Irony Pilled to Death

I hate the Minecraft movie, and I haven’t even watched it in full.

I’ll offer a tongue-in-cheek apology for starting off with such an incendiary statement. I may not hate A Minecraft Movie as an individual piece of art – I’ll happily concede that. To be more specific, what I loathe is the necessity that it must be enjoyed – and thus criticized – ironically.

I know that Jack Black is (pause for dramatic effect) a past-his-prime zany actor whose whole schtick is breaking the rules in the most milquetoast ways possible. I know that he cooks chicken with lava. There is a small undead child on a chicken that seems to invoke vicious rioting amongst those who see it. I’ve heard utterly nothing about the plot, characters, cinematography, or structure. None of the commentary I’ve caught from my little hovel under the rocks has given me any indication that A Minecraft Movie exists as more than an overgrown meme, window dressing for our latest bout of antisocial fervor marketable to the children.

If you’re looking for an actual review or analysis of the film, it’s not here; frankly, I’m not sure it exists anywhere.

Additionally, you might respond to my cynicism here with one line of questioning: “J.M., this is a kid’s movie that you’re worked up over, isn’t it? Why are you wasting time and mental energy thinking about it?” I’ll answer succinctly that it’s art, it’s culture, and the notion that anything can be enjoyed without any sort of reflection is the empty, irony-poisoned modus operandi that late-stage Capitalism foments. When we stratify culture between “authentic” and “mass-market drivel,” we’re acknowledging that the majority of people consume mostly slop – we validate that mindless desire to consume uncritically.

For so many people – many of whom lean more towards the critical side of criticism – there is a refusal to acknowledge that a work can be appreciated earnestly, perhaps even due to its flaws rather than in spite of them. Doing so is seen as a sign of analytical weakness.

I worry this is all intentional.

Of course, I don’t think that there is some broad conspiracy with clearly-defined goals about dumbing down our culture. What I’m saying is that it is death by a thousand cuts. Corporations attempting to memeify every aspect of their IPs do so with tongue-in-cheek glibness, a hint of plausible deniability, and enough irony to allow people to look past the artificiality of it. If they tell you it’s fake, it’s manipulative, it somehow seems more honest. Most people tend to trust a little bit of duplicitousness more than we trust wholehearted openness.

Just a year ago, Disney-Pixar’s Elemental tried to make a meme out of Clod, a weird little dirt guy who apparently showed up in the movie as comic relief. Videos were posted of people going wild in theaters at the sight of him, for some reason. Most people saw through that one and rightfully dismissed it as the cynical astroturfed nonsense it was.The same didn’t happen with the goddamned Chicken Jockey.

The meme was not the point; instead, that scene in the movie seems to have become a lightning rod for people to release their antisocial, obnoxious tendencies at the expense of other moviegoers and the poor service workers who have to manage the chaos and clean up its aftermath. It’s totally okay for young people and clout chasers to go to a showing just to sabotage it, though. It’s ironic. And because it is ironic, it means utterly nothing.

If anything, Warner Bros has only allowed this behavior to be elevated – just a week after I pitched this piece, they announced “Block Party Editions” that would permit “audience interactivity and sing-alongs” – which given my knowledge of what’s been going on seems like lawyer-approved weasel words to avoid explicitly condoning those riotous behaviors.

The word slop has been thrown around a lot in the past year, mostly to refer to AI-generated amalgams of data fed in and spat back out. However, the plagiarism machines aren’t the only things creating utterly-meaningless media that exists not to entertain but merely to fill silence, to quell discourse with a ballistic vest that says: “It’s ironic, bro! Stop thinking so hard about it!”

There’s always going to be bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment. I don’t intend to grandstand and suggest that all creative works must surpass some snobbish litmus test to exist. I do, however, think that viewers of all creeds and capabilities should interrogate the media that they enjoy. To enjoy something ironically is to enjoy it with mockery. We can claim that we are laughing with a work rather than at it. That is sometimes true.

When the work itself is made to cater primarily to the ironic audience, however, we are not laughing with it. It is laughing at us.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the works of David Lynch and the ways in which his work allows itself to be earnestly confounding. There is an awareness in the ways Lynch uses shots that break the “laws” of filmmaking in order to create unease. It never feels at the audience’s expense, though: sometimes, he seems to tell us, he’s just as confused by the dream-logic of his own work as we are. Hazy recollections of Americana are used and exploited to hint at the monsters beneath the surface – to render normalcy an obvious facade. Irony in Lynchian works so often emerges to mock the viewer’s hunger for logic and clean cuts; thus it becomes an integral part of his layered style.

This is a far contrast from that mainstream irony that only holds disgust behind its critical veneer. Sometimes, in modern viewings of so many pivotal works, people are left watching and waiting for the memes, the moments that have been cut up and disseminated in digestible shorts robbed of their meaning and intensity. Everything else is merely perceived as slop that surrounds the victuals.

Irony is easy. Cynicism is easier. What’s the point when things are blighted with stagnancy? Companies are going to shovel AI slop down our throats, so we might as well swallow just to get the taste out of our mouths.

These are the exact conclusions that astroturfed irony-posting wants us to make. Enjoying something ironically is entirely separate from enjoying something critically. To connote the two is to suggest that loving art is to also loathe it. Robbing art of sincerity – and outright denying the existence of sincerity as a valid aspect of art – only helps to further desaturate the vibrance all around us. Killing art is the first step to killing the soul.

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J.M. Henson has been playing video games since Doom II at the age of four, and hasn’t shut up about them since. You can find them on Bluesky posting very occasionally.