In the early to mid-nineties, brilliant writer and prose stylist Joan Didion decided-- in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne -- to write the script for a Hollywood film starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. I'm sure they did so for understandable financial reasons.
For less obvious reasons, the movie is terrible. It is dull, confused, and pointless. There are about five different narrative threads that you think might amount to the film's story. None of them go anywhere. There are a series of people on the screen. But you can't stand any of them.
The screenwriting pair seem to have been aware of at least some of the film's deficiencies. Dunne even devoted an entire very entertaining book to describing the process of the film's creation. While he ultimately appears to think the movie turned out as more passable than it is, he does not rate it as anything higher than mediocre.
After admitting this much, however, Dunne then attempts to exonerate himself and Didion of responsibility for the fact. He casts blame for the film's chock-a-block storytelling on the collective decision-making processes that happen around the Hollywood readers' table, and the inevitable artistic compromises that result. "A camel is a horse that was made by committee," as he memorably puts it. And his Redford/Pfeiffer movie indeed turned out to be very much a camel.
There seems to be some truth to Dunne's explanation of the film's failures. In Dunne's descriptions of the comments he receives from various twenty-something creative executives during the rewrite process (he is advised, for instance, to give the female protagonist more scenes in which she performs random acts of kindness for her coworkers, as this will make her "likable"), one is reminded of the unforgettable description of a filmmaker's script meeting in Friedrich Reck's Diary of a Man in Despair. As soon as something like consensus starts to emerge amongst the group, Reck notes, the hordes of young people employed by film studios begin to fear their jobs may soon be revealed as unnecessary. And so the "notes" and "edits" pour in again.
One is fully prepared to believe that studio consensus-seeking has ruined many a good film, and in just the way Dunne and Reck describe it. It is more than a little ironic to see Dunne invoking this notion, however, when Didion herself once decisively rejected it as an excuse for poor filmmaking.
Writing much earlier, in one of her essays in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Didion points out that blaming artistic failures in Hollywood on the "studio system" rather than the individual creator reflects an unspoken conviction that all genuine self-expression must be pure and full of integrity. Didion's point is that this view, while touching, remains at best unproven.
Reading between the lines of Dunne's book, one must say that Didion's point in this essay manages to score a few points -- while her and Dunne's screenplay loses several. While we can all agree that the film that ultimately resulted from Dunne and Didion's draft is bad, and that committee-thinking probably contributed to its downfall, it is by no means clear from Dunne's book that his and Didion's original ideas would have made it better.
One of the worst things about the film, for instance, is its approach to gender relations. Pfeiffer's character is simpering and insecure. Redford plays a weathered he-man who roughly shows her the ropes of the journalism profession, yelling at her, teaching her everything she knows, and eventually romancing her and sleeping with her. While she is working for him.
Okay, so the movie is sexist. Was that because of the dreadful studio executives and their prejudiced assumptions about what the American public demands? Au contraire. Apparently, in Dunne and Didion's original draft, Redford's character goes so far as to slap our female protagonist across the face. This not because we needed to show that he is bad news as a romantic partner; rather, it is because we needed to demonstrate that he is a rough-and-tumble sort of alpha male with an edge of danger.
It was actually a studio executive, with his supposed blinkered conservatism, who insisted this scene get the axe. The executive's objection to depicting male-female relations in this way was that it "doesn't play in 1994, the whole consciousness is different," and that it "constitute[s] abusive behavior." Sounds inarguable enough. In response, however, Dunne says that he and Didion repeatedly "invoked the dreaded letters PC" to try to bring him onboard with keeping the scene -- thankfully, to no avail.
In hindsight, the studio was obviously right, and our artistic visionaries clearly wrong. And it was our heroic screenwriters, not a nitwit creative executive, who came up with the idea of naming Robert Redford's grizzled crusading journalist character "Warren Justice." (Dunne in the book insists this is less preposterous than it sounds, because there is the poet named Donald Justice. Are you persuaded?)
It seems to me that the problem with Dunne and Didion's film is very much not that the studio went too far in trying to "soften" the script and render it more PC. Rather the opposite, in fact: it ought to have scrapped the whole dated premise.
I'm intrigued by how often, when we read things or see films from the 'eighties and 'nineties, people seemed to live in dread of being accused of being "PC." (There is a reason, after all, that Dunne was able to invoke the specter of this accusation in his argument with the studio.) When we look back on the era, indeed, it is very obvious to us that the dread of being labeled PC was taken far more seriously than the possibility of being racist or sexist, and that people did far more to avoid it - including by saying and doing things that were racist and sexist. Where, then, were the purported PC police that were supposedly running amok?
