This is an introspective 2,000 word aritcle, that is split into two parts. The first is the typical attempt to poke holes at Woke Thought and Cancel Cutlure. The second is an attempt to be introspective on my role in it. If you've already read my doing my shtick with the first half, skip along to the second half.
Roxana Hadadi’s review of The
Tomorrow War is quite possibly the most offensive thing I’ve ever read from
a reviewer. As I’ve written about elsewhere,
there have been movie reviews that that ring like public service announcements to
remind us of the existence of racism, homophobia and misogyny. There are also
tremendous amount of reviewers who use their platform to police any
violations of a narrow definition of politically correctness.
But I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a movie critic engineer a reason to hate a
movie star simply because he’s white, religious and doesn’t get into his
personal politics:
In her opening paragraph, Hadadi, writes:
“I don’t see personal stories that
necessarily resonate with me, because they’re not my stories […] The voice of
the average, blue-collar American isn’t necessarily represented in Hollywood,”
Pratt said. That was a willfully ignorant statement back then, and it still is
now.
Please note that this reviewer slams Chris Pratt for what he says in a
press junket. These events exist solely for the stars to say positive things
about their own projects. The reviewer
proceeded to slam him for equating that with championing whiteness and tacked
on the claim that the film featured a lot of POC and women characters who are
secondary to the hero. So by her logic, no white man can star in a film?
The engineering of a conflict against Chris Pratt is the hardest
part of this to take considering there are no statements that Chris Pratt makes
himself about race. A popular term on the left in their (in my opinion,
counterproductive) war on microaggressions is “coded.” When a number of
well-known intellectuals signed an open
letter calling for less dogmatism in progressivism, many went on the
offensive suggesting that the letter was a “coded” attack on the trans community
despite the issue not being mentioned in the letter.
In the same way that people read coded hate in a letter to Harper’s or Chris
Pratt’s churchgoing and treat it like real hate against the disenfranchised, the extreme fringes of the liberal party have thrived on
intellectual sloppiness as of late.
The primary problem of wokeness when not used well is that it encourages
people to see and advocate for a simplified world governed by dichotomies. One
is either anti- or pro- racist, misogyny and homophobia and there’s no
in-between. As someone who actively has campaigned for democratic candidates
and would like to see the Senate and House remain blue, I know firsthand this
is not a great world view to impose upon others.
In the case of Chris Pratt, this is an illogically messy projection. Pratt is
undeniably gay-friendly and hangs around in progressive circles but is a church
goer and the son-in-law of a Republican ex-governor. The phenomenon of people calling for
his head when it was discovered his preacher is exclusionary towards the
LGBT population (not technically true in terms of the Church’s admission
process) is symptomatic of the fact that we as Blue State America have never
reckoned with the fact that we don’t have a way of reconciling Christianity
into our current state of wokeness.
I don't feel any affinity towards
Christianity and I don't believe we are a Christian nation but there's nothing
to be gained from having an all-out war on anyone who's a church goer as to the
kind of press that Chris Pratt was hit with.
As for being non-political, look at the take of yet another writer
who is dedicated more to reminding us racism exists than analyzing the
situation in context: :
“Not
everything is politics” is the most privileged thing a person can possibly say.
There is only one type of person for whom “not everything is politics” and that
is the straight, white, American male, because he is the center and everything
is for him. Not everything is politics because politics defer to his point of
view. But for the rest of us, yes, everything IS politics. Our skin is
politics, our voices are politics, our bodies are politics, our marriages are
politics, the way we do or don’t pray is politics, our right to flee violence
and/or poverty to make a better life is politics.
Again, author Sarah Marss is reading a person’s stance to be apolitical as
coded in ways that it probably is not. It is also assuming that Chris Pratt
owes the author and her allies anything. Forgive me for reading something coded
in this message, but the author is saying “You are not using your position as a
wealthy citizen correctly to rally for my cause” as if there’s no debate to be
had. Chris Pratt, it is assumed, would vote on the author’s side if he took an
interest in politics. That, simply put, is dogmatism. The debate over whether
voting is an obligation is a complex one that shouldn’t be put entirely on
Chris Pratt’s shoulders.
It’s also strategically unsound. I have an uncle, for example, with
ridiculously backward views and would have voted for Trump if he were properly
mobilized to get to the polls, so the rest of my liberal family tries to keep
him as apolitical as possible about actually going to the polls.
I agree with Marss that we shouldn’t take for granted that the government will
affect certain oppressed populations more but from a strategic standpoint. As
for voter apathy, as someone who knocked on doors in two campaigns in minority
neighborhoods this past year, there are unfortunately many apathetic voters of
color as well. For many people, an apolitical stance is a coping strategy
against the madness of a field they have no control over. It’s not a mark of
whiteness as many white people on both sides of the aisle are frustrated about
politics and remove themselves from it.
The ultra-liberal fringes who are over-represented (look at pitch calls from
Buzzfeed, Salon, Variety, AV Club and most lit journals about the desire to
hear LGBT, women, and POC) in literary journals even if they are (I agree)
tragically underrepresented in other industries hammer us with the same
articles over and over policing the lack of diversity. In worst-case scenarios,
it leads to what reads as blanket
attacks on whiteness such as the Time cover “The Unbearable
Whiteness of the Oscar Nominations”.
