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After I read Ron Rosenbaum’s tribute to his cat Stumpy, a rescued stray from Brooklyn who lived with the writer for 15 years, I had several pangs of guilt for having attacked him in The Village Voice in 1991 over a review he wrote of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. For me, devotion to one’s companion animals and the ability to write movingly without becoming maudlin about the bond between human and animal trumps any piece of film criticism. And Rosenbaum got extra points for directing his readers to City Critters, a volunteer rescue agency from which I’ve adopted several strays.
And so, this time around, rather than simply slamming Rosenbaum for his laughably ignorant and careless “The Scott Disorder: Of Brother Directors, Tony’s the Great One” (The New York Observer, 6/19/06), I direct the brunt of my attack toward that elusive target, the film blogosphere, for its uncritical embrace (as far as my obsessive Googling has discerned) of the piece. Are film critics so insecure that they regard the incursion of a card-carrying cultural critic into their turf as a cause for celebration, even when said cultural critic betrays in almost every graph his deficiency in post-Seventies movie history, not to mention his inability to read credits? Or was the sibling-rivalry subtext in Rosenbaum’s contention that younger brother Tony has eclipsed older brother Ridley as a zeitgeist meister seductive enough to blind bloggers to the fact that the claims the writer made for the younger Scott’s Domino were not only specious historically but also based on a certain blindness as to what was actually on the screen?
The first time I noticed this peculiar blindness in Rosenbaum’s criticism was in the aforementioned review of The Silence of the Lambs where he wrote that the film is “not merely stupid, repulsive, sickening, and hateful. It’s worse. I think it’s evil.” Basically, Rosenbaum took the two-minute scene involving the autopsy of one of Buffalo Bill’s victims and used it as a lens through which to view the entire film. His reading of the scene, however, was blatantly incorrect. Rosenbaum claimed that although the scene made him retch, Demme intended it to be titillating and that viewers would fall for the supposed titillation were not Rosenbaum there to save them from it. But why did he assume that what made him retch would give everyone else a hard-on? He went on to argue that Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling is a victim of Hannibal Lecter’s “rape of her mind,” willfully ignoring the fact that Clarice outplays Lecter, successfully using his vanity to tease from him the information she needs to accomplish her rescue mission. The film rides on one woman’s desire to rescue another; in terms of gender, it turns gothic horror traditions inside out. But in order for Rosenbaum to have acknowledged the self-sufficiency of Foster’s Clarice, he would have to recognize that in some movies, his own male rescue fantasy is superfluous, unless, of course, he makes a transgendered identification with the female hero. Instead, he chastised Foster for appearing in the film when she’d already seen the effect that Taxi Driver had on the twisted mind of John Hinckley. “Of course she was not to blame, nor in any way responsible for Hinckley’s delusion and she was only 14 when the film came out.” Who ever considered her blameworthy? No one except Rosenbaum, who then claimed that if she was innocent the first time, she certainly wasn’t by the time of The Silence of the Lambs. “Didn’t she wonder if this might seem like encouraging further fantasizing by all the susceptible lunatics out there?”
What enraged me at the time—and still does—about Rosenbaum’s unexamined paternalism was that he wrote this piece for Mademoiselle magazine, whose readership was almost entirely young women. The problem with Rosenbaum’s recent piece on Domino isn’t its sexual politics, although I can’t discount that Rosenbaum’s embrace of the film might have something to do with the titular character being ultimately a victim even though she wields an assault rifle almost as big as she is. And it’s not that I disagree with him that Domino was undeservedly panned by critics, the exception of note being Manohla Dargis, who deemed it “a lollapalooza of delectable cheap thrills.” No, my quarrel with Rosenberg is about his claim that the younger Scott brother’s Domino has a “vision-changing impact” equal to the older Scott brother’s Blade Runner. Such a claim could only be made by someone who hadn’t been to many movies in the past 10 years. (Let’s put aside Rosenberg’s limited use of the word “vision” as referring only to visual elements. If he applied a larger definition of vision, then Ridley Scott would have not one, but two zeitgeist films to his credit—the other being Thelma and Louise.) Rosenbaum rhapsodizes about “the greenness of the green” in Domino, “electro-slime, poison neon green. The green of Love Canal.” Well, I too have thrilled to the look of what I’ve described, more than once, as the phosphorescent green of decay. That particular green look, however, reached is apotheosis in 1995 in David Fincher’s Se7en and has been so overused in recent years (I’ll make an exception for Shane Carruth’s 2004 Primer, which captured the effect for $7,000 on Super-16) as to become as much of a pop-punk cliché as the other visual elements which seem to have rocked Rosenbaum’s world: the variable speeds of the images (ultra fast, ultra slow) and the jaggedness of their editing. Rosenbaum is on somewhat firmer ground when he tries to describe the effect of time in the narrative sense, the way the film “does the nasty to the time in it” (that’s a terrific phrase) or how “everything is out of synch, everyone is out of their minds.”
But the fever-dream narrative of Domino should be credited to its screenwriter, Richard Kelly, who wrote and directed the first zeitgeist movie of the 21st century, Donnie Darko. From the privileged position of someone who saw Kelly’s Southland Tales at Cannes, Domino seems like one of many possible Kelly side-trips, directed by someone who’s more technically experienced but lacks Kelly’s madly felt, heartbreakingly tender vision of the world. But even without having seen Southland Tales, Rosenbaum should have been able to discern Kelly’s voice in every line of dialogue and voiceover and every oneiric turn of the action. Isn’t it strange then that Rosenbaum never mentions his name and no one in the blogosphere (correct me if I’m wrong) noticed the omission?
© 2006 by Amy Taubin
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