Not buying it
Does it feel a little contrived if I pick nits with this kinda shitty review of the new movie Enchanted? Am I not a responsible, thoughtful individual? Aren’t I, like Slate critic Dana Stevens, bothered by Disney’s glorification of quote-unquote crass consumerism? Don’t I want to see movies that teach better values to our small female people?
Well: (1) Yes, probably a little, since I don’t really care about Enchanted. (2) No, not all that responsible, and slightly less thoughtful after smoking marijuana for so long and (worse) then abruptly quitting smoking marijuana. (3) Eh. And (4) no, mostly I want to see movies with girls pillow-fighting and exotic martial arts. Also, as a staunch McLuhanist, I’m not so much concerned with the content of any particular medium as with the transformative impact of the medium itself.
That last sentence is the sort of thing that helps me win arguments at cocktail parties, especially when I shout it while furiously waving the lit end of a cigarette dangerously close to my opponents’ faces. But I also mean it. And while it’s a bit of a stretch to say it specifically applies to the case of my complaint about this movie review, it’s kinda not: A lot of the bullshit we have to wade through—see also this fantastically informative piece on how video-game ratings aren’t stopping kids from playing the violent ones*—is a result of the ongoing insistence that we’re all a bunch of little blank roboslates, condemned to directly emulate whatever takes place on the screens we happen to look at.
I don’t buy it! And that’s why I don’t care, Stevens, about “the movie’s solemn celebration of … shopping.” You know what I’ve learned in 31 years of living, particularly during the two I spent waiting tables in Midtown Manhattan? People love shopping. Not all of them, but lots, and lots of them are women. (Men like shopping, too, but you don’t seem to see packs of fathers and sons loaded down with Bloomingdale’s bags, giggling as they cram themselves into a taxi.) It’s almost as if the movie is reflecting a truth about ourselves. But maybe you really think that if the movies would just quit making it look like so much fun to buy new things, little girls wouldn’t want to do it?
Look, the archetypal princess story goes back at least as far as 1990, and getting fancy things has always been an integral part of it. The fancy things, after all, are one major reason it’s a princess story, rather than a social worker story. (I guess maybe you’d have been happier, Stevens, if there really had been a fairy godmother instead of a credit card, even though that seems like it would run completely contrary to the fairy-tale world–vs.–real world aesthetic?) And movies aren’t vehicles for didacticism, at least not at the expense of entertainment or story structure. And a good review should tell us more about the film than the reviewer’s own vaguely anticorporate semiphilosophies, especially when she’s getting paid to publish it on a website that prominently features the very word “shopping” in its table of contents.
—j
*I don’t know why this is—it always worked so well for movies.
