Yesterday on Twitter I derided Anne Thompson‘s go-with-the-woke-flow celebration of the appallingly overcranked RRR as “virtue signalling.” Glenn Kenny called me a bad person for saying this.
HE reply: “’Virtue signalling’ is a fairly common malady. Common among older white critics, I mean. Hardly an insult. In their heart of hearts, they know what they’re up to. Someone comes along and calls it by its rightful name…not exactly a cruel or even rude accusation.”
Kenny: “So to call someone a liar is not an insult…gotcha”.
HE to Kenny: “Proclaiming your woke bonafides by praising an obviously mediocre film by a Tollywood schlockmeister…calling such a film an ecstatic experience isn’t ‘lying’ — it’s a way of telling your readers and fellow critics ‘look how liberated and post-racist I’ve become in my critical estimations! Except I’m post-racist in a good way. By thinking only positive thoughts about people of color.”
Kenny: “[So] you’re not insulting your dear old friend Anne Thompson, and she would never tell you to piss off on account of you doing so, or just ignore you. It’s true Anne is pretty good-natured. But everyone has their limit. And I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by suggesting you made yourself something of a non-person to her some time ago. And now you’re freer to lay it on than you ever were, since you’ll likely never lay eyes on her in person again.”
HE to Kenny: “Aside from the usual collegial chiding, I did absolutely nothing to warrant being labelled a ‘non-person’ in Anne’s eyes….nothing at all. It’s all horseshit.
“You wanna hear something? Last year a person in the know told me that when the #MeToo Millennial harridans and hardcore trans lunatics decided, for no sensible or logical reason other than the furtherance of woke psychosis (and with your own kind and gracious goading when you tweeted that I had behaved like some kind of sexual ogre because, in a state in which the legal consent law is 16, I’d fallen in love with a 17 year-old heiress when I was 10 years older), to classify me as a toxic person who had to be booted out of two fraternities (Gold Derby and Critics Choice)…
“You know what I heard later? I was told by a person in the know that my ‘dear old friend’ Anne Thompson, whom I’ve known and been friendly with since the early ‘80s…an old Entertainment Weekly colleague whose Hobart Ave. home she invited me to once or twice to when our kids were very young in the early ‘90s…this person in the know told me that Anne voted with the Robespierrres to eject me on one of those decisions. (I forget which.) That is what’s known in the journalism trade as exhibiting loyalty, backbone and character, or otherwise being (heh-heh) a good hombre.”