The Rawness

Click the following links for part 1 and part 2.

This installment of the Precious movie review is about an epidemic currently infecting our society that I call Scar Worship. I believe it comes from a combination of two societal trends that are currently everywhere:

1. unflinchingly dwelling on and continuously reliving misery and hardship, and
2. oversharing, in as explicit detail as the boundaries of good taste will allow in the belief that doing so proves our strength and our ability to deal with harsh realities will “raising awareness” and will somehow heal us

Many social critics call our current environment a “therapy culture.”  Frank Furedi discusses this in his book Therapy Culture, and Christina Hoff Sommers treads similar ground in her book One Nation Under Therapy.  While therapy culture has its good aspects, such as less blame being shifted to victims, more awareness of social issues affecting certain demographics and more people speaking out about problems that would never have previously been made public, the extremes that therapy culture has been taken to actually make victims weaker in the long run.

Dwelling on problems that have passed, reinforcing the feeling in victims that they will forever be emotionally crippled by whatever trauma was done to them and that such emotional and psychic scars will not only continue to haunt the victims throughout their lives but actually serve to define them…these are examples of therapy culture taken to its worst extreme: scar worship.  Scar worship is where a victim’s goal is no longer to heal their scars but to celebrate them and keep them forever fresh by constantly picking at them.  Meanwhile, the world is moving on without them and they’re still reliving their past over and over again, often trying to get closure from whoever it was the wronged them or trying to get sympathy from people they come across. They get so used to their nonstop pity party that they end up defining themselves by their trauma. It becomes their identity, and they begin to cling on to it for dear life because even a fucked up identity in the mind of most is better than no identity, and these people have reached a point where they have no idea who they are without their trauma.

In high school I remember reading a two-part interview in SPIN magazine between Camille Paglia and Celia Farber, which was reprinted in Paglia’s essay book Sex, Art and American Culture.  But the part of the interview that really stuck with me almost two decades later was the following exchange about rape victims and the different ways to approach the victim mindset (emphasis at various points added by me):

FARBER: One point that hasn’t been made in the whole rape debate is women’s role over men, sexually.  In the case of a rape, a man has to use brute force to obtain something that a woman has – her very sex.  So naturally she’s weaker physically, and will always be oppressed by him physically.  But in that moment when he decides that the only way he can get what he wants from her emotionally, or sexually, or whatever, is to rape her, he is confessing to a weakness that is all-encompassing.  She is abused, but he is utterly tragic and pathetic.  One is temporary and the other is permanent. I was raped once and it helped me to think of it like that.  Not at all to apologize for him, but to focus on my power instead of my helplessness.  It was a horrible experience, but it certainly didn’t destroy my whole life or my psyche, as much as contemporary wisdom insisted it must have.

PAGLIA: Right, we have what they want.  I think woman is the dominant sex.  Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of a woman’s attention.  It’s very interesting what you said about the rape, because one of the German magazine reporters who came to talk to me – she’s been living in New York for ten years – she came to talk to me about two weeks ago and she told me a very interesting story, very similar to yours.  She lives in Brooklyn, and she let this guy in whom she shouldn’t have, and she got raped.  She said that, because she’s a feminist, of course she had to go for counseling.  She said it was awful, that the minute she arrived there, the rape counselors were saying, “You will never recover from this, what’s happened to you is so terrible.”  She said, what the hell, it was a terrible experience, but she was going to pick herself up, and it wasn’t that big a deal.  The whole system now is designed to make you feel that you are maimed and mutilated forever if something like that happens.  She said it made her feel worse.

Commenter DF, in the comments for the last installment, left this gem:

This abuse mentality reached a new cultural low in my mind when I came to learn that one of the guys that has been crushing for my girlfriend tried to gain her sympathy by admitting to her that he was sexually abused. I’ve met the guy and he’s what I’d call uber liberal squared and the most pro-feminist male on the eastern seaboard. What is fascinating about this kid is that he’s in a position to pull tons of chicks but due to a crippling lack of masculinity (even my gf unprompted mentioned that he’s very effeminate) he gets almost nowhere. Lack of game goes without saying. What surprised me was that my gf told me he wasn’t the first guy to pull such as stunt on her!

Sadly, I’ve heard many similar stories, especially on college campuses and big city dating scenes.

And it’s not just the left or women that have a monopoly on scar culture, it’s everywhere. I deal with it on my blog all the time. I’ve been trying to preach to guys out there about how to be stronger, better men and there seems to be a lot of readers who instead take my writings as license to blame women for everything under the sun and whine and wallow in self-pity. It sickens me. I talk about the damage radical feminism has done to male identity as a means to an end, and that end is to grow into better men. But many guys out there miss the point and want to remain exactly the same and instead make whining about radical feminism and emasculation the end game. They worship the scars they received from rejection, emasculation, heartbreak, divorce court and don’t make any effort to heal and grow stronger. I especially find this among people who find my blog from reading Men’s Rights blogs and as a result make the mistake of thinking I’m a fellow Men’s Rights Advocate (I’m not. In fact my attitude toward the Men’s Rights crowd is pretty similar to Roosh’s).

Oprah is the biggest living prophet for scar culture. As I described in previous installments, she constantly celebrates her scars and keeps them fresh in various ways. She acts and produces movies that describe traumas and dysfunctions that mirror her own. She consistently names books to her book club that revolve around characters wallowing in misery and having indignities heaped upon them. She will invite any celebrity under the sun to appear on her show if they’re willing to air out their dirty dysfunctional laundry, like when she recently had Mackenzie Phillips and Whitney Houston on to share their horror stories.

Oversharing is now the norm, as described by the Daily Waffle blog:

Now, there’s nothing wrong with emotional disclosure. It is healthy in moderation: better than keeping negative feelings bottled up. To communicate freely is normal, natural and surely healthier than the stiff-lipped, stoic ways of the past, when expressing feelings was unseemly, not ‘respectable’.

Can you keep a secret?
But what I resent is the constant baring of souls, the unsolicited sharing of intimate secrets, and the incessant outpouring of emotion. It’s a post-Oprah Winfrey world, where gushing is good – and where you, dear listener, are the unpaid therapist. All too often, oversharing is an imposition on the listener.

‘I’m afraid it’s part of the psychotherapy age that people feel the need to reveal themselves,’ says Pat Doonbar, a psychologist who specialises in confessions. But be warned: it’s not real therapy. ‘What oversharers are looking for is for others to be uncritical sounding boards. That’s not healing.’

Moreover, there may well be negative consequences of people knowing too much about you. ‘It’s about appropriate self-disclosure,’ says Relate counsellor Paula Hall. ‘If we give out intimate details, it should be in a situation of trust, with close relatives or a counsellor.’

The trouble is, oversharing is part of the spirit of the age. One only need read a newspaper, turn on the TV or look on the internet to witness a babel of people talking about themselves. Chat shows, teenagers weeping on reality television, celebrity biographies by the yard, memoirs about appalling childhoods – all these show a society in the grip of oversharing. Some in the public eye seem to relish such self-exposure. Take Richard Madeley, as in Richard and Judy, who let viewers into the secrets of his vasectomy, and even his daughter’s first period, on TV.

Onion AV Club has recently weighed in on the same topic:

Over the last century, we’ve evolved from a society hindered by unhealthy repression—taking our most painful secrets with us to the grave to spare our loved ones distress or social shame—to one that values the importance of unburdening and “exorcising our demons.” For most, this involves years of intense therapy sessions, followed by even more years of learning to cope with the revelations they engender, then slowly rebuilding a new life, where you accept those demons as part of who you are, but not the sum total. It’s a deliberate, frustrating, incredibly private process—unless you’re famous. In which case, you just go on Oprah.

Oprah is a listener. Oprah is a giver. Oprah is the warm, matriarchal hug that says things are going to be all right. Oprah is also the illusion that we, as a culture, take the harrowing confessions of her guests and learn to draw inspiration from them—which no, we simply gawk in horror at them, then dwell on and debate each other over the sordid details. For example, did anyone come away from Oprah’s recent interview with Whitney Houston with a greater understanding of why she spent most of the last decade in a drug-fueled stupor, or leave feeling inspired by her newfound commitment to rehabilitation? No, we came away with a few crazy anecdotes about Bobby Brown spray-painting “evil eyes” on the wall, a handful of carefully deflected non-answers, and plenty of forced “lessons you’ve learned” that Oprah shoehorned in to create the illusion that all of these things were somehow symbolic of a redemption arc that never really materialized. But oh, it’s cathartic, and look how brave she is, and see how we can take our pain and grow from it and so forth—and isn’t Oprah caring for providing a safe place where one can get those sorts of things out in the open?

