It's not news that "humankind cannot bear very much reality," as T.S. Eliot once noted. We've always looked for short cuts to avoid confronting certain individuals and experiences head-on, in all their richly intimidating complexity. Only difference nowadays is that our culture actually encourages us to grab the first and handiest label when it comes to anything more complicated than a cartoon character. (And despite his lack of depth, even poor Sponge Bob Square Pants can't escape getting slapped with a scarlet H - for homosexual - by the religious right.)
Easy to say we're a polarized nation, drowning in politically correct idiocy, and let it go at that. But that red and blue, liberal and conservative dichotomy is spawning a truly scary way of describing the world. Faced with living, breathing, messy reality, we're given to saving time and thought by whipping out conceptual cookie-cutters to make it fit into our own, familiar status quo.
Unfortunately, when that cookie cutter comes down, heads and arms and legs get lopped off. To freeze-frame recalcitrant reality, you've got to lose bothersome elements like nuance, subtlety, resonance, ambiguity, perspective, context - all the stuff that enlarges us.
Cookie-cutter-speak is the first language of politicians and talkshow bloviators. Witness Seattle-based national talk-radio host Michael Medved, who in the weeks leading up to last Sunday's Academy Awards engaged in extraordinarily simpleminded readings of best-picture nominee "Million Dollar Baby." Fueled by political bombast, Medved reduced "Baby" to liberal blue, treating the movie as nothing more than a political billboard for euthanasia.
Never mind that Clint Eastwood's latest foray into the power and tragedy of familial love is a beautiful, challenging fiction about three idiosyncratic "losers" who rise to heroic grace under pressure. Or that "Baby"'s images are so strong and pure, they make us recall that film can be poetry.
And the little matter of spoiling "Baby"'s narrative twists and turns for those who hadn't yet seen the movie was irrelevant in the face of this fundamentalist jihad against Hollyweird, the mythical country Medved claims is so clearly out of sync with America. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd, bless her barbed tongue, wrote a bracing column enumerating how much great art we'd lose (for starters, all that Shakespearean mayhem) should we apply Medved's rule of thumb.
I didn't think that Medved and his ilk could do any real damage to "Million Dollar Baby." We're privileged to live in a country where books and movies aren't burned, a nation with room for both genius and its antithesis.
But sometimes when the cookie-cutters start pounding away, and the ugly, mindless labels start flying, I wonder that we don't dream of being better than this.
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