In the second act of “Waiting for Godot” Vladimir and Estragon have it out in an insult contest. They go through “moron,” “vermin,” “abortion,” “morpion,” “sewer-rat,” “curate” and “cretin,” before Didi gets leveled by “critic.” The ones passing dramatic judgment in print must have had thicker skins back in the 50’s, by Act II of the early performances they could be the only ones left in the theater. Today it’s not uncommon to hear the play referred to as the most important of the 20th century. Reviewers were the first to hold that ground. That fact didn’t move them up a single notch on the Samuel Beckett scale. He couldn’t be bought off with praise.
Content was an insurmountable obstacle for critics with Walsh’s film. Lying about details is less safe when five times as many people saw the show.
However you rate the panning and raving crowd of the Eisenhower era now, the following generations were no improvement. In the long run, Gogo keeps being proven right. When Hollywood turns out 130 minutes of idiotically fake acrobatics and calls it “action” or several slashers a week, movie beat writers ought to be yawning or groaning or spiked when they don’t. It’s a lot worse when they lie outright, as a monolithic class, about the content of what’s put upon the public as a “thinking man’s film.” Once we get there, reviewing the reviewers becomes a last resort of cultural — and possibly physical — survival.
Vladimir and Estragon are street people — sophisticated sympathy with them is entirely hypothetical and academic. In the high court of fine art and erudition, nothing is as guilt-ridden as the vox populi. The demand to dummy serfs up online is nearly unanimous among woker-than-thous. Magnanimously tolerating real world insufferable masses is a path to the Podunk Post of film rating careers.
Looking down on Longfellow Deeds is the loyal function of every hobnobbing apprentice snob. They have no intention of touching, hearing, or smelling Walmart people. Reality is a frightening threat to the literati. Characterizing it unfaithfully is how to score a place at the beautiful people’s table. At the top of the reviewing food chain, it’s not even safe to describe loaded content from fiction accurately. Could an elitist movement to redact literalism from published letters actually exist? Don’t be too sure.
Western Guilt Mars a Film Description
In July 2022, John Michael McDonagh’s film, The Forgiven, was released in the United States. Arty cinemas everywhere ran trailers prior to general screening. The flick grossed $1.37 million before swirling into obscurity. Taking the cast and remote location into account, Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain were the headliners in a remote North African locale, the production company known as House Un-American Activities must have taken quite a financial licking. That didn’t stop an A-list of critics from licking on The Forgiven like a pack of puppies swarming an overwhelmed toddler. What they left out describing the action, and why, is a lot more relevant than the film itself.
It all begins with Dr. David Henninger and wife Jo crossing the Mediterranean on a small craft destined for Tangiers. By the lights of Wenlai Ma, writing for The Daily Telegraph, the assault on the indigenous population starts before the couple gets ashore:
“British toff David Henninger (Fiennes) and his American wife Jo (Chastain) are approaching Tangiers by boat when he, adorned with a Panama hat, looks up from his newspaper and says “L’Afrique.” His expression of that one word is dripping with superiority, a colonialist attitude that would come to hang over the whole film.”
Ma’s ear for French is a prickly one. Ordinary listeners simply heard the name of a continent. “Colonial” comes up frequently in the reviews. Westerners who do any boozing for a few days on foreign soil have graduated into Ottoman scale oppressors. Meanwhile, ex-colonizees crossing the Mediterranean northward must be accommodated indefinitely. France, Spain, Italy, and Germany have a mean population density scores of times higher than coastal western North Africa and over 100 times higher than the Sahara Desert. People departing the Mahgreb leave behind huge empty spaces — that were mostly unoccupied while they occupied them.
The Henninger’s are headed for a shindig at a refurbished ancient fortress deep in the Atlas Mountains. It was probably built by a 16th century corsair who amassed a fortune kidnapping infidels. The couple stops for lunch first in the city. As the doctor finishes off a bottle of chardonnay, his wife refers to him as a “highly functional alcoholic.” His rejoinder that the “highly functional” cancels out the second half of the description is the most memorable line in the film. Soon their journey is underway as David takes the wheel in a rented car. Jo says they have 400 miles to go.