Except some things have no business being out in the wide open. Some things do not need to be processed under the watchful eye of millions. Yet this is how our oversharing culture has lately learned to process things, and this is why you get revelations like the one absolutely everyone has been talking about today…

Leaving the central story aside for the moment, however, it’s the sideshow to this whole nauseating affair, the way it’s become endemic of how our culture now processes its tragedies, that I also find distressing—and it raises a question about our disturbing need to make our private problems public, and the way doing that almost automatically negates their impact. Phillips has said that she wants to “put a face on consensual incest,” and that’s a brave and noble intention. But outside of writing a memoir and appearing on Oprah to talk about said memoir, there doesn’t seem to be much else to that intention, at least so far. (Though it’s always possible that further speaking engagements to fellow victims, charitable donations, and the like will follow.) And that definitely goes for Oprah too: On her show, she prompted Mackenzie Phillips to cut right to the chase and cough up the incest story right quick, lest her audience assume this was another cut-and-dry “how I got sober” narrative and change the channel. And of course, as with anything Oprah does, it was all under the auspice of “confronting our pain so we can learn from it.” But what, exactly, did we learn today from this shitstorm, other than that John Phillips was probably the worst father in the world (which, you know, we already knew that), Mackenzie Phillips has a book for sale, and that Oprah—like our entire oversharing society—pretends to be sympathetic when really she’s just acting as a classy surrogate for her audience’s gawking? And will this finally be the nadir of the celebrity memoir, or—as some have already half-jokingly speculated—just the bar everyone else has to clear from now on? The idea that Mackenzie Phillips endured what she says she did is certainly tragic; that still we’re finding new, unnerving ways to turn confronting that tragedy into entertainment may be equally so.

Much of this critique also applies to the so-called “healing” and “learning” we’re supposedly undergoing when we see the freakshow of incest horrors in movies like Precious. I already gave one theory about why Oprah and her cohorts in scar worship love wallowing in this filth so much, and that is that they want to normalize dysfunction. The more they can convincingly paint the world as a predominantly dysfunctional place filled with incest, abuse, trauma, exploitation and teen pregnancies, the more normal their childhoods become by default. But there’s another reason besides normalizing dysfunction, and that’s self-aggrandizement. The Oprahs, Tyler Perrys and Lee Daniels of the world have a vested interest in painting a picture of typical black life as being as dysfunctional as one can imagine, because by doing so, they make their own success stories sound that much more remarkable. The successes Oprah, Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels have had are remarkable in their own right, but in a meritocratic society that lauds the concept of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, their success stories become that much more remarkable if they can portray the environments they came from as being as hopeless and depraved as one can imagine.

People buy into this myth of Oprah as pro-woman and pro-black, but she’s not. She’s pro-Oprah. Period. Everything she does is motivated by narcissism and self-aggrandizement. Take for example the “down low” myth about their being an epidemic of black gay men pretending to be straight. There is no scientific evidence that this is more prevalent in the black male community than any other community. But based on the flimsiest of hearsay, Oprah was willing to dedicate a whole show on it and make “down low” into a household phrase and a supposed national emergency. If she was really as pro-black as people say, don’t you think she’d think long and hard before throwing black men under the bus with no proof?

Keith Boykin has written about the down low myth here and here. And one of the best pieces on the down low myth was by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Slate, and this excerpt was best, because it also gives some insight as to why so many white commentators of all political stripes also seem to love the movie Precious so much:

In the face of all the skeptical science, why is the belief in the Down Low menace so entrenched? For starters, there’s the phraseology, which hints at some carnal secret society, and is catchy to boot. It also helps that the Down Low is the sort of threat that white commentators of all political stripes like to condemn. Conservatives get to disparage black people’s inherent amorality (a band of men is endangering their families to have sex with other deceptive men), liberals can attack our inherent homophobia (the black community is so thuggish that the men can’t even admit to being gay), and everyone gets to agree that black America is, in a nutshell, a nuthouse. In short, shaking your head over the DL is the perfect way to shake your head over how awful it is to be black.

And what does Oprah get out of it? She gets to paint more black women as victims of awful, deceptive, sexually depraved black men. Her personal narrative now becomes cultural group narrative of all black women. Like she did during her big break when acting in Color Purple and continues to do to this day by backing Precious, she is only as pro-black as she needs to be until it clashes with her personal agenda of self-aggrandizement and scar worship, and at that point she’ll willingly help throw black men under the bus in order to make black women, and by association herself, look admirable.

White conservatives watching Precious get to lambast the Great Society and point fingers at the welfare queen stereotype Mo’Nique plays to prove how progressive liberal policies have ruined the black community. White liberals have a new movie to feel good about feeling bad about, absolving their guilt and proving once again they are the most caring people on the planet. Black people get a new meme in their neverending victimology and self-pity narrative. And Oprah and her ilk get to further normalize dysfunction while making their own success stories appear that much more remarkable.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out who doesn’t benefit from all of this.

Picking up where I left off in yesterday’s Part 1 of my Precious review, I’m now going to cover the history of the biggest promoter of the Precious movie, Oprah Winfrey. I’ve already covered how incest, abuse and dysfunction are recurring themes in the works of writer/director Tyler Perry, director Lee Daniels and author Sapphire. But Oprah is the bar-none queen of focusing on these pity-party-as-empowerment themes.

Oprah got her start in The Color Purple as an actress. It was a movie filled with black women who were victims of incest, physical abuse, verbal abuse. She regularly profiles sob story victims of abuse and dysfunction. She rarely finds a sob story she can resist, which is why she was so easily taken in by James Frey’s fraudulent junkie memoir A Million Little Pieces. Con man Yellow Kid Weil in his memoir discussed how a con man’s biggest tool is his mark’s greed:

DURING THESE YEARS I DISCOVERED MANY THINGS, BUT MOST
important I learned about people, their strong points and
their weaknesses — especially their weaknesses. All the people
I swindled had one thing in common — greed, the desire to acquire
money. But that was not always enough. In numerous cases there
was some other factor, some small desire that helped me to clinch a
deal…

I am not talking about small swindles, where an honest person loses his money. I have never been a party to such schemes. I have never taken a dime from honest, hard-working people who could not afford to lose. But the victims of confidence games are usually people who are wealthy and can afford to pay the con man’s price for the lesson.  I ought to know. I’ve had dealings with some of the wealthiest men in the country. They had plenty of money, but they fell for my schemes because they were greedy for more.

Weil said greed was responsible for creating the type of gullibility that made for an ideal con game target.  And it was Oprah’s greed that made Oprah the perfect target for James Frey con: she’s a glutton for dysfunction.  Her greedy appetite for it is endless.  She binges and purges continuously on confessions of degradation, paeans to personal pain and orgies of persecution and self-pity.  She can’t get enough.

Doubt me? Look at the books and movies she tends to produce or promote on her show.  Brokeback Mountain.   Tyler Perry movies.  Beloved, about ex-slaves living in degradation.  Is it any surprise Oprah was the venue MacKenzie Philips chose to reveal her own incest drama?  Go through Oprah’s Book Club selections and check out how many of her selections have to do with incest, sex abuse, rape and family dysfunction and you’ll discover a lineup that makes Lifetime Channel’s programming look like The Disney Channel:

• The Bluest Eye (black girl raped and impregnated by her father then beat by her mother, then later raped a second time by her father who commits suicide while the black teen becomes delusional and insane),
• Black and Blue (wife is abused by husband, who later tries to track her down and kill her for leaving), 
• Breathe Eyes Memory (black woman Sophia’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother, who was a victim of a rape, which produced Sophia.  The mother has nightmares of the rape, gets pregnant later in the book which causes nightmares of rape to worsen, starts imagining the baby is talking to her in the voice of the rapist, and the mother eventually kills herself while pregnant by stabbing herself in the belly with a rusty knife 17 times). 
• I Know This Much to be True (which covers deformity, insanity, AIDS, diabetes, SIDS, rape, homosexual rape, lesbianism, incest, wife battering, child abuse, police brutality, war, murder, suicide, divorce)
• She Comes Undone (A girl named Dolores’ parents divorce after the death of her infant brother dies at birth, and her mother has a mental breakdown.  She gets raped at 13 years old by a married, trusted older neighbor and becomes impregnated as a result of the rape, but later miscarries.  Depression causes her to overeat and become obese as she gets older, and her mother ends up getting murdered on the job after a big fight with Dolores.  She gets attacked and groped in college by some mean girls and frat boys, which causes her to run into the arms of a lesbian for protection.  Lesbian seduces her after both women engage in a night binge eating and binge drinking.  Later attempts suicide, ends up in a mental hospital, is forced to have an abortion, has a dysfunctional abusive marriage to the man who forces her to have the abortion, then is financially bled dry and cheated on by her husband).
• Middlesex (hermaphrodite is born to an incestuous marriage of brother and sister and has a whole ton of issues, too many to get into here)

I know it’s tempting to believe I’m just cherrypicking selective books and themes to make her look bad, but I challenge you to go to this page and research the plot of every book on that list not written by Bill Cosby and deny that these are by far the dominant themes of the stories that interest her.

Something else of interest. Tyler Perry also suffered through molestation and abuse. Guess who encouraged him to come out about it?

Filmmaker Tyler Perry has revealed that Oprah Winfrey inspired her to speak up about his horrific childhood days when he was abused by members of his family.

