Twee

 
Twee
The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film

by Marc Spitz
It Books

2014

 

 

I'm glad that I finally read Twee, but also glad I got it from a library. I've been wanting to read it, but I ended up wanting to like it more than I actually liked it. 

 
Twee is a cultural history of a particular aesthetic that is more or less the same as 'indie' or 'hip.' The archetypal Twee kid, in Spitz's mind at least, is shy, maybe not friendless but certainly an introvert, who retreats to the safety of their bedroom to immerse themselves in their books, records, or other hobbies. The Twee kid is fussy and proper, hates sports, likes things just so, has encyclopedic knowledge of their own slightly esoteric interests, and probably prefers the controlled neatness of the world inside their head to the messiness of reality.

 
If all this seems a little vague, you might be picking up on one of my concerns with Spitz, who seems to have trouble defining his own key concept. Twee is opposed to mainstream pop culture, but also to what's currently being called 'indie sleaze' - the Mods were probably Twee, the Punks unquestionably weren't. But Spitz also spends a whole chapter arguing that Kurt Cobain should really be considered Twee, so it's hard to know how well defined the term is, even in his own head. Model trains are probably a Twee hobby, superhero comics definitely aren't, but I don't know if he could explain why not.

 
The chapters are roughly chronological, starting just after WWII and leading up to 2014, when the book was published. There's a kind of messiness to the book's structure that annoyed me. Most chapters aren't about just one thing (though a few are!) and I couldn't always sense the logic in what Spitz put together. For a book about the sort of people who don't want any of their foods touching on their plate, I found Spitz's organization surprisingly sloppy.

 
Certainly, the highlights are all here - Belle & Sebastian, Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, mumblecore movies, indie pop music, Garden State, Juno, Gilmore Girls, Zooey Deschenel. We also get a chapter on Glasgow's pre-Belle indie rock scene, one on French New Wave movies, one claiming that Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are presaged the rise of punk, another anointing the Smiths and They Might Be Giants as the Twee equivalents to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

 
Spitz's opening chapter, in the aftermath of WWII, posits that Twee comes from an impulse to create a kindler gentler world, one that is aware of real danger and death, but safe from it, and where sexuality is both intriguing but also just out of reach. A world of precocious, prolonged childhood, in other words, as obsessed with youth and beauty as mainstream culture is, determined to preserve an ideal of 'purity' in a way that's both polite but also moralizing, and seemingly both White and middle-class, that's probably as exclusionary as the other flavors of Nerd culture in the US. That's my critique though; Spitz has nothing but praise. (Incidentally, his opening chapter identifies Walt Disney, the Peanuts comics, Dr Seuss, Buddy Holly, James Dean, "The Catcher in the Rye," Truman Capote, and Anne Frank's diary as key proto-Twee influences. Make sense of that if you can, because I couldn't!)

 
A few final questions worth asking. The answers are not in this book. First, when does the word 'twee' actually first get used to define this aesthetic? Relatedly, just because Twee tastemakers today like something older, is it really fair to say that it was Twee in its time (something I especially wondered about New Wave cinema?) How has Twee changed over time? To what extent is Twee an aesthetic, and to what extent is it a movement of people promoting that aesthetic? How much can we distinguish it from other things indie, hip, or just 'cool?' And seriously, what are the dangers inherent in revering a cocoon of perpetual, mythic childhood and trying to exclude everything from outside it?