Browsing the LA Weekly, I was scanning for a movie to go to this weekend, and saw this review of ‘The Blind Side’:
Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to the white folks who took him in.
Based on a true story recounted in Michael Lewis’s 2006 book of the same name, Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them. Steel magnolia Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock, frosted and thickly accented) welcomes the homeless Big Mike into her family’s Memphis McMansion, later explaining to him how to play left tackle. In every scene, Oher is instructed, lectured, comforted, or petted like a big puppy; he is merely a cipher (Aaron has, at most, two pages of dialogue), the vehicle through which the kind-hearted but imperfect whites surrounding him are made saintlier. “Am I a good person?” Leigh Anne asks her husband non-rhetorically – as if every second in this film weren’t devoted to canonizing her. – Melissa Anderson
And I was kinda annoyed at this.
Why? Well, for starters because the story is – as the reviewer notes – true. A white family did take in an essentially homeless black child, raise him, and see him succeed.
And so for Ms. Anderson, it’s a story that can’t be told. Or if it is told, it must be told through the lens of oppression and blind rage – or something.
Now, there are so many problem here that I’ll freely admit that we won’t address them all. But I want to focus on one, small issue.
And that is that the concept of ‘truth’ as enjoyed by someone like Ms. Anderson is a kind of cartoon; an Isaiah Berlin hedgehog, Hollywood ‘high concept‘ kind of a thing where the essential truths are few and huge and relatively uncomplex. The story of race in her world in America is the story of oppression by whites of blacks and other people of color; repression that is physical, economic, cultural, and goes to the heart of the character of every non-white American.
The problem is that there are millions – maybe even billions by this time – of true – meaning factually correct – stories that don’t fit that neat ‘high concept’ model of truth. Because reality is a fox’s world, where many messy small stories have to accumulated into a larger vision.
The story of Mike Ober and the Tuohy family is a truth about race in America. As is the larger story about slavery (itself made up of a million lesser stories, some heinous, some humane). As is the Civil War. As is Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Civil Rights – or the cashier who was rude to a customer of a different race at the liquor store where I bought champagne this New Years’ Eve (the cashier was black, the customer Asian).
And so it’s frustrating to me to hear from someone so invested in The Big Story that she can’t embrace or even acknowledge a small truth that contradicts it.
We’re seeing a bit of it that play out in Patterico’s debate with Charles Johnson over a lame Photoshop of Sarah Palin and President Obama.
The small truth – that the picture’s provenance began with a woman who is a registered Democrat – can’t be allowed to stand in the way of a Big Truth – that the picture is a right-wing assault on Obama. I’ve got to compliment Patterico as embracing the ambiguity here while for some reason Charles seems to reject it (…in the last collision with Charles here, I think we may have been trying to make the same point).
The reality there is doubtless as complex as the reality of the story behind Blind Side. And it only fits the Big Story if you chop off it’s legs, or better still ignore it.
I don’t like Big Story thinking. It suggests that people who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of reality. I like thinking that can take a position and embrace the facts that challenge it.
I wish Melissa Anderson and Charles Johnson showed more of that kind of thinking….in fact, I wish a lot of people on many sides of many arguments could.
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Ah, but the truth must not stand in the way of those who would profit from the allegations of racism.
Aw geez. Can’t a nice story just be a nice story? As you maybe can guess, AL, I am done with the victimhood of the wannabee oppressed. As with all groups and causes who run along the fringe until they become so shrill only certain animal species can hear their cries…they insult those who are truly victims and create an escape route for those who are truly bigoted. When the nice lady wanted to complain about the an officer’s rudeness and her certainly he only stopped her because she was DWB when all he said was “good morning, ma’am”(caught on videotape) I wanted to tell her how much easier it becomes for me to be skeptical of the next accusation of racism, because I’ve heard too many provably false accusations. And why does it have to be about color all the time anyway. Can’t it be about some nice folks taking in a needy kid?
It was a really good movie, too, not false or manipulative as I worried it would be.
Part of that’s the casting. Sandra Bullock was near-perfect, and is actually the force-of-nature pivot of the whole film. I give good odds that she gets her Oscar for this one. But Quinton Aaron deserves equal credit for his role as Michael Oher, which is harder as so much of it is non-verbal. He makes the movie a consistently understated narrative, and that’s a big part of the reason why it works.
If you haven’t seen this one, I recommend it. It will be better than you think – and more to the point, it will be very good.
In the end, seats in theaters, DVD rentals, etc. are the best response to people like Melissa Anderson. But pointing out her fundamentally dishonest mindset along the way is productive, too.
Well, no. If The Blind Side were not a true story that stuck pretty close to its real life characters, it would be regarded as cultural propaganda and critics in general (not just the few like Anderson) would bury it in revulsion.
Stories about interracial relationships, of any kind, are always deeply despised by somebody. At one time, people who railed about miscegenation and blacks on public transportation would have hated this movie. Now it’s white liberals who can’t stand it, especially when one of the characters is a white southern she-devil. (The sneering references to “Steel Magnolias” and “Memphis McMansion” are purely visceral.)
Interesting side point: I just saw Tarantino’s very strange Inglourious Basterds, a great film full of scalpings and obscure references to German Weimar culture. One of the references is to Karl May, the German Zane Grey.
May’s westerns were about a white man and an Apache who became “blood brothers”. This kind of un-Aryan thing was not acceptable to the Nazis, and May was briefly banned – until it was learned that Adolf Hitler was a big Karl May fan. Other Karl May fans included Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein.
