Wednesday, February 16, 2005
God I Miss Harry Callahan
Memo to Dowd, Rich, Eastwood and other members of the cultural heights: you're way out of your league. James Bowman has your number so badly it's nearly unfair.
Eastwood's 'Million Dollar Baby' is the talk of Hollywood, and is receiving more than its share of praise from the "critics." To be honest that is about as far as my own knowledge extends. Nor is it likely that I'll be in a position to render even a first-hand opinion of the movie, much less something like a coherent take on it. I can flatly say that I will not be seeing it - and this is not because Bowman's essay has put me off of it. Rather it is that I can't look at 99% of the scheize that has come out of Hollywood for the last, say, decade and a half.
But I can steel myself against the sentimentalists of the cultural left with Bowman's semi-regular surgeries on their follies and their pufferies. In his essay of February 14, Bowman exposes a scam that has become so common that we don't even notice it. And it (the scam) has had such a long run that the perpetrators can't even see that they're engaged in it.
Yes, yes, I'm speaking in generalities. What, exactly, am I referring to? Read the entire piece, is my first entreaty. But to set the table, Bowman calls out the elites for their constant denial that modern Hollywood productions, with 'Million Dollar Baby' being the case in point, have any political point to make. He cites a New York Times film critic:
And if Scott's was the extent of the treacle of adulation for the former Dirty Harry, we might think this was just more right wing paranoia. But alas, it's only the beginning. Next we have Frank Rich, one of the pillars of acceptable Manhattan opinion:
Part of Bowman's genius is his ability to make connections and seamlessly bring in other current events, on their surface not obviously related. So as we follow his exposition of the sham apoliticalness (sorry, that's my word) of the cultural products which are ostensibly the subject of the essay, we must also consider one this culture's patron saints, who has just passed away and who is racking up glowing eulogies fit for a philosopher king.
What about Maureen Dowd?, you may be asking; I said Dowd was out of her depth too. Again, go read the piece. But if you don't have time for it, here is a part of what Bowman has to say about the crown princess of ironical irony.
As I said, they're way out of their depth.
Eastwood's 'Million Dollar Baby' is the talk of Hollywood, and is receiving more than its share of praise from the "critics." To be honest that is about as far as my own knowledge extends. Nor is it likely that I'll be in a position to render even a first-hand opinion of the movie, much less something like a coherent take on it. I can flatly say that I will not be seeing it - and this is not because Bowman's essay has put me off of it. Rather it is that I can't look at 99% of the scheize that has come out of Hollywood for the last, say, decade and a half.
But I can steel myself against the sentimentalists of the cultural left with Bowman's semi-regular surgeries on their follies and their pufferies. In his essay of February 14, Bowman exposes a scam that has become so common that we don't even notice it. And it (the scam) has had such a long run that the perpetrators can't even see that they're engaged in it.
Yes, yes, I'm speaking in generalities. What, exactly, am I referring to? Read the entire piece, is my first entreaty. But to set the table, Bowman calls out the elites for their constant denial that modern Hollywood productions, with 'Million Dollar Baby' being the case in point, have any political point to make. He cites a New York Times film critic:
A.O. Scott of the New York Times, who called it "the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year," went on to praise it in particular as "a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove." Nothing to prove! It has nothing but something to prove, and something that Hollywood proves so routinely that it has by now become rather a bore for me, at least, to see proved again -- namely that our lives are our own to do with as we please. God and any of God's putative "laws" don't come into it. Clint Eastwood's libertarianism becomes cosmic in its dimensions, an existential demonstration of human freedom as the only response to our loneliness in the universe. It is a venerable movie theme, to be sure, and the very foundation of the noir cinema of the 1940s, where it also had a strongly political dimension -- although then it was more Marxist than libertarian, and not marred by the cheap sentimentalism of Clint's essay in the form.
And if Scott's was the extent of the treacle of adulation for the former Dirty Harry, we might think this was just more right wing paranoia. But alas, it's only the beginning. Next we have Frank Rich, one of the pillars of acceptable Manhattan opinion:
Frank Rich, also writing in the New York Times: "What really makes these critics" -- by which he means Michael Medved and others -- "hate Million Dollar Baby is not its supposedly radical politics, which are nonexistent, but its lack of sentimentality." I confess that when I read these words, I was gobsmacked. Sure Frank Rich is an unreflecting, knee-jerk leftie, but he's not insane, is he? Of course we can understand why the politics hardly count as radical anymore to him. They've been around so long and are so much taken for granted in the circles he moves in that they don't even look like politics anymore, just common sense to all but the fanatics, as he sees them, of the right. But "lack of sentimentality" is so obviously, so overwhelmingly false that there must be something else going on here. Rich is himself a critic, and for him to say there's no sentimentality in Million Dollar Baby is equivalent to his saying there's no sentimentality in -- oh, I don't know, Forrest Gump. It suggests he doesn't know his business.
Part of Bowman's genius is his ability to make connections and seamlessly bring in other current events, on their surface not obviously related. So as we follow his exposition of the sham apoliticalness (sorry, that's my word) of the cultural products which are ostensibly the subject of the essay, we must also consider one this culture's patron saints, who has just passed away and who is racking up glowing eulogies fit for a philosopher king.
But the denial of any political content is a long-standing strategy of the cultural left in America, one going back to the days of McCarthyism when committed and believing Communist screenwriters were hauled before Congress to justify themselves and claimed, in the words of their apologist, the late Arthur Miller, that "they wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a mildly liberal cast, but most of it mindless." Miller, of course, backed up such a preposterous claim by writing The Crucible -- a play which is still being read and performed in American schools by your children and mine, and treated with the same reverence that Miller himself was in a spate of recent obituaries and encomia -- in order to pretend that there were no more Communists in America in 1953 than there had been witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Ever since then, it has become customary to greet any criticism of leftist politics in the movies or other works of drama or fiction with similar charges of right-wing paranoia.
What about Maureen Dowd?, you may be asking; I said Dowd was out of her depth too. Again, go read the piece. But if you don't have time for it, here is a part of what Bowman has to say about the crown princess of ironical irony.
For "Michael Moore and Mel Gibson aside," she writes, putting on her aesthetician's hat, "the purpose of art is not always to send messages. More often, it's just to tell a story, move people and provoke ideas. Mr. Eastwood's critics don't even understand what art is." Ha ha. Good one, Maureen. Right on cue, the right-wing boobs she first invents and then ridicules week after week in her column come on the scene to make the same point, the only point she is able to make anymore, namely that of the incomparable intellectual superiority of herself and her chic and artistic friends to all those who disagree with them, particularly on matters of faith and morals.
As I said, they're way out of their depth.
# posted by mds : 2:55 PM
