A matter of taste

>> Critic Carl Wilson attempts to like, or
at least not hate, Celine Dion in
Let’s Talk About Love

by Juliet Waters

In my defence, I didn’t really know what Red Lobster was when I applied to work there. Just as I didn’t know why all my food server friends from Laval were so excited when a young Celine Dion and her entourage sat in my section. She ordered the Crab Alfredo, and as I’d been trained, I microwaved a bag of linguini and another bag of sauce, mixed them together and charged her 15 bucks. From what I remember, she seemed nice.

Call it my critic’s code, but once you’ve served someone nuked crab from a bag, you can never gleefully slag anything they do—no matter how many trite songs, tacky weddings, silver cat suits, teary television moments, or how long their heart goes on. Still, I’d like to think that even without this experience, or the nice friends I made from Laval, critics who make a production of slagging Dion would irritate me. In Celine-bashing, I always smell the sweat of those who work too hard to prove their taste by slagging the obviously tasteless.

So I had a hard time getting through the first two Celine-hating chapters of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love. But it was worth it when I learned that Elliot Smith developed a sentimental attachment to her after she gave him a heartfelt pep talk right before he performed “Miss Misery” at the Oscars. Smith didn’t much care for her music, but reportedly he used to get a look of rage in his eyes every time someone made a derogatory remark, firing back “You know, she’s a really nice person.”

Learning this must have been a shock to Wilson whose hate-on for Dion started on the night “Miss Misery” lost to the theme from Titanic. But Wilson’s decision to start a reappraisal of her music began sometime earlier, in the aftermath of a divorce. Like other books by professional critics on the topic of “my weird post-divorce obsession” (see American Sucker by New Yorker film critic David Denby), the book is a mixed success.

The strongest chapters are those in which Wilson explores the most mysterious aspect of Dion’s success, the fans. Anyone who’s ever travelled outside North America or Europe will appreciate Wilson’s investigation into the weird phenomenon of Dion’s intense popularity in the most dangerous ghettos of Jamaica, Middle East hot spots and China. Then there’s the Celine Dion dreams Web site, where one fan’s dream reveals an astonishingly accurate description of the Dion experience. “She [Dion] washes another dreamer’s face using a wet, live kitten.” About the only thing missing is a reference to the Dion-loving sociopath narrator of Irvine Welsh’s Filth, who thrills to her “singing that horrible song, the one she was just made to sing.”

The weakest chapters are, surprisingly, not those in which Wilson wallows in the sad netherworld of his research: the solitary trip to Vegas to see the unexpectedly entertaining A New Day show; or the hours spent forcing himself to listen to Let’s Talk About Love, while the neighbours are forced to listen too. This is, after all, the typical world of a Dion fan, the world of foreclosed mortgages, broken marriages, denial, debts and dysfunctions, the consequences of trying to acquire class when you have none, and other banal tragedies of life.

No, I could do without the chapters analyzing taste according to everyone from Pierre Bourdieu to Thorstein Veblen. Or worse, the ones that worry about the possibility that Celine might be in danger of becoming cool (and implicitly the critics who wasted ink slagging her, in danger of being exposed as wankers.)

Just a defence of the human right to sentimental attachments, even when the object of that attachment repels us, and even when that object is so blatantly and relentlessly putting herself out there to be attached to—this, for me, should be enough.

Let’s Talk About Love:
A Journey to the End of Taste
by Carl Wilson, Continuum,
pb, 167pp, $10.95