![The guest critique marches on. This one comes from Trev, who decided to review one of my review-reviews (the one about Inglourious Basterds). This is Metacritique’s first review-review-review.
ex·ploi·ta·tion [èk sploy táysh’n]n.1. The act of employing to the greatest possible advantage
Art is vanity. To take what is private or privately cherished and cast it upon the world in a show of noise and color: to spraypaint in true detail one’s love and frustration on the walls of Babylon. It is for the sake of such cries for attention as these that men make slaves of themselves in dark offices, whipped like an Israelite by some poem or manuscript. Others take their pains with the very stone of the earth. In any event one hopes to be freed and exalted by the labor’s final end, praying that one will be remembered with one’s work, seen and loved wholly once enough of an effort has been made. The artist hopes to pay his dues in flesh.
The torture of these silent laborers is the existence of the casual producer, the man who seems to perceive in life no debt or dues but rather simple fun: to whom creation is a revel in himself like any other, for whom an opus is formed not of flesh but the same easy stuff as a joke at the bar. His art too, of course, is vanity, but its profile is light and palatable; while the auteurs struggle in the dark to discover and speak their hidden names, his rolls off the tongue like a mere innuendo, a phrase of perhaps-fine form but—the auteur suspects and claims—little content.
Such are the criticisms leveled at famed director Quentin Tarantino by Manohla Dargis in her review of his latest film, “Inglourious Basterds.” Or so claims my brother-in-arms Ben Lansky, here, in his review of her review. Tarantino is a good target for this form of resentment, famous as he is for his overpowering style and unabashed, seemingly unexamined indulgence of stereotypes and fetishes widely considered to be obsolete. The word “exploitation” is tossed about, and one is made to reflect on the double meaning of this word in the context of Tarantino’s work: he is as shamelessly derivative as he is shamelessly lowest-common-denominator, stealing symbols and tropes from every which where like a slightly less educated George Lucas. Blackness, for instance, is a concept without which no story’s palette would be complete, and both directors have been known to apply it with less than perfect subtlety.
This promiscuous attitude toward the use and re-use of heavy-handed, especially violent, imagery seems to contribute in great part, to the intellectual disdain frequently directed towards Tarantino’s work. In these cases, “exploitation” seems to be locked in an unfortunate marriage with its modern connotations of wasteful, non-team-playerish negativity and white male oppression.
Dargis hints [that Q.’s values] are either weak or sinister, most pointedly articulated in her reference to Tarantino’s “chortling exploitation of spectacular violence.” Do Tarantino’s movies exploit violence? There are whole sections of university libraries devoted to this question. Some argue that Tarantino’s movies are in fact about cinematic violence, or violence in general, commenting on exploitation more so than perpetuating it…
Though seemingly committed to the same definition of the E-word as Ms. Dargis, Lansky is right to cast doubt on the black-and-white interpretation of Tarantino’s exploitative behavior. He draws our attention to the positive possibilities presented by the director’s shocking images. The presentation of a remorseless killer may cause us to reflect on the necessity of moral sensitivity, rather than simply desensitizing us to it; similarly, the remorselessness of the presentation itself may open new paths of contemplation on the subject of symbolism, of represented life and its relationship to the real, of represented morality as a part of that:
Tarantino’s fascination with the moral trials of criminals pervades all of his movies, and just because the characters may not wrestle with self-doubt doesn’t mean that the audience isn’t meant to.
Likewise, Tarantino himself may act as the same order of example. If we find ourselves struggling with or becoming bitter over his casual dalliance with images we believe to be uncasually profane, the opportunity is presented us to examine the source of these reactions and critique the subtlety of our eye as viewers. His misbehavior is an instructive object for us, though our instruction may begin in a storm of frustration. This attitude should extend, in this review review reviewer’s opinion, to his very egotism, his casual pride: what do we, the darkened toilers, have to resent? His belief in his greatness steals nothing from ours. When we despise his vanity, it is a mirror in which our own is reflected.
—T. Clark DeTal, 2009
P.S.: The scrupulous reader may have noticed that in this review and in Mr. Lansky’s, the term auteur is used in two directly opposed senses. Let it be observed that this does not in all likelihood reflect a difference in beliefs about the meaning of the word or our perspectives on creation, but more probably on our rhetorical flexibility. See, this is why you’re scrupulous, is because of weasels like us! Gold star.](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kprvdzJGu51qzcnpmo1_r1_400.jpg)
The guest critique marches on. This one comes from Trev, who decided to review one of my review-reviews (the one about Inglourious Basterds). This is Metacritique’s first review-review-review.
ex·ploi·ta·tion [èk sploy táysh’n]
n.
