Can a novel/film be fundamentally racist or sexist, and still be great?

It's also such a time-specific criticism, because the further you get away from a period, the less all that stuff matters.

Well, of course, but art doesn't exist in a vacuum, so why should the criticism thereof do so? Taking that same example of the hypothetical racist song I mentioned, yeah, perhaps centuries from now, when standards have changed, it'll be viewed only as great art and its racism will be irrelevant; but accepting it unconditionally *now*, *before* its racism has been rendered that, is an entirely different thing.

The other day I was talking with a friend who was bending over backward so far to appear non-racist that the conversation didn't make sense. (This is in the U.S.) "So I met this guy the other day...he was from England...great accent. He was an African-American." Errr, no he wasn't.

There's also a component of the words "sexist" and "racist" that implies intent, I think. The intent is much harder to locate the further removed we are from the time and place of the works creation.

For a contemporary work, I think we need to be careful. If Lost in Translation doesn't take the Japanese seriously, how does that affect the film's plot, tone, sensibility? Does it cheapen the laughs? Does it reduce the complexity of the film's central relationship? If they're just a couple of ugly Americans, does finding solace in each other mean they're too lazy to appreciate waht surrounds them? Does the fact that neither of them went on this trip for pleasure absolve them of any inadvertant cultural insensitivity? Are the characters insensitive or is the film insensitive (or neither)? If the film is perceived to present a lazy take on cliched stereotypes then it has a different effect than if it's perceived to be a benign portrayal of a more abstracted experience of "foreign-ness". The former is flat and might be a reason to consider the film "bad", the latter is thoughtful and might be a reason to consider the film "good".

Does a novel/film have a responsibility to be morally upright to be "good"? I say no--throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a little too easy. Doesn't mean any underlying racism or sexism isn't troubling or relevant to the discussion though.

Yes, there are things bigger than art, and therefore we might want to censor racial incitement to violence etc. but that's something of a different issue.

I'm intrigued - what can art do?

But I would contest that there are necessarily better places to go than fiction for socio-political analysis. All written work is subjective, certainly anything that purports to be "non-fiction." History as a category of academic research, is incredibly politicized and bound by temporal, subjective strictures. Historians are hardly allowed to be objective. Fiction on the other hand often personalizes broad trends in society. Serious academic analysis and fiction can be quite complementary. And if they're well written, the reader can be complimentary. There. Now we're all being pompous!

Wha? I'd say fictional narrative is as good a place as any! I mean, sure, non-fiction will be better at exploring certain issues in depth, giving out all possible takes on a certain issue, etc. But fictional narrative is much much better at making socio-political issues seem paltable, at getting into what lies behind them, how they affect everyday life and that kind of stuff. And again, I can't see how this clashes with the creation of subjective experiences.

xpost with Skottie

What if society in the future found that graphic representations of violence were absolutely evil? They might disqualify any film that depicted a shooting as off limits for any serious discourse on art. And see the entire society that produced it as utterly bankrupt morally. We obviously don't toe that line in the 20th/21st century. But we're quick to say that other behaviour is absolutely wrong.

We don't have all the answers.

tennessee williams was a great writer, though he was also a racist and a bigot (e.g., he gave stanley kowalski his name because he thought that polish-americans were animals).

though wagner was neither a writer nor a filmmaker, lots of jewish people still seem to like his music.

(See also Robert Brassilach.)

Exactly. Because otherwise, there would only be one correct way to believe.

Quite, especially when so often 'evil' is conflated with 'difference' -- with results that are all too obvious in The World In Which We Live.

It's like he just made the dashiki; it's not his fault if there's this weird guy on the corner, in the dashiki, who keeps telling me that there's a Jewish conspiracy to keep the black man down. Although I haven't seen that guy in a few weeks.

strangely it also bothers me when people try to cry "racism!" against something like the Lords of the Rings films. I've read essays comparing the Uruk-hai to Africans and that insist Gollum is supposed to be Jewish, which says more about the critics in question and THEIR notions more than those of the filmmakers.

I do see your point as well.

i do know, however, that for SOME jewish people the facts of wagner's anti-semitism -- and the nazis' co-opting of his music for their ends -- DID taint his music. to the extent that, if memory serves me right, it wasn't until well into the nineties that any israeli symphony added wagner to their repertoire.

