The recent simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer has, predictably, unleashed a stultifying flurry of hot takes and counter-takes. Maybe the problem is being on social media to begin with, as this amplifies everything, but the truth is that I still get valuable things from Twitter, despite it all, so I remain. I have no opinion on either film yet, by the way, but the inexorable, interminable one-upmanship, the attempts at cleverness, the unwillingness to cede ground to gain mutual understanding, casting aspersions on people who like or dislike the wrong things, and who are probably making the world worse by liking or disliking the wrong things … it’s all so boring but boring in a way that aggravates and deflates.
(And when people insist on very, very high stakes for things like these, the sheer earth-shaking political importance of having the correct opinion about a movie, a musician, or even a product you can buy in a store, I would humbly submit that this is actually a kind of displacement and substitution, serving to plaster over feelings of political inefficacy that are too unpleasant to confront head on. But that’s another topic…)
So what’s a take? What’s in a take?
I’m not going to review the literature and condense existing approaches here. I want to noodle through some of my own initial thoughts and see where they go. First off I suppose I’d describe a take as an opinion, largely though not necessarily shared for public consumption, styled in such a way as to grab attention, to implicitly or explicitly specify an opponent to put in their place, and to underline the authority—legitimate or otherwise—of the speaker. (This last is also part of what differentiates a take from clickbait, though there can be overlap.)
“I think strawberry ice cream is good” is an opinion, as is “this strawberry ice cream is better than that one.” “Strawberry ice cream is a garbage flavor and people who consume it are contributing to the climate apocalypse” is a TAKE. “Actually, strawberry ice cream has a deeply classist history, here’s why real leftists shouldn’t eat it” is a TAKE. The form of the take is confident, even if its real world utterance is in fact steeped in irony or self-deprecation (“here’s my cold take…”); the person providing the take knows what needs to be sorted where. And though people sometimes preface their takes with the cliché, “I don’t know who needs to hear this…,” they in fact do have an idea of who needs to hear this.
I could tell you my opinion(s) about Wes Anderson, for instance, or I could condense them into something resembling a take, although the more take-like it would get, the less of a true picture it would be of my thoughts and feelings, in this case.
“I tend to like his earlier films more, and don’t really keep up with his new ones, partly because the early films have more palpable and moving sense of class realities that seems to have vanished over time.” (A more-or-less true statement of my opinion, hastily expressed, and very reductive both of my actual thoughts and Anderson’s films.)
But to make a take I could say something like
“Privileged filmbros give Wes Anderson a free pass for ignoring social reality and making his fascist-aristocratic fantasies of a saccharine past.” (I don’t actually think this, but I could extrapolate this basic sentiment from my previous opinion, and further refine it, to attempt to achieve a little blip of attention, as a not-very-original take.)
A few more qualities characterize takes. For one thing, a take condenses an argument. There’s a shorthand that could be unpacked at length, but typically isn’t. You simply touch the conclusion of that presumptive argument (including things that “everyone knows”), or you use a takeaway image or posture (e.g., referring to someone as a “Karen” or noting their “Karen haircut”). The take, in addition to condensing an argument, reaches for a bit of stolen valor. I tend to think of this as the “mic drop” quality. The take is there to indicate that you do not expect a rejoinder, nor will you entertain rebuttal. You won’t change your mind because you don’t need to change your mind; you’ve done the work; you are the expert; hence, directly pass the argument stage and go straight to the forceful opinion. You’ve grabbed attention with an unusual or divisive claim, you’ve specified some kind of opponent or target, and you’ve signaled your authority in the matter.
There feels like something imitative, emulative (or call it mimetic) about the overall structure here: it’s comparable to a juvenile fantasy of mastery; an athlete’s highlight reel without practice or process.
I know it’s not the case that there was an Edenic communicative world before where clear, rational debate took place in good faith among people sincerely committed to mutual understanding and open to changing their minds, as if only recently have we had things like takes. (Would that it were so simple.) There are historical precedents and points of comparison for this kind of thing, too; maybe the take is perhaps a performance akin to historical wits and repartee at royal courts. Takes are competitive. Or rather, to come to the point, what’s served by takes is not actual debate (though the forms of debate are what it’s built from), but status. In an environment of attention scarcity, for instance, it seems to be helpful to imitate the pronouncements of those who are socially sanctioned to be expert, who are thus more able to venture unorthodox or inflammatory opinions.
