Adam Kotsko is ahead of me in teasing out the somewhat predictable dismissal of Soderbergh's Che found in the Gray Goose. As Adam notes,
Scott claims that we need a “moral reckoning” on Guevara. Yet do we really lack for skeptical commentary on the Cuban revolution and left-wing revolutionary activities in general in the US? Hasn’t mainstream opinion settled on the conclusion — or rather, the a priori assumption — that, whatever Guevara’s intentions, the Cuban revolution was bad on the whole? This is what political correctness really looks like: dismissing any position outside the mainstream as somehow naive or dishonest, forbidding directors from being sympathetic or identifying with certain types of subjects.As certain as this account is, this isn't exactly what I found shocking in Scott's treatise, though it is something like an inevitable outcome of what we take to be an even more striking moment. Indeed, this particular review has what is perhaps the most pitiful and embarrassing concession available to anyone who calls themselves a critic:
Che represented, to Sartre and others, and perhaps to himself, a new kind of person, a creature of pure revolutionary integrity free of the usual trappings of bourgeois subjectivity. Those trappings, of course, are part of what make characters in movies interesting. In honoring the myth of Che as a kind of macho Marxist superman in whom thought and feeling, action and theory, passion and discipline are united, Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro (a producer of the picture as well as its star) remove him from the realm of ordinary human sympathy.Emphasis ours, dude, emphasis ours. Let's clarify what the critic has just announced, in all its shamefulness. Via his own syllogism, to be "human" is to be bourgeois. A purportedly serious student of cinema, Tony Scott has just declared that he accepts the ruling ideology as in fact the only possible measure not just of art but humanity; that he will not even try to engage with a figure who denies it; and that, as a critic, he is only interested in conventionality. Oh, one can be certain that he is open to that particular kind of unconventionality one finds in The Ice Storm or the like — which is to say, that particular performance of noncomformity which is the very soul of bourgeois conventionality. But should an artwork actually proffer a character who is indeed outside "the usual trappings of bourgeois subjectivity" (his words, not ours), Scott's obligations as a critic and capacities as a human come to an abrupt end.
Shouldn't one lose one's license for that? Is it any less tawdry than conceding you don't like any art that isn't pro-government — or for that matter refuse any art that doesn't present the proletariat as the seat of virtue and strength? Or, in perhaps the most pitiable, defensible case, tantamount to saying "I only get movies about people like me"? Surely there is no greater idiocy imaginable. One is humbled to live in a world with such titans.
Posted by jane at December 14, 2008 04:43 PM | TrackBack