I saw the Three Billboards movie. The decision to see it was entirely a matter of default; it was Christmas vacation, my sister-in-law had proposed that we all go to the movies, her vote was for the 18th Star Wars film, I was inclined to see something else, etc.
I should clarify that I’m a film enthusiast, or “buff,” but I rarely see movies produced more recently than Kindergarten Cop. After a years-long movie drought, fatherhood brought me back into the theater for a string of works designed for children. Happily, this coincided with what now appears to have been Pixar’s period of early, funny films.
Somewhere along the line, I began hearing rumors that Hollywood was occasionally allowing a movie to slip through that did not feature wisecracking gunmen, ironjawed fellows who could fly through the air and smash stuff, or white women in imminent danger of marrying handsome underwritten characters. These rumors intrigued me, and I started going back to the octoplexes and enjoying the many stories about quirky young goofballs coming of age and quirky older goofballs forced to interact with youths that were now sassily bucking Hollywood trends.
Thus, when this family moviegoing plan was dangled in front of my eyes, I figured there would be several options available that did not include an actor propelled toward my face with a fireball behind him.
It turned out that the options were more limited than I’d predicted. The two octoplexes near my house, Concession Theaters 8 and Salt Bucket Cinema, were literally showing the exact same lineup. And our local art house had apparently discontinued its policy of running quirky goofball product and was now catering to the average Joe and average Josie who don’t want to pay movie theater prices unless there are scenes with buff characters jumping from the roofs of skyscrapers.
There was, fortunately, an obscure little movie getting good reviews, and the ad didn’t have a nutty mugging-filled picture of thirteen second-tier actors and three actors who had been famous around the time of Dorf Goes Auto Racing. It was, I discovered, a film taking place in a small American town, and from what I could determine, for once it wasn’t a town packed with adorable curmudgeons. Instead of that, it was about the dark underbelly of rural America. As an elitist liberal from the big city, I’m always eager to see a film about creepy backward-thinking rustics bedeviling plucky progressive rustics. (While I recognize that this sort of caricature is probably not fair or accurate, it’s hard for me to believe that young homosexuals flee this kind of hometown because of the preponderance of adorable curmudgeonry.)
Following this Micheneresque backstory, I found myself sitting in a theater seat next to my wife, who in a moment of holiday coma, had gone along with my suggestion.
We enjoyed the movie very much. It did have a scene or two of Quirkium Rusticana, but this was balanced by (TRIGGER WARNING) rape, murder, suicide, beatdowns, blood, burned flesh, guns, Molotov cocktails, two separate scenes of people going through glass windows, and so forth. It also found time for a bit of racism along the way, not a lot but just a little.
After we saw the movie, we didn’t really expect to hear about it again. To our surprise, it did well at the Golden Globes, an annual award exercise where films are occasionally praised even when they don’t have a larger-than-life central character that teaches us a lesson. In accordance with federal law, Internet content creators waited the customary six minutes before going into Backlash Mode. (The way it works, I’m told by friends from L.A., is you make your product, and if you’re fortunate enough to have people praise it, you go to the bathroom, and upon your return you look at your phone to see what the backlash is. Keep in mind, I’m talking about a regular length bathroom visit, rather than David Crosby length. In the unlikely event that David Crosby was involved in an entertainment product that was well liked, and went to the bathroom, he would return to the living room to discover that he’d been drummed out of the business.)
Now, I need to make something clear before I continue. I won’t succeed in making it clear, but I need to at least try. For those of you who are weary of screeds against political correctness, I empathize. I am also tired of such screeds. I feel strongly that people screeding on this theme should be required to type out the entire phrase every time they trot it out, based on my rule that if you need to lighten your load by reducing a thing to its initials, you’re probably trotting the thing out too much. Thus, if you’re constantly yammering about the rampant corruption that pervades the FBI (post-2016 if you’re conservative, and for its entire history before that if you’re liberal), you must refer to it as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If you want your friends in social media to know that you’re laughing out loud, or that a thing asserted is your opinion, say so. If you want to colorfully indicate the degree to which a thing IS something, type out the words “as fuck.” The one exception to this rule is SNL, because even though I feel that people refer to this program way more than they ought to, we can all agree that it’s physically impossible to say the words “Saturday Night Live” out loud without bungling them. Don Pardo could do it, but he had to say it loudly and slowly, like a man selling snake oil to rubes.
So, yes, I too am tired of someone bringing up political correctness every time they’re cruelly restrained from telling a hilarious joke about faggots. It gets old. Moreover, as a person over 25, I’m aware that conservatives were not always so heroically dedicated to freedom of speech. I don’t think it was liberals that used the legal system to hound Lenny Bruce off the planet.