Earlier this month, the helmer had written an email to fans disclosing the violence he suffered at the hands of his father and paternal grandmothers during his childhood.

He had also revealed that a man in his neighbourhood had molested him.

Now, the ‘Madea Goes To Jail’ filmmaker has said that a 1991 special episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, in which she spoke about the verbal and physically abuse she was subjected to by her family members, made him realise how cathartic letting his secrets out could be.

“After I found a dictionary and looked up ‘cathartic,’ I realised what she (Winfrey) was saying, so I started writing,” the Daily Star quoted him as telling People.com.

Perry added that his new movie ‘Precious,’ co-produced with Winfrey, would raise the issue of child abuse.

He said: “The story of abuse in our community and in many communities is still a taboo subject.”

Oprah herself has gone on the record about her own abuse history repeatedly. She has discussed being raped at 9 years old by a 19 year old cousin, the first of three relatives she claims to have molested her. She said this abuse led to her becoming promiscuous and becoming pregnant at 14 years old, a baby she lost.

And this is where Oprah’s enthusiasm for the movie Precious comes in, and it goes a long way to explain her overal cultural agenda. Oprah wants to normalize dysfunction. She wants to make her personal obsession into everyone else’s personal obsession. She wants to make it seem like a more omnipresent and pervasive problem than it actually is, because if she can make every tragedy that occurred to her become perceived as normal, her childhood becomes normal by default. If you view every cause, movie, book or show she champions through this lens it becomes pitifully transparent. And the whole world is falling for it. And when you look at the abuse resumes of everyone involved in the creation of Precious and compare it to the things that occur in the story, you can see how they’re trying to normalize every piece of abuse in their collective pasts almost like going through a checklist.

Not only is this culture of dyfunction becoming seen as normal, it’s actually starting to become the cool and trendy to make abuse revelations. It has become the publicity stunt attention whore tactic of choice today. Stars are falling all over themselves to one-up each other in lurid, depraved abuse confessions. In fact, just in time for the release of Precious in fact, guess what? One of the stars of the movie, Mariah Carey, is suddenly confessing abuse!

Mariah Carey has been abused.

The ‘Obsessed’ singer – who married actor-and-rapper Nick Cannon in 2008 – has spoken out about how she has been affected by the struggle she faced in previous relationships and hinted her ex-husband Tommy Mottola was responsible for her ordeal.

She said: “Abuse has several categories. Emotionally, mentally, in other ways. I just think you get into a situation and you feel locked in. If your situation is similar to one of the situations I’ve been in, which I won’t harp on. For me, to really get out, it was difficult because there was a connection that was not only a marriage but a business thing where the person was in control of my life.”

Mariah wed music executive Tommy in 1993 after he signed her to the music label CBS Records. They separated just three years later and divorced in 1998.

The 40-year-old beauty also spoke out in support of ‘Rehab’ singer Rihanna, who was assaulted by her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown earlier this year following a pre-Grammy’s party.

Mariah admitted she can empathise with the 21-year-old starlet’s experience of domestic abuse.

It won’t be long until a functional family and marriage becomes something to keep secret and be ashamed of.

Next in part 3: Culture of Narcissism and Scar Worship

I had my arm twisted into going to see the movie Precious with a group of friends. As it got the stamp of endorsement from both Oprah and Tyler Perry, I pretty much knew to expect to have my senses mercilessly pummeled with propaganda about how poor, unfortunate and relentlessly abusive the mere act of living is for black women. But I must say, even with that in mind I was still unprepared for what I actually saw in the theater that day.

Not since Birth of a Nation OR Amos and Andy have I seen a movie portray blacks in such a positive light. It was quite possibly the most uplifting movie since Saw I through VI or Hostel. Not since the rough sex humiliation genre was created in pornography has a movie worked so hard to empower women and portray them respectfully. In all seriousness, if this movie was directed by a white person, based on a novel from a white person, and was being promoted as an authentic black experience by white media personalities instead of by Oprah and Tyler Perry, I guarantee you it would be picketed to death and considered a travesty. Yet because it gets the seal of approval from the top victomology tastemakers in Black America today, we have black people not only celebrating the most vile, disgusting minstrel show in decades but also encouraging nonblacks to view the movie in order to learn about the “authentic” black experience. In fact, I’ve encountered black people cry racism against white people who accuse the movie of exploitative and stereotypical and demeaning. That’s how twisted it’s become: we now have blacks not only celebrating insulting black stereotypes but angry at whites for not praising them as well.

The best way to describe this movie is “poverty porn.” I understand the desire to shine a light on unpleasant issues. It can also be arguably positive to be graphic and make the audience uncomfortable in order to avoid sugarcoating something unpleasant and to make the audience really care about something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. But Precious goes far beyond those first two goals and aims for pure shock value and emotional manipulation and twisted titillation. The scenes where the character Precious is being raped by her father shows a montage of shots that include pig’s feet frying (because she’s a fat, greasy piece of meat, get it?), then slow-mo closeups of Precious’ father applying handfuls of Vaseline to his sweat-drenched privates, cutting to Precious being mounted by said father and graphically humped, with shots of Precious’ mother watching from a doorway, then more closeups of bacon frying in fat (in case you missed the ham-fisted (pun intended) metaphor the first time around), then closeups on Precious’ morbidly obese body rocking back and forth from the humping…really now? As the details and depictions of abuse keep getting piled on higher and higher in increasing detail it becomes clear that director Lee Daniels is using the guise of a “message movie” to both giving himself license to be as fetishistic, lurid and morbid with the subject of abuse as he wants to be and giving the audience license to be titillated and scandalized to their heart’s content because everyone knows it’s a “message” movie, which somehow makes the voyeurism noble rather than twisted and indulgent.

The plot, if you don’t know, is about a morbidly obese, dark-skinned Harlem 16 year old illiterate ghetto girl named Precious who lives with her verbally and physically abusive mother, and has been repeatedly raped since the age of 3 by her father, resulting in two pregnancies, one of which resulted in a Down’s Syndrome child named “Mongo” (short for mongoloid).  The mother, when not verbally and physically abusing her at length, sometimes takes the time out to sexually abuse Precious as well by forcing her to perform oral sex on her while the mother masturbates.  The ghetto black boys in the street taunt her when she walks by and shove her to the ground for kicks.  Her mom blames her for the fact that she was raped by her father, is shown cursing out the Down’s syndrome baby Precious has by her father and later trying to injure the second baby Precious has by her father by dropping it and later trying to drop a giant TV on top of Precious and the infant from a great height (the TV narrowly misses).  Just as Precious escapes her toxic home environment and moves into a halfway house and starts feeling like she can get a better life, she discovers her father just died from AIDS and she is HIV-positive.  But wait! The move ends on an inspirational note.  What’s so inspirational after all of that you may ask?  Well, Precious gets to beat up her mom in one scene, gets to tell her off and make her feel crappy for once in a later scene before walking out of her life for good, and gets custody of both her kids to boot.  Sure she has no job, a death sentence, an 8th grade reading level, no family support system and two kids she has no means to support and who have no one in sight to take care of them when Precious dies, but don’t be fooled it’s an inspirational ending because she gets a small revenge on that mean old mom I guess.   Yes, her life goes from outrageously, improbably, cartoonishly shitty to just really, really shitty, which somehow now passes for inspirational.  The only thing I’d be inspired to do if I was remotely in Precious’ shoes after watching this movie is commit suicide personally, but hey, I’m not an Oprah fan or a NY Times movie critic so what do I know?  As a nonliberal I’m obviously morally depraved or emotionally stunted not to see the beauty of this movie.

The big problem with this movie is that it doesn’t care in the least about poor blacks. It just totally exploits them as sideshow freaks to gawk and laugh at, a vehicle to satisfy the various personal agendas of the creators and audience members while pretending to be an exercise in nobility and compassion.  I watched it in a predominately black theatre, and many of the scenes the audience was laughing or cheering at were disturbingly inappropriate, and much of that seemed deliberate based on how over-the-top the subject matter was presented. 

Let’s look at the people involved in this movie, either as creators or promoters.  Lee Daniels, the director, is openly gay and has been very vocal while doing press about this movie to describe how he was abused growing up by his dad for being gay. Oprah has long been vocal about the incest and sexual abuse she received growing up. Tyler Perry has recently come out as a sexual abuse victim and has gone on the record with his childhood horror stories to the press. Mo’Nique, one of the stars of the movie, has gone on the record as an incest and abuse survivor. Sapphire, the author of the book Push that the movie Precious is based on has said that she was an incest victim from the age of 3 years old. And with the exception of Mo’Nique, each of these participants is incredibly obsessed with stories of abuse, sexual depravity and dysfunction in their works.