Even self-aware “bad takes” operate a bit like conspicuous consumption: hence, someone will share a knowingly controversial or maybe downright stupid opinion and follow it with “fight me” or “I said what I said.” I.e., I’m visibly not concerned with how this might affect my status.
Because the take is a status play and is agonistic (or antagonistic), as a form, I think it reinforces a structure of technocracy when it is scaled as a social practice—because the authority of the expert is what’s being imitated, at its root.
I wanted to find an example to look at of how a burgeoning take came to be, diverging from a polemic, an opinion; so let me go back to my youth, during the Web 1.0 era, and show you something like a proto-Take and how it was distinguished from its source. I remember talking about this not only with friends who were cinephiles and avid readers of film criticism, but also some co-workers and more “run-of-the-mill” movie watchers. Here we go:
Even before the first word of his 1998 dual review of Small Soldiers and Saving Private Ryan, Jonathan Rosenbaum—not the most popular or recognizable film critic in America, but quite possibly its most important at that time—caused a stir by awarding four stars to Joe Dante’s widely dismissed (and misunderstood) kids’ movie about toys, and one star to Steven Spielberg’s near-universally acclaimed war drama. Rosenbaum is not guilty of succumbing to a “take” mentality here; he lays out a compelling and, depending on the reader, convincing argument. At any rate it’s clear why he evaluates these two films in the way that he does. His review is not a take. But I know from personal experience that the impact of those star ratings at the top of the webpage dominated many people’s discussion of the piece. I had a movie buff co-worker who simply couldn’t get over it; couldn’t wrap his head around it. I don’t think he grappled with a single idea in Rosenbaum’s review precisely because the star rating topsy-turvy was too powerful an indignity for him to roll with.
We could extrapolate from Rosenbaum’s polemic, which he lays out in a more orderly and linear fashion via text, a take, which is imparted near-instantaneously by taking in the pertinent information visually, quickly, and can only be linear for a very short amount of time (i.e., its condensation). This is essentially visualized in the above screengrab. (Thanks to Wayback Machine for enabling access to the original Chicago Reader movies page.)
A polemic can be hyperbolic and unfair, but I would say it typically passes a certain threshold of discursiveness. A take doesn’t pass that threshold; that’s why it so often involves an imagistic quality; even if there’s an article attached to a take, which almost no one will read, the hed and/or lede will be what get attention and keep everything churning. A polemic, or argument more generally, requires sentences to build up. A take should ideally have no more than a sentence or two.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, goes the old saying (the Sagan standard). The take is what bypasses precisely that diligence and proportionality.
Here’s a suggestion. If someone is committed to thinking, they may actually do some interesting things with the form of the take: rather than dropping the mic and letting it remain on the floor, they might start to think through a take’s perspective, flesh it out, see where its logic leads, test it against counter-examples. The ludic or carnivalesque potential of what can come after the take form, on its other side, is still under-explored. (In film criticism, some people might cite Armond White’s commitment to the bit as an example of this; I’d wonder if some of the more seemingly outré critical works in the oeuvre of Uncas Blythe might be an example of this, or something like So Mayer’s all-time list of ten imaginary films, an exercise in what Girish Shambu calls speculative cinephilia.) Sometimes it can be helpful to walk through what someone’s take actually has condensed—to put back into place the extraordinary evidence, so to speak. But we might also perform a “yes, and” see where we can go.
… I’m not strongly committed to any of the claims or categorizations or methods here. I’m primarily thinking in public in order to make better sense of the way that a range of social protocols seem to work, how different social processes or technologies function, etc. Feel free to show me a better way of approaching things. No need to start any debates about whether I’m too harsh or too easy on Wes Anderson though.
Very thoughtful writing on a topic that I struggle with, often feeling torn between staying quiet until I've done some careful thinking on a subject and the urge to just fire off takes. I really like what you say about takes being partially defined by assumptions of audience ("making up a guy to get mad at" phenomenon), especially within the contemporary climate of 'what does it mean watch/like something'. Something that came to mind as I was reading was Bourdieu's Distinction and thinking of the take similar to taste as an act of social distinction (recognizing that this may require similar assumptions of audience). Morality, politics, and activism become synthesized in the take, which functions as a discursive practice within a discursive field, but one that situates the interlocutor within that field.
Since last Friday, I've repeatedly seen the take that seeing BARBIE before OPPENHEIMER, or seeing it rather than the Nolan film, is a political act. (And of course, it's a decision being publicized on social media, often from people who haven't even seen it yet.) This utterly baffles me, but it bears out your second paragraph.