One Easy Trick To Write Unreadable Cultural Criticism
″I’m arriving at this film angry, so I’m going to review it in a very petty way” is a foul recipe
Approximately 50 years ago, I wrote about this annoying tendency I had noticed after Dave Chappelle and then Louis C.K. became controversial among the sorts of culture writers who had previously celebrated them: these writers, perhaps realizing they now needed to be seen as “anti-” Chappelle or -C.K., reverse-engineered reasons to get angry about thoroughly standard aspects of the comics’ stand-up acts. Suddenly, the two men were “punching down,” for example — never mind the fact that if we’re going to adhere to this very stupid, comedy-killing rule, they’d been doing so for years, given that (to take two of a million examples) pre-controversy Chappelle had a character who was a slapstick crackhead, and pre-controversy C.K. had a whole bit explaining why calling gay men faggots wasn’t, in fact, offensive, as long as they were sufficiently effete and goofy. These offensive, down-punching jokes went noticed; the critics didn’t have any problems with them until the comics became controversial for other reasons.
That in mind, enter “ ‘The Zone of Interest’ — a Holocaust movie without Jews,” a screechingly unreadable opinion essay on CNN.com by Peter Rutland, a professor of government at Wesleyan.
If you haven’t seen The Zone of Interest, which was nominated for five Oscars and which won in the Best International Feature Film category, you should. It’s a film about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who live in a perfectly lovely house abutted by an astonishingly beautiful garden right outside of the camp — so close they can hear gunshots and occasional screams and can see plumes of smoke belching out of the camp’s crematoria. Suffice it to say none of this prevents the Höss family, during the glimpse of them we get during the film, from squeezing every last drop of joy and life out of the peak of a Polish summer in a beautiful part of the countryside.
But Rutland is mad at this film, and he’s expressing his anger almost two months after the film came out. Usually, if a film is lucky enough to spark think pieces, they come quickly. Why the delay? Because Rutland got angry at the film’s director well after the film came out.
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