I don’t think I’ve delved too deep, on this site, into the nuances of my conflicted relationship with the hipster male, but it’s a subject of some interest to me, in a I-hate-them-because-secretly-I-want-to-be-them kind of way. I’ve never quite figured out where my envy/loathing of hipster doods comes from, since I wasn’t raised in Brooklyn or anything, didn’t really meet any or even know what they were until high school, and didn’t go to Vassar or Wesleyan or Oberlin or any of those colleges where the hipsters go to refine their ability to persuade good-looking women that liking good music, tousling your hair artfully, and having a quasi-creative job at a graphic design firm or a social networking start-up makes you more creative and Byronic and thoughtful and sensitive than, say, actually being a fucking writer who sweats precious bodily fluids trying to figure out how to articulate in language a distinctive and fresh artistic vision of the world (not that I’m bitter or anything).
It has something to do, perhaps, with what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences," the fact that we’re most competitive with, and most easily hostile to, people who are very similar to us. Or perhaps the more apposite notion is what Aristotle said about envy, that
We also envy those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbours and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question; this annoys us, and excites envy in us. We also envy those who have what we ought to have, or have got what we did have once.
I was thinking about it all, in any case, because I just watched the first episode of Flight of the Conchords, which HBO has made available on its website, and I’m trying to process my critical reaction, which is, as you might have anticipated from the display of raw ambivalence above, an ambivalent one. The show, a Tenacious D-meets-The Royal Tenenbaums hipster spoof musical thing about "a two man, digi-folk band from New Zealand as they try to make a name for themselves in their adopted home of New York City," is about what you’d expect from such a thing — really funny at times, a bit slow at times, a bit twee, very clever and also, underneath it all, existentially aloof.
It’s also (and this is where I bring it all full-circle ‘n’ provocative ‘n’ shit) subtly misogynistic. Or rather, it’s not so much that the show is misogynistic (though arguably it has touches of that) as that the hyper-self aware, hyper-self absorbed persona of the male hipster is, deceptively often, just yet another mask that the modern man has discovered that allows him to avoid being vulnerable to the female world. Flight of the Conchords is a lot of things, and one of those things it seems to be, based on episode one, is a boys’ club.
Or, alternatively, I’m just envious of these guys, who remind me of guys who I disliked and envied back in the day.
Also, this song from the show is really funny.