(xpost acc to this: http://deutschland.asinah.net/en/wikipedia/r/ri/richard_wagner.html his call for "annihilation" meant culturally, not physically, but still, gross. apparently he was a pacifist as well.)

It's also the case that the extremes tend to be far more dramatic and thus often make for more effective and/or engaging storytelling.

what's interesting about Birth of a Nation doesn't have much, if anything, to do with its content. It's lauded because of its technical achievement, not because of its message.

As far as novels: Celine.

Here's a little blurb on it from this week's Montreal Mirror:

Fans of David Wark Griffith won't want to miss this weekend's presentation of two of his most famous films, Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, which screen this Sunday, Feb. 22 at Concordia's Hall Building (at 2p.m. and 7p.m. respectively). Montreal Film Society founder Philippe Spurrell is organizing the screenings, a benefit for his own historical feature, Blanket of Secrecy (now in production), about the burial of black slaves in Quebec. For those who've never seen Griffith's features, they're obviously crucial cinematic events; it's important to note that Spurrell will not be projecting video onto the screen, these are actual celluloid prints - the very best way to experience these epics. Tickets for the screenings are $11.95, $9.95 for students and seniors. Info: 859-9110.

I think I have a bit of a problem in that the writer gave ABSOLUTELY NO CAVEAT. It is especially galling given that the film is being creen during Blcak History Month and the funds going towards a production dealing with slavery.

I don't think Mahler's opinion of Wagner has much to do with it at all. Mahler could have been a Jewish anti-semite for that matter.

There are explicit Jewish characters in 'Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg', 'Parsifal' and 'Der Ring' and...guess what they're not very flattering.

Yes, and in Shakespeare, and in Marlowe, et al. Begins to sound more like an excuse not to try and understand difficult works, like Shakespeare and Wagner.

I think I have a bit of a problem in that the writer gave ABSOLUTELY NO CAVEAT.

Oh, god, no! What if children sneak in and are INFECTED! With RACISM! Please be assured that absolutely no one who doesn't know all about Griffith is going to the screening in the first place.

There is a unfortunate trend in the latter part of this thread toward self-congratulatory smugness. What were those benighted racists thinking, anyway?

I read Ivanhoe in school, and I found its ambivalent anti-semitism to be the only really interesting thing about it (Because/Despite of that I'm Jewish). Some other Sir Walter Scott book which is just an adventure story would probably bore me.
What do y'all think?

I can enjoy and love films that have racist/awful characters, but films that themselves are racist are another matter entirely.

yeah, he's a weird case. the misogyny in a lot of Hitch's stuff (the way he disposes of Guy's wife in Strangers on a Train still upsets me) is hard to deny. on the other hand, a lot of his best films - Rebecca, Suspicion, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, and even Vertigo - seem more sympathetic and insightful about their female protagonists than almost any other classic (or modern for that matter) films I can think of.

The difference Skottie, is that Shylock and Barabas are JEWISH.
Beckmesser, Mime (or Alberich) and Kundry (if you accept the premise which i agree is open for debate, but less so due to the existence of 'Judaism in Music' etc.) are representations of certain 'characteristics'. As i said tho it doesn't put me off.
However if i was Jewish, i might feel differently, i don't know.
I might this kind of underhand, undeclared portrayal was way more flagrant and disturbing than the two characters in the plays above.

Mahler was well aware of Wagner's ideas, indeed he suffered prejudice in his life (he converted to catholocism to become director of the Vienna Opera). His music is very Jewish incidentally, and only superficially related to Wagner's in the final analysis.

Would you like a movie where the bad guy wins? doesn't that make the "message" evil?

Do you think this would encourage this kind of thinking to it's viewers or does it just annoy you?

I tend to give lots of credit to the viewer to pick up something that maybe condescending (which I think is very rare or rather more a way someone watches something then a way something is made) and decide for themselves.

No. Absolutely not. If for no other reason than there is no definition for these terms that transcends time/geography/region and a host of other factors. Some behaviors or attitudes may fit squarely within MOST people's definitions of ____ism, but not everyone's. And many, many attitudes will fall outside of many other people's definitions of ____isms although they will be decried by still others as clearly racist/sexist/whateverist.