Very few of the media products that emerged from that era strike us now as particularly thoughtful on the subjects of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Instead, we seem to have a series of Hollywood screenwriters who were deliberately taking a "bad boy" thrill in dropping in scenes and one-liners they knew would offend some of their audience. The supposedly family-friendly 1987 film The Monster Squad, to take one at random, manages in its bare 80-minute runtime to positively depict non-consensual voyeurism and sexual blackmail, mock overweight children, and insinuate that gay men are pedophiles. In one scene, one of our snot-nosed suburban white kid heroes describes a neighbor as "probably just some guy on welfare." This is supposed to be a funny, amusingly precocious, and therefore charming remark.
And of course, it's not like this sort of pattern came to a halt once the millennium turned. It is true that Hollywood is forever being denounced as "liberal," and is surely staffed almost entirely by people who vote a straight-Democratic ticket. But perhaps for this very reason, Hollywood is always falling over itself to churn out films it thinks will pander sufficiently to what it imagines to be the prejudices of the rest of America. I was watching the Fast and Furious franchise recently with a friend. At various times police in the films plant false evidence on a man in order to frame him and brutalize another man in captivity, mocking the Geneva Conventions in the meantime. This is portrayed as smart police work, and maybe even as funny.
Even a film with a broadly "liberal" political message, such as 2015's The Big Short, seems to rewrite the historical record at times so as to ensure that all positive agents of the film's action are white men. The film's examples of corruption and malfeasance, meanwhile, are attributed largely to female SEC regulators and women Wall Street executives. In the real world -- and as described in Michael Lewis' book on which the film is based -- one of the first whistleblowers on the subprime mortgage industry was a woman. Because this is Hollywood, however, she appears nowhere in the film.
Is it fair to judge films on this basis? Or am I just being "PC"? Dunne and Didion would probably say the latter. They would perhaps insist that human relations are more complex than the political mores of a given epoch will allow, and that artists should have the freedom to portray behavior that would be out of bounds in our actual lives.
And yes, this is surely true. We ought to be capable of both depicting and handling the sum of reality, in all its variegations, even when it cannot easily be slotted into our ideological categories. What strikes one about the failures of "PC" consciousness in films or books, however, is that they so often depict the world as less complex than it really is. These "non-PC" moments are, nearly always, failures of realism and honesty, rather than an excessive frankness in "telling it like it is."
Take the great Paul Bowles novel The Sheltering Sky. The book is brilliant, engaging, artful, and memorable -- right up until the point at which our male protagonist (based on the author) dies. Then, his wife in the novel (based on Jane Bowles, the author's actual wife and fellow writer) -- who, up until this time has been a compellingly human character with complex motivations, now decides to wander into the desert. There, she is raped by two men in a caravan, and falls in love with one of them. He takes her home, adds her to his harem, locks her in a room twenty-four hours a day, and feeds her drugs to keep her stupefied.
What is her reaction to this, in the novel? "[S]he lived now solely for those few fiery hours spent each day beside Belqassim [her captor]," writes Bowles. She would lie with "her mind empty of everything save the memory or anticipation of Belqassim's presence." Is all of this really happening? Or is it a fever dream hallucination brought on by the glaring North African sun? One wishes to believe it is the latter, but the novel gives us no particular reason to think so.
Now let us turn to Muriel Spark's classic novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Recall the scene, if you will, in which our main character's art teacher forcibly kisses her. Shortly thereafter, while the main character is still a teenager, the two begin an affair.
Both of these scenarios transgress in many ways against our modern egalitarian notions of gender relations. One of them, however, (Spark's) stands up as art. The other, painfully, does not. Why? Because one seems grounded in real human experience, with all its strangeness and baffling complexity and inscrutable motivations. The other is idiotically straightforward and simplistic - so much so that it utterly defies credibility.
To his credit, Bowles acknowledged --in a preface he latter attached to the novel -- that reviewers who criticized the final section of the novel were pointing to something more substantial than merely a lapse from the canons of "PC." In the strange and radically discordant final fifty pages of the book, Bowles notes, "The novel followed the directions of Kit's fantasizing, which to some critics meant my own male—thus unrealistic—fantasizing." Well, I think they had a point, Paul Bowles. (Though I swear, you'll love the book up to this point!)