Lee Daniels was the producer of Monster’s Ball, another piece of depression porn, race baiting and explicit sex scenes masquerading as social commentary and penetrating insight into the human condition. Next he produced the movie The Woodsman that was all about child molestation. Then his directorial debut Shadowboxing was filled with shock-value violence and sex, including an heavily-implied interracial incest angle between stepmom Helen Mirren and stepson Cuba Gooding, Jr.   The author of the source material, Sapphire, seems to have a preoccupation with rape and abuse stories in her work.  As bad as the movie was, her book is more intense, more graphic and more prurient, describing in detail how Precious performs oral sex on her mother, and ebonically correct passages like this:

He slam his hips into me HARD. I scream pain he come. He slap my thighs as cowboys do horses on TV. Shiver. Orgasm in me, his body shaking, grab me, call me Fat Mama, Big Hole! You LOVE it! Say you love it! I wanna say I DON?T. I wanna say I?m a chile. [...] Then my body take me over again, I come again. My body not mine, I hate it coming.
Afterward I go bafroom. I smear shit on my face. Feel good. Don?t know why but it do. [To the credit of the movie's creators, they somehow found the restraint to leave out the shit smearing.  Maybe they did it to avoid an X rating because I doubt it had to do with a desire to exercise good taste]

Tyler Perry’s works are also often filled with harrowing, detailed tales of abuse happening to characters over and over before things are allowed to end on a slightly more uplifting note.

And then there’s the reigning queen of the abuse-fetish, Oprah. Oprah has had a longstanding obsession with harrowing tales of dysfunction, abuse and incest, particularly involving black women (as well as pie-in-the-sky vague self-help cliches).  We’ll pick up tomorrow in Pt 2 with an in-depth analysis of Oprah’s career and mindset, and I’ll explain the selfish, self-serving motivation that explains why Lee Daniels, Tyler Perry and Oprah enjoy and promote such stories of dysfunction porn.

Click here for Part 2.

Boy did I hate this movie. I hate the Dark Knight to the point it where I couldn’t wait to leave the theater 20 minutes into it. And this is from someone who bought into the word-of-mouth buzz totally and sat down in his seat totally geeked to see a wonderful action flick. I’ve followed the raves online just to try to figure out exactly what it is I missed that made this movie supposedly so great. Instead my only conclusion is that there are just a lot of rabid fanboys and intense Heath Ledger fans combining to form a massive wave of delusion. This movie is nowhere near the masterpiece its supporters claim it is. Not only is it not great, it’s not even good or even competent on most levels.

• The incessant need to try to be “realistic.” There are two problems with this. First, Christopher Nolan seems to think “realistic” is synonymous with “boring.” Most of the things that make Batman the comic character fantastic and larger than life are excised from Nolan’s movie version most likely because he finds them silly and unrealistic. Batman’s fighting style is brought down to earth so that he’s not doing any high-flying gymnastics or martial arts, just some really boring and dull fight style consisting of extreme, incomprehensible close-ups on repetitive body blows, elbows and arm grabs. And even worse, these fights are all shot in the dark and with lots of quick cuts, which I guess is somehow supposed to increase the realism through incoherency.  We have a boring Batmobile that doesn’t have any bat insignias or oversized scallops or anything really that indicates it’s supposed to have a Bat-theme. Because I guess driving a giant bat-shaped car would be ridiculous. Joker can’t have permawhite skin like the comics because that’s also unrealistic, so he just wears face paint. And the list of fantastic comic elements that get taken out of the mythos for the purpose of the film go on and on. Which leads to my second problem with all this realism: IT’S A FUCKING MOVIE ABOUT A BILLIONAIRE WHO TRAVELS THE WORLD IN ORDER TO BECOME THE WORLD’S SMARTEST MOST HIGH-TECH CRIMEFIGHTING NINJA, THEN RETURNS TO HIS HOMETOWN TO DRESS AS A GIANT BAT, DRIVE A WEAPONS-LOADED TUMBLER TANK LOADED, AND CLEAN UP ALL THE CRIME IN THE CITY BY ESSENTIALLY SINGLEHANDEDLY PUNCHING IT IN THE FACE EVERY NIGHT. AND NOW HE’S GOING TO FIGHT AN EVIL CLOWN. So please tell me…who the hell who go into a movie with a premise so inherently ridiculous and then DEMAND REALISM? Whenever I bring up how dark, dreary and joylessly boring this movie is, people say “it’s supposed to be realistic.” Why is the fighting and action so badly shot and dull? “It’s supposed to be realistic.” Why is Gotham City so bland and generic now and no longer a character like in previous Batman movies? “Realism.” And so on and so on. Since when is a movie about a guy dressing as a Bat to kick everyone’s ass every night the type of movie that demands realism?! It’s the exact kind of movie that works best when you accept how preposterous the premise is and respectfully have fun with it. This is what made the Burton Batman so great. It took the source material seriously, had the deep psychological stuff for the older fans that take the comics too seriously, and it also had the fun, over the top stuff for the people who grew up on the more fun, pre-80s grim and gritty stuff that came later. It had something for almost all ages and took it just seriously enough but not too seriously.
• Chris Nolan can not shoot action. He simply sucks at it. His camera work is horrible. You have a general idea what’s going on in the fights, but it’s never really clearly shot. We have a general idea on how he flipped the truck using the batwires but it’s not exactly clear what was happening or how he knew it was going to happen. Outside of things exploding, nothing else in the actions scenes worked, they just came off frenetic, claustrophobic and clumsy. Very, very clumsy. The New Yorker provides a very accurate description of Nolan’s action scenes:
  

  Men crash through windows of glass-walled office buildings, and there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method. Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can?t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks. All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber.

• Depressing and sadistic. I guess this may fall under the “realism” criticism, since my take is that the filmmakers and the fans of this movie think that the more relentlessly sadistic, moralizing and depressing the movie is, the more realistic it becomes. But do we really need a superhero movie to explore such heady, bleak and cynical themes rather than a movie with a premise maybe better suited to such themes, like No Country for Old Men? And of course some fans will respond “But T, superheroes are just as capable of adult themes as any other genre. Why can’t Batman explore these same ultraserious, depressing and high art themes.” To which I’ll again respond BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT A RICH NINJA GUY THAT DRESSES AS A BAT WITH SUPERTECH THAT RUNS AROUND KICKING AN EVIL CLOWN’S ASS AT NIGHT. No matter how much you lie to yourself, it’s simply not as high-falutin’ a setting as movies like No Country for Old Men or Sophie’s Choice. It’s a premise best suited for fantasy, escapism and cheap thrills. And there’s nothing wrong with that! You don’t have to reinvent it into Godfather II meets Silence of the Lambs meets a snuff film in order to prove there’s such depth and worth in the source material. Why does a movie about freaking Batman have to be so bleak, ugly and induce such nauseating violence and flinching?
• Fake hypocritical moralizing. This is a movie that tries to have its cake and eat it too. It is cynical, depressing and ugly throughout, showing everything ugly about society and human nature. The Joker is effectively presented as the moral center of the movie, the only person who not only stays true to his morals throughout, but he never questions or even wavers from them. Batman is weak and indecisive throughout, letting people die on his watch regularly, agonizing over every decision, even trying to steal a woman he loves from her fiance while claiming to admire said fiance. Harvey Dent, after being shown to be such a beacon of strength, immediately becomes a psychotic mass murderer and attempted child killer after his fiancee dies and he gets burned. The whole movie is dedicated to proving the Joker right about everyone else and showing that only he had anything resembling a consistent moral code. But wait! There are two boats that don’t blow each other up (barely). So obviously people are not so bad, right? Oh, and Batman doesn’t kill. So that makes Batman morally superior to the Joker and also proves the Joker wrong again. Yay. Except Batman kills Two-Face about five minutes later with no problem!! What’s the point of putting so much value into the fact that Batman won’t kill, presenting his inability to kill the Joker (and even going so far as to save him) as a moral victory over the Joker ONLY TO HAVE HIM KILL ANOTHER CHARACTER FIVE MINUTES LATER. And if killing is okay after all, then why does the Joker not deserve it more than Harvey?
• Did I mention it was sadistic and had lots of fake moralizing? Allow me to add overly manipulative in the process too. As the Daily Mail said, “The Dark Knight an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice, but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.” A commenter on the website rottentomatoes.com said it way better than I ever could, so I’ll just quote him:
  

  I kept getting exhausted and repulsed by how The Dark Knight continually had its cake and ate it too, by how it shoved oppressively bleak moments in our faces, then turned away from them later on: Gary Oldman gets shot, and we have to deal with his wife breaking down and screaming at the policeman who inform her of his death; but a half-hour later: no, he’s not really dead! We have to watch minute after minute of prisoners and civilians on two different barges decide whether or not to detonate explosives rigged to the others’ boat, and linger over their “screw everyone else, I’m totally in it for myself” rottenness (and *no one* on either boat stands up and says, “stop these madmen!” — but oh yeah, then the prisoner decides to throw the detonator out the boat window, and the civilian decides he doesn’t have the heart to go through with it — so you see, folks, the moviemakers finally demonstrated to us that these people REALLY aren’t rotten after all, even though they’ve just forced us to deal with five straight minutes of odious human nature. And then we have to endure another five solid minutes of Aaron Eckhart’s character’s holding a gun to a child’s head, to possibly avenge his girlfriend’s death, while Batman stands by and does nothing except to try to talk him out of it. So many scenes seemed intentionally designed to make us all feel powerless against society’s innate evil, and linger over and shove the rottenness of humanity down the audience’s throats. The constant foisting of fear and oppression and helplessness, going hand in hand with vigilante justice (and even an indirect justification of the Patriot Act, with Bruce Wayne’s radio-monitoring device) made me wonder if Dick Cheney had co-written the screenplay. My wife and I left the theater both wondering out loud, is THIS the movie that our country really needs to be tuning into right now? But of course, we’re only two small voices amongst the movie’s $150 million opening weekend, and after all (as so many fanboys are quick to point out), “it’s only a movie.”

