Signs of Intelligent Life
Roger: I'd never accuse you of consciously formulating your reviews in
accordance with a political agenda. My fear, based on lifelong respect for your
writing and the early corruption of my morals by Beyond the Valley of the
Dolls , is that the immense responsibility you've assumed could get in the
way of your having irresponsible fun. It would be OK if you hated South
Park: Bigger, Longer
& Uncut ; what worried me was that you said
you felt guilty for having laughed. By the way, I missed the racism in that
film--unless it was the depiction of Canadians as having crudely bisected
eggheads. As for homophobia: I saw, on the contrary, a sophisticated gay/camp
worldview being slipped in through the back door. So to speak.
Fight Club is a more difficult case. Its makers clearly thought they
were satirizing fascism; you think they ended up celebrating it. My view is
closer to yours, but it's a tricky line. Some of the greatest artists burrow so
deeply into their characters' twisted psyches that they risk making a case for
"the dark side." (A seminal masterpiece, Taxi
Driver , goes about
as deep as you can--and some people think too deep.) A smart, twentysomething
former
Slate
writer tried to explain to me the other day that the
point of Fight Club is that the hero spends the whole movie punching
himself in the face. To him (and many others), this ironically brutal
confession of impotence sums up the messy, unresolved feelings of his
generation. I'm skeptical--I think the film's ironies are more opportunistic
than insightful. But I find it so much harder to dismiss than The Green
Mile , which doesn't ever risk making the case for its evil characters'
worldview--and so illuminates nothing.
Sarah: Lovely case for The Sixth Sense , which had me bawling at the
end although it cheated like mad and I could smell the greasepaint on those
ghosts. Your body-and-soul riff accounts for why the world through the prism of
movies seemed to open up toward the end of this year--to seem so fluid that
even Elvis the Destroyer had an out-of-body experience.
By the way, I'm not your host; I'm just the guy who camps here year-round. I
admit I felt a little territorial when the Movie Club started; now I'll be
lonely when the rest of you leave. I began on a note of hope for movies; I end
feeling hopeful about criticism.
Best,
David
P.S.: Jar Jar must die.