This problem -- the lack of realism -- is what ultimately makes the rape scenes in Bowles or the romance in the Dunne/Didion movie so unsuccessful. Unsuccessful, we might add, from an artistic as much as a moral point of view. Sexist, racist, and homophobic attitudes in books or movies are not objectionable because they violate some arbitrary canon of "political correctness." They are objectionable because they are dishonest.
Women do not in fact long to be ravished and held prisoner by strange men. Gay men are not in fact all attracted to little boys. White men do not in fact always save the day. It is not actually funny and charming when police frame innocent people, brutalize criminal suspects, and apply the "third degree," or when teenagers take nude photos of their female classmates and use them to blackmail them into doing their bidding. A work of art might legitimately depict any of these things happening—but to depict them without consequences, without darkness, is a betrayal of the world as it is.
In essence, it is the lapses from the supposed PC canons that are truly ideological in nature, rather than the application of these standards. If to be ideological is to insist on interpreting all reality through a narrow and pre-set frame of assumptions -- to choose to depict the world in terms of abstractions rather than real, complex human beings and human motives -- then sexism and racism are the ultimate ideological stances.
As Mary McCarthy once put it in a story, "for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism [or, we might add, other forms of prejudice] was a form of intellectuality, [....] It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize."
Artists, in their desire for liberation from ideologies, sometimes forget this fact, and therefore end up railing against moral and political criticism in all their forms. In hindsight, however, political critics of works of art never appear ridiculous to us simply because they assessed those works on the basis of moral and political standards, because they asked whether or not they were morally sane, whether or not the political attitudes they reflect correspond in some way to what is true. They appear ridiculous to us only when the moral and political standards the critics apply were themselves absurd.
There is a poem by E.E. Cummings, for instance, in which he mocks the 1930s Marxist critic, Mike Gold. Class-conscious Marxist literary criticism was to the 1930s as "Political Correctness" was to the 1990s. It was the perfect bugbear, and Mike Gold, as one of its crassest exponents, therefore became the easiest whipping boy—particularly for modernist poets who were tired of being accused of catering to aristocratic, bourgeois, and effete tastes disconnected from the proletarian class struggle. Wrote Cummings of Gold:
For what did our intellectual do,
when he found himself so empty and blo?
he pondered a while and he said,said he
“It’s the social system,it isn’t me!
Not I am a fake,but America’s phoney!
Not I am no artist,but Art’s bologney!
[...]
or as comrade Shakespeare remarked of old
All that Glisters Is Mike Gold
There is, to be sure, something preposterous in the 1930s brand of criticism that went counting up political crimes in the works of other authors, naming all the places where Shakespeare negatively portrays a member of the working class, say. It seems ludicrous to us not because all of the cited passages of Shakespeare have actually borne the test of time, however, but because we disagree with the dogmatic idea that simply because these lousy passages exist, then all the rest of Shakespeare must be bourgeois dreck as well.
The reason why now, Cummings has aged better than Mike Gold, is not because it is wrong for critics to expect literature to portray working class characters with realism and sympathy. It is because of the absurd absolutism of Gold's position—the mindset which divided all the world into sheep and goats, "bourgeois" and "advanced." It is because doctrinaire and totalistic Marxism proved to be an unrealistic an ideology, and as incapable of being honest about whole realms of the human experience, as any belief system yet invented.
There is no such thing as an abstract "Political Correctness," therefore. There are only true things and falsehoods about the human experience. Sometimes -- indeed, very often, as in the hands of Mike Gold and his modern-day successors -- falsehoods are uttered in the name of political or moral propriety, egalitarian ideals, leftist or radical talking points, etc. But I suspect they scarcely compare in number to the falsehoods that have been uttered in defense of racist, sexist, inegalitarian, and heteronormative views about how to structure society -- and which are themselves totalistic and absolutist ideologies.
It is this falseness, at last, that we object to in the films and books we have been discussing here. "Warren Justice" should not slap Michelle Pfeiffer's character in a movie. This is so not because it might offend someone's sensibilities in the audience. There are perhaps sensibilities in the world that ought to be offended, and the mere fact that someone might be rendered uncomfortable is never a justification for excluding something from art. Rather, Warren Justice should not do so because to portray such action as "sexy" and rugged, to depict it as a prelude to romance, would be an ugly and false touch in a work of art. It would be an artificial "movie moment" in the worst sort of way. It would be bogus. It would be absurd. Thank God the studio took it out. Too bad they left all the rest of the movie in.
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