1. The act of employing to the greatest possible advantage
Art is vanity. To take what is private or privately cherished and cast it upon the world in a show of noise and color: to spraypaint in true detail one’s love and frustration on the walls of Babylon. It is for the sake of such cries for attention as these that men make slaves of themselves in dark offices, whipped like an Israelite by some poem or manuscript. Others take their pains with the very stone of the earth. In any event one hopes to be freed and exalted by the labor’s final end, praying that one will be remembered with one’s work, seen and loved wholly once enough of an effort has been made. The artist hopes to pay his dues in flesh.
The torture of these silent laborers is the existence of the casual producer, the man who seems to perceive in life no debt or dues but rather simple fun: to whom creation is a revel in himself like any other, for whom an opus is formed not of flesh but the same easy stuff as a joke at the bar. His art too, of course, is vanity, but its profile is light and palatable; while the auteurs struggle in the dark to discover and speak their hidden names, his rolls off the tongue like a mere innuendo, a phrase of perhaps-fine form but—the auteur suspects and claims—little content.
Such are the criticisms leveled at famed director Quentin Tarantino by Manohla Dargis in her review of his latest film, “Inglourious Basterds.” Or so claims my brother-in-arms Ben Lansky, here, in his review of her review. Tarantino is a good target for this form of resentment, famous as he is for his overpowering style and unabashed, seemingly unexamined indulgence of stereotypes and fetishes widely considered to be obsolete. The word “exploitation” is tossed about, and one is made to reflect on the double meaning of this word in the context of Tarantino’s work: he is as shamelessly derivative as he is shamelessly lowest-common-denominator, stealing symbols and tropes from every which where like a slightly less educated George Lucas. Blackness, for instance, is a concept without which no story’s palette would be complete, and both directors have been known to apply it with less than perfect subtlety.
This promiscuous attitude toward the use and re-use of heavy-handed, especially violent, imagery seems to contribute in great part, to the intellectual disdain frequently directed towards Tarantino’s work. In these cases, “exploitation” seems to be locked in an unfortunate marriage with its modern connotations of wasteful, non-team-playerish negativity and white male oppression.
Dargis hints [that Q.’s values] are either weak or sinister, most pointedly articulated in her reference to Tarantino’s “chortling exploitation of spectacular violence.” Do Tarantino’s movies exploit violence? There are whole sections of university libraries devoted to this question. Some argue that Tarantino’s movies are in fact about cinematic violence, or violence in general, commenting on exploitation more so than perpetuating it…
Though seemingly committed to the same definition of the E-word as Ms. Dargis, Lansky is right to cast doubt on the black-and-white interpretation of Tarantino’s exploitative behavior. He draws our attention to the positive possibilities presented by the director’s shocking images. The presentation of a remorseless killer may cause us to reflect on the necessity of moral sensitivity, rather than simply desensitizing us to it; similarly, the remorselessness of the presentation itself may open new paths of contemplation on the subject of symbolism, of represented life and its relationship to the real, of represented morality as a part of that:
Tarantino’s fascination with the moral trials of criminals pervades all of his movies, and just because the characters may not wrestle with self-doubt doesn’t mean that the audience isn’t meant to.
Likewise, Tarantino himself may act as the same order of example. If we find ourselves struggling with or becoming bitter over his casual dalliance with images we believe to be uncasually profane, the opportunity is presented us to examine the source of these reactions and critique the subtlety of our eye as viewers. His misbehavior is an instructive object for us, though our instruction may begin in a storm of frustration. This attitude should extend, in this review review reviewer’s opinion, to his very egotism, his casual pride: what do we, the darkened toilers, have to resent? His belief in his greatness steals nothing from ours. When we despise his vanity, it is a mirror in which our own is reflected.
—T. Clark DeTal, 2009
P.S.: The scrupulous reader may have noticed that in this review and in Mr. Lansky’s, the term auteur is used in two directly opposed senses. Let it be observed that this does not in all likelihood reflect a difference in beliefs about the meaning of the word or our perspectives on creation, but more probably on our rhetorical flexibility. See, this is why you’re scrupulous, is because of weasels like us! Gold star.
