Letters to the Editor
-
Black whatever
Andrew,
I agree with you. Clearly, there is nothing at all "ironic," intentionally or otherwise, about the apparent glee that you take in describing as "exhilarating" stuff that sounds just plain repellant to me.
it's just creepy. To me, anyway. But let's talk about the movie, Ok?
You did try in your review to address the fact that some folks are bound to be offended by this film. And I do understand, intellectually, what you were saying when you explained that it is possible to depict a misogynist society without succumbing to misogyny.
I'm not completely stupid.
But this part of your review doesn't connect in my mind with your actual _description_ of the film, which sounds like it is designed to appeal to something in the viewer that is puerile and prurient, while being compicated and well-made enough to allow the viewer to justify his or her enjoyment of some pretty repellant stuff on the grounds that, in enjoying it, he or she is "getting" something that "some viewers" may not.
Like, say, Hustle and Flow. Which, similarly, was supposed to "depict" misogyny without succumbing to it, but ultimately seemed to me, when I got around to watching it, to be a well-made but deeply flawed film that used thin, debased caricatures of women as props for the main character to interact with; which, to my mind, is the very definition of succumbing to misogyny, however much this technique may have been effective in drawing a complex and nuanced portrait of the primary character.
Maybe I'm wrong, though, and there is something deeply ironic and subversive and _important_ about this aspect of this director's work that doesn't simply serve the purpose of advancing some comfortable narrative about race and the South but actually says something valuable about, well, women. Something ironic in the old sense of "irony" as meaning something other than "you just aren't cool enough to understand."
If so, though, I wish that you could find a way to explain it to me in a way that is rooted in a critical assessment of these elements in the work itself, rather than hinting at how they might be justified by some larger, ineffable meaning that cannot be spoken.
Except, I guess, by saying, "Hell, yeah."