August 4th, 2011
Like most film-geek sites, Ain’t It Cool News is, when it comes to politics, reliably liberal. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just the water they swim in. But for some reason, this piece on the script for Kenneth Lonergan’s MARGARET, really rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it’s because the essay is by “Mr. Beaks,” a guy who’s way more sophisticated than Harry Knowles. He should know better. And maybe it’s because Beaks’ piece isn’t partisan so much as it’s offensively shallow.
Beaks begins by lamenting that we haven’t had many 9/11 movies, saying that he’s seen only five films influenced by the event. He ignores The Dark Knight. Maybe it just slipped his mind; maybe it’s because The Dark Knight asks uncomfortable questions about the stability of the liberal order when pitted against illiberal threats.
Beaks then laments our debased political culture:
Agree or disagree with that assessment, you have to at least admit that our national discourse has grown unusually hateful over the past three years, a phenomenon Lonergan captures beautifully in a series of recurring sequences set in a high school history class, which, hilariously and without fail, disintegrate into personal attacks over the Israeli/Palestinian question. Characters make broad claims, which are then broadly mischaracterized and spat back as even broader indictments of the other’s inhumanity. Tune in HARDBALL, CROSSFIRE or HANNITY AND LIBERAL GUY SO SPINELESS THE LEFT WON’T CLAIM HIM on any given night, and you’ll often see the same dubious level of debate.
Of course Crossfire has been off the air for years and Alan Colmes hasn’t been on the Hannity show in a long time either. He then says of Lonergan’s screenplay:
MARGARET is a lot of things – a coming-of-age drama, a metaphor for our country’s growing pains after having our terrorism cherry popped . . .
As if 9/11 was America’s first experience with terrorism: the Beirut Marine barracks bombings, the Iranian embassy hostages, Khobar Towers, the first World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, the African embassy bombings, Oklahoma City–this is a partial list.
These are pedantic points, I know. The larger thrust of his thesis–that the 9/11 attacks were particularly influential and that we have a hyper-polarized culture–are probably true. (It’s certainly true of our media culture.) But these superficial mistakes are just a preview of the laziness that leads to Beaks’ final Big Idea:
This brand of arguing plays perfectly to Lonergan’s unerring ear for the way we often talk past each other as we hammer home our own selfish agenda, and he does not recoil from such ugliness. Commendably, no one in the script is immune from such fiery speech; even Ramon, a compassionate, measured Latino gentleman who courts Joan, lets slip a slightly anti-Semetic slur in the frustrating heat of frenzied rhetorical combat.
Americans have never been terribly skilled when it comes to accepting each other’s differences . . .
And it’s this last bit which is just maddening. “Not terribly skilled when it comes to accepting each other’s differences” compared to who? The French? Nigerians? The Saudis? Germans? The Chinese?
Without romanticizing America, it’s impossible to find another nation even half as polyglot which has handled its cultural factions with such aplomb.
The problem with AICN’s politics isn’t that they’re often liberal. It’s that they’re infantile.
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I see the same cringe-inducing dynamic at work whenever a radio station disc jockey – say the morning crews at 98 Rock or 105.9 – try to explain a political event. It’s not the leftism, it’s the misinformation.
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Wait…what?! You read reviews of serious movies at AICN? That is your first mistake. Your second mistake is not making fun of the “compassionate, measured Latino gentleman”. Your third mistake is not taking Beaks to the proverbial woodshed for using the phrase “cherry popped” in the context of a terrorism attack.
Otherwise, everything else you say is genius.
Galley Friend J.E. August 4, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Essay’s last line: “But just as the majority of the moderate Muslim world struggles to throw off the shackles of barbaric extremism, we need to identify what we have in common, consign the fanatics to the fringe where they belong, and, quite frankly, stop acting like a goddamn seventeen year-old girl.”
Only a writer who calls a minority (and a tiny one at that) a “majority” ends up with something this unintentionally hilarious. Which comes first, om or kumbaya?