At this point, I’m tired of hearing the term. In the Donald Trump era, it’s used to dismiss any slightly liberal notion. “I’d like to punch that broad in the vagina, but that wouldn’t be POLITICALLY CORRECT.” This overuse of it entirely invalidates whatever legitimate criticism it may have represented when I first started hearing it decades ago. For those who don’t know this, there is actual historical underpinning for the concept, Orwellian and disingenuous though it may seem today. There was a time in this country when many liberals had a romantic view of communism, and even of Stalin. This manifested itself in a large number of well-intentioned liberals attending meetings where the communist party line was indoctrinated into them by men wearing dungarees. As far as I can tell, this indoctrination was generally more along the lines of young middle class Americans learning that rich white people weren’t always in the right, and not so much about hanging the Rockefellers from telephone poles and murdering scores of dissidents, but the general idea of the term “political correctness” was this— liberals are, like the Soviets, rigid about making everyone adhere to a thought-destroying party line. This insinuation has a lot of truth in it, naturally, but seems an odd criticism to hear from people who question the conservative bona fides of anyone to the left of Roy Moore. On top of that, I’m not sure where a party throwing around the RINO acronym gets off accusing the left of being hidebound. But I do think it’s fair to mock the kind of credulousness displayed by privileged liberals back then, even if the mockers like to conveniently forget that our country dealt with this amusing naïveté by destroying the lives of countless such naifs. And not just destroying these lives, but doing it in a weaselly and secretive way, presumably because the blacklist was just as anti-American as a young actor or screenwriter going to a few communist party meetings before he or she started getting invited to Hollywood parties.
For these complicated reasons, I have mixed feelings about the origin story of the “politically correct” appellation. Now that the phenomenon has metastasized into the less namby-pamby “safe space” movement, my feelings about it are even more complicated.
I’ve already whined about my recent dealings with a few women who felt it was offensive for me to question the sanitizing of Carmen. I won’t go into that again, but I will use that example of well-intentioned Art Massage to pivot into my point.
Anyone who’s still with me will now have to forgive me for another round of equivocating and qualification, as I attempt for the umpteenth time to thread the needle between total acceptance of every left-wing shibboleth and Archie Bunker-esque right-wing grousing about pinkos and fags. It’s getting harder and harder to be amusing in this vein, but the very encouraging numbers I see on my blog’s page view counter suggest to me that there must be plenty of people who share my conviction that white supremacy and misogyny are ugly and prevalent, but this doesn’t mean that we have to buy into every liberal attack on the free exchange of ideas.
My point today isn’t really about all of that so much, though. It’s more about how we should deal with art, whether it’s our own or that of others, now that we’re all trying to figure out how things are going to go down from now on.
I’m fortunate to work with a few women who tell me to my face when my writing is sexist, even through ostensibly I’m in charge. I can’t say it’s fun when this happens, but what I do love about it is that they’re able to do it without getting angry at me. They’re firm about it, but kind, and as a result I find myself actually considering their viewpoint. Not initially, of course. I hate being criticized, and when my writing is criticized, that really triggers me. But— I love and respect these women. And, they don’t accuse me of sexism that often. And, when they do, I remind myself that they’re working for peanuts, or even less. Walnuts, sometimes. And, I also remind myself that they always bring their own beer. Who am I to dismiss the concerns of these gals? I venture to say that I’ve actually learned from them. And it feels good to learn something about myself, and improve my art to boot. I think they realize that my sexism is due more to stupidity than to misogyny, and they underscore this generous assessment by not only handing me a high quality beer, but usually opening it for me too. It’s nice to be respectful of and respected by women, and if the price of that is accepting the unspoken truth that I am an idiot, I can live with that.
Now that we’re all putting our feet up and pretending the Battle of the Sexes is pretty much over, allow me to return to my point about the Billboard film.
The backlash against this film is mostly about racism. The movie, you’ll recall from about twenty paragraphs ago, is hardly about racism at all. And that’s the reason for the backlash.
There’s a racist redneck cop in this movie, who’s consistently made fun of for being one. In events alluded to several times early in the story, he had beaten a confession out of an African-American suspect. The word “torture” is bandied about, but we’re never given any specifics. Later, after a whole lot of other stuff unrelated to racism occurs, we’re told that his real problem is anger management rather than racism. Eventually, after he’s lost his job, been humiliated by an African-American, and his flesh burned to the point where his face is all fucked up, he decides to do the right thing. As a result of THAT, he has the crap kicked out of him by a character we despise. But- it turns out— he let this happen on purpose, so he could save the day and also redeem himself.
All of this is thoroughly contrived. Hard to swallow, even. But that’s what storytelling is all about. I tell myself that I don’t like being manipulated, but in fact, like everyone else, I love it. I have news for those of you who like to go online and nitpick about how phony and unbelievable a movie is— and I don’t think there’s ever been a movie that hasn’t been criticized this way— but this manipulation is what art is all about.
