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General Dog posted:I feel like this movie does the easiest, cheapest thing in the world by setting up a protagonist in McDormand who’s armed with an unassailably righteous anger, and then giving her a bunch of cheap cardboard cutouts to beat up for the audience’s entertainment. Not exactly - the billboards actually have nothing to do with with the death of the daughter. The billboards represent a failure, an inability to articulate the real problems - i.e. the rape in the church, the torture of the (notably unnamed) ‘black guy’. The filmmakers go with the somewhat tasteless metaphor that the daughter, once raped and tortured, literally turns black so that she can serve as a metaphor for all suffering, in the abstract. So the failure of the movie is not that McDormand is “unassailably righteous”, but that she isn’t - her protest is too plainly useless - devised to fail. McDormand is far too self-aware to be doing this unintentionally; she has multiple speeches where she clearly expresses what her true problems are - cops are gang, and they’re covering up torture. Case closed. So why her ridiculous demand for a global surveillance death-machine from Captain America: Winter Soldier? Obviously it’s so that she can revel in her impotence. McDormand comes unfortunately close to the right-wing logic that, so long as she remains powerless and despised, she is entitled to do anything she wants. (See Harrelson’s supremacist character in the last Apes movie, who uses his feelings of powerlessness as a justification: “You are impressive. Smart as hell. You're stronger than we are.”) And yet we have a half-dozen liberal characters supporting McDormand as she indulges in a goose chase and distracts from the actual problems - including Harrelson. Ultimately everyone in the film is a liberal. Even in her grievances, McDormand exemplifies the culture of complaint: saying “rape-death is bad” over and over, but expecting someone else to come up with the solution. ‘Raising awareness’ as the end-goal. The subtext of Harrelson’s suicide note, where he says that the suicide was absolutely not because of the billboards, is of course that it was totally because of the billboards. Harrelson, who stresses civil liberties and gradualist reform, pays to leave the ads up as a monument to his ultimate failure and a message to his more-progressive replacement. And of course the biggest twist is that McDormand ‘went too far’ by attacking the police as an institution. She didn’t believe enough in gradualism, and is chastised for it. “We [cops] aren’t all the enemy, you know.” The new chief is one of the three black characters whose sole character trait is, collectively, ‘being black’ and ‘voicing approval/disapproval of how the white characters seek justice’. Rockwell’s ostensible redemption, for example, is marked by how the black couple in the bar come to his rescue by shouting “he’s a cop!” That is to say that he’s earned the black couple’s recognition - is no longer a bad cop. The whole film is really a therapeutic narrative about Harrelson as a humanist Jesus gently chastising the ‘extremists’, while celebrating their shared human foibles in a paternalistic way. Like, aw shucks, Rockwell just did a torture because his daddy done passed away - and McDormand just missed her daughter. It’s the same apolitics as Marvel’s Black Panther. It’s Trump’s little note reminding him to say “I hear you.”
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Mar 26, 2018 19:13
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Uncle Wemus posted:What makes a right wing resistance different from a left wing one? Well you need to take a step back there, because there are no leftist characters in this film. (Perhaps the only way to redeem Three Billboards is to read the whole enterprise as illustrative of a fundamental inability of Americans to conceive of socio-economic justice. Leftism is alien to the universe of the film.) “What is wrong with the complaint of the truly deprivileged is that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address It: they, translating their demand into legalistic complaint, confirm the Other in its position by their very attack.” -Zizek The (main/only) difference between America’s right and its center is that the right falsely perceives white men as the damaged, deprivileged minority. The right-wing fashion today is to appropriate the language of multiculturalism, tolerance and so-on. So today’s fascists are parasitically attached to liberalism, deploying slogans like ‘Men’s Rights’, ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ - effectively claiming that they are black gay women so that the liberal-capitalist Other will acknowledge and take pity on them. (See also: libertarian attempts to make ‘nerd’ into an ethnicity.) McDormand’s protest is, at least, based on her identity as a woman with black friends. But we should strongly emphasize the ‘least’ in that sentence. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Mar 26, 2018 |
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Mar 26, 2018 21:38
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