Obviously good stories really do appeal across some very wide boundaries, and that’s what some people really hate about them.
This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with collectivism. In requiring that favorable reactions are only due to members of select victim groups, it denies the manifest fact that the human race is made up of individuals, all of whom are unique and diverse, and only belong to groups if you take a very big shoe horn to force them in and blind yourself to their enormous differences. Diversity in the collectivist view is only worthy if you don’t belong to the designated oppressors group. Collectivists all claim the moral high ground for themselves because of their compassion for victims. Here we have a situation where nobody is a victim in the end, so obviously nobody is worthy of honor. BALONEY! And congratulations to the film makers for telling this point of view!
The young Big Mike wasn’t being trivialized in every scene. In a memorable, amazing scene, Leigh Anne goes to visit Michael’s cocaine addicted mother. Leigh Anne’s presence, acceptance and empathy to the devastated wreck of a woman was the most basically luminous Christian moment I’ve seen in film in years.
No “The Blind Side” isn’t about saintly white people, but it is about what people who are religiously inspired can do.
It was a beautiful film and in the end, the LA reviewer demonstrates that many in our ‘culture’ are repelled by real beauty and are too small to appreciate our rich humanity.
_The story of Mike Ober and the Tuohy family is a truth about race in America. As is the larger story about slavery (itself made up of a million lesser stories, some heinous, some humane)_
How nice that it all evens out in the end. Likewise, I suppose the story of the holocaust is full bad nazis and good ones; some good jews and some bad ones. I’m sure the story of the Taliban includes many brave and kind-hearted people.
I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that you would raise a mighty stink if you saw a movie about a US soldier who came back from Iraq and beat his wife to death (or killed himself), arguing that even if based on a true story, it sends the wrong message and promotes a false narrative about soldiers, war, the USA; and that it ignores the larger, more important truth; that it fails to provide proper context; that it focuses on an outlier rather than something more essential. You would probably argue that simply by selecting that particular story the movie-makers are legitimate targets of criticism because they are so evidently trying to make a larger point (Big Concept) rather than simply telling the story of one individual (smaller truth). I’m not sure how much you would support a movie, based on a true story or not, that creates a portrait of reality deeply at odds with your version.
Perhaps you’ve met Anderson, or know more about her than I do, but I do not see how you can conclude from the extract of her review in the LA Weekly that
_The story of race in her world in America is the story of oppression by whites of blacks and other people of color; repression that is physical, economic, cultural, and goes to the heart of the character of every non-white American_
In fact, if you read the “entire”:http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-11-17/film/saintly-white-people-do-the-saving-in-the-blind-side/ review instead of just the extract, you can see that she believes the movie is sappy and condescending, not that it contradicts some “Big Picture†or large truth. (Readers will be thrilled to know the original review comes from the Village Voice.) It seems to me that you are projecting onto her a set of beliefs so that you can knock them down.
Isn’t it just a tiny bit ironic that what you are touting as a complex, messy, small “truth,†inconvenient or otherwise, is a Hollywood movie? Sure it’s based on a true story—lots of movies are. But–at least to my mind–it is silly to argue that these condensed, scripted, re-arranged, dramatized 2-hour fantasies have anything to do with truth.
Many apologies. I accidently hit submit instead of preview. My lengthy comment was a) unfinished b) unedited c) with an exposed link. Can someone fix c for me.
God knows we all had a problem with Schindler’s List’s portrayal of a German war-profiteer…
But the truth is even the holocaust takes a back seat to race struggles in this country.
mark:
Well, that pretty much explodes film, fiction, and representative art in general, since none of it exists that is not condensed, scripted, rearranged and dramatized. This is why people enjoy it – more than they would enjoy hanging out at the coroner’s office, watching the autopsies.
How silly of us.
I guess we should just stick to The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Though come to think of it, the truth in that book is condensed, scripted, arranged, and occasionally even dramatic.
Glen,
I think you are confusing enjoyment with evaluation. I love a Hollywood movie as much as anyone else. They’re great fun. But I don’t recommend searching among the faces at the Oscars for purveyors of the truth, or for anything mildly important or challenging. You may feel differently, of course.
Elitist that I am, I have no problem in elevating a good book over a good movie if I am looking for a glimpse into the complexities and ambiguities of human nature.
In lifting all the adjectives of my statement, you neglected the noun at the end. Hollywood makes million dollar fantasies. Hollywood may want to make you feel better, but it isn’t really designed to offer up any truths, social, scientific or moral.
AL,
As someone who damn near worships literature, I don’t see anything to disagree with in your last comment. Literature, at least for me, expresses rich truths (& entertains at the same time). I’ve never seen a Hollywood movie that does that. Hollywood will take a truth, a book, or a true story and wash out everything that makes it difficult. I imagine that is simply a function of economics. The costs of making a movie are so high that the appeal must necessarily be very broad in order to make the investment worthwhile. As a result, the best movies pale in comparison to the best books.
mark –
Leaving aside the fact that “I don’t like movies” is irrelevant to a discussion about a movie, I think that like Anderson you’re letting generalizations get the better of judgment.
Yes, literature is superior to film. John Huston’s Moby Dick, made in Hollywood, is not Melville, but it certainly doesn’t suck. Neither does The Godfather, Ben Hur, The Caine Mutiny, or Deliverance – all made in Hollywood, from books.
Citizen Kane is a classic example of a film that does things literature can’t do. If it all leaves you cold, then you’re arguing from a point outside of most people’s experience.