Let’s face it. Millennials are old news. And old in general. The youngest are 30, and the sway they once held over ‘the culture’ is fading, even if we’re nostalgic for 2016. It’s gotten so bad for them, that terms like ‘Millennial’ and ‘cheugy’ are now derogatory descriptors for anything that stinks a little too much of BuzzFeed, skinny jeans, and ankle socks in checkerboard vans.
Millennial-ism has now been neutralised, instantly recognisable and discredited. But let’s not kid ourselves: generational divides are flimsy, and as far as ‘social constructs’ go, one of the less credible ones. What millennials used to be, Gen Z is, just differently. So in this dusk of millennial-ism, let the owl of Minerva take flight over what was such a key feature of that optimistic time. The #relatable object, from memes to poems to books and films.
‘Relatable Art’ Is Designed For Consumption
If you’re like me, you’ll remember the days when BuzzFeed had serious cultural relevance, and websites like Vine and iFunny were posting ‘relatable’ content, in the form of short form video or image macros. Think “Mondays, amirite?” with a gif from The Office (US), and a host of comments declaring “Mood, this is so me on Mondays”. Content like this peaked in the 2010s, and the term eventually wormed its way into the arts.
What started as a word for pitching daytime tv and sitcoms became a way of evaluating art itself. In 2014, Ira Glass described Shakespeare as “not relatable”, prompting the first public censure against the term in Rebecca Mead’s article ‘The Scourge of Relatability’. Five years later, Jeremy Larson would respond to this critique to redeem the value of creating relatable art, such as in the way it can affirm underrepresented identities in media.
Each of these articles represent watermarks of the zeitgeist of relatable art. Nowadays, however, it is recognised as a self-contained form, essentially synonymous with ‘marketable’. Our ability to recognise this type of art is a testament to the human ability to sense when we’re being sold something. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography, “I know it when I see it”. In this instance, we know it to be commodified art, whose primary function is a market one, measured in terms of virality and revenue.
Relatable memes are generally inoffensive, non-threatening laments about the difficulties of life; being bad at relationships, work and school, being introverted, klutzy, or facing minor inconveniences. Their virality is no accident; it’s a result of careful data analysis. ‘Relatable art’ as a set phrase has taken on a similar colloquial meaning: inoffensive content, told from the perspective of a non-threatening subject. It comprises greeting cards, Instapoetry, or Kitschy pop art like that of Banksy. It has a clear and readable message, with hot takes ranging from ‘government bad’, to ‘phone bad, book good’, to ‘be yourself’.
Gen Z’s ironic salvaging of relatable content doesn’t stem from cultural nihilism or an attempt to turn the century’s horrors into spectacle. It’s a reminder that in an era where the individual has been stripped of their political power and our media and institutions have proven to be complicit and toothless, we will not forget. Where world events are themselves spectacles manufactured by elites, such as Trump’s tariff obsession or recent invasion of Iran, in a tragic reversion, the world of parody becomes more real than the real itself. The sharp satire of online humour is a way of reclaiming political and social agency, ensuring that focus is not lost where the mainstream news cycle would divert it.
Relatable memes, in their manufactured marketability, tend to be reductive of reality. When Gen Z gets their hands on them, their ironic awareness of the form is a way of pluralising and adding the nuance that is lacking in the original content. They restore a way to relate to an otherwise vitiated and commodified view of the world.
Take, for instance, the Two Guys on a Bus meme, or the Dramatic Crossroads meme. Such images, initially shared as a way of encapsulating some kind of ‘universal’ experience, are endlessly iterated until even the initial format itself is questioned. The dualisms necessitated by the original image in each of these examples are exploded, challenged, and rejected. The younger generation decline to eat at the content slop trough.
Art, however, needs relatability.
This, however, is a literature and arts column, so let’s get some perspective. The initial backlash against relatability in art came precisely because it was seen as synonymous with the above mentioned online phenomenon: it’s content slop, manufactured for the sole purpose of viral spread and mass marketability.
