I'm now on the lookout for the word 'homophobic' to describe in negative terms any article of cultural criticism. When I find it, I will automatically assume the critic is a wuss and then make appropriate adjustments.
There are, among my contemporaries, several or maybe few, who cannot seem to get over the fact that Malcolm X was assassinated by a black man. It seems to them, the very hight of hypocrisy or conspiracy. I can't remember which, but my understanding won't mitigate their outrage. That is the nature of outrage, by the way. People just want to stay mad. And so I believe it is with those critics who wield 'homophobic' in their arsenal of opprobrium.
The article that launched this minor deflection from my ordinary tangents was over at the Film Freak which was the joint that got me interested, for a week, in Mad Men. In the space of a few paragraphs they assailed a couple of flicks, one about Michael Jackson and the sequel to Boondock Saints. All the time I was reacting, I thought that Boondock Saints was Layer Cake, but I recall them of a piece. Some ultraviolent cool flick with people being bloodied to rock music. But now that I recall the plot of Boondock Saints, I'm actually more ready to concede the arguments.
Nevertheless, the point of my weighing in, aside from my general anti-yuppie sentiments regarding the moral compass of the Hollywood aesthetes and the questioning of the sanity that might consider Larry David a 'genius', is whether or not it makes a whit of difference if someone calls you a fag when they are in the process of shooting you in the head. Or the slightly different question on the matter of homophobia, which is hardly as deadly as say... cholesterol.. whether anyone who can stomach your garden variety shooting-people-to-rock-music-movie should be palatable if one cannot handle namecalling. Is this just another case of calling attention to the mote while ignoring the beam?
Well in the case of Boondock Saints II, given the premise of the original film, probably not. But in the case of 'homophobic' as criticism, probably so. Film Freak has piqued my curiosity and exposed my bias, which is why they remain on the RSS feed, but I'm really on this deflection.
Malcolm is dead, and I still say he was more important than Matthew Shepherd. But what happened to either of them is not commonplace by a longshot. What goes by the screens as 'racist' and 'homophobic' has become such a weak and often witless bleat that the meaning of death has lost its sting. This is why, I suppose, it has become fashion to write movies about mass extinctions and the slaughter of henchmen.
Speaking of which, I caught P2 this Halloween weekend. It was extraordinarily creepy precisely because the victim was quite obviously a woman who had no reason to expect to defend her life in such a manner as she was forced to by the circumstances of the film. She had been completely bred out of her killer instinct, except at the very end of the film at which point the antagonist called her a cunt. She then, like a daemon bit of computer code summoned by remote control, did something more depraved than anyone accused of torture at Abu Grhaib. She burned a man alive.
If we are becoming so trigger-bound within our already demoralized culture that the mere utterance of a single word pushes us into mindless outrage, then that more than anything shows how brittle we are. I'm sure there's a psychological term for that.
PS. I already know what you're going to call me. Try again.
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