Politics & Art: Reviewing the reviewers
The New Statesman, the Spectator, & the Shape of Water
I’m widely regarded amongst my peers to be right wing. I see myself as a leftie, but no one else does, which is probably telling. I can’t see myself being able to cast a vote for Corbyn, and I think people are too harsh on Rees-Mogg. Those two statements mean that I’m basically a cross between Thatcher and Hitler as far as my friends of my own generation are concerned.
I think it’s fair to say that a primary reason for this is that, by and large, they don’t understand anti-semitism. Their take on Nazism is that it is anti black people and homosexuals, it was started by Hitler (Germany’s Donald Trump) who was defeated by communists & liberals and then the Jews stole Palestine.
The discomfort I feel as someone who desperately wants to be on the left stems from the fact that the Tories seem vastly more likely to keep defending a traditionally liberal value: Freedom of Speech. When holocaust-deniers (divided vaguely between the vile, the deluded and both) are silenced by the same teenagers who no-platformed Peter Tatchell, Brendan O’Neill and Germaine Greer, the only logical conclusion available seems to be not that they want to defend Jews, but that they must detest free speech at least marginally more than they fear them.
The things I’m saying here, no matter how they make you feel, would traditionally make me a leftie.
The pursuit of balance
Every week I read both the Spectator and the New Statesman in a desperate bid to be able to milk the best from each side, as well as to be able to persuade myself and others that I’m sort of open-minded. Of course, I get the worst of each side as well: I was treated to articles last week explaining how the Oxfam scandal demonstrated how bad the Tories are… and how futile charities are.
There is a kind of balance to their quality: week to week there is quite often a clear answer as to which is better, but they more or less alternate on that front. Where they shall never change is the arts section. The Spectator is always spectacularly inferior to The New Statesman when analysing films and music especially. What’s particularly noticeable is the sheer volume of bad reviews it gives.
I should be fair. Positive movie reviews are hard to write. No one knows this better than Deborah Ross, a woman whose career seems to be to perpetuate that oft-proven assumption that the political-right are constantly deficient when it comes to analysing the arts. The majority of Ms. Ross’s reviews are negative, and most of these can be boiled down to either the statement ‘I wish I were watching a film that makes me feel nice’, or, more accurately, ‘I don’t know what genre is’. If this seems harsh, then I can only refer you to her own work, highlights of which include:
- Bemoaning that there was no romantic story arc in the film Dunkirk.
- Complaining that Spotlight, a film which observes the integrity of the press in exposing the Catholic Church child abuse scandal, didn’t sensationalise their story enough.
– Accusing Blade Runner 2049’s exposé of how hyper-sexualised our use of technology is of itself being needlessly hyper-sexualised, which is basically akin to complaining that Gary Oldman needlessly smoked too many cigars in his portrayal of Churchill, or that too many people needlessly died in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. Then again, she also accused The Big Sick of being racist toward Pakistanis…
Of course, she does all this because it’s easier than praising things — just look at her attempt to give acclaim to The Artist: “I loved it. Loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it.”
Essentially, what Deborah Ross is saying in each case is that she wished she’d seen an entirely different type of thing: She wished she’d seen Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour instead of Nolan’s Dunkirk. She wished she’d seen an episode of The Waltons instead of Blade Runner 2049. And, instead of watching Spotlight, she wished she’d seen Nancy Grace berate a paedophile on live TV.
So, I don’t love the Spectator’s approach to film reviews, and don’t have time to engage with their music ones. Yet I often have to check myself that I’m not making the same pathetic mistakes whenever I want to say or write anything negative about a film. But I’m confident that I face an entirely different dilemma with The Shape of Water:
It is an excellent film. And it terrifies me.
Certainly the reactions to it, both in the theatre and the press, have alarmed me more than any item of culture has in a long time.
I shan’t ruin it, as it is a film which should be seen (exquisitely detailed — note whose name comes up in the opening credits as the word ‘monster’ is read by the narrator).
I shall say, without spoilers, that it went to great and none-too-subtle lengths to connect the ideas of race-equality, gay-rights and bestiality.
