In a 5.2 N.Y. Times article called “Dear Movie Industry, We Have Thoughts’, critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis riff on this and that. A diverting enough thing until I came upon Scott’s startling suggestion that anyone offering a historical analogy about today’s near-tyrannical climate of politically correct admonishing is up to no good.
“Please read some history,” he implored. “About the Salem witch trials, the Spanish Inquisition, the martyrdom of early Christians, Joseph McCarthy, Joseph Stalin, the Gestapo, Pol Pot and any of the other historical monsters and catastrophes you like to invoke when talking about whatever is bothering you in contemporary culture. Also please refrain from hyperbolically throwing around words like ‘silencing,’ ‘thought police’ and ‘censorship’ in reference to criticism on social media or elsewhere. People who indulge in this kind of rhetorical inflation are like rats spreading bubonic plague.”
Really? So I can’t use the term “p.c. brownshirts” any longer? And the HE meme about zealous sentiments within the #MeToo and #TimesUp community recalling the mindset of Maximilien Robespierre…that’s no good either?
There’s a slight but horrifying possibility that Donald Trump could actually be re-elected in 2020. One factor that could bring about this nightmare scenario, it seems, is a generally held suspicion among rural bumblefucks that the left has devolved into a culture of p.c. scolding. But there’s nothing to this, right?
A Twitter guy named “32 across” called this piece “the latest installment in the DSCU — the Dargis Scott Critical Universe. Please refer to it that way from now on.”
I for one began to have doubts about the DSCU last June when they posted a “Best Films of the 21st Century” piece and stated that Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen‘s Inside Out ranked seventh.
In a century that has celebrated Zodiac, Zero Dark Thirty, Manchester By The Sea, Leviathan, The Wolf of Wall Street, A Separation, The Social Network, No Country For Old Men, Memento, Traffic, Amores perros, United 93, Children of Men, Adaptation, The Lives of Others, Michael Clayton, Almost Famous (the “Untitled” DVD director’s cut), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Collateral, Love & Mercy, Dancer in the Dark, A Serious Man, Girlfight, The Departed, In the Bedroom, Call Me By Your Name, Loveless, Personal Shopper, The Square and The Big Sick, the seventh-best is fucking Inside Out?
