Riff: The Strange Ascent of ‘Strained Pulp’

Illustration by Tom Gauld

In his 2012 review of the Steven Soderbergh film "Haywire" in The New York Times, A. O. Scott identified and named a new phenomenon in popular culture: strained pulp. "Nowadays," he wrote, "everyone must love (or at least pretend to love) pleasures that were supposedly once disdained or taken for granted: dive bars, street food, trashy films. But knowing, sophisticated attempts to replicate those things often traffic in their own kind of snobbery, confusing condescension with authenticity. Movies like 'The American,' 'Drive' and now 'Haywire' offer strained pulp, neither as dumb as we want them to be nor as smart as they think they are and not, in the end, all that much fun."

It's certainly true that much of what was once regarded (and dismissed) as disposable lowbrow culture now enjoys an unprecedented artistic and critical prestige. Are we truly seeing the ascent of a new classification of culture? If so, what are we gaining — or losing — in the process? To find out, Riff assembled the following panel: A. O. Scott; Stephanie Zacharek, the chief film critic for The Village Voice; and Adam Sternbergh, the magazine's culture editor:

Adam Sternbergh: This observation about "strained pulp" really struck me — in part because so much of what I love falls precisely in this category: knowing, sophisticated attempts to replicate pleasures that were once widely disdained. I like Soderbergh's genre films like "Haywire" and "The Limey"; I like Michael Chabon's self-consciously pulpy novel, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union"; heck, I liked "Drive." Am I dumber than you want me to be? Or not as smart as I think I am? Or both?

A. O. Scott: When I wrote that review, I was not really making an argument or staking out a position — I was trying to scratch an itch, to put my finger on something that was bugging me, even about things I kind of liked. The movies I mentioned — "Haywire," "Drive," "The American" — struck me as art-house renderings of grindhouse pleasures, self-aware tributes to movies whose apparent lack of self-awareness has always been part of their allure. Let me be clear that I'm not talking about what we used to call, back in the '90s, "irony," though a better term might have been "insincerity." There was a time when just about anything — dumb commercial entertainment, ugly clothes, the weird dishes your grandmother used to serve — could be appreciated and appropriated in quotation marks. Strained pulp is not quite that — its celebration of the formerly marginal and disreputable is serious and sincere. The condescension is not overt but is latent in the desire to correct and improve the recipes retrieved from the past, to finish vernacular artifacts with a highbrow glaze. We're going to make 'em — movies, cocktails, regional dishes, zombie novels, garage-rock anthems — just the way they used to, but a little bit better. This strikes me as a form of snobbery. But then again, maybe I'm the snob.

Stephanie Zacharek: Beware the seemingly random but astute observation, because there's always some editor ready to turn it into a symposium. I love "Haywire," "Drive" and "The American," each of which made one or another of my 10 Best lists, partly because I respond to, and respect, their impetus to capture the disreputable thrills of lower-tier '70s movies like "Vanishing Point" and "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry." But I concede that they're filled with — I won't call it nostalgia, but I will call it yearning. Is it possible that one person's yearning for a lost mode of moviemaking is simply another person's self-aware grab for a mood, a style, a vibe that can't be recaptured?

Scott: I think you're right that what drives the production of strained pulp is yearning — a desire to recapture and update some of the cool, louche styles that seemed to arrive so effortlessly in the past. I suppose I share some of this yearning, which may be why I resist some of its results. The effort is visible and its source intelligible, which dissolves some of the mystery and the magic. I guess what I'm saying, to stick for another moment with the movies that started this train of thought, is that they are art films in spite of themselves. I'm not trying to knock them, but to note that they perpetuate the very taste hierarchies that they try so hard to undermine.

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