Now I have a newsletter. I started this for a few reasons, the least boring of which is that I'm in between projects and have been looking for something new. This isn't the new project, it's part of the search. I'm researching and reading, and that leads me to find facts and stumble on ideas that I want to share. This opening entry is basically a mission statement to myself. The next issue will be about music and movies.
I spend a good amount of time every day puzzling over some variation on the same question: What does this mean? The "this" varies. It could be a photo in a magazine, the punctuation in a text message from a friend, or the arrangement of jars on a grocery store shelf. If I share my thinking with someone, their response—if there is one at all beyond a polite nod—is usually "you're overthinking it."
Overthinking, then, is bad. It's the sign of an anxious mind with nothing better to do. It's an act of overeager analysis that leads to a thousand tiny conspiracy theories: the text ended with an ellipsis because my friend doesn't want to talk, or the store stocks the least-popular jam on the easiest-to-reach shelf to move less-popular product. Overthinking like this invents subtext where there is hardly any text. It does so in the service of selfishness, too. We imagine others are thinking about us, and thinking deeply enough to meticulously place periods at the ends of emails to convey feelings they refuse to say outright.
There are better ways to spend an afternoon.
There are worse ways, too. Whenever one of my hunts for meaning turns up treasure—a forgotten history of the grocery business, an epiphany on the tone I use when texting—I write off the many earlier failed attempts as the cost of doing business. I have a new fact to share at a party or a more delicate way to talk to others. Overthinking pays. I overthink language to a degree that I'm a somewhat successful, though occasionally annoying, editor.
Plenty of us overthinkers do this dance. It's the result of a jaunt of overthinking that, in its inward turn, produces not a conspiracy theory, but a rationalization. Instead of understanding how the world works, we make an excuse for how we operate. We obsess until we convince ourselves we're merely thoughtful.
There's a roundabout logic at play here that I could spend more time on (and I have). But it’s not a good idea. So, as an effort to be less selfish and less anxious, I’m going to move my overthinking to channels where it leads to something more beneficial, channels where I can come up with ideas to write about. And channels that might (if I do it right) lead all this overthinking to be called something else. “Analysis,” maybe.
I don't write to justify or excuse my thinking, I write to refine or revise it. Here, I'll mostly be writing about popular culture and historical ephemera. It's the perfect target for my type of overthinking. The search for meaning in art is rarely conclusive, often consuming, and ultimately personal. When the art in question is also a commercial product made on deadline and targeted to mass audiences, the search becomes more ambiguous but more rewarding.
I'm about to watch Joel Coen's The Tragedy of MacBeth. I have no doubt that every element of every frame will have been placed intentionally and the actors' delivery and movements will be deliberate. I may never know what the meaning of every decision is, but I know they were made with a purpose behind them. Publicly diving those intentions is analytical, critical, and widely accepted as totally normal (if maybe a little pretentious sometimes). But after I watch MacBeth, I might take in a few episodes of Riverdale. Here, I don't have the assurance that every decision is the result of 50 rejected ideas and months of careful consideration. They very well might be, but it's also possible The CW upped the order of shows for the season and the crew scrambled to get enough hours of TV put together to fulfill a contract.
I'm not trying to make some grand point about "high" and "low" art (ugh at the concept). I'm also not in denial that The Tragedy of MacBeth cost millions of dollars and is distributed by one of the wealthiest corporations in the world for mass consumption. Nor am I saying Riverdale is a thoughtless show (it's not), or discounting or ignoring any of the brilliant and thorough analysis of Riverdale and of pop culture writ large (a body of work I'll try to contribute to at some point). I just find that, in channeling my anxious impulses, I tend to be happiest when I focus on work where the degree of deliberateness is in question. We all do things for a reason. Maybe that reason is art. Maybe that reason is to collect a paycheck and clock out on time. It's in this overlap and ambiguity that I find meaning—not the meaning of the work, but a meaning for myself as I enjoy the work, a little theory to think about while I wait for the bus or to bring up with friends so we have something to talk about other than the obvious (what do people talk about these days?). When I do this, I'm still twisting the world to fit a theory I've invented, but I'm not at the center. I'm trying to turn the selfishness of my overthinking into something that leads to a less hollow result. The thought I put in adds weight to the light and meaning to trivia, even if the weight and meaning are for me only.
An example: When I hear the stumble (or maybe it's a tape cut) on the vocal track for "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," I wonder if it's there because Bob Dylan was tired and left it, or because it has some larger purpose. I smile thinking it's both, maybe a response to the guy who opened a press conference with Dylan by asking him to explain why he decided to wear a Triumph Motorcycles shirt on the Highway 61 Revisited album cover…much to Dylan's confusion.
Whenever I'm overthinking a work of culture, I spare a few moments to dwell on this footage, as well as the Dylan documentaries Don't Look Back and Eat the Document. In every exchange with fans and critics, the search for meaning bothers the artist. Everyone who asks what something means is asking with an assumption there is a message, and that the message must be shared with the world. As I wander between different schools of criticism—waffling on my stance on authorial intent and applying close reading techniques equally to novels and the copy on a bottle of kombucha—I'm finding sense for myself in the nonsensical, creating order by inventing a dadaism of basic cable, but I'm not pretending to have answers. Whatever I share isn't meant to be definitive. It's an argument for myself—a start to a conversation that I'll overthink the details of until I find some other show to occupy this nervous energy. It's important in this analysis to not be like the fans or journalists in Don't Look Back who want a definite answer or a memorable quote, and to instead be like the people in the background who are simply enjoying the ride.
This is a mental exercise that keeps me from wondering if the abrupt ending to a phone call I had yesterday was because I had annoyed the person I was talking to or because our chat had run its course and we had other things to do. That is the overthinking that has no reward, yields no legible text, and frays the nerves. This is the overthinking that, hopefully, makes for a fun read. I'm going to overthink. I'm going to be selfish. But I hope to find meaning, rather than assign it.