• Forced chemistry. I was so glad I didn’t see this on IMAX. First because the action outside of the explosions was horribly shot, so seeing it on a big screen would have done nothing for me. And second because the close-ups of Maggie Gyllenhaal were painful enough on a regular screen, seeing her on IMAX would have made an excruciating movie that much worse. I just can’t buy a powerful DA and a billionaire fighting over a chick who resembles a sad turtle or a cabbage patch kid that’s all grown up. You mean to tell me that Bruce Wayne has that gorgeous ballerina, who is shown to actually have a scintillating intellect to boot, and he’s pining over a homely girl that looks 40? (And to all you guys who have seen Secretary, yes, I know there’s something in the viewing of that movie, perhaps subliminal messages or mass hypnosis, that causes seemingly normal people to see something hot in Maggie Gyllenhaal. I’ve never seen that movie, so please keep in mind that I didn’t get those crazy brainwashing rays and am only judging her by her actual looks). What a step down from the Kim Basinger days.
• No nuance or subtlety in the Joker. Fans are clamoring to say that finally the Joker was done right, like the comics? Give me a break. The Joker is not a hideously scarred, limping, stooped over creep in the comic books. He actually looks like he’s bordering between creepy and harmless. That’s exactly what makes him so cool. He can look like a harmless clown on the outside at times, harmless enough that children would approach him, but that clownlike exterior belies the unpredictable, and psychotic murderer underneath. It’s a great dichotomy: he looks like a clown or jester, immaculately dressed in a press suit, but he’s a fucking nut loose cannon that can go crazy on you at any minute and shoot or hack you to pieces. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I think Batman and Joker work as archnemeses on a subconscious level: the one who looks like a dark demon of the night is the good guy, the one who looks like the happy, bright clown is the psychopathic force of evil.  However Nolan has created a guy that blatantly looks crazy and psychotic and depraved from the moment you see him, before he even speaks, like Leatherface or the blonde Japanese guy from Ichi the Killer. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="270" caption="The Real Inspiration for Ledger's Joker, the movie Ichi the Killer"][/caption]

  When you see Ledger’s Joker, there’s no doubt from the beginning that you are looking at a depraved lunatic, that subtle cognitive dissonance you get from seeing a fun looking clown also switch into psycho killer mode is taken away and instead you just see a guy that looks like a sick serial killer acting like a sick serial killer. (I think Ledger did a wonderful, although overrated job, and I don’t blame him for the lack of subtlety. I think he was playing exactly what he was told to play, and he did it well).

• Plot holes and bad scene transitions galore. Batman leaves a party of billionaires upstairs alone with the Joker to save Rachel Dawes. The Joker was up there searching for Harvey Dent. We never cut back upstairs to find out what happened. Did the Joker just give up and leave? Did Batman even try to go up and catch him? We never find out because it just jumps to the next scene. The movie is loaded with tons of inexplicable scene jumps like this, like when Harvey and Rachel are suddenly kidnapped. How did Joker plan in the beginning heist for the kids’ schoolbuses to have such a perfectly timed gap in between them for him to drive his own schoolbus in between during his escape? Anyone who knows anything about school buses knows they don’t drive behind each other in city traffic with a huge gap between them large enough for another school bus to just jump into the line. Bruce Wayne is shown as unable to do anything technical without Lucius Fox’s assistance, even to change his costume, yet at the end he miraculously can suddenly singlehandedly use and upgrade the sonar trick Lucius Fox showed him earlier and create a program to somehow make every cell phone in Gotham City broadcast a video signal that he can watch through some space-age lenses that cover his eyes in the Batsuit and are fed through a supercomputer in his secret lair. (So the Joker having chalk white skin and having over-the-top fun fight scenes are too ludricous for Nolan’s “realistic” vision, but that crazy tech wasn’t?) How about how ridiculous Gordon and Batman’s plan was of faking Gordon’s death and just transporting Harvey while hoping the Joker would attack…yet when it happened they still seemed totally unprepared for it. A commenter at imdb.com nailed it (found through The Dark Knight Sucks):
  

  If I understand it correctly, Gordon faked his own death (even though it?s edited to make it look like he got shot for real) to protect his family. Batman then decides to announce who he is but Dent takes his place. The Joker intercepts the Dent convoy but is himself intercepted by Batman. Carnage ensues including the destruction of large parts of the Gotham road system and various buildings and, seemingly by fortune, Batman, the Joker and, the driver of the convoy who is, of course, Gordon, reach a point at which the Joker is captured. Unfortunately for them that?s what he wanted all along.

  So: doesn’t make very little sense when you try and add it up from characters? POV. Why would Gordon legitimise such a ridiculous plan: there?s no guarantee it would work and he?s placing the lives of his men and Dent in very real jeopardy because he knows the Joker is coming for them. Batman may suffer from incredible pride but there?s no way he could have planned, forseen or even imagained such a successful scenario as him flipping the Joker?s truck, faking his defeat and Gordon?s reappearance because it all happened just metres away from his vehicle. The Joker needs Dent for phase 2 of this particular plan os his attempt at killing him is self serving. He needs to be caught AND he needs the guy with the phone in his stomach to make it with him otherwise he?s got no way to get Lao or the money. He surely should have walked into the station with his men a la Se7en!

  I put this to a friend and he suggested the whole “agent of chaos” angle which doesn?t work for me because Dent, Gordon and Batman ren’t agents of chaos and that’s the force they’re fighting against. If the Joker had initiated this then, yes, I could agree. But this is their party which the Joker crashes.

• And even more plot holes. Okay, Harvey Dent is supposed to be some hotshot District Attorney right? And his fiancee is a rising star Assistant DA in his office? And they spend all their time together? Well let’s look at their stellar legal work in action, as described by Dark Knight Sucks:
  

  Well, the writers must have been a bit more lazy on the day they wrote the segment where Rachel and Harvey were trying to nail Lau on something. Particularly, they were trying to use Lau as a means to incriminate all the crime heads in Chicago (I mean Gotham).

  Apparently, they got Batman to go all the way to China, risk his life, illegally kidnap a Chinese citizen who had not been convicted or even indicted on any US-based crime, and bring him back for questioning and they didn?t have an actual plan. They had NO IDEA what to nail him on, they just knew that he was the money-man for the mob. So, when he finally admits to being the banker for numerous criminal organizations, Harvey has a eureka moment with Rachel and blurts ?we can get them on RICO!?, presuming of course they can prove just one of the organizations pooling their money with Lau had committed crimes.

  A bit of education: RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) is a US federal law. That means HAD that been the case that Harvey chose to pursue that path, he would have to hand over the entire case to a FEDERAL court, taking it completely out of his hands to prosecute – his jurisdiction was at a city level for Chicago (I mean Gotham). He was not a federal prosecutor. If he was, he would be referred to in the movie as a United States Attorney. If some want to argue semantics that he was a federal attorney and merely referred to as a District Attorney, that argument will fail because such positions are appointed by the President of the United States. They are not elected to that position, as is the case with Harvey Dent (it?s pretty clear in both the viral marketing and election context of the movie).

  That was just one flaw with that segment; another flaw is the fact that Lau?s lawyer just stood there doing nothing while Harvey and Rachel were using unjust tactics to pressure him to talk, making implications they would place his life in danger based on how much he cooperates. Because, without those tactics, they didn?t seem to even have a clue of what to get Lau to admit to which might implicate the criminals they were after.

  So basically these legal eagles didn’t think of the RICO statute, simply the most obvious and most-used statute used against the mob, until a EUREKA! moment occurred during an interrogation.

