Failing to Pass the Political Correctness Test with “The Green Book”
What a drag it is to feel I have to confess to the powers of political correctness, that I really liked the movie “The Green Book”. I have found several of the rather snide reviews that seem to abound, both snobbish and condescending. I saw the film today and in it I saw people changing inside and with each other. I didn’t feel self-congratulatory as a white person, or that all was well in the world of race. Just because people have some moments of humanity together doesn’t mean we white folks have to congratulate ourselves or think all is now okay.
It isn’t. Racism is sadly still very alive and was never solved. However that doesn’t negate the fact that sometimes between human beings hatred is interrupted and even transformed. I resent anyone implying that my liking the movie makes me stupid, insipid, easily seduced or just wanting to think I’m wonderful.
Racist? I know I am, I have gotten to know that part of me better over the past years and still have to work it. The movie didn’t make me feel good about myself; it just made me equalize the playing field of life for a couple of hours, as happens in any good film, or good novel, or real authentic human encounter. I liked it a lot. I empathized with the white driver and the black pianist (both played exquisitely by way by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali). I liked the fact that the relationship they had seems to have changed each of them.
I tend to resent critics in general because with the turn of a hand, whether by pen or computer, they can ruin the run of a work of art that might have taken great pains to come into existence. When I was blogging for Huffington Post I interviewed James Earl Jones who was then starring in the Broadway version of “Driving Miss Daisy”. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-smaldino/finding-what-drives-us-th_b_785292..
As described in that piece, I found something very deep in the play and in the performances. At the same time I noted that the New York Times critic minimized the play as “slender”; it was a kind of kiss of death for its popularity.
I had been raised on the idea that as a Jewish liberal who was “for” civil rights I was immune from the tag of racist myself. That, I am seeing more and more, is not the case. I assumed I was not one of the bad guys taking advantage of my white privilege. I was wrong and want to bring whatever increasing awareness I can, to the table.
America in general had not been a place conducive to reparation. Sometimes it has not been conducive to an awareness of how much cruelty and brutality there has been towards many kinds of people and minorities. At the same time I do not want to be treated cruelly because my heart was moved by a movie. I do not want the critics to assume that I am any more racist, because I saw the two protagonists as in need of some knowledge and genuine bond the other could supply. I suppose that I’m saying I want to rebel against the easy categories. And I want to be less bruised by critiquing that can seem so absolute and fancy: I want to take it less personally as well. I want to question the authority of anyone dictating taste with such apparent ease.
A propos of “fancy” I have this term I use as I refer to “ceilings and basements” to describe this. It means that much advice, criticism, standard setting, is done on what I call the ceilings, where many of us live much of the time in the messier arenas I refer to as the basements. I don’t think the airy ether of ceiling judgments helps anyone. I think we need the room to examine our loves and hates, our prejudices and to admit when our hearts are tugged at (I know, don’t end a sentence with a preposition).
Instead, I want to wonder out loud at the glib superiority of some critics, and the harm they do in making the readers and viewers cringe in shame rather than becoming freer in their own honesty. Okay, I mean freer in our own honesty, freer to feel the true feelings that we have.
We need richer dialogues about racism in America– where there is real listening and real learning and owning of difficult emotions and experiences, and history. For now, I don’t think a dialogue about race in America will be helped by glibness on any side at all.
THE HUMAN CLIMATE 