What was so peculiar about this was that it’s the kind of thing that Rod Liddle, Deborah Ross’s colleague at the Spectator might have done, pending the resources and the inclination. The somewhat prattish provocateur would have taken great delight in recreating A United Kingdom or Brokeback Mountain with a bestial relationship at the centre.
I would have joined the uproar against such a film. My banners would have read ‘Stop making false equivalences between homosexuality and sexual crimes, and on a side-note you should be aware that you’re coming dangerously close to looking like a racist!’ (In my world, nuance is prioritised over brevity, even on protest signs).
Those equivalences were once pushed to the sides where only the crudest parodies would touch them. But now they have been owned – such comparisons were only intolerable when they would have threatened to topple the gay-rights movement. Now though, there’s no wrong in it as the momentum is going in the other direction: now bestiality can share in the success of other progressive movements.
After witnessing a black couple and a homosexual man being evicted from a pie-bar we are taken straight back to the flat where a woman and a fish are starting their relationship. It should be said that their communication was a handful of sign-language and her feeding him eggs – this was not anthropomorphism, it was, perhaps, the equivalent of a relationship with a smart Labrador.
What with his…aquatic nature, they opted for the bathroom as a suitable compromise for consummation, and the shower curtain was pulled across in a throwback to the times when silver-screen sex was a cuddle which disappeared beneath the sheets… only this time the curtain was pulled across after full frontal nudity and second base with a fish. This gave the scene all the euphemistic power of a father who starts the sentence with ‘when a mummy and daddy love each other very much’ and then finishes it with the f-word, the phrase ‘at it like rabbits’, and a rough sketch on the back of your maths jotter.
It’s not the first time in the past year that I’ve been deeply unsettled by on-screen sex (Atomic Blonde went out of it’s way to conflate eroticism with violence) and it shan’t be the last (I have some trepidation about seeing Red Sparrow next week). This, again, though, is different. It’s the aspirational tone — this wasn’t grim, it was Grimm: a fairytale full of horror but also of joy. It was conscious of light and dark. Darkness was the American dream man, del Toro’s Gaston… and light was the union between this woman and a fish.
Because of the myriad sexual revolutions of the past 60 years, consent seems to be the only remaining prerequisite for morally acceptable sexual behaviour. (The confusion some famous men have recently expressed as to what they did wrong suggests that this, too is being chipped away, but that’s for another article). Consent, of course is a vital thing to insist upon, but is it the only one? Consent is the only thing which holds at bay paedophilia and bestiality, but this film is not celebrated despite it pushing back the boundaries of what that entails – it is celebrated for that. Perhaps you will call me a maniacal doom-sayer for implying that our current dominant worldview is leading to a significant drop in the age of consent within the next 10–15 years, but then again, if I’d have predicted the reaction to The Shape of Water just 5 years ago, you’d have called me the same thing.
This is why, I think, my friends (and by now probably many readers) regard me as disgustingly right-wing: I adore art & creativity, but I have a hyper-awareness that is quite possibly too sensitive as to where it leads…but I don’t think so.
I’m all for progress, but here’s the question I find myself asking over and over and over again: If we don’t know what the final outcome that we’re aiming for is, how are we ever to know the difference between progress & change? Until that question is answered, I can never celebrate any achievement of ‘progress’. I need to be persuaded that something is broken before I will work to fix it. I’m not against progress any more than I’m against reconstructive plastic surgery, but the unease one feels when a distant aunt pulls you into an unfamiliarly buxom embrace is nothing compared to how I felt when I heard callers on the Kermode & Mayo programme expressing that they had been won over to bestiality.
As long as the loudest voices on the left continue in this vein: shrill, anti-free speech and pro-‘progress’, people like myself – the politically left and morally conservative – will continue to vote to the right and everyone will continue to be surprised by elections which are marked by liberal dialogue… and conservative victories.
Your progress just looks like change to us – and, for fear of sounding like a typical remoaner – change for the sake of change and in the face of the unknown seems recklessly dangerous.