But is that really all that relatability is? When Rebecca Mead attacked the category, she was attacking something quite specific, a (usually online) cultural category signified by the umbrella term relatable. I’ve already addressed a good portion of what falls under this umbrella. But are we not throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we declare it a bad yardstick by which to measure a work of art?
To answer this, it’s useful to describe two of the key ways that people think about relatability. Its first and primary manifestation goes like this. In a film like Frances Ha (2012), privileged Westerners living in major cities might relate directly to the struggle of figuring life out in your twenties. That’s because the film is literally about that, its story runs parallel to one’s own narrative of oneself, reflecting it back.
Rita Felski uses the term ‘Recognition’ in her book Uses of Literature (2008) to describe this experience. When we relate to art in this way, it is a direct form of ‘becoming known’, in which our identities are objectified in the medium in front of us, and affirmed in their being. We literally feel seen.
Recognition is what critics tend to attack when they declare that we shouldn’t use the relatability of a work to evaluate it. To do so, they say, risks making demands of the artwork itself; that it must not only reflect us and our beliefs, but affirm them. Of course, any dogmatic attitude towards the content of art should be condemned–but we also shouldn’t be surprised that great swathes of people consume art uncritically. Hallmark is the world’s best-selling brand of greeting cards, after all. It’s the market function that has pushed this sort of art to the top.
But recognition isn’t bad in and of itself: we all do it, and we really can’t help it. Everyone navel-gazes. It’s fine. More than fine, it’s good. Recognition is the most important tool for community formation. Promoting collective feeling through art is preferable to a hyper-intellectual, ideologically ‘pure’ individualism, the academic counterpart to our economic atomisation in post-industrial society.
On top of this, Jeremy Larson is right in that the push for greater representation in media is good, because it means that less people will be alienated from art and media, and more people will then go on to engage with works that do more than uncritically affirm their identities, particularly their identities as consumers. Without critical reflection, however, collective feeling can also be a tool for exploitation and domination, and the push for representation will remain a shallow pretext for market domination.
In her book Identification Papers (1995), Diana Fuss introduces a second way of conceiving of relatability, one that restores its importance for artistic reception. Identification, for Fuss, is a process that comprises recognition but goes further. It keeps our identity at a distance, enabling us to recognise our identity without allowing it to crystallise into a necessary fact.
I saw this when I was speaking to a friend recently, after watching Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974). It’s about an isolated surveillance operative who engages with the world through wire taps and cameras. This film came out decades before social media was conceived of, and yet while watching the movie he described feeling like it perfectly encapsulated the breakdown of distinctions between digital and physical reality in the age of social media. In short, he related.
Identification needs recognition first, we read ourselves into the artwork, but we also read ourselves out. Not just affirming his use of social media, The Conversation reframed his use of social media in terms of an isolated, loner surveillance operative. Sure, he wasn’t that, but he was put in those terms. Identification in this way challenges, introduces otherness, and encourages contemplation, not affirmation.
Where recognition forecloses critical engagement, identification fosters it. If you have ever left a movie theatre with a new lease on life, you probably experienced identification. Things can’t go on like this. I have seen my self, askance and in different terms. As Rilke says in his poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, “There is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”
So, What’s the Point of Relatability?
Diana Fuss is clear that identification happens in a liminal space. This liminal space is hard to pin down, and the works of art that work on you the most might fall on deaf ears elsewhere. Recognition and identification might work in degrees: an art might have a lot of one, and a little of the other. There isn’t a mathematical way of figuring this out, and certainly a work that you identify with doesn’t make it instantly great. Robin Williams made that clear in Dead Poet’s Society (1989).
But I know for certain that you can’t have identification without recognition: if we declare that relatability is out, very well. But don’t be angry if all art from then on leaves you as cold as Jeff Koons’ Hoovers do for me. Without any relatability, without a way in, how can we expect people to even begin to engage?
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