Meanwhile, two teen Berber boys (Driss and a friend) are seen scratching at the sands for a type of insect fossil marketed to tourists. They take respites huffing glue from a paper bag. Between them a plot unfolds to rob and carjack the next well-heeled visitors who come their way down the desolate Saharan roads.
Hosting events at the villa are a gay couple, Richard Galloway and Dally Margolis (Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones). They are partying like it’s 1999. If they were doing it in Florida, it’d be an act of courageous defiance worthy of our approval. In a locale where the nearest neighbor is miles off, our enlightened evaluators of motion pictures find it every bit as haaram as Sayyid Qutb would. Never mind that the decadence and debauchery that takes place is routine weekend recreation for both toilers in the entertainment industry and those covering it. The further piety gets from the enlightened West, the more sacred it becomes.
On the road well into darkness, the Henningers cover ground that looks like an abandoned gravel pit. You might think the lunch vino would have worn off by then. There are few signs or speed limits. The Henninger’s think they are lost. At this point, while rounding a corner, Driss jumps intentionally into the car’s path hoping to halt it. His friend waits behind a boulder with a revolver leaving no doubt what’s next. That’s what over a dozen reviewers call “selling fossils.” When Driss is killed as the oncoming vehicle fails to slow in a timely fashion, his accomplice flees. Now, guess whose fault it all is? Here are some examples from mainstream description.
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times:
“They were careless people,” the narrator in The Great Gatsby says of two of that novel’s wealthiest, cruelest characters; “they smashed up things and creatures.” They would probably get along with the similarly careless wretches who populate The Forgiven, though especially the unhappily married couple who smash into a teenager, killing him.
David (an excellent Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (a decorative, badly used Jessica Chastain) are yelling — and looking — at each other while rocketing down a dark Moroccan road when they plow into the boy. For reasons that are more narratively useful than persuasive, they bring the body with them to their destination, a sprawling compound where a bacchanal is underway. There, after servants whisk away the body, David and Jo join the festivities, assuming their place among the other avatars of wealth, great privilege, and bone-deep rot.”
Next is Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com:
So when they find themselves lost and confused during the long, nighttime drive to Richard’s remote estate—and accidentally run over an impoverished teenager selling fossils on the side of the road, killing him instantly.”
Robert Daniels of the Los Angeles Times:
David, an alcoholic doctor recently sued by a patient for a botched diagnosis, and his younger wife Jo, a children’s book writer, bicker their way through a road trip to the luxe villa of their wealthy friend Richard (Matt Smith) and his loud, spoiled boyfriend Dally (Caleb Landry Jones).
Searching for Richard’s isolated home, the couple drive aimlessly through the Sahara. As David speeds around a dusty curve, a local boy named Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) jumps into the road and is killed by David’s car.
Then there’s Vince Mancini at uproxx.com:
The Forgiven is about — and this won’t shock you if you’ve seen Calvary — guilt. How much guilt we owe personally for the criminal society we didn’t ask to be born into but nonetheless benefited from, and which forms of penance are constructive and which are just masturbatory rationalization.
How did we get here? Mancini wants us doing penance because some tribes wandered into the Sahara Desert 10 or 15 centuries ago and stayed put. When they finally figure out how inhospitable the place is and head to greener pastures in Europe we become guiltier still. But, as this “morality tale” shows, it’s when they get themselves killed incompetently attempting to rob and possibly murder the wicked Westerner — that the ultimate price must be paid.
It was the Henninger’s duty, going by critical coverage, to be victimized. Berbers, apparently, are so righteously entitled to settle some vague score that the felonious plot graphically depicted in the film must be censored from description. The Eurotrash can’t be allowed to get away with it — while it remains hazy what “it” is. Sure, the good doctor was less than completely decent; he couldn’t be certain he wasn’t responsible. That doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t in the least.
