I thought this WaPo review of the Constant Gardener was interesting. No way I'll see the movie; after falling asleep in The Russia Houseand groaning through The Tailor of Panama, I've given up on film adaptations of John LeCarre novels. They're awful. But it's interesting because the review starts with a long meditation on radicalism--specifically the distinctly uncomfortable, unsympathetic, borderline-mentally-ill personalities that are drawn to radical politics, and the way they show up in film:

This is actually a fairly common portrait in the movies. Think of the many other radicals the flicks have portrayed as loose cannons with messy lives, full of small treacheries against people while yapping moral triumphalism in favor of some mythical animal called The People.

Hollywood, the reviewer points out, doesn't make radicals particularly likeable. Even the supposedly heroic ones like Karen Silkwood come off as twitchy and priggish. And even friendly directors like Julie Taymor in Frida still make the title character seem like "a twisted sister off on a self-dramatization crusade, who used a bus accident as a tool for constant manipulation of those around her, turning many things into one-act plays starring her own self. Some would come away from that film thinking: She's not a part of the solution; maybe she is the problem."

The reason this reviewer likes The Constant Gardener so much is that it offers a different portrayal--a "countertheory"-- of a zealous radical:

...[F]ar from being a screwball angry at a vanished or indifferent parent taking her for granted, she has rational politics. They're cause-based, not anger-based. She's examined the policy, she's understood the science, she's read the documents, she sees the implications...[The film] holds that the radical is not a crazy hater who needs to tear down out of narcissism, to avenge her own slights. She takes no pleasure in destruction; it's that she takes no pleasure in injustice, and if she sees injustice everywhere, it's because injustice is everywhere.

Fine, the reviewer likes these noble, rational radical types. But that doesn't really comport with reality. I've known quite a few of these people in my short time on earth, and they're not pleasant. A desperate dedication to political change is unhealthy and often a cause or a symptom--I don't know which-- of a deeply disordered life. There's a reason Hollywood's attempted hagiographies of them can't make them seem likeable: they're not. The closer the films get to the truth, the less sympathetic their subjects appear. I won't be seeing The Motorcycle Diaries, but there's a reason they focus on young Che Guevara finding himself on a coming-of-age tour--because in later life, once politics consumed him, he was a doctrinaire, homicidal jerk who enjoyed shooting people who disagreed with him.

It's not just me and Hollywood that noticed this tendency of radicals--pick up a copy of Paul Johnson's Intellectuals. It's a historical account of the lives of people like Marx, Lenin, Brecht, Freud, even touching on Chomsky, and the way they actually lived. It's quite an eye-opener.

Posted by: seedubya at 02:46 AM | Comments (24) | Add Comment
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