A Very Personal Review of the Reviews of “I, Tonya”
In the top-tier newspapers where I often go for a quick survey of movie reviews, there was this...tone in the articles about “I, Tonya.”
Manhola Dargis in The New York Times, David Sims in The Atlantic, and Richard Brody in The New Yorker all had problems with the way the film handled domestic violence— they all criticized it for being too “glib” about abuse, about the unnervingly slapstick way scenes moved between moments of intense home violence and snarky one-liners.
I saw the movie soon after it came out, and it hadn’t even occured to me to see its depiction of abuse as slapstick or glib. To me it seemed like a rather insightful — or at least interesting and meaningful — artistic rendering of the way one normalizes domestic violence in order to cope.
But I suppose it’s a valid criticism, I thought, reading these reviews, except for that tone — that tone of distance, of some kind of squeamishness or profound discomfort with the subject matter at hand.
I realized what I really wanted to know, to ask the authors of these breezily intellectual take-downs of a movie’s handling of domestic violence, was:
Have you ever been hit? Not spanked or lightly slapped or something else done with a modicum of control (although even that — have you?), but really hit? Punched or beaten or whaled on? What about thrown into something or had things thrown at you or been dragged around for a bit or fled with terror in your home while being chased by someone else whose home it is too? Have you been yelled or hissed at while you’re being hit, or when you know a beating is about to come? Do you know the feeling of those words hitting you before, during, after the physical hitting — words that are hateful, derisive, mean; words said from a face you love and trust, in a voice twisted and unreachable? Have you watched someone you love being beaten or thrown by someone else you love and been unable to stop it? Do you know the feeling of trying to protect but failing? Have you, as you grew up, had to face the horrible horrible truth — dim at first, but becoming sharper and brighter with time — that you have begun harming those you love in the same way you were harmed? Or that you have chosen a partner who does those same things to you — things you couldn’t escape as a child? Do you know what it is to reach inside yourself and try to pry apart love and abuse, only to find that they are fused at their cores?
— my guess is no. But I would like to ask, to actually know. Because unless they do know what that’s like, it sure is hard to see how they can be so confident about “I, Tonya” doing it all wrong.
