than willing to admit that context is everything for me. If this sort of review had appeared on a site like The Daily Reel, I'd call it well played. Brilliant even. But why, tell me Jesus, is this in the NY Times arts section? I'm all for convergence, but really, like this? Maybe that is like me saying I'm okay with anal rape as long as it doesn't happen to me, but all of this makes me understand the outcry amongst Austrian coffee house intellectuals over the introduction of newspapers when it was said that the appearance of so many varied topics will only result in everything losing its meaning. The same argument is applied to Internet news sources where one can catch up on the latest car bomb attack with one eye, while the other orb scans the dets of Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy and OH MY GOD is Bragelina getting fat! At first I found this thought off putting and precious, but now I get it.

Part of the problem is, as Mark Cuban already pointed out, big newspapers like the Times oughtn't be covering things that are necessarily temporal. Things like big breaking news events and even viral video are covered with much more precision and timeliness by other web sites devoted solely to such matters. In essence Cuban is the hunky jock who outs himself to the hot former nerd with an eating disorder, reassuring her, Look at you, you're gorgeous. You have it all, you just can turn me un-gay. Stick to what you're good at: letting the men's basketball team have their drunken way with you. Or something like that.

Is it me, or is it a sign of the times when our collective interests can leap from opera to classical music performance to web video in one fell swoop? What are we to make of our cultural standing that now includes YouTube (on the cusp of getting its own verb a la Google or Facebook) as a legitimate art form? It seems to me that we are now practicing the circumnavigational habits of the men of yore by going so far backwards that we end up ahead. And at our helm is a mahogany bust of Virginia Heffernan.