• Batman is impotent in his own movie. A good villain should be a step or two ahead of the hero throughout the movie. It keeps it exciting, and you want the hero to be challenged. But at some point there should be a scene where there hero turns it around and ends up getting ahead of the villain and outsmarting him once and for all in the endgame. This never really happens. The only “victory” Batman gets is when the two boats don’t blow up, which happens out of dumb luck. It could have easily gone the other way. Batman didn’t actually do accomplish the saving of those people, they just happened to end up okay, but no thanks to him. He spends the whole movie jumping through the Joker’s hoops, and even when he physically defeats him, it still seems like part of Joker’s plan. Then he sends Batman to chase after Harvey Dent, showing him that he corrupted someone thought to be uncorruptible. Chalk up another victory to the Joker, and another instance where Batman is two steps behind the Joker. But at least Batman got ONE moral victory in right? He still doesn’t kill, right? He managed to stop the Joker without killing him or letting him die. Too bad five minutes later even that victory is undermined by Batman killing Harvey Dent. So Joker not only corrupted Harvey Dent, he got Batman to kill at the same time. Great job, Batman! NY Magazine has a great piece on the impotence of this Batman throughout the movie:
  

  From the beginning of The Dark Knight, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman is only the fifth- or sixth-most-interesting character in his own movie. (The Joker, Harvey Dent, Gordon, Rachel Dawes, and even Alfred the butler are more intriguing onscreen than Batman.) Sure, it’s not uncommon for criminals and supporting characters to be flashier than the superhero in a comic-book movie. It is uncommon, though, for the hero to serve ? as Batman does in The Dark Knight ? as little more than a patsy: just one of Gotham’s wind-up toys, serving only to be set in motion by the Joker and sent into yet another trap. Unlike in most superhero movies, Batman isn’t two steps ahead of the criminals, or even of us; instead, he’s constantly behind, until even the audience can see the plots developing, and Batman’s investigations making things worse.And so throughout The Dark Knight, Batman himself is further and further marginalized, made more and more impotent. Batman can’t stop the violence, can’t crack the case, and his inability to comprehend the pure malevolent chaos that the Joker represents costs dozens of Gotham residents their lives. In so exhilaratingly illustrating the expression of that pure chaos ? and in the dire straits it eventually puts our so-called hero in ? The Dark Knight can be read as a philosophical argument against superheroes in a complicated world.

I already know what the #1 defense from fanboys regarding this movie is going to be, “Oh My God, it’s a comic book, get over it, it’s not supposed to be realistic, get a life!” And you know what, I agree, it shouldn’t be realistic. The problem is, I’m not the one that set this standard of realism, it’s the creators of the movie and the fans of this movie that did that. I judge a movie according to the standards it sets for itself, and the creators of this movie wanted to present an adult, high Art with a capital A, pretentious movie that we should take as seriously as any other arthouse or intellectually sophisticated adult movie out there. This so-called gravitas and unflinching “realism” is exactly what this movie’s fans tell us is so great about it. In fact, when you complain about anything in this movie, the first thing that fans tell you is that it’s okay because the movie is supposed to be realistic. Why is the fighting so bland? “It’s supposed to be realistic.” Why does Gotham City looks so bland? “It’s supposed to be realistic, duh?” Why is it so relentlessly sadistic, mirthless and morally grey? “It’s supposed to be realistic, real life is not so black and white.” Why can’t the Joker actually have permanently white skin like he traditionally does rather than just be a guy with “war paint?” “Because this is a psychologically intense realistic tour-de-force along the lines of the Godfather 2 or Silence of the Lambs, it’s grounded in reality!”

Yet once you accept the premise of the filmmakers and the fans that this is meant to be a realistic, adult, intellectual and high Art movie and start judging it by those standards, that means you have to start taking it to task for the limitless ways it fails in plot mechanics, characterization, motivations and logic under those higher standards. Yet what happens once you start pointing out the myriad of ridiculous plot holes in this movie, ridiculous coincidences and things that just make no sense, like the utter stupidity of the cops at every turn (for example locking the Joker up without ever bothering to remove his makeup and send a picture of his unmade-up face to every federal and local law enforcement bureau in an effort to uncover his identity, then leaving him unprotected and not handcuffed in the interrogation room guarded by a single cop, even though he’s proven to be badass enough to fight the Batman and wreak total mayhem across the city?) These exact same people start saying “What do you want, it’s a comic book movie! It’s about a guy that dresses up as a bat! Weren’t you ever a kid? What do you expect, Shakespeare?!  It’s not supposed to be realistic!” You can’t have it both ways.

And what sense does it make, if you ARE going to practice selective realism, to only select using realism in areas that will make the movie more boring and incoherent and illogical? So we must can’t use suspension of disbelief to make the Joker as visually unique as the comics and previous movies with chalk-white skin and creepy red lips and actual green hair. We can’t suspend our disbelief and just have a guy who is rich and has cool gadgets to fight crime with, we must forever be bogged down with the “process” describing how he gets every last toy. We’re not allowed to suspend our disbelief enough to have fantastic, over the top fight scenes like you see in movies like Kill Bill and Die Hard 4, movies that are somehow less ashamed of the superhero comic conventions and superhero aesthetics and laws of physics than an actual superhero comic movie like Dark Knight, we’re supposed to accept boring, incoherent plodding fighting instead. But what we do need to save our moments of suspension of disbelief for according to Dark Knight and its fans? Plot holes and wildly illogical event sequences and poorly thought out coincidences! Using suspension of disbelief for anything that would lead to escapist and over the top fun is forbidden, but for anything that makes the movie a more incoherent, jumbled and illogical mess, then it’s okay to accept the unbelievable. Wonderful.

See, I watched Spider-Man 1 and 2 and both movies were loaded with plot holes. How was Peter Parker able to put together such an expensive and complicated looking costume if he’s poor? How is it that the only two people in town who end up with superpowers happen to know each other? And don’t get me started on the improbably coincidences and the laws of physics broken throughout both movies. Yet in those movies I totally don’t care about the plot holes because Sam Raimi obviously shows us that the movie is in no ways meant to be realistic and minor plot holes are not that serious. He made a lot of it is tongue-in-cheek, was unafraid to embrace some of the more ridiculous but entertaining and fun conventions of the superhero genre and showed that he is unashamed to be silly and unrealistic at times in order to have some damn fun with his movie. So for his movie, I don’t bother to apply the same stringent levels of judgment regarding plot holes and logic. Nolan, to me, is ashamed to be doing a superhero movie and tries to excise everything superheroic he can get away with excising from the movie. And ironically he ends up with a movie less in touch with humanity than a movie like Spider-Man 2 that totally and apologetically accepts itself as a movie about superheroes and all the inherently ridiculous conventions that come with the genre.

When you look around the internet there is an extreme comic fanboy fervor that has overtaken message boards and magazine websites exaggerating the merits of this movie and attacking anyone who dares say anything bad about it. There is obviously a huge emotional investment in this film on the part of its fanbase to believe it would be the greatest thing ever no matter what the final product was that actually ended up in the scene. I think a lot of this has to do with the profile of the modern superhero comic fan. See, I am an adult superhero comic fan myself, so I’ve seen how the genre has evolved in the past few decades. Back in the day, the average superhero comic fan was of teenage years and gave up the hobby as he grew older. At some point, probably around the late 60s, the comics became so emotionally compelling and of better quality, especially after Marvel Comics hit the scene, that these readers started giving up these comics at later and later ages, if at all. So the older the average age of the readership got, you have to figure the more embarrassing it became for them to remain comic fans. So at some point, particularly around the 80s, there became this need to pretend superhero comics had incredibly more depth and intense psychological roots than they were ever really meant to have. The problem with this new wave of grim and gritty superhero comics, and movies they lead to like Dark Knight, is that these characters and premises were created over 60 years ago for kids and were never intended to hold up to intense psychological scrutiny and deconstruction. The more realism you apply to these things, the more the flaws become apparent. If you start examining Batman under the lens of realism and deconstruction, of course he will start looking like a neurotic and psychotic emotionally stunted morally grey madman who is the flipside to the Joker and may be harming society just as much as he’s helping it. That’s why this grim and gritty movement of the 80s started a slippery slope and we live in an era where every single Batman and Joker story has to focus on how morally grey and impotent Batman is in the face of Joker’s insanity, how he is actually the flipside of the coin to the Joker, the weird homoerotic undertones their relationship now has and the constant implication that Batman is somehow as unhinged psychologically and messed up as the Joker. It’s not bad stuff to explore occasionally, but as the norm it’s horribly cynical and bleak.

Comic fans love proclaiming that this movie, in being so “realistic,” is somehow the most true to the dark, psychologically intense world of Batman comics. They say this because (a) they want to convince themselves that Batman comics really are intended to be this realistic and intense and (b) they want to convince others that what they read is so realistic and intense so that they can feel less embarrassment at still reading them in their 20s and 30s. The reason they overrate this movie so much is because so much personal validation is tied into this movie for them. So the more realistic the movies are, the more comic fans will claim to anyone who will listen that they just witness a movie that is exactly like the books they?ve been mocked for reading for decades. But if this realistic tone is really so true to the comics as the fans say, then let?s run down everything in the Batman mythos and see if they can work in the sequel in this new ?realistic? tone Nolan set up: Mr. Freeze? No. Killer Croc? No. Robin? Doubtful. Blockbuster? Maybe if they just did him as a big dude. Poison Ivy? DOubtful, unless you seriously tone down her abilities and take away her powers? Bane? Maybe. Dr. Phosphorus? No. Can you ever have other superheroes guest star? Definitely not. So if it creates a world where so much of Batman?s world from the comics, including Robin, won?t work at all or at least without being severely altered, how exactly is it true to Batman?s comic world?

