THE MOMS ARE ALL RIGHT

This is Andrea Peyser. She writes for the New York Post, a publication that, through my having read it daily from about the third grade until about five years ago, has shaped me (for better or worse) as a writer. It also, through its proudly wiseass tone and shameless obsession with gossip, had an effect on me as a thinker. Without the New York Post, this blog probably wouldn't exist, or would be a lot tweedier and Times-ier. But, as mentioned above, I stopped reading the Post, largely due to Ms. Peyser becoming its dominant voice, and her propensity for columns like this one.





This is Lisa Cholodenko. She made a couple pictures a few years ago that I really liked, High Art and Laurel Canyon, both character studies in which at least some of the characters were queer women (which Ms. Cholodenko is). Her latest picture, The Kids Are All Right, is about a lesbian couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore who had kids via donated sperm. The kids want to meet the sperm donor, who turns out to be a what-me-worry scruffball played by Mark Ruffalo, who appalls Annette Bening, intrigues Julianne Moore, and drama ensues. Like Laurel Canyon and (to a lesser extent) High Art, the drama interweaves compellingly with comedy, and though the results are imperfect, they are singularly Ms. Cholodenko's own; she definitely counts as an auteur.

Now, Andrea Peyser is not a movie critic. She writes a column in the Post whose template is as follows: First, something happens (the New York Mets behaving like baseball players, a kid from California joining the Taliban, a mother making a modestly budgeted independent movie loosely based on her own experience). Andrea Peyser, based on no more information about said event than I used as an example, reacts angrily and unthinkingly, has four cups of coffee, screams into her word processor, and the next day the result is printed for the Post's readership to behold. She is not, by and large, someone you want to have angry at you, not because her powers of rhetoric are so powerful, but because the force of her ill-thought-out anger is so overwhelming.

Ultimately, as anyone who has ever tried arguing with an irrational person can attest, there is no winning an argument with someone who refuses to argue rationally, no matter how wrong they are. On the surface, taking all emotional and prejudicial elements out of the equation, Andrea Peyser and Lisa Cholodenko have some important things in common. They are both writers. They are both mothers. They are both roughly the same age, are both white female Americans, and for those two reasons alone one would think that they would be able to reach some sort of mutual understanding.

This, however, is giving Andrea Peyser far too much credit. Her approach to writing is very different than Lisa Cholodenko's, and the result she seeks to achieve so dissimilar as to exist in another universe. Lisa Cholodenko observes and reports; her scripts look at people as they are and attempt to come to some sort of emotional understanding of them. Her male characters are not as fully realized, at times, as the women, but even Christian Bale in Laurel Canyon (an unsympathetic philanderer) and Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right (a "hey duuuude, fockin CaliFORnia brah" type) are allowed to be recognizable as human beings, if not terribly deep.

Andrea Peyser, however, reacts with irrational anger, and with the blunt, simple—but effective—rhetorical skills at her disposal, seeks to elicit the same irrational anger in her readers. She is a propagandist, and a very successful one, because she has the advantage of believing (to whatever shallow and fleeting degree) what she says.

Thus, her main critique of The Kids Are All Right—that it is pro-gay Hollywood propaganda—is especially ironic. People often see their own faults in others, or project their own faults onto others undeservedly. To call a naturalistic character study, that spends its running time rounding out its cast as human beings, propaganda is particularly rich. It would be intellectually dishonest if the accuser was operating intellectually, and morally bankrupt if the accuser had any conception of morality that was not repeated rote from millenia-old books. This claim should not be taken seriously in the slightest, especially when considered that Andrea Peyser might not really care about the movie, Lisa Cholodenko, or the issues at hand at all. The tone of her article is actually much less angry than she can be (calling for John Walker Lindh to be shot in the back of the head without trial being, and hopefully will continue to be, the definitive example) indicating that she might not really be all that moved by the issue.

This does not absolve her of responsibility for stoking the fires of anti-gay hatred, or for committing the cardinal sin of journalism, described by sportswriters as “writing the lead on the way to the ballpark,” and known to non-journalists as guiding the results of an experiment to conform to a previously formulated hypothesis. As a blogger who can be described as not exactly a critic but occasionally a critic of critics, this particularly gets on my nerves. No matter how much I'm looking forward to a movie (or, alternatively, dreading it) I always remain open, and will always acknowledge faults in something I'm predisposed to enjoy, and give credit to the successes of something I'm not. This holds true for political content as well. And never, ever, EVER, should a critic claim a thing is what it is not. Amateur, professional, immaterial. The act of criticism is dependent on reason. Reason is dependent on observation. Observation deals with what a thing is.

And one thing The Kids Are All Right is not is a Hollywood picture. It was independently financed and produced. It is being distributed by Focus Features, the “specialty” division of Universal. Pictures that are acquired and distributed by specialty divisions, in spite of the tacit endorsement of a major studio, are not shaped in any way by that studio. They are acquired for distribution for one reason only: to make money. To point out an obvious truth from the free market economics the Post so loudly supports, demand affects supply. A major corporation would not seek to profit from a product that no one wanted. Thus, the acquisition of The Kids Are All Right for distribution proves the point that—while it may not equal the size of the audience for something like Inception—a market exists that wishes to see movies about gay people.

This point was proven by a movie Ms. Peyser cites, carelessly, in her rant: Brokeback Mountain (also distributed by Focus). Brokeback Mountain grossed nine figures. This was not the result of propaganda on anyone's part. It made money because people liked it and thought it was a good movie. The Kids Are All Right is currently averaging something insane like $28,000 per screen in limited release, bringing it close to the top ten while being in a fraction the number of theaters as everything else. It is making money because people like it and think it's a good movie. People want to see it. People will go to see a good movie no matter what it's about. And, because attitudes like Ms. Peyser's notwithstanding, people are not as narrow-minded and hatefully reactionary as she is anymore. We are evolving, because that is what living creatures do.