That's the defintional problem. The other, bigger problem is that there is no person utterly without racist or sexist tendencies on SOME level. And then we've limited the big human character flaws to racism and sexism. There are other issues that people grapple with that are just as bad. And in 100 years, these issues may seem as trivial to people's day to day life as say, whether one belongs to the Church of England of the Church of Rome. Both big deals 400 years ago.

I hear your point, Pete, but it doesn't trouble me that an artist politics are different from mine, or even flawed. Especially if the artist is dead and my enjoyment of the work doesn't support his flawed cause in some economic way.

But ultimately, the quality of the work is what matters. Hitler's paintings are bad not because he was Hitler, but because he was a bad painter. Naive, sentimental, and heavy handed. Like his politics. The pictures didn't lead to the deaths of millions and millions of people--the politics did. Wagner's music didn't lead to any deaths at all, even though he may have been a proto-nazi. Eliminate all the anti-semites in Europe since the Babylonian diaspora and you've pitched out most of the population during any given time period, including the present one.

I think I get what you're trying to say but in many cases the political statement and the subjective experience can't be separated. If you've e.g suffered discrimination due to race,sex, sexual orientation then the political is very much part of the personal experience. It's not just some abstract idea, but something real and painful.

And surely having empathy for those who are being discriminated against falls in the same category.

If that's the case, though, wouldn't a review of a Waugh book have to deal with his racism to a very high extent, because if it didn't it wouldn't be doing his work justice? Sort of like the exact opposite of your complaints re: ILX's take on "Lost In Translation"?

A lot of this comes down to context...like, the differences between someone saying "Waugh's works are racist, he is sux0r and no one should read him" and someone saying "I can't really get into Waugh because of his racism"...or indeed a conversation concerning Waugh that only focuses on his racism w/o any of its members revealing whether they actually like him or not (this is something that happens on ILX all the time - I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been left fuming over some thread or another where ppl discussed socio-political factors in a manner that cast a favourite artist of mine in a very negative light, only to find out later that all or at least most of the ppl throwing those accusations actually like that artist too!)

Same thing with reviews - big difference between "this artist is a bigot. Don't buy his album" (which sux0rs) and "this artist is (various factors) BUT also a bigot and thus I can't approve of him" (which I can respect and/or agree with, though sometimes I wish that the reviewer had just dug a bit deeper into what the artist is saying) and an almost neutral "this artist is a bigot" (these days my favourite reviews are the ones that are almost exclusively descriptive, where if there wasn't a star rating system above it you wouldn't even be able to know whether the reviewer liked it or not.)At any rate, I agree with Alex In SF about *not* mentioning an artist's bigotry when it is clearly present in his work being the worst way to go.

Of course misogyny, racism, etc. can be fascinating, but at the risk of delving into radical subjectivism, just because a piece of art is fascinating to me or you doesn't mean that it *has* to be to any other given person, or that if that person doesn't enjoy it because they can't get past its bigotry that they're "missing the point", as it were.

xpost Ronan do ppl who answer "no" to the thread's title question actually EXIST?

(Waugh doesn't satirise the Marchmains in Brideshead, though. There, he does the full-on romanticisation of the Catholic aristocracy. But Handful Of Dust is the better novel!)

Yes, you're right, appreciation of art is subjective and if someone just can't appreciate something because of some inherent bigotry, OK, fair enough. I think it's a question of being able to distance yourself from it. With some things that's easy - we're not going to complain about Homer's unthinking acceptance of slavery. With some things it's not easy - some song on the radio performed by people your age and in your cultural sphere.

If you take the quantity "racism as currently conceived" and subtract "average racial attitude in England c. 1910 - 1948" you are left with the quantity "not very much racism." Waugh was hardly very different than any other white English man of his generation in this regard.

And again, the idea that being racist is the worst thing a person can do/be strikes me as odd. It equates racism, or race hate with the practice of genocide. Not unrelated concepts, granted, but hardly on a par.

about Homer's unthinking acceptance of slavery.
Hunh???
Slavery in the US/Carribbean based on the importation of African agricultural workers bears virtually no resemblance to slavery as practiced in antique Greece and Rome. Slavery then was one of many spoils of war. Rather than being racist, Romans coveted Greek slaves to work as teachers/artists because the Greek culture was considered more advanced.

inherent bigotry often = "you have an opinion different from mine"