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When it comes to film criticism, or any kind of art criticism for that matter, I don’t subscribe to interpretations that reflexively assume that what’s on the screen serves a symbolic purpose. An individual character isn’t necessarily a symbolic stand-in for a whole class; a movie’s plot isn’t necessarily allegorical. Of course, in some cases, a film can evoke a deeper interpretation, something beyond what-you-see-is-what-you-get. A woman getting murdered on screen by a male slasher may not automatically be a symbolic victim of social misogyny, but if that woman is first paraded around naked and the filming technique creates an aesthetic that caresses the violence, it would certainly be reasonable to see misogyny at work. But any interpretation really depends on the individual movie; how it tells the story, how it presents characters, how it is filmed. It’s very easy to create meaning where there is none, highlighting the importance of drawing on what is in the movie itself to make a case for any given interpretation.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s recent article (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) over at the Huffington Post illustrates what I mean. The title gives it away: Horton Hears a Racist. “…there are many obstacles this New Era will have to face. A sagging economy. War abroad. Faltering education. And, worst of all, the movie Horton Hears a Who,” he writes. That’s right, Horton Hears a Who is worse than war and economic slowdowns. In a tortured line of reasoning, he sets out to explain why:
“…the mayor ignores his 96 daughters in order to groom his uninterested son to become mayor. Why doesn't he groom one of his much more enthusiastic daughters? And, of course, it is the brooding son who, in the end, saves the entire world of Whoville. The daughters? They get to cheer from the sidelines. It’s true that in the book a "very small shirker named Jo-Jo” does add his tiny voice to the din and thus saves Whoville, but that promotes the idea that we all have our part to play in our community, not that sons are smarter than daughters.”
From there, he argues that “if our society is willing to tolerate any form of social injustice and discrimination toward any single group, then they have created a breeding ground for injustice throughout society. If we allow sexism, ageism, homophobia, religious intolerance, then racism can only flourish as well.”
So by hearing a sexist, Horton hears a racist.
Or, Maybe…
Although the question seems simple enough – why doesn’t the Mayor pressure one of his daughters instead of his son? – the answer could, involving a lot of parsing, take up a few thousand words. But it boils down to not having enough information from the movie to judge whether the Mayor is being sexist or not. Maybe the daughters don’t want to be mayors and he’s okay with letting them do whatever they want, which is doubly unfair of the expectations he holds of his son. Or maybe they’re too young, and son Jo-Jo, by being the oldest, is first in line to follow Daddy. Alternatively, we could play the ol’ reverse sexism trick: Is it sexist for the Mayor to pressure his son and not his daughters, but not the other way around? Might as well ask if Finding Nemo was sexist for not making Nemo a girl.
Without ignoring how systematic injustices, both ongoing and in the past, can result in injustice for anyone other than members of a privileged white male class, the focus on class at the expense of individuals is fraught with peril because it assumes the worst often without evidence. Male relationships are regarded with suspicion. As many sit-comes will have it, fatherhood is regarded as some sort of buffoonery. There are plenty of films about the relationship of daughters with their parents; Juno is an excellent recent example. Why can’t a film simply be about a son’s relationship to his dad? As I’ve said, it could take entire books to sort through all the assumptions, meanings, and interpretations involved in this particular line of discussion.
Context is everything, and it’s the context of the film that reveals how off-base and ridiculous Mr. Abdul-Jabber’s criticism is. The ending of the film consists of the Mayor being shown the error of his ways, how he was wrong to impose his expectations on a son whose talents and interests lie elsewhere. As part of the greater theme that “a person is a person, no matter how small,” the entire point of the story is to recognize the value of each and every individual, no matter how different. That’s hardly the stuff of racism and sexism.
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Read Mr. Sisa’s blog (frederik-sisa.blogspot.com).
