A reality TV fan hijacked my chat about arthouse film. How to stick to the program?

While having a complex, nuanced and deeply satisfying conversation with a friend about an arthouse movie, another friend rudely hijacked the conversation, talking about a crap reality-TV show. How should I have brought the conversation back to quality cinema?
J.N., East Bentleigh, Vic

Credit: Simon Letch

High culture and low culture have always lived side by side. You go to the cinema to see a gut-wrenching Albanian film about the futility of war and, before it starts, you’re on your phone checking footy scores, Flybuys offers and a YouTube clip called “Top Ten Skydives Gone Wrong”.

You go to a bookstore to buy a glowingly reviewed collection of Vietnamese poetry about the trauma of colonialism and spot it in the bookstore window surrounded by 40 kids’ publications about various animals farting and a weight-loss book called Eat Less, Crap More!

You go to a high-end restaurant and pay $280 for “Essence of Lettuce”, which is blown into your face with a handheld fan while AirPods play the sound of lettuce wilting, and you’re so hungry on the way home that you stop at a drive-through for nuggets with barbecue sauce and, for dessert, nuggets with sweet-chilli sauce.

So, in the same way, high and low culture can coexist in conversations. If a friend wants to talk about Married At First Sight, you could compare it to Asghar Farhadi’s Iranian divorce-drama A Separation (more relationship twists, fewer dermal face fillers). If a friend brings up the new season of Survivor, you could bring up Claude Lanzmann’s 10-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah (fewer tropical locations, a few more survivors).

Find the high and low cultural commonalities and you may wind up having an even more complex, nuanced and satisfying conversation, maybe over a packet of Chicken Twisties washed down with a well-structured 2016 shiraz from WA.

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