There are tons of instances but so we’re not here all day, I’ll just pick two
that recently struck a chord with me:
First off, Sonia Sariya’s review of Narcos:
“The first episode is the unfortunate showcase of most of these
missteps—including the most irritating one, a bizarre reliance on a narrator
who is trying so hard to impress upon the audience his white, American
maleness that he comes off as a caricature, not a character.”
And,
again, Roxana Hadadi’s review of Mr. Corman entitled “Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Mr. Corman is a
Misguided Attempt to Finger-Wag at White Privilege.”
“But “Mr. Corman” also adds in
aggressively twee animated flourishes, whirls Gordon-Levitt around a couple of
songs, wastes time with an incredibly facile parallel-universe standalone
episode, and builds up to a final-episode reveal that hangs all of Josh’s
issues on his white privilege. A noticeable pattern is that nearly every person
who criticizes Josh’s woe-is-me attitude is a person of color, most incisively
the Korean American Emily (Jamie Chung). In a scene that “Mr. Corman” clearly thinks is allyship, Emily makes
a broad generalization about Josh’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that is
not just staggeringly dismissive, but also disrespectful to the people of color
for whom the show thinks Emily is speaking. “
In the first case, I have no idea what the heck “impressing his white,
American maleness” is even supposed to mean.
In the second, I’d argue that Hadadi’s similar insistence
on reading the work through a black-and-white (forgive the pun) lens misses the
point of the work. I’d argue that “Mr. Corman” isn’t a work centered around
examining white male privilege. Instead, it’s about a white, male character in
a funk whose journey towards being a happier person involves being a more
selfless person. In the character’s moral orientation, being a better feminist
and ally to people of color is important.
Hadadi essentially paints Gordon-Levitt’s character’s needs as irrelevant so
long as he makes the POC and women look good. It’s ironic because what Hadadi
is calling for is a reverse “magic negro” for Joseph Gordon-Levitt as both a
creator and for his character. It’s also funny how Iranian-American writer Hadadi
(by the way, I’m half Iranian-American), uses her experience as a “POC” to
co-opt the experiences of South Koreans and weaponizes their perceived outrage
at a complaint that barely holds water.
I agree with the Hadadi that the show is bland, but
the “finger wagging” is done by Hadadi herself in explaining how the show
should be rather than what the show is.
PART II: Where do I fit
in with all of this?
“Orrin, you’re not oppressed, you’re a s---ty writer, there’s a difference”
-Emily Van der Werff, widely respected film critic for Vox
When I read Roxana Hadadi’s review, I was so annoyed that I
told her so on twitter. I prefaced it with the fact that I understand female
writers probably feel threatened when they see people attacking them on
twitter. I was promptly blocked and she took a swipe at me afterwards. To her
and many people like her who I’ve crossed swords with in cyberspace, I’m some
sort of ignoramus that stands in the way of progress. It’s easiest for them to group
me with Trump-supporters or racists (my stance on
racism is that it’s a loaded word and we’re all a little racist, as “Avenue
Q” so wisely
preached). I’ve been given a lot of crap (mostly in cyberspace) over the
box that the identity politics crowd thinks I belong in and that just keeps
providing me with more evidence that something is off about that line of
thinking.
One thing that bothered me tremendously was the line above
which came at a twitter exchange in which I pointed out that if the majority of
critics view their job description as advocating for identity politics, can
they still call themselves the minority?
In response to that, Van der Werff (one of the principal advocates
against Harper’s letter on intellectual openness and someone who I’ve had brief
exchanges with on twitter and through e-mail over a job application and
entering their critique-a-thon) wrote
the following line.
"Orrin, you are not oppressed, you're a s---ty writer. There's a difference"
There’s so much wrong with that line—from Van der Werff’s 1)
point-blank critique of my work as if only her opinion matters to 2) her assumptions of what challenges I face from
an ableist perspective as someone with disabilities to even my ethnic heritage
(I'm of the same ethnicity as Caroline Famke--a half-Iranian Jew who wrote under Emily at Vox and she uses that in her reviews) to 3) her assumptions of why I write 4) sharing her opinions of my writing when
my work I would assume was given to her in confidence, to 5) not acknowledging her
own power as in she is (or at least was) a gatekeeper to that corner of the
literary world as a board member of the TV Critics Association, to 6) not
considering that I might have studied the issues she talks about (I do have an
undergraduate degree in geography and a master’s in public policy).
But if I detach myself from that, it’s just a measure of how far removed one
side is from the other and how a difference of opinions isn’t bridgeable even
for people of the same party.
And that might include myself as well. Whether I should have bothered the
reviewer personally over Twitter is something I thought about a lot afterwards.
Still, that’s understandable that it’s hard not to group people in this
polarizing era and I can be guilty of grouping all people who preach identity
politics. If David Duke were writing movie reviews and kept wanting to use the format to express his societal views, how could I not be bothered?
And I’m not sure what comes next for myself. I’ve written over 20 pieces
putting into words the ridiculousness of the direction identity politics is
headed and what I perceive the damage of that to be. About 10 of
those have been published in right wing outlets. Have I said enough? Is there
more? I don’t know, but I aim to try to keep a line as best as I can of
civil respect and decency in modelling a path forward.