So the next criticism becomes, if what you say is true and the main cultish fervor over this film comes from adult comic fans who need this overserious superhero movie for some type of personal validation, why did it make such crazy box office numbers. Obviously it’s huge among noncomic fans too. Well this can actually be explained easily: it?s a perfect storm of several mass hysterias at once. First there’s the comic fanboy hysteria that feels the more serious the source material is taken, the better the movie automatically is because it helps them achieve personal validation for the fact that they are reading it well into their 20s and 30s. That alone would make big box office, but you’re right that alone wouldn?t raise it to these ridiculous box office numbers. But then we get the “early death of a young genius” syndrome, similar to what happened to Tupac, Biggie, Bruce Lee, James Dean, Brandon Lee, Selena and most recently Kurt Cobain, where a genius that dies young is elevated to mythic proportions, and all their works, and ESPECIALLY what they were working on after they died, gets huge business. Ledger died and became our latest “Kurt Cobain.” Next comes the Brokeback Mountain crowd, those people that will automatically flock to a movie and rave about it if enough reputable critics drone on and on about how oscarworthy it is. These three groups combined to make the Dark Knight the most overrated movie of all time.

Let the flaming begin.

Radar Magazine asks “Who Killed The Movie Star?“. It’s an article that ties in pretty well to one I wrote about the newest and most important type of celebrity of the modern era, The Tabloid Star. Radar Magazine points out:

For most of the century…having the right name on the marquee?be it Chaplin, Garbo, Grant, McQueen, Schwarzenegger, or Hanks?has been the most cruc predictor of a film’s success.

No longer. The past year has seen more falling stars than the skies above Roswell. Since 2007, with the notable exception of Will Smith, whose upcoming tent-pole flick Hancock is enjoying some of the best prerelease buzz of any summer film, virtually every star of note has tanked at the box office, sending a collective shiver down the industry’s spine. Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Reese Witherspoon, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Ben Stiller, and Will Ferrell have all starred in movies that made less than $40 million domestically, far from the magic number?$100 million?that’s become the standard measure of a successful release. Outside of their tried-and-true franchises, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Cameron Diaz, and Johnny Depp have fared little better, topping out, in some cases, at less than $70 million. Same thing for the presumably unbeatable duo of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, whose widely praised political romp, Charlie Wilson’s War, took in a scant $66 million.

In 1995, Jim Carrey was paid $20 million for The Cable Guy. For his next comedy, Yes Man, he’s receiving nothing up-front and shares in the profits only if there are any (Photo: Getty Images)

“We’re in a cycle where stars aren’t as important to a film’s success as they used to be,” says Variety editor in chief Peter Bart, echoing a May cover story in the Hollywood Reporter. Between 1990 and 2000, roughly two-thirds of the top 10 grossing films each year could chalk up their success to star power; since 2001, that number has declined by more than half. “There was a period of time when studio marketing departments could count on just hiring a movie star to open a movie,” says producer Lynda Obst?casting, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the absurd Kindergarten Cop, and Julia Roberts in the aggressively mediocre Runaway Bride. “It’s not so easy anymore,” she adds.

Accordingly, movie star paychecks aren’t what they used to be. In 1995, the rubber-faced Jim Carrey was the first actor to be awarded a $20 million contract?for the ill-fated Cable Guy. (Soon after, Sandler, Smith, Cruise, Schwarzenegger, Willis, and others were commanding the same price.) At the time that Columbia Pictures made him the offer, the funnyman had never had a flop. Since then, he’s had plenty. As a result, Warner Bros. just financed his next comedy, Yes Man, with a very different sort of deal: Carrey will receive zippo up front, but is entitled to 36.2 percent of the movie’s profits … should any materialize.

Face it: The movie star as we’ve come to know him?an actor who can reliably put butts in seats on opening weekend?is dead.

Then the article goes into reasons why this may be the case. Culprit #1? The tabloids:

THEY’RE JUST LIKE US! So why would we pay $11.50 to watch them?

Call it death by a thousand crotch shots. The incredible success of the weekly tabs, an innovation credited to Bonnie Fuller, the former Us Weekly editrix (who went on to bring her dark magic to Star before stepping down in May), has reduced the movie star to someone who’s “just like us!” And if they are mere mortals?as we’re forever being reminded, one Starbucks run at a time?who needs them? By chronicling an actor’s every bad hair day, sartorial screwup, and debased love life, the tabs?joined by TMZ with its nightly curbside ambushes and Perez with his doodled penises?have ripped the veneer of glamour from one matinee idol after another, exposing the sad, unbalanced, attention-starved creatures underneath. As a result, we’ve adopted what Hollywood historian David Thomson calls “a bitter, acidic, vengeful attitude toward the stars.”

To see the carnage Fuller has wrought, look no further than former box-office golden boy?now perpetual superfreak?Tom Cruise. Or recall the horrifying fate of the original Bennifer, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, who were poised to become Hollywood royalty and instead watched helplessly as their careers were shredded by the tabloids (granted, the couple all but invited the harpies into their bedroom, but still). In 2001, the year before they began dating, Lopez was the first star ever to have the country’s No. 1 album (J.Lo) and top-grossing film (The Wedding Planner) simultaneously. That same year, Affleck starred in the blockbuster Pearl Harbor, which grossed a gargantuan $198 million. In 2002, the duo hooked up and proceeded to hijack the media, flaunting their relationship in music videos, magazines, and a prime-time television special. After their breakup in 2004, blamed on “media scrutiny,” both went into virtual hiding for years. Now he’s bleeping Jimmy Kimmel, and she’s bleeping Marc Anthony. Ouch.

Like I said in my blog post, using tabloids to gain exposure seems to increase your fame and buzz, but actually destroys your primary career. It makes you too relatable to the masses thereby taking away much of your mystique. We all know how flawed many of our past matinee idols were, but we usually found out long after it mattered posthumously. At the time we didn’t know Marilyn Monroe’s demons, were unaware of Rock Hudson’s sexuality, were clueless about Joan Crawford’s child raising techniques, were oblivious to JFK’s affairs and Elvis’s drug habits, and Jayne Kennedy’s sex tape wasn’t readily available for purchase by the masses. Their handlers guarded their secrets religiously.

And this level of insight into celebrity lives leads into the other reason tabloid exposure hurts the stars: the lurid details of their real lives form narratives become more compelling than the fake narratives they create onscreen. The details of Lindsey Lohan’s train wreck of a life, along with the cast of outrageous characters that come along with it like her parents and sister and lovers, are much more interesting and fascinating than any of the characters or storylines I’ve seen described for her recent movies. When the truth becomes more fascinating than fiction, people will choose the truth. Compare this to old newsreels of past matinee idols where they strove to create the illusion of a glamorous but relatively bland drama-free personal life that paled in comparison to the roles they played on the screen. Why pay $11.50 to see a celebrity act out a fake story when you can keep track of their real life stories that are a lot more salacious, fast-paced and outrageous for a fraction of the price? The movie roles almost seem to be a distraction to audiences from the more compelling drama that is the actor’s real life shenanigans.
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Remember when I linked to this video of Madonna emasculating her husband?

Now it turns out they may be getting divorced. No surprise there.
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I also declared that the Pete Wentz/Ashlee Simpson pregnancy may be the highest concentration of douche genes ever seen in a single human being, a long-awaited (dreaded?) messiah of douchedom even. This latest public statement by Pete Wentz just confirms my worst fears:

Dad-to-be Pete Wentz has a confession: He’s made out with dudes.

He tells Out magazine he first smooched a guy when he was 16 or 17, probably on a dare.

He experimented again around 18 and 19, he says.

His last same-sex make out?

“A long time ago,” Wentz, 29, says. “Probably when I was 22?”

The Fall Out Boy bassist ? who wed Ashlee Simpson in May ? puts all his experimenting in perspective.

“When I said that I make out with dudes, there was a slight sense of sexual rebellion in that,” he tells Out. “And I probably even made it a bigger deal than it was.”

Lordy, has edginess ever come off as more forced and contrived? Do people really still get impressed with stuff like this at this point?

What’s he doing in this picture? Is that supposed to be a sneer or something? I remember when punks and alt-rockers actually used to be fuck ups. I mean, real-deal fuck ups. Not normal, suburban whitebread clean cut kids trying hard to seem fucked up and edgy in order to emulate their punk heroes from decades past. The traditional symbols of rebellion from bisexuality to tattoos to piercings have been so co-opted and resold that no one even takes them seriously as symbols of rebellion anymore. Even asexual hipster geeks now have more sleeve tattoos than heroin and meth-addicted z-list metal road bands, but instead of the tattoo making them look edgy they just end up sucking the cool out of the tattoo. With every new tattooed and pierced Pete Wentz and Joel Madden that hits the big time, the more douchey that old punk aesthetic becomes. No amount of tattoos and piercings and spikey hair will ever erase this level of lame geekiness:

Remember that old Sesame Street sketch “One of these things is not like the other?” Read I Need More, the autobiography of Iggy Pop or the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (An Evergreen book) by Legs McNeil and then watch that clip again and tell me which one it is.

