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December 06, 2004
Picking Your Targets Carefully...
Matthew Yglesias is annoyed with Jonathan Last for believing that works of art should not show bad people doing bad things and escaping punishment, and thus trying to expel Natalie Portman from the Ideal City:
Matthew Yglesias: Art And Whatever: I don't quite understand what's going on in Jonathan Last's review of Closer. I'm going to see the movie in a couple of hours, so I won't say anything about Last's characterization of the film, but as he writes on his blog, Galley Slaves, "it deals mostly with Natalie Portman and the cultural legacy she's left behind."... [I]t "really seems to be nothing more than lingering fury at Portman's admittedly-chilling role in Leon." And here's where I must protest. Last's beef:
In her big-screen debut, Luc Besson's 1994 Léon, Portman played Matilda, a pre-pubescent orphan who is taken in by the movie's titular middle-aged professional killer. Matilda dresses mostly like a prostitute, with tight leggings and a black velvet choker. Trying to shock another character, she refers to Léon as her lover, before later telling Léon that she is falling in love with him. In the European release, there's a scene in which, while the two are in bed together, Matilda asks him to make love to her. In Léon, Natalie Portman is 13-years-old.
There's no explanation of what Last thinks the wrongdoing is here, but I take it the point is that it's immoral for a girl as young as this to be sexualized and especially immoral for a middle-aged man like Léon to have some kind of sexualized relationship with her. No disagreement from me there. But here's the thing -- the movie is about a professional hit man for the mafia. That's also a pretty immoral line of work. Another character is a corrupt cop. That's an immoral thing to be. Immoral characters, in fact, are popping up all around the worlds of cinema, literature, and drama. It's sort of integral to the enterprise. Sometimes these immoral individuals are pitted against clearly moral, heroic individuals. At other times, in the fictional world as in the real world, things are rather more complicated and most everyone does bad things to some extent. Weird, uncomfortable situations arise. I wouldn't describe Leon as a rigorously realistic work, but it's about seamy underworld life so the characters in it are a bit, well, seamy and underworldish. Obviously, you could make a movie about gangsters without featuring a sexualized 13 year old girl. But you can't make a movie about hit men, corrupt cops, drug dealers, and a mafia boss without something shady going down. And you can't have art -- decent art, at any rate -- if the bad guys always need to be beaten by a pure-of-heart knight in shining armor type. Plato, for just this reason, wanted to expell poets from the Republic, but we generally think that was a bad idea.
I'm annoyed with Jonathan Last because he doesn't dare--he's not manly enough--to take on his real targets. Natalie Portman in Leon is, after all, the same age as Juliet: but Last does not dare throw Shakespeare out of the Ideal City. Why not? Plato would.
And that guy Plato. What's he doing in the Ideal City? Why isn't Last denouncing him? Why does he stay quiet about that full-scale endorsement of the Homosexual Agenda that is the Symposium? Here's a sample:
Aristophanes... the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two... "Androgynous"... the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members.... Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great.... Zeus... said: "Men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two.... They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling.... He bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility....
After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one... so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women... the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments... they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.... And these when they grow up become our statesmen.... And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together...
The real reason to be annoyed at Last is that he's looking hard for soft targets. So rather than condemn Plato or Shakespeare for corrupting the youth and making the worse appear the better cause, he takes off after a twenty-something actress. Wimp.
Posted by DeLong at December 6, 2004 08:05 AM
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Comments
Last may not be criticising the script, as much as the use of an actual, living, breathing 13 year-old girl in such a role. He may be arguing the immorality of adults inducing Natalie Portman herself, at 13, to do all that stuff before the camera, being taught bad behaviors and generally corrupted in a misguided adult's selfish attempt at art, rather than costarring in something wholesome and character-building, say, a Mary Kate and Ashley movie. To do so, he would have to have internalized some assumptions about thirteen-year-old actresses that might just not hold water...
Posted by: ProfWombat at December 6, 2004 07:05 PM
Nice. Puritans are annoying, but selective puritans are worse.
Posted by: Tomas Lauridsen at December 7, 2004 03:58 AM
"...he takes off after a twenty-something actress. Wimp."
Hey, I'm no wimp, and I take off after twenty-something actresses all the time.
Posted by: fling93 at December 7, 2004 01:36 PM