On Selfies and Relatability: An Excerpt from A Sentimental Education

The imperative toward relatability (and, often, resistance to that imperative) is something of a leitmotif for a generation of writers who came up simmering in the stew of the Internet. This link between relatability and digital self-expression is summed up in Rebecca Mead’s 2014 New Yorker article “The Scourge of ‘Relatability,’” in which she describes the expectation of relatability as a twenty-first century phenomenon, one that began with the aesthetics of daytime television but has since expanded into film, literature, even fashion. But what does relatability mean, and how is it distinct from the more general (and much older) desire to identify with characters in works of art? Mead explains:

[T]o demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a differ- ent expectation: that the work itself be somehow accom- modating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism. (2014)

This definition doesn’t quite hold up to her examples. So many things are labelled relatable that it’s hard to imagine were created for the purpose of accommodating viewers’ solipsistic desires, such as a designer’s clothes having “relatable shapes.” But Mead’s central point is clear: lazy reading and viewing habits are producing worse art, art that doesn’t challenge us but panders to our desires for uncomplicated, self-affirming, selfie- like representations. The question the article doesn’t address is exactly who this “we” might be; if art is meant to reflect us, it must have an us in mind