This entry was posted on 1/17/2008 10:31 PM and is filed under All Posts.
I have hounded John Podhoretz for years. I started attacking him by "letter to the editor" means when I was a lowly staffer on an undisclosed political campaign during the run-up to the Iraq War, and he was a neo-conservative political columnist for the New York Post. He only made it worse for himself by having the personal honor, and time commitment, to actually respond to my attacks.
I would write a hit piece on his latest "Islamo-fascist" diatribe, and he would personally reply and debate the merits. And I would write back, and he would write back, and surprisingly (to me), on and on it went. New columns of his would continue to be published, and yet there he and I would be, still chewing over this or that point from months before. It was as if he knew, "The only way this guy is ever going to finally respect my point of view is if I never quit this debate over it."
I never did agree with his point of view, but I certainly learned to respect it. Try the same game with any other Op-Ed columnist that particularly annoys you. Good luck getting the time of day out of them. John, for all his ideological flaws, is one of a kind.
That can't be said for his latest piece in the Weekly Standard, a review of P.T. Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" (John is now the Standard's movie critic, in addition to being the newly crowned editor of Commentary, and, even worse, Norman Podhoretz's son). It's clear early on in the review that John actually likes the movie, and even admits as much to his reading audience:
Plainview is, like the movie that contains him, profoundly eccentric and very interesting. And because of how singular a character he is, Plainview does not seem to be a symbol of anything. He is not the personification of capitalism run amok, or the oil business, or America in the 20th century. For that reason alone, There Will Be Blood rises above the model of socialist agitation provided by Upton Sinclair, who wrote the novel on which it is loosely based.
But then, John gets lazy:
The problem is that the movie probably would have benefited from a conscious and obvious effort on Anderson's part to turn Plainview into a symbolic representation of America at its worst. Such a decision would have been artistically questionable and politically noxious. But it would have made watching There Will Be Blood a more satisfying experience because it would have given the movie a broader and more mythic scope.
Read: "Would have made this review a lot easier to write, as the ambiguity of the character of Plainview is completely contrary to my wish to review this movie as nothing more than socialist claptrap. God damn you, Paul Thomas Anderson, for making a movie I can't pigeonhole as typical left-wing propaganda!"
1/17/2008 11:56 PM
znufrii wrote:
Best movie of the year, in part precisely because it lacked that which Podhoretz complains about not being there. Reply to this
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