BRIE LARSON MAKES A SMALL CONTRIBUTION TO THE TRUMP 2020 CAMPAIGN: In a piece titled, “Brie Larson Promises ‘I Do Not Hate White Dudes,’ But Laments Lack of Inclusion Among Film Critics,” the future Captain Marvel, age 28, is quoted as saying:
“I do not need a 70-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about ‘[A] Wrinkle in Time.’ It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.”
“And while this is very woke of Ms. Larson,” Sonny Bunch writes in response at the Washington Free Beacon, “I sense two issues with her theory of criticism. The first is that she doesn’t actually have to read old white men to find out A Wrinkle in Time is not particularly good; there are plenty of women and minorities who are happy to fill her in on that fact.” Bunch links to a screenshot full of female, black and Hispanic reviewers who didn’t give thumbs up to A Wrinkle in Time, adding:
But there’s a bigger, more troubling issue with Larson’s line of thinking: the presumption that certain people are more prone to appreciating specific works of art because they fit into some broader category of gender or race or whatever. As Jessica Ritchey noted in Mel Magazine after an Internet gadfly suggested Vertigo is only considered a good movie because “lol white men amirite,” this is kind of gross:
One of the most exhausting aspects of our current cultural moment are the “ugh, only straight white men like this” takes that completely erase the voices of female critics, critics of color and fans who don’t fit neatly into binaries of who “should” like/dislike something. It’s part of a larger and much more pernicious problem — mistaking pop-culture consumption for moral worth as opposed to, you know, how we carry ourselves every day; how we treat other people; and how we support (or don’t) the causes that matter to us. Instead, we equate what someone watches on Netflix as the mark of a good/bad person.
Art is complicated; art is messy; art doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. Sure, A Wrinkle in Time got hammered. But Moonlight is a film about a gay black man that was nigh-on unanimously praised by the straight-white-male critical corps. Girls Trip is a film about black women that clocked in at 90 percent fresh. Black Panther? 97 percent approval rating. I’m not sure a more diverse array of voices would actually change that much when it comes to a bad film’s reception, at least in the extremely reductive sense of a film’s RT score.
In her response to Larson, Amy Alkon tweets, “Age-ist, sexist, racist thinking is now so chic. Guess what: I have read @TerryTeachout‘s insights for decades and appreciated the hell out of his insights. He’s a white dude. Whatever. It’s the insights I come for, not the skin color or age.”
Brendan O’Neill of Spiked wrote in his FaceBook page last year that, “It’s becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn’t because they have huge ideological differences — it’s because they have so much in common.”
And as Glenn noted last year:
If you divide America along racial/ethnic lines, eventually the largest racial/ethnic group will start to think of itself as a racial/ethnic group and act accordingly. But in the meantime, it’s a good living for [Ta-Nehisi] Coates, and I guess an okay one for [alt-right founder Richard] Spencer.
And if you want more Trump, well, Coates will help you get more Trump, and a lot more effectively than Spencer ever has. Right after the election, John Podhoretz tweeted, “Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating [the] U.S., until finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group.” That’s where “whiteness”-as-original-sin gets you. But hey, like I said, it’s a good living for some people.
Larson’s Captain Marvel movie, distributed by the ever-woke Walt Disney Studios, opens in March of 2019. I wonder how many identity politics-themed bon mots Larson will be tossing to interviewers during its run up.