I read the article, Matt Taibbis failed effort to review the film. It fails as a film review because its nothing but an open denunciation of Taibbis sense of what the politics of the film are. In essense, he hated the movie because it told a fictionalized personal story about an individual who fought in a war that Taibbi objected to, and that persons complicated life and his as well as his wifes and others around them trying to come to terms with the close up terrifying challenges in their own lives. The movie failed be be political in a way that Taibbi might have liked. Hes worries that others who dont share his politics and are as psychologically stunted as he is, but are on another side, might be cheered by the political conclusions that they draw from this intensely personal story. This brings to mind Boris Pasternacks paraphrasing of something once said by Lenin in the dialogue at one point in Dr. Zhivago where an apparatchik is explaining to Zhivago that his poetry is essentially obsolete garbage, because it was about love, i.e. something of the personal, and that in the times in which they were living, the personal was dead. Only the political, or something that could be seen as right in the sense that it promoted the right views politically and served that collective purpose, had value. I often think that to many of us fall into the same sad stunted and empty trap that Taibbi has, of rejecting anything, including any art, that doesnt serve the right political purpose. Art cant be art if it is politically flawed in this view, especially if it is personal, and the characters are flawed in such a way, that they represent something that doesnt send the right class or identity message. God forbid that it might offer a differnt way of looking at the world all together, something different and therefore wrong to even consider.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 05:12:39 +0000
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