Criticism, culture, and freeze peach
Jan. 21st, 2015 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI keep having thoughts about the Michael Moore/Seth Rogen/Clint Eastwood/loads of even stupider people thing, and what its implications are in terms of free expression. Which I resent, as I try very hard not to think about most of these people at all.
The short version of this story is that Clint Eastwood made what looks like a very slick movie based on a book written by a murderous pathological liar. I haven't seen the movie. I'm semi-planning a viewing party if I can get a good torrent of it and reviewing it on this blog, but there's no way I'm going to pay for something that's going to give me a headache. But my issue has very little to do with whether American Sniper is a good movie or not. It might be—I'm too much of a Sergio Leone fangirl to discount Eastwood's contribution to cinema—but that isn't the point. The point is when Seth Rogen and Michael Moore, both film professionals, went on Twitter to criticize it, they got an avalanche of shit in response that forced them to retract—er, clarify—their positions.
I find this fascinating.
Let's cycle back a few weeks ago, when we were all Charlie, and freedom of expression was supreme. Did you lose friends in a Charlie-based debate? I sure did. Some of my points have been vindicated, in that the result of Je Suis Charlie is that the rights of white men to say whatever racist shit they like has been confirmed by the international community as sacrosanct, whereas anyone else's tasteless and shitty attempts at satire are grounds for arrest. So the freedom to be an offensive asswipe (or to not engage in collective gestures of national mourning) is, far from being a universal value, largely contingent on skin colour, much like every other freedom under a white supremacist system. Quelle surprise.
Digression: I'm not a free-speech absolutist—few people are, when you take free speech absolutism to its logical, fire-in-a-crowded-theatre conclusion. One must have certain societal safeguards in place. Hate speech contributing to a culture of persecution is one such logical limit—but, naturally, works poorly as a law, since those in charge of enforcing it are generally on the winning side of said culture, so this limit is best enforced by pieing, egging, and public humiliation (not, however, by murder. At most, several months hard labour in gulag.). Presenting false information as fact is another limit; otherwise you end up with FOX News blatantly making stuff up, and large numbers of people believing it, which is a tangibly bad thing to happen to a civilization.
Why am I talking about Charlie again, when I promised not to? Because this new construction of free speech, which is in no way new, has an interesting twist. Previously, you had the right to say whatever (as long as you were a white man). Now, you are free to say whatever (as long as you are a white man, and you are offending the correct people)...and no one else has the right to say you suck for doing so.
Let's break it down. We know what free speech legally means in most of the Western world: It means that the government cannot break down your door and arrest you for publishing something. That's a pretty good rule. On a more informal basis, we can extend it to the right to not be killed by extra-legal actors, such as idiot terrorists, for publishing something. Most people can get behind that.
But we also know what free speech means on the internet. It means that I can't be banned from your journal for responding to your post entirely with pages and pages of pornographic ASCII* because I disagree with your opinion on MRA, because if you ban me, you are censoring me. It means that you can't say that Charlie Hebdo is racist and unfunny, because if you do, you're against free speech and pro-terrorism and insufficiently European. It means that you don't get to block your aunt on Facebook after she forwarded you that anti-vax propaganda. It means that all speech, no matter how offensive, wrong, or sub-literate, is absolutely equal in value and deserving to be heard.
The result of this confusion over what freedom of expression actually is and is not is twofold. First, Jenny McCarthy's opinion on vaccinations is allowed to occupy the same space in the public discourse as that of actual doctors with medical degrees. Second, it becomes taboo to criticize, because criticism is equated with censorship. Saying that something is balls is equivalent, in today's parlance, of saying that you think it shouldn't have been made and want to silence the person who made it forever.
Which brings me, via a roundabout route, back to American Sniper.
What Michael Moore said is that snipers are cowards. What Seth Rogen said was that the movie reminded him of that bit with the Nazi propaganda movie about the sniper in Inglourious Basterds. (I find the latter comparison insulting, as I suspect Tarantino shits out better movies than Rogen, Moore, or Eastwood-as-a-director could ever hope to make, but I'll admit that my bias is towards movies that I actually find entertaining.) Both are fair statements well within the tradition of film criticism.
In fact, the very point of film criticism is for someone who knows a lot about film to take a giant shit over someone who has just made a film. This is a fine tradition, and there are many shining, hilarious examples of critics utterly destroying an awful movie that reinforced cultural hegemony and thus was wildly popular, such as Zizek's takedown of Avatar or Kermode savaging Sex In the City II. One would think that film criticism—in this case, the critique of a film made by a white man by other white men—would fall squarely into the realm of Culturally Approved Free Speech.
But. It ignited a Twitterstorm. It became a Thing that I had to read about in the Real News. Apparently it was such a controversy that both filmmakers had to step back from their initial statements and say positive things about the film, like they liked Cooper's acting or they enjoyed the movie.
This is not film criticism. This is kindergarten, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," no fee-fees allowed to be hurt bullshit. And I find it deeply disturbing, chilling, because the freedom to critique is all about the freedom to question, and in order to maintain some sort of justice or equilibrium in a culture where anything can get said, you must also have a culture where anything that gets said can be questioned. Obviously, we've never really had that, but we've also historically had gatekeepers. Now it's all about the loudest, richest voices, and if people out there are loud and rich enough to force loud, rich Seth Rogen to back down on a tweet, what hope is there for anyone marginalized ever getting a say?
