If you cannot appreciate the most complex, richest, best writing or film-making or art or music in the room because you just aren’t smart enough to get it, you will be completely baffled as to why the stuff you do get is not regarded with the same esteem.
Ms. Loofbourow believes that female writers and film-makers are just as good if not better than male writers and film-makers, but do not get the respect they deserve. Let’s be clear– she is making a judgement based on her own personal knowledge, that female writers she knows of are just as good as male writers she knows of.
And we all devalue women’s writing due to the fact that “we” devalue the art works that women value more highly, because they are valued more highly by women. I’m confused too. Here’s a quote:
Study after study has shown that, no matter how loudly we complain that reality TV is heavily scripted, or that an image is the product of makeup, lighting, and Photoshop, we’re totally unable to disregard the evidence of our own eyes.
And that “evidence of our own eyes” is that this stuff is brilliant.
Who the hell is “we”? In the most outrageously narcissistic comment in the piece, Ms. Loofbourow declares that she– and she alone, because all of the rest of us have deficient appreciation– knows what we are all thinking. She can’t “disregard the evidence” of her own eyes and so she must insist that no one else can either.
She cites Mark Twain’s inadequate appreciation for Jane Austen as if, again, she really believes that Jane Austen–a fine writer who nevertheless remains one of the founders of soap opera, with it’s obsessive concern with how men unjustly under-appreciate the wonders of women–is on par with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or even Dickens. She is not. She is a fine novelist in her genre who inspired an endless parade of mediocre writers– but her novels are still about the emotional lives of women who are consumed with their relationships with men and with each other and don’t have any real importance in the world of politics or science or the arts apart from their emotional lives.
Besides, it wasn’t Jane Austen’s fault that she wasn’t involved in research on gravity or negotiating treaties, or commanding armies. What else could she write about?
This is really a giant, hoary screed at men: how dare you not think that I am as smart or smarter than you. And rather than show us, she tells us and expects us to take her word for it.
Apparently, men like me are too stupid to realize that the narcissistic Lena Dunham character in “Tiny Furniture” is supposed to be unattractive. I don’t believe it. There is a difference between acknowledging the reality that cannot be denied and deliberately creating an unattractive character in order to say something important about unattractiveness. Aura is Lena Dunham, her mother is her mother, her sister is her sister, the apartment is the apartment.
Is Maude Lewis supposed to be unattractive in “Maudie”? Or is she just Maude Lewis, described to us by the film-makers using all of the information available to them?
Amy Schumer’s most distinctive passion is her instance that, no matter what men think, she really is very sexually attractive. She doesn’t care what you think. You think what she tells you to think.
Dunham is too honest to fall for that shtick.
Sometimes we just get pure blather:
Thanks to shows like Fleabag, Enlightened, Insecure, The Good Wife, Awkward Black Girl, The Book Group, Scandal, One Mississippi, The Maria Bamford Show, The Comeback, Top of the Lake, Orphan Black, Orange is the New Black, Getting On, Happy Valley, and Doll and Em, we’re finally getting some nourishing fiction that welcomes female protagonists with wrinkles and corrugated narratives that don’t easily convert to motivational posters. Most of these narratives destabilize the implied male position behind the camera and queer its conventions in sometimes transformative ways.
“Destabilize the implied male position behind the camera and queer its conventions in sometimes transformative ways”? I defy you to defend that line.
She even believes that because three colleagues of an award-winning professor missed a clumsy joke — which, in her mind, was somehow transmuted into a brilliant piece of performance art– that they therefore must also have completely ignored her speech, sitting there for an hour, apparently, not listening to the speaker in front of them, and had discounted her work as a teacher because they misread her lousy joke as nervousness. This is idiotic.
In a desperate attempt to empower herself, she presents a self-condescending comment by a 19th century memoirist as an incredibly hilarious satirical jibe at Mark Twain, again, even though, it is clearly intended to disarm critics by proclaiming the modest ambition of the writer, while subtly claiming that women’s thoughts might actually have some value.
Elizabeth Gilbert, she alleges, was considered a serious writer when she wrote about men, and trivial when she wrote “Eat, Pray, Love”. The latter truly was a mediocre book, but whoever thought she was ever a great writer must belong to the mythical “we” of this piece who only exist as the imagined monument to Lili Loufbourow’s ego.
The further you move away from white masculinity, the more points of view you have to juggle.
Well, let’s keep it simple for a minute Ms. Loufbourow: how the hell do you know what white masculinity sees? How do you know that those who are not white males have a deeper, more embracing perspective? Show us even one clue that you have one clue what white men see when they look at women’s writing.
I don’t regard Alice Munro as a one of the greatest writers in the English language today– or Salmon Rushdie– because she is a woman, or because he is a man. They are both simply brilliant writers, and if you don’t know what makes them brilliant that is a limit on your perspective, not theirs.
[whohit]The Subtle Aesthetic of Soap Opera[/whohit]