In Psycho, Hitchcock set it up so that we actually identify with the murderer. In real life, as I have mentioned in the past, I don’t care for woman-stabbers. But Hitchcock figured out how to override that, and bring a woman-stabber to such glorious life that he’s one of my favorite characters in any film. He did this in other, more complicated, ways, but the cheap manipulative way was to cast the lovable and photogenic Anthony Perkins. (In Robert Bloch’s original novel, the stabber is dumpy and sweaty, and you probably wouldn’t want to see him in a dress and wig. And of course, in the real life story that inspired Bloch, Ed Gein was not only unattractive, but he actually made his mother into a lampshade. That real life story isn’t manipulative at all, it’s just vile, like much of real life.)
The trick is for storytellers to manipulate us in a way that we like. There’s an upcoming movie about the war in Afghanistan, where Americans (judging from the trailer) appear so heroic on the screen that I expect internet backlashers will blow past all protocol and lash back at the film before anyone says anything nice about it. On the other hand, people who already see American soldiers as unambiguous heroes will probably just let the film wash over them like the surf washed over Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity.
It’s easy for me to see through such manipulation. But when I watch Dirty Harry, it’s a different story. That film is as manipulative as any ever made. Eastwood isn’t just cool in Dirty Harry, he’s also pitted against one of the most inarguably heinous villains in screen history, a disturbed AND physically unattractive pervert with an unpleasant voice who’s cleverly making use of the liberal parts of our Constitution to keep the cops off his ass while he tortures and murders a young woman. He also hijacks a bus load of children. So, yeah, I’m rooting for Eastwood this time around.
Wandering back, yet again, to the billboard movie, people have raised objections to it because after the highly manipulative arc of the story, we find ourselves warming up to this racist cop. (That’s happened before, notably with In the Heat of the Night, where Rod Steiger’s racist sheriff is remarkably lovable, and no-one objects to this, presumably because the anti-racism message of the film is so bold-stroke impossible to miss, even for Steiger. Plus, the ultra cool Sidney Poitier is just about the only character in the movie who’s not a dumbass.) This warming trend is what people object to. Sam Rockwell’s cop character, as I’ve laid out for you, is burned and beaten to the brink of death, in two different scenes. He’s also ignominiously fired by a black man. For racism, as I recall, more or less. But that’s not enough of a comeuppance for him, for some people. In their view, the audience ought to hate him until the film ends, and also on the ride home, I suppose.
Believe it or not, I don’t mean to belittle any African-Americans who disagree with me. They’re absolutely entitled to feel differently from my view, which could well stem from the other kind of entitlement. The bad kind.
But it does seem to me to be connected with our current landscape, where misogynists aren’t just outed, and their meal tickets revoked. We also have to hate them too, and talk about them as if they are a scourge and anathema to good citizens everywhere. Forever, presumably. And as inexcusable as much recently-uncovered behavior obviously is, I’m not entirely onboard with the “virtual leper colony” approach to every malefactor. Some, yes. Most, perhaps. But all, always?
And in the realm of art, do we really need to enforce strict rules where every racist is a cartoon villain, impossible to like, and the screenwriter rams this home in some ludicrously obvious way? Would we really be better off if movies were more like Scooby Doo episodes? Once they rip the mask off the monster, and we learn that he’s actually Old Man Hazeltine, there’s no second act. We don’t see him at home, later, sitting around in his bathrobe crying.
If we are to have a rule where onscreen racism, or misogyny, is always accompanied by audience hatred and no redemption is ever possible, I submit that we are talking about a system not unlike the Hollywood edicts of long ago, or the Comics Code enforced internally to stop censorship-minded Senators from sniffing around. The resulting product would arguably be more contrived than movies already are today, which is saying something. Just like storytelling infected by racism and misogyny and homophobia, where blacks are bugeyed children, and women are leggy bubbleheads, and gay men are cravated, lisping fops was far from any observable reality, the cinema world some people are asking for is designed to make some people feel good, regardless of its being undeniably full of shit. A few years back, I recall a time when suddenly every cop show had a black chief, or a black squad commander. In a notable example of this, Yaphet Kotto was cast to play a character based on a real life guy who was real life white. This is, of course, a mild example, and was entirely well-intentioned. I love Kotto’s Giardello, too, a wonderful character beautifully played. But he wasn’t a realistic portrayal of the cop in question. That need not matter, but I’d argue it doesn’t matter precisely because Kotto did a great job on the show, not because it made people feel good to see a black man in the role. That’s just a bonus.
I can see that many of you need to go stretch your legs, so I only have enough time to mention another complaint leveled against the billboard movie. Peter Dinklage was in the film in a bit role, and a reviewer accused the director of “wasting” him. What I recall is that in his few minutes onscreen, he managed to be both funny and serious, bringing gravitas and humor to a film already filled with a lot of both. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a dwarf in a movie guilt-trip a woman character for not wanting to have sex with him, and he played that scene very effectively. It was moving, but also understated. He packed a lot of star power into a brief performance.
I don’t think it would have been a better film with forty more minutes of Dinklage, any more than I think Dinklage would be a better actor if there were two more feet of him.
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