anhedonia essay: sentiment equals naïveté

The equation at the theme's intellectual center. To feel sincerely is to be naïve, and — per JOI's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick — "naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America." The Brick's real target is the underlying, "queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive": the hip cynic imagines himself the opposite of the naïf, and the film's claim is that he is a naïf in denial, the two coexisting in the same face. This is the load-bearing idea under the whole anthology — irony is not sophistication about sentiment but a fear of sentiment wearing sophistication's clothes, and the culture that treats naïveté as sin has simply forbidden itself the one thing it is starving for.