* Why did you click that? You know better. You know what I'm like.
The short version of this story is that Clint Eastwood made what looks like a very slick movie based on a book written by a murderous pathological liar. I haven't seen the movie. I'm semi-planning a viewing party if I can get a good torrent of it and reviewing it on this blog, but there's no way I'm going to pay for something that's going to give me a headache. But my issue has very little to do with whether American Sniper is a good movie or not. It might be—I'm too much of a Sergio Leone fangirl to discount Eastwood's contribution to cinema—but that isn't the point. The point is when Seth Rogen and Michael Moore, both film professionals, went on Twitter to criticize it, they got an avalanche of shit in response that forced them to retract—er, clarify—their positions.
I find this fascinating.
Let's cycle back a few weeks ago, when we were all Charlie, and freedom of expression was supreme. Did you lose friends in a Charlie-based debate? I sure did. Some of my points have been vindicated, in that the result of Je Suis Charlie is that the rights of white men to say whatever racist shit they like has been confirmed by the international community as sacrosanct, whereas anyone else's tasteless and shitty attempts at satire are grounds for arrest. So the freedom to be an offensive asswipe (or to not engage in collective gestures of national mourning) is, far from being a universal value, largely contingent on skin colour, much like every other freedom under a white supremacist system. Quelle surprise.
Digression: I'm not a free-speech absolutist—few people are, when you take free speech absolutism to its logical, fire-in-a-crowded-theatre conclusion. One must have certain societal safeguards in place. Hate speech contributing to a culture of persecution is one such logical limit—but, naturally, works poorly as a law, since those in charge of enforcing it are generally on the winning side of said culture, so this limit is best enforced by pieing, egging, and public humiliation (not, however, by murder. At most, several months hard labour in gulag.). Presenting false information as fact is another limit; otherwise you end up with FOX News blatantly making stuff up, and large numbers of people believing it, which is a tangibly bad thing to happen to a civilization.
Why am I talking about Charlie again, when I promised not to? Because this new construction of free speech, which is in no way new, has an interesting twist. Previously, you had the right to say whatever (as long as you were a white man). Now, you are free to say whatever (as long as you are a white man, and you are offending the correct people)...and no one else has the right to say you suck for doing so.
Let's break it down. We know what free speech legally means in most of the Western world: It means that the government cannot break down your door and arrest you for publishing something. That's a pretty good rule. On a more informal basis, we can extend it to the right to not be killed by extra-legal actors, such as idiot terrorists, for publishing something. Most people can get behind that.
But we also know what free speech means on the internet. It means that I can't be banned from your journal for responding to your post entirely with pages and pages of pornographic ASCII* because I disagree with your opinion on MRA, because if you ban me, you are censoring me. It means that you can't say that Charlie Hebdo is racist and unfunny, because if you do, you're against free speech and pro-terrorism and insufficiently European. It means that you don't get to block your aunt on Facebook after she forwarded you that anti-vax propaganda. It means that all speech, no matter how offensive, wrong, or sub-literate, is absolutely equal in value and deserving to be heard.
The result of this confusion over what freedom of expression actually is and is not is twofold. First, Jenny McCarthy's opinion on vaccinations is allowed to occupy the same space in the public discourse as that of actual doctors with medical degrees. Second, it becomes taboo to criticize, because criticism is equated with censorship. Saying that something is balls is equivalent, in today's parlance, of saying that you think it shouldn't have been made and want to silence the person who made it forever.
Which brings me, via a roundabout route, back to American Sniper.
What Michael Moore said is that snipers are cowards. What Seth Rogen said was that the movie reminded him of that bit with the Nazi propaganda movie about the sniper in Inglourious Basterds. (I find the latter comparison insulting, as I suspect Tarantino shits out better movies than Rogen, Moore, or Eastwood-as-a-director could ever hope to make, but I'll admit that my bias is towards movies that I actually find entertaining.) Both are fair statements well within the tradition of film criticism.
In fact, the very point of film criticism is for someone who knows a lot about film to take a giant shit over someone who has just made a film. This is a fine tradition, and there are many shining, hilarious examples of critics utterly destroying an awful movie that reinforced cultural hegemony and thus was wildly popular, such as Zizek's takedown of Avatar or Kermode savaging Sex In the City II. One would think that film criticism—in this case, the critique of a film made by a white man by other white men—would fall squarely into the realm of Culturally Approved Free Speech.
But. It ignited a Twitterstorm. It became a Thing that I had to read about in the Real News. Apparently it was such a controversy that both filmmakers had to step back from their initial statements and say positive things about the film, like they liked Cooper's acting or they enjoyed the movie.
This is not film criticism. This is kindergarten, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," no fee-fees allowed to be hurt bullshit. And I find it deeply disturbing, chilling, because the freedom to critique is all about the freedom to question, and in order to maintain some sort of justice or equilibrium in a culture where anything can get said, you must also have a culture where anything that gets said can be questioned. Obviously, we've never really had that, but we've also historically had gatekeepers. Now it's all about the loudest, richest voices, and if people out there are loud and rich enough to force loud, rich Seth Rogen to back down on a tweet, what hope is there for anyone marginalized ever getting a say?
* Why did you click that? You know better. You know what I'm like.
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