Everyone has latched onto the “Hollywood Jewish moguls are a disgrace to their people” (not exact quote) bit in Gregg Easterbrook’s New Republic blog. I don’t really have anything new to add to the debate over the anti-Semitic valence of the remarks or over the appropriateness of the outcome. I do feel that what’s gotten lost (and what immediately struck me when I read the post last week) is how shoddy Easterbrook’s understanding of film as a medium is.
I’m actually not a huge Tarantino fan, which is what kept me from immediately chiming in last week, but Easterbrook’s assetions that there’s nothing to the filmmaker did rub me the wrong way:
Tarantino’s films are simply trite as regards adoration of violence. In Hollywood, nothing could be less original. ….And his supposed innovative screenplays? Spare me. The out-of-sequence technique Tarantino uses is praised as ingenious, yet every first-year film student is taught this device. To laud Tarantino as innovative because events happen out-of-sequence is like lauding The Bridges of Madison County as innovative because it opens with a discovered letter from someone who has died. All novice novelists know that device. Of course, the novelistic device may be used well or poorly, just as time-shifted cinema may be good or bad. Tarantino’s out-of-sequence film moments are, uniformly, trite drivel.
Certainly, a flashback does not a masterwork make. But not all directors tell flashback stories with assured editing, the right sense of timing, or with an eye to graphic matches between shots. That Easterbrook doesn’t even register a stylistic difference between Tarantino and more “invisible” Hollywood style suggests that he’s not attuned to what makes cinematic art particularly cinematic.
Slate nailed the problem down:
By the time Easterbrook gets to the item’s last paragraph, in which he slags Eisner and Weinstein, he’s embraced so many cliché³ and stereotypes about movies, violence, and the people who make them that it’s only a small wonder that he stoops also to pick up a few about Hollywood executives and money worship. But Easterbrook’s appreciation of Eisner and Weinstein’s careers is no more savvy than his treatment of movie violence.
Do Disney, Eisner, and Weinstein really purvey the sort of immoral bloody cinema that so outrages Easterbrook? A brief review of Weinstein’s credits proves otherwise. If Weinstein worships anything, he worships uplifting and somewhat arty movies. His genius has been finding ways to make money on them. Joe Bob Briggs would have a hard time curating an Ultraviolent Film Festival from the Weinstein filmography if you factored out the Tarantino films and a few Scream-type pics.
The inability to recognize even the difference between art films and broader-audience Hollywood language led to his indictment of Mel Gibson’s upcoming biopic as a “crass attempt to commercialize Jesus’ death via exaggerated gore” along the lines of Mad Max or Lethal Weapon. (Not many have seen the movie yet, but the clips shown reveal immediately that’s it’s going to be a different kind of movie cinematically). Before Easterbrook’s next screed on movie violence, he should a) bone up on a little on cinema, its form and history; and b) stop treating “Hollywood” as an entity rather a (too) broadly applied term to understand both style and industry. In other words, he should show the same careful approach he takes to writing about environmental policy.
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