Sydney’s Jeans, Jarhanpur’s Liberation, Perfidia’s Betrayal

We're in an age of “anything goes" interpretation, where things from films to pants are subjected to political critique. The Left would do well to resist the temptations of this moment.

The Librarian, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (ca. 1566)

A friend told me that a new Sydney Sweeney interview led to a second wave of handwringing about her controversial jeans ad.

Arguing about the meaning of pants is a uniquely asinine thing in our (often asinine) cultural discourse, so I’m extremely sorry for succumbing to the temptation to talk about it. However, this story was already on my mind the first time it blew up, as it seems exemplary of a contemporary fixation on interpreting culture.

I’ve noticed a rise in intense debates about the meaning of every hyped up musician or movie release. People can’t seem to agree: Is Taylor Swift a feminist icon or a gas-guzzling elite? Is Superman endorsing a two-state solution or just flying around in a cape? Is One Battle After Another an anti-fascist ode or an “anti-Left psyop”?

This phenomenon is drifting into politics and policy. Politicians routinely accuse each other of being communists or fascists or both simultaneously, and people argue bitterly over big things like the COVID-19 pandemic and yes… little things like Sydney Sweeney’s pants.

Simply put, we’ve entered an age of interpretation.

As someone who did a PhD in music that was heavily focused on methods of artistic interpretation, I’ve been amazed by how the naval-gazey character of certain strands of academic discourse has transformed into an “anything goes” interpretive habit where people project whatever they want onto culture.

Give the above, I thought I’d share some thoughts on how people are interpreting movies and other cultural artifacts, why some of our default patterns of interpretation are flawed, and some issues the Left might consider instead.

Suspicion’s on the Rise

In 2023, I wrote an article for Damage about a surging tendency of critics to search for hidden meanings in movies and TV shows. In the piece, I shared how a wide range of commentators—from Lefter-than-thou Marxist writers to middle of the road Rolling Stone reviewers—were diagnosing secret messages lurking in seemingly innocent cultural works.

Part of the story I wanted to tell there was about the historical roots of what is sometimes called “suspicious” interpretation, a style of critique that treats artworks as containing secret psycho-socially conditioned endorsements of social domination. This style of analysis often led to fantastical interpretations, such as the idea that jazz was a manifestation of social repression that deceived the masses into complacency, or the countervailing claim that mass culture actually subverts the dominant social order.

Marxism is often blamed for the spread of suspicious interpretation. However, as early as 1938, the Marxist critic Mikhail Lifshitz questioned the tendency to convert the “history of art into a collection of rebuses and symbolic figures hiding certain class meanings,” driven by a desire to “catch the writer red-handed just at the moment when he accidentally babbles out the primary tendencies of his class consciousness.”

Suspicious interpretation won the battle, especially in the 1990s as post-Marxist liberal critics gained power in academic arts fields like music. This tendency coincided with the extension of lofty theoretical interpretation to the most mundane examples—unremarkable everyday experiences or “quirky” minor details of history that were treated as high-stakes sites of contestation and resistance.

That tradition drifted out of the academy and became the new normal of progressive criticism during the the first Trump era. In researching my piece, I dredged up some really weird shit, like an attack on Princess Peach for being a bad feminist and the outlandish claim that Minions 2: Rise of Gru was a deep meditation on the capitalist proletariat. It’s also begun to colonize the Right, who despite their protestations about “cultural Marxism” have largely accepted the premises of suspicious critique.

Suspicion is only one mode of analysis that relies on what Adolf Grünbaum has described as “meaning connections” rooted in “thematic kinship or affinity.” These interpretations derive causal explanations between two things based on their similarity or kinship with each other. In the case of the minions, for example, the yellow creatures superficially are a kind of “workforce” of a leader, something that vaguely aligns them with the proletariat who serves as the workforce of the capitalist class.

One core problem with this approach is that mere similarity cannot be the grounds for claiming causal relatonsips or “aboutness,” such that we can say Minions 2 is (intentionally or unintentionally) about capitalism. My friend Bryan Parkhurst has explained the limitations of these critiques in the context of music, arguing that thematic kinship interpretations “attribute to mere abstract formal similarity a meaning, or an independent meaning-establishing power, that it does not have.”

Bryan gives the example of the Sun’s relationship to oranges. While the Sun is causally responsible for the orange’s growth, oranges are not orange colored and spherical because the Sun is also orange and spherical. Things do not need to resemble their causes, and in fact, there’s no identifiable (non-speculative) mechanism explaining why art bears formal resemblances to underlying social institutions or practices.

