Title: I Wear The Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)
Author: Chuck Klosterman
Genre: Social Science
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: July 9, 2013
Pages: 224 pgs
Synopsis
Review
I enjoy reading essays on popular culture. They take me back to the days when I would download articles on the media’s effect on society. I know I still have binders full of academic articles somewhere in my apartment.
Anyway, it would be naive to say that anything exists in a vacuum nowadays. Because of the internet, cellphones, television, etc, there is a constant flow of information that has some kind of effect on society. Things like that intrigue me. I often give people the side-eye when they believe that nothing has affected them and their thoughts are entirely their own when in fact they are spewing ideas that have been perpetuated by mass media.
The beginning of the book starts off with the author referencing Snidely Whiplash from the Dudley Doo Right T.V. show. The main antagonist has always felt this urge to tie women to the railroad tracks. He then goes into incidences of actual people being tied to railroad tracks. I like that he tends to back up his claims with examples and relevant information.
From the very beginning the author states something very interesting and goes back to it quite often. He says that villains are the ones who “know the most, but cares the least.” All of the people he mentioned followed this idea except for Hitler who is often placed in a category all his own.
When looking at the style of the book, I would say it reads like a stream of consciousness. It was a bit hard to follow at times and some ideas weren’t really clarified before he moves on to the next idea. Although, I liked the book and feel like the author thinks differently than most people, it bounced around a lot. Moving from topic to topic and back again in each paragraph didn’t appeal to me.
I enjoyed the fact that he presented questions that you wouldn’t immediately ask. For example, why is Batman so beloved, but people doing vigilante acts in real life are vilified? Or, why did Bill Clinton not catch the brunt of the backlash from the Monica Lewinsky scandal?
My favorite idea that he presented focused on Batman and his refusal to address issues of his childhood. Batman has the means to continue his crusade against bad guys even though it will never bring his parents back. His entire adult life is shaped around an incident that happened when he was a child. That part stuck out the most to me because I never thought about Batman in that way. He is such a flawed character and when placed in the real world, he would have been told to grow up and not let the past stop him from living his life. He probably would have also been on a lot of medication or locked in an asylum.
Klosterman wraps up the book with an excerpt about himself. He talks about how in his own way, he’s the villain and as he gets older he identifies with villain characters more and more. The longer it takes me to write this review the more I realize how self-centered this book is. I’m not saying that that is a horribly back thing, but a lot of his ideas lead back to things that he thinks, not a real analysis. I mean there was actually a large chapter about how the author can no longer hate bands anymore while going through all the bands he used to hate.
Anyway, this was the first book that I’ve read of his and it’s been a pretty decent introduction to his work. Although he can be all over the place, I like the way he thinks. It was a pretty quick read at 224 pages. If you like books that analyze villains in popular culture, then this is a great book to start off with.
Rating: 6.9/10
Peace,
