Now that Barbie has sold more than ONE BILLION dollars of tickets at the box office worldwide and our beloved Greta Gerwig has become the #1 commercial female director in movie history, it’s time for the complaints.
Oh, but wait.
Now that Oppenheimer has sold more than $600 million dollars of tickets at the box office worldwide and proven there is no ceiling to how popular, acclaimed and profitable THREE HOURS of dark, dramatic filmmaking can be, it’s time to eviscerate Christopher Nolan and IT into the cinematic equivalent of swiss cheese.
Boo hoo, right?
I know.
Nevertheless, this is why we can’t have nice things.
As life goes on you get to the point where you not only realize you can’t please everyone, but that you really don’t give a sh-t and stop trying.
In reality, the only person you can actually please is yourself.
And even that is unlikely.
Especially when you are doing something artistic.
Actually, the arts are no different than life in that regard so let’s amend that thought to include everything. When you try to be (or do or create) all things to all people you wind up with not much of anything worth spending time with.
I tell writing students that it doesn’t matter if a subject they write about has been done before because:
a. Everything (and everyone) has been done before, and
b. If you dig deep and tell the story in a personal (Note: But necessarily autobiographical) enough way, it can’t help but be original because no one has exactly your take on the world (Note: Clones, accepted).
It only took me decades of therapy to get to this point but here I am preaching what the most truly evolved of us knew far earlier in life.
Still, better late than never.
I was a movie critic at Variety for many years, many decades ago, and the most astute remark I ever heard about critics came from my colleague Jim Harwood, a really smart guy who sat at a desk to the left of me and used to write for the Wall Street Journal before covering show business and writing short clever columns about people like Ted Turner and Kirk Kerkorian long before that was popular.
When someone asked him once what qualified him to be a critic, he turned tartly to them and without missing a beat, said:
Because I have an opinion and a place to print it.
Now, of course, EVERYONE does.
Including me.
God (Note: Or whoever you imagine Her to be) help us all.
See, what Harwood, as we all called him, got before any of us and is worth reminding all of us of at this moment, is that critical thought is nice but it’s not an absolute and there isn’t a right or wrong.
There’s simply an opinion.
There are a lot of boys (Note: Well, adult males acting like little boys) up in arms about what they perceive as the small-mindedness in which they are ALL being portrayed in a film about a doll.
Just as there are lots of conservatives foaming at the mouth that a short sequence where little girls toss aside their Betsy Wetsy-like infant dolls in favor of a hip, curvaceous, fashion -forward plastic version of young women, means motherhood is in peril and the very future of society as we know it is being put at risk.
Oh. My. Goddess.
The complaints about what was going on in the mind of the genius man who supervised the invention of the first nuclear bomb and enabled it’s launching is a bit more complicated but nevertheless operates on the same principle.
Choosing to show a genius of the 1930s, 40s and 50s working in a boy’s club of mostly men (Note: Despite the fact that far less than 5% of the scientists working with him at Los Alamos were women) must mean that the filmmaker, not the math genius, ignores (nee marginalizes) women. And the idea that the two primary sexual partners shown in his life were a female biologist and a female psychiatrist is further proof that the guy who made this movie can only see women as his own personal sexual receptacles.
Worse yet, is the clear racism employed by not showing re-recreated or existing documentary footage of the actual atomic bomb going off at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and getting to literally view the faces of tens of thousands of Japanese people being ripped away.
That couldn’t be an artistic choice to center the film on the man’s existential crisis of good vs. evil and not the literal enormity of the bomb. It can only be the means by which one gets to negate every achievement that came before it and dismiss the film, in its entirety, as a relic of storytelling of the white male privilege kind.
Well, I mean, Chris Nolan IS a white guy who is a bit of a genius just as Greta Gerwig IS a feminist with a passion for the color pink and cheeky comic irony.
What else could, or SHOULD, their movies be???
Oh, OF COURSE I get the complaints and where they’re coming from.
I’m not a TOTAL moron. (Note: Even though it might be easier to dismiss me as such.)
But to accuse the films as either a whitewashing of history or a too woke view of men and/or women-hood is truly a bit reductive.
I was tempted to use the word self-serving but that would be a putdown to anyone else’s viewpoint, which I don’t seek to do (Note: No matter how tempting). It’s merely to suggest that no one work or person or place can be 100% inclusive of everything and/or everyone.
And even if they could, guaranteed a bunch of the rest of us wouldn’t like the result of that either.
So instead, here’s a thought:
If you don’t like what’s out there – do your own film. Or, get a group of friends together who think like you do and have them do it.
Or write it. Or sing about it. Or paint it. Or rhyme it in couplets.
And then disregard anything I, or the world, has to say. Especially if other people, but most importantly you, like it.
Billie Eilish – “What Was I Made For?” (from Barbie)
notes from a chair 