Jazz, as it turns out, isn’t even made by Fordist industrial manufacturing techniques, so its resemblance to capitalist standardization turns out to be completely incidental—mere thematic kinship.

Jarhanpur’s Liberation

Thematic kinship arguments came to prominence recently in the debate about whether Superman was a commentary on the ongoing Gaza War. Many commentators noticed certain similarities between that war and the conflict of fictional countries Boravia and Jarhanpur.

For those predisposed to have a critical attitude about the real-world conflict, Superman’s intervention signaled Gunn’s “clear evocation” of it. Others emphatically disagreed. A particularly funny objection came from Ben Shapiro, who claimed Superman couldn’t be about the conflict because it didn’t conform to his own beliefs about it.

Gunn denied he intended to comment on the issue. Additionally, he completed the script several months before the conflict began, and filming began just a few months after. If the film materialized in mid-2025, there might have been a strong basis to suspect Gunn was lying or was psycho-socially incepted to comment on the conflict. But the film had been underway for several years by the time we all saw it, so at best it’s merely plausible to say that he aggressively reworked the film to send a secret message to viewers.

As it turns out, what we were seeing was really an instance of thematic kinship between a movie and a real-world event that many of us had on our minds.

On Interpretive License

Superman is a key example of how contemporary criticism signals a shift away from the artist and artwork to the desires of the critic.

In academia, there was a debate around authorial intent, or what the French critic Roland Barthes termed the “death of the author.”

Commonly, interpretations of art hinge on perception of the author’s intentions. Superman expresses James Gunn’s view about politics, Beethoven’s late style expresses his deafness, and so on. (These interpretations are sometimes called “expressive” theories, since they interpret how an artwork expresses the interiority or aesthetic aims of its creator.)

In the 1960s and ’70s, a prominent tradition of critics began to question the fixation on the author and the artwork, often associated with “reader-response criticism.” This tradition argued for seeing the viewer as the sole or primary creator of artistic meanings.

Barthes, for example, argued that the “image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author.” He put forth a (pretty unconvincing) historical and progressive claim that new traditions of artmaking had rendered the author obsolete, effectively killing their function as the causal agency embedded within the artwork.

The critic Stanley Fish developed a more substantial argument for reader-centered interpretation, arguing that it was the nature of aesthetic experience to produce mere interpretation. For Fish, locating a definitive, static meaning of literature was impossible. Instead, he claimed, cultural analysis was a persuasive act where we attempt to impose our prior assumptions onto an artistic object. In this spirit, he wrote, “our activities are directly constitutive of those objects, and of the terms in which they can be described, and of the standards by which they can be evaluated.”

While Fish rejected the idea that an interpretation could be truly falsified, he maintained that radical free interpretation would be checked by broader norms of acceptability, or what he termed interpretive communities.

However, by the time I came up in academia, our interpretive community had become pretty corrupt and directionless, yielding an anything-goes approach to interpretation that increasingly became the norm. Many academics weren’t interested in closely studying artworks, authors, or boring technical theories about how readers create interpretive meanings. Instead, they cast artistic texts as a space to discuss whatever met their fancy, whether it be playful or political or narcissistic self-therapy.

In this way, a lot of criticism today is in the intellectual legacy of critics like Fish, who take for granted the right of the critic to project whatever they want onto the artwork. Moreover, as our broader collective, our interpretive community, fragments into in-groups and social media noise, the guardrails vanish—to be replaced with subcultural cache or the ad-hoc authority of whoever shouts the loudest.

Perfidia’s Betrayal

I saw the debate about One Battle After Another as a key example of this kind of self-projection, with people hoisting all kinds of—often contradictory—interpretations onto what I saw as a fairly straightforward account of how Lefty good guys battled autocratic thugs.

One free market libertarian platform characterized PTA’s film as an attack on the Left and its failed notion of revolutionary politics. Another similarly-minded platform said just the opposite, alleging the director “can’t really bring himself to reckon with the darkness and violence of his radical left heroes.”

The Left was similarly divided. While one writer suggested the film was “unambiguous” in its progressive stance, another progressive reviewer suggested OBAA played into problematic stereotypes about Black women that were hidden in PTA’s unconscious.

Many critiques of the film’s messaging hinged on the film’s portrayal of the “imperfect” Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), who betrayed her Leftist comrades. Several of these arguments were a species of what I like to call the “existence equals endorsement” argument, where the mere presence of something in a movie is taken as an endorsement or statement about it. (The existence-equals-endorsement critique is a recurring one you often see of morally ambiguous or anti-hero characters, such as the accusation that bad people are being celebrated on shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Succession.)

