"The Reader" (2008)

The recent NY Post editorial cartoon showing a chimp being executed by the police, and equating said chimp with the author of the stimulus package is raising some rather predictable eyebrows. The thing is, that there is a good chance that the identical cartoon would have appeared if we had a white president. (After all...how many times did you hear Bush referred to as "The Chimp"? That would have been squashed INSTANTLY about Obama, bet your ass) I also think that we're going to see a rise in "iffy" material like that, treading on people's racial sensitivities. Part of that is that, on the one side, people are too sensitive. The other is that, on the other side, racism is a real thing, and racist opponents to Obama (including Democrats who wish like hell they'd had a white guy to vote for) just CAN'T call him what they really want to, and we're going to see the stress creep out in odd ways.

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My guess is that if someone can do a quantitative analysis, material critical of Obama's administration will show a disturbing tend to slide toward racial stereotype. And in a country where stereotypes of whites had equal weight and impact, that would be just fine--all's fair in war, and so forth. But we're in uncharted waters here, and everyone is just going to have to be a little extra careful

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That doesn't mean not poking fun at, or lampooning the new POTUS. I've seen tons of good funny stuff about him. The cover of the new Mad Magazine, with Obama smoking a dozen cigarettes in the Oval office while juggling a dozen crisis, with the title "Obama: the first 100 minutes" was priceless. The Daily Show, MAD TV, SNL, and other shows have done it just fine. I suspect that the people who complain that they can't make fun of him are worried that they have to edit themselves too much...and that if they didn't, some racist stuff would come sliding right out. We're human. It's in us, people. We're trying to grow up as a culture, but conscious actions (like voting) are different from unconscious preferences (like...love scenes in movies, for instance?)

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Speaking of sensitivity...and I'm deliberately not saying "oversensitivity", the recent flap about Kate Winslet's movie "The Reader" is a perfect example.

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WARNING: SPOILERS

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The film is set in 1950's Germany deals with a young man who, at the age of 15, has a summer fling with an older woman (Winslet). She is distant and controlling, and has him read to her before making love. After three months, she disappears. Years later, when in law school, he attends a field trip to a war crimes tribunal, where he recognizes his former lover, now accused of being a prison guard complicit in the murder of hundreds of Jews. Needless to say, this fucks him up royally.

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There is a major story point that deals with her confession to being the leader of a group of prison guards, and authoring a document that the boy knows she could not have done: she was illiterate. Does he come forward with his information? What does it all mean? In the midst of a country trying desperately to come to grips with its evil actions, this little human story is actually quite well done.

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And it has spawned a mini-controversy, Jews who believe that the film, by focusing on the perpetrators rather than the victims, is an apologia for Nazism. Or that it is saying that her illiteracy somehow mitigated her crimes.

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The fact is, while I disagree, I understand how they feel. If within living memory, someone had tried to eradicate my people, I would be mighty, mighty touchy about how any depictions of those events were handled, especially considering that there are so many people who pretend to deny the Holocaust. Yes, that's what I said. I don't think most "deniers" really don't believe it. I think they're lying sacks of shit who want to make anti-Semitism more acceptable by casting doubt on the one event so huge, so repugnant, so awesomely, catastrophically evil that even people who don't like Jews are repelled by what the Nazis did.

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Yes, the movie humanizes the face of evil. But it would be a grotesque mistake to do otherwise: we got bitch-slapped on 9/11, and a significant proportion of our population became willing to cast people even accused of being terrorists into Gulags to be tortured. That's what people do when they are frightened. That's what people do when they can define those tortured or killed or enslaved as "other."

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Winslet's prison guard is a burned-out shell, a cipher. She took a job guarding people she probably didn't consider fully human, so that performance of her job was the highest moral imperative. Despite the fact that numerous characters speak with open loathing for her actions, the mere fact of suggesting that the situation was more complex than "evil Nazis" gets some people's hackles up. Probably especially for those who love Israel, but are disturbed about the morality of some of its actions. Moral ambiguity is a bitch. Service to a higher moral authority can cost you your life, your freedom...hell, even your job.

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I've felt similar things every time I see a Civil War movie that omits the attitudes of enslaved black people...meaning 99% of them. Every time I hear apologists trying to explain how few Southerners owned slaves, slaves loved their masters, slavery would have ended anyway...all that crap, which boils down to: "those Southerners are my people. I have to believe they are good." And of course, they know full well that venomous racist would mirror their comments with very different intent.

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I don't think it was the Nazis. There were hundreds of camps, all over Europe. People knew, and most of them didn't do a damned thing. It wasn't just the Germans. It was a tendency within human beings, within us as a species. And hell, I've seen human beings helping strangers more often than I've seen animals helping strange animals, so don't get me going on that. We hold ourselves to impossibly high standards...and so we should.

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The negative result of those high standards is that we can't believe that we would do such things. Watching Winslet's awesome vulnerability in her role underscores her commonality with the rest of mankind. If we don't want another Holocaust...another Biafra...another 9/11... we have to stop pointing the finger, and seek to root out the evil within ourselves.

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If we don't do that, no matter what we THINK we're doing, we're just laying the ground for the atrocities of the future. Hell, the Germans thought God was on their side, too.

I'd give "The Reader" a B, but Winslet an "A" for her fearless, exquisitely measured performance.

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Will Smith's "Seven Pounds" got "Best picture" at the NAACP Image Awards. Considering the panning it got by white critics, the fact that it notably underperformed for a Will Smith movie, and the fact that it had Dat Old Debbo sex in it, shall we look at all of the possible reasons I can think of?

1) Pure coincidence. Nothing has anything to do with anything.

2) Black people tend to give "their own" a pass, being too forgiving of an unremarkable film.

3) Whites tend to have a flinch response to black sex. This is probably unconscious in most cases, so there will always be another explanation for why they didn't like it.

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My best guess? Go for the answer that is universal, rather than attributing different characteristics to different groups: "members of a group will tend to be more supportive of members of their group, and less supportive of members of other groups. Much of this approval or disapproval will be subconscious, especially when there are cultural prohibitions against such attitudes."

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I like that one. So...black people would tend to forgive flaws...a bit. And whites would tend to exaggerate flaws...to the exact same degree. Personally, I think that if Brad Pitt had a track record like Will Smith, and had done "Seven Pounds" it would have jumped across the 100 million mark. But there's no way to prove that, now is there?

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Which should be of comfort to anyone who thinks I'm talking about them.