David Sexton of the New Statesman said the flick has “been both critically admired and rounded on as just a repellent display of toxic white privilege.” If that referred to the competition between vapid boors striving not to look strident as they try to be witty in the dialogue at Dick and Dally’s, I’d be on board. But people like Sexton are keen on the cast’s smugly arrogant repartee.
What Sexton calls “toxic white privilege” is investing in the barren sands of economic torpor while improving the lifestyles of locals employed. Reviewers find working for Richard and Dally voluntarily the rough equal to being one of the Europeans enslaved by Berber corsairs over hundreds of years. You might be tempted to come back like Stork in Animal House: “Well, what the hell we sposed to do, ya moron?” Going by reactions of some in mainstream media over recent years, engaging in senseless riot, like the one in the finale of Animal House, cannot be ruled out as the answer.
When at least a dozen critics at the top of the reviewing food chain leave the same critical details out of the description of a subject, what does it mean? Only a deranged crank would believe they convened to agree on this prevarication. Isn’t the fact that they all got there independently worse? This kind of loathing for the milieu they all inhabit, and thrive in, is unmistakably a symptom of viral cultural pathology. The ones relying on us for sustenance and plush accommodation are out to get us for providing those resources. And we remain the ingrates.
The West will be the guilty party, even if fiction must be fictionalized to reach that verdict.
The Untouchable Am I Racist
Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist, with surely a fraction The Forgiven’s budget, more than doubled that film’s full take on its first weekend. With even moderate mainstream media attention we’d probably be looking at three times the 12 some million dollars the film has grossed so far. The anti-hate industry, however, does not take kindly to not hating those who yuk it up at woke expense.
Not a one of The Forgiven’s mainstream reviewers took on Am I Racist. The flick was too far beneath their contempt to merit a panning. The comic documentary goes through the motions of anti-racist doctrinal demands in the real world. The procedure ends in invariably comic consequences. Who, but a wandering ideological naïf, would expect anything less?
Content was an insurmountable obstacle for critics with Walsh’s film. Lying about details is less safe when five times as many people saw the show. Is it at all ironic that the ones who did were less inclined to be deceived? Legacy media’s Amen Corner remains convinced that their gospel is the faithful one. How many of that flock actually saw Am I Racist for the purpose of cultural exposure? It would be a trenchant study to find out. None of them noticed the falsifying that went on reviewing McDonagh’s film, which had about one-tenth the viewers — with 100 percent more reviewers.
The film examines what will happen when you follow so-called “anti-racist” guidelines in the real world. People get confused. Matt is quickly expelled from one “do the work” therapy session. To make any headway he must go incognito. Hilarious results abound.
Being white and not believing you’re racist is the fast track to hot water. There are so many pratfalls. One “expert” agrees that in the matter of “cultural appropriation” you’re damned if you do or if you don’t. In “antiracist” guise Matt visits a bar in the middle of nowhere. It’s a joint most people would characterize as “redneck.” A question is posed about “centering whiteness.” Who, one patron asks, is “centering,” whatever it means, “whiteness” in the first place. The rustic regulars in this dive come off as the most sensible people in the documentary.
“Whiteness” is not a term invented by the antiracist’s prey. They’re not the ones who believe in it fervently. Going by The Forgiven reviews, diehards of the faith are the “critics.” Those same ones who are absolutely livid that targeted victims missed out on their big chance for victimhood. Why should anyone expect that they’d feel differently about the same results in real life?
Traditional reviewers in legacy media found Am I Racist too toxic to touch. But mainstream media did not snub it altogether. Vinson Cunningham of the New Yorker and Meagan McArdle at The Washington Post covered the film as a regular news item. Both writers entertained the delusion that the filmmakers and their audience failed to get the full significance of the movie. Alas, the media man’s burden is splainin’ to the peasantry.
Closer to reality is a healthy appetite among the masses for more such confrontations. They get the film’s message fully as well as why the mass media turns out the schlock they do instead of Walsh-like hilarious profundity.
Practitioners of arty pretension never tire of pretending they’re onto something deep. “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it,” was once the Washington Post‘s motto. Were they referring to some kind of affliction”?
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