In this spirit, Perfidia was taken as an allegorical figure or personification of a topic of the author’s choosing, whether it be a pro/anti stance on a social group, communism, Leftist violence, and so on.

Neither PTA’s claims about his intentions nor the film’s contents showed me much evidence we should interpret it as an allegory. In fact, the message seemed fairly on the nose, with characters constantly shouting out what PTA has said was the main message of the film: “no fear.”

Additionally, the film relied on a broad fabric of quirky individuals rather than a few sweeping archetypes, including many other morally complex figures. They often made mistakes or highly contingent judgments that were mediated by the situations they found themselves in—choices they themselves sometimes recognized as being in conflict with their goals and principles.

If anything, I would be more inclined to see these actions as suggesting people act within a set of objective social circumstances that constrain their agency, the antithesis of a film where highly typical figures simply embody character traits. Either way, I don’t see grounds to claim the film contained clear statements about the correct form of politics or the nature of certain classes of people.

Of course, OBAA was jam-packed with all kinds of timely and enticing themes, from immigration and the modern Left to race and revolution. These themes provided fodder—thematic kinships—for critics who were eager to evaluate the film based on whether it shared their stances on a given topic.

Beyond Interpretation?

As it turns out, Sydney Sweeney’s jeans turn out to be a perfect item for our contemporary discourse, where hyper-subjectivist, anything goes interpretation collides with a pervasive climate of suspicion and a tendency toward free association rooted in vague thematic kinships.

The discussion cast a suspicious eye toward a banal ad for jeans rooted in an ordinary cliche—the “my mama gave me good genes” folk saying people use all the time without simultaneously believing in rassentheorie. Beyond the vague thematic kinship of Sydney’s good jeans and people who have pernicious views about which people have “good” genes, very little held the episode together beyond a desire to raise a fuss about a celebrity.

Today, the Left is very tempted to buy into the tendencies I have described. It might feel empowering to expose ideologies hidden in plain sight or celebrate small sites of resistance lurking in the movies we like. However, In doing so, we risk being dragged into shopworn bad habits for interpreting art.

Beyond the methodological limitations I’ve presented above, there are a whole range of presumptions that come packaged with contemporary interpretation: that artists can’t help but make unconscious social metaphors out of their works; that action movies can teach people how to think about global affairs; and that movie reviews offer some kind of political tool for shattering mystification and winning over the masses.

These ideas sound good in the echo chamber of progressive discourse, but they largely just resonate with people who are already presupposed to a certain way of thinking about art and politics.

As the old academic and critical paradigm calcifies and reveals itself as moribund, we can ask when and why and if we need movies and records to agree with us—as well as what we gain by castigating them if they don’t.

These sorts of questions are especially productive if we want to seriously understand how people outside of progressive subcultures experience art. Traditions like Marxism prize the ability to look out at the world with sober senses—especially the world of working class people—and criticism has a chance to ask why and how people use art in their lives.

In my experiences as a teacher and music journalist, I’ve found that most people largely treat the arts in a more mundane but equally meaningful way. They use it for entertaining themselves, staving boredom, locking in to study, dancing, and processing sadness or other powerful emotions.

I see no reason to resent these ways of experiencing art. I also think I’m not alone in believing people accept the world as it is not because they are deceived but because they are tired and struggling to get by and lack collective institutions by which they can easily change the world.

Even if you don’t agree, it’s still necessary to own the critique, developing a robust theory of why culture deserves suspicion and leaning into the desire to shock and shame people for uncritically enjoying minions movies. The blasé grading of movies for their ideological correctness does little to épater la bourgeoisie or awaken people from their complacent slumbers.

One of the things that’s been lost from early reader response theory is a self-consciousness about why and how interpreters use art. Interpretation does things with and to art, whether it be contorting movies into symbolic coded telegrams, using TV shows as a platform for sharing our political beliefs, helping people encounter great new music, or championing artists who really and directly advocate for the things we believe.

Ultimately, it’s worth owning it when we want to use art for specific ends. Superman was really about the Middle East because so many people were about the Middle East, were thinking about and arguing about it all the time. The film arrived at the perfect moment, and its thematic kinship with real-world causes emboldened people to use it as a vessel for their beliefs. Perhaps Superman is a good tool for discussing that topic. If so, we should acknowledge it and use it a tool rather than litigate whether it’s an expression of its author’s secret beliefs.

For me, evaluating status quo culture based on whether it agrees with us about geopolitics or radicalism or pants is just one use, and it’s not the best one.