I’ve become convinced that the most edgy, daring and rebellious show of the past decade was actually 7th Heaven, because it was probably the only one that was willing to go against the mainstream grain and didn’t care how much criticism and backlash it got from the masses. People think it was mainstream because it was uncynical and focused on family values and religion and morality. But mainstream simply means what the majority finds socially acceptable, and nowadays with the widespread pornification of pop culture, the majority of entertainment celebrating piercings, the pornstar aesthetic, debauchery, binge drinking, promiscuous women and tattoos the idea of a repressive society is now a myth, if anything our current problem is that our society is too permissive. It’s probably the most daring thing that will ever grace Jessica Biel’s acting resume.

If being punk rock is about going against the grain and doing stuff that actually shocks and outrages people, I think Charlton Heston with his unabashedly pro-gun and outspoken conservative views as a member of the ultraliberal entertainment community and the scorn it won him probably made him one of the most punk rock celebrity in recent years. I’m sure he’s garnered more scorn, shock and outrage from the mainstream than Good Charlotte, Green Day and Fall Out Boy combined. Madonna doing another statement against Christianity and sexual prudes? *Yawn* Brigitte Bardot bashing Muslims and multiculturalism? That’s “punk.” Kirk Cameron suddenly becoming a born-again christian at the height of his fame is way more “punk” than Wentz and his homo makeout sessions.

Now my problem isn’t that I think that clean-cut goody-goody geeks don’t have a right to make rock music. I’m all for it. But don’t go around trying to portray yourself as this gritty, edgy bad boy because you aren’t fooling anyone worth fooling. Be yourself. Live what you know. It’s one of those things I always liked about Will Smith, even when his music wasn’t my cup of tea. The guy was ridiculously comfortable in his own skin and never tried to be anything he wasn’t. He did wholesome rap ditties about high school, the suburbs, his parents and trying to meet girls. And this is during the height of West Coast gangster rap and East Coast afrocentric rap when everyone thought you had to be either a stone cold gangster or a black revolutionary to have any validity in hip-hop. And people embraced him for being true to himself and he spun that sincerity off into one of the most illustrious Hollywood careers ever. It’s probably why he’s one of the few A-list actors left that can make a move huge just by attaching his name to it. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

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Last year, I went to see Rocky Balboa in the theaters. I’ve always loved Rocky movies, especially the first one, and I thought it was a great ending to the franchise. But as I sat there in the theater, it reminded me of how different it is to watch a Rocky movie with a crowd as opposed to watching it at home on TV. The energy from a Rocky crowd is both intense and infectious, almost like watching a real sporting event.

Stallone is very underrated as a writer and an actor. His ability to suck in a crowd emotionally and make them root for his character is incredible. You really get sucked into the movie and forget it’s fiction for a while. You really want all those assholes that put Rocky down and constantly ridicule him or try to crush his dreams to get their well-deserved comeuppance. You see Rocky struggling uphill against impossible odds and being shitted on by arrogant, petty jerks every step of the way and it reminds you of all the dreams you had or currently had that people shitted on. You see those arrogant assholes on the screen and get reminded of all those real-life pricks from your own experiences that just player hated from the sidelines of life and got great enjoyment watching your struggles and failures and twisted the knife and rubbed it in whenever they could.

But I started to wonder: does anyone watch Rocky and sympathize with the pricks? Same with those 80s movies where some obnoxious athlete bully, yuppie or preppy is ridiculing the underdog hero and trying to crush his dreams…does anyone watch those movies and identify with or even root for those guys over the underdog hero? Did anybody in the theater cheer when Johnny swept the leg in Karate Kid?

These types of bullies, peanut gallery picks and dream crushers must exist in some shape or form in the real world, or else these movies wouldn’t be so powerful in evoking emotion and recognition from us. And these movies are so popular and widely seen that it’s highly doubtful that jerks just avoid those movies, they have to be in the theater crowd or among the ones watching at home. Yet no one who watches these movies seems to ever think of themselves as the prick or bully. They all see themselves in the protagonist hero role, and that’s who they end up identifying with.

These movies appeal to our basic narcissism. We get to watch these movies and imagine ourselves as the hard-working dreamer. We get to imagine ourselves as the type of good, positive person who would chase a dream like Rocky against all odds, or at least be supportive of a Rocky and be on his side as he chases his dreams. But we conveniently forget all the times in real life that we were the criticizing, smug assholes, all the times we helped crush dreams. Those moments don’t support our positive fantasy image of ourselves, so we don’t pay much attention to those and play them down. We can go to a Rocky movie and think of Rocky as representing “us” and the sneering, condescending dream-crushing bad guys as representing “them,” but we can go to a restaurant that same night and crack jokes about the waiter and scoff at how stupid he is to actually think he’s going to make it as an actor along with the millions of other dreamers in town and ever be more than just a glorified grunt. The irony of these moments eludes us. A lot of times, the arrogant jerk is you.

See, the Rocky fallacy is simply this: it’s easy to root for an underdog when you already know beforehand that he’s going to win. This doesn’t make you a good person. It doesn’t give you moral superiority. It doesn’t mean you have faith in people (faith is belief in something, even when you have no proof or guarantees that your belief is warranted or will be rewarded). It doesn’t make you Rocky. It just makes you like the typical person. Those pompous jerk characters in the Rocky movie? They don’t know they’re in an inspirational feel-good movie called Rocky and that Rocky is the star of the whole thing. If they did they’d support Rocky from the very beginning just like the audience does.

When you watch The Pursuit of Happyness, it’s easy to have that sense of moral superiority by siding with Will Smith’s character…because you already know his risks are going to pay off. You feel good at the end because you feel your faith was rewarded and in some ways you feel your own urges to dream have somehow been validated, but truth be told you knew your belief in the character was going to be rewarded before even watching the movie. But in real life, you and your friends would probably badmouth and look down on someone in that situation at the bottom of his rope hoping against all odds to conquer the world of stocks.

Think about all those people who supported the Rocky character when watching the movies. How many of them scoffed at Stallone the actor when he had a string of flops and it seemed his career was washed up? How many of them laughed at him when he announced he was making a Rocky sequel, just like people laughed at Rocky when he tried to enter the big time after an unremarkable career as a washed up local boxer? That’s because unlike with the Rocky character, we had no guarantee Stallone would succeed in his comeback, and being supportive is always harder without guarantees.

I think this is why so many people hated Rocky V. It’s not the best in the franchise, that’s for sure. But when I saw it, I never thought it was as horrible as everyone claimed it was. It was as well-acted and well-written as any of the other installments. But now I realize why it received such backlash: because Rocky ended as a loser because he had no money or glory, despite winning the street fight. The faith the audience had was conditional: “we believe in you against all odds Rocky, and fuck any haters that say otherwise…unless you actually lose. Then we’ll turn on you too.”

Stallone made a fatal miscalculation with Rocky V: he overestimated the public and thought they “got” what he was trying to say all along. That the winning and the glory isn’t what matters, it’s never giving up the fight in the face of all adversity and being able to hold your head up at the end of the day knowing that you tried your hardest, regardless of the outcome. He had too much faith in his audience, not realizing that they never got that message. So he had to make a slight correction in Rocky Balboa and made Rocky a successful entrepreneur and gave him back some ring glory, and the fans all came back, once again buying into the myth that they were the kind of good guys that would never turn on someone for trying hard and ending up a loser.

Another great example of this is Eli Manning. Tons of people in New York made him a whipping boy for years. They laughed at how inferior he was to his brother Peyton. As he improved and stayed resolute and improved toward the end of the season, people gave a cautious optimism, but still scoffed at him to be safe. Even as the game progressed and he played almost flawlessly and the Giants were within striking distance to win the Superbowl, people I watched with kept saying “Oh man, he’s gonna choke. He’s a loser. Kiss this game goodbye. They’re gonna lose this, I know it was too good to be true.” And after that final play where Eli killed it and won the game, those people were jumping up and cheering the loudest. And I’ll never forget what one of those guys said: “WE WOOONNN!!!!! Whoooo!!!”

Think about that for a second. “They’re gonna lose.” “He’s a loser.” “He’s gonna choke.” But after he wins? “WE won!” Where was the “we” when the outcome was still in doubt? Why is it suddenly first person plural now? You can bet this guy is one of the people who watches Rocky and identifies with the underdog supporter and not the haters and jerks in the movie. And he’s wrong, because back in the real world if Eli starts off bad next season he’ll be the first badmouthing him again and calling his Superbowl win a fluke.

It takes a lot of character to support someone against all odds. It takes even more character to not be outcome-driven and still support them for trying hard even after they lose. Rocky movies provide us the risk-free comfort of fooling ourselves into believing we have that level of character and empathy and courage.

In reality though, that image of ourselves is often the most fictional part of the whole moviegoing experience.