...David Denby

I do not like the New Yorker film critic David Denby. At the same time, I can't stop reading him. When the latest issue of the magazine appears in my mailbox (usually a week later than it should!) I immediately look to see whether Denby or the magazine's other film critic, Anthony Lane (annoying for other reasons), is featured. If it's Lane I'll look to the other stories first and eventually find my way to the back pages to see what sort of cutsey turn of phrase the movie under review has inspired Lane to write. But if it's Denby writing, I have to see what he says right away. Even though I know it will make me mad.

I have mixed feelings about the New Yorker as a whole. On the one hand you have the still- great-after-all-these-years investigative reporting of Seymour Hersh. On the other you have the smug liberalism of writers like David Remnick, George Packer, and Denby. Remnick and Packer do the bigger stories: on war, say (which Packer was for, though now he's not), or politics, or profiles. They both write beautifully as I suppose one must when writing for the New Yorker. But where Hersh's dry, list-like style serves to keep his assumptions in the background (minus the assumption that governments are corrupt) - indeed, it is difficult to glean a solid political position or perspective from Hersh's writing: is he a Democrat, Republican, left or right-winger - the same cannot be said for Remnick or Packer. Their liberalist assumptions are precisely what is foregrounded in their writing: thoroughly Democrat-leaning, never will you find a statement or even a sense that there might be a perspective beyond or other than their own (even when Democrats are being criticized). The intolerant conservatism of the Bush administration is scoffed at regularly and often for good reason. But positions and perspectives to the left of the Democrats (which is to say, to the left period) do not even come in for scoffing. They don't come in for anything at all. Is it possible that free markets and privatization schemes might be a bad idea in some instances? Not to these guys.

And not to Denby either. Denby's writing is nowhere near as compelling as Packer's. And his intellectual rigor...well let's just say there isn't much of that in his approach to movies. Maybe there shouldn't be? Who is to say. But Denby shares with other writers at the magazine that smug sense of moral righteousness that cannot stand to see the vaunted principles of liberalism (some vaunted for good reason) questioned. Sometimes, in fact, Denby cannot even see that they are being questioned. Take for example his review of Michael Winterbottom's "The Road to Guantanamo". Like several other critics, Denby saw this film as being a straightforward piece of propaganda. For Denby, movies, maybe art generally, should not be biased (unless it is an implicit bias confirming Denby / the New Yorker's world view). I get the sense that popular culture (for Denby) is meant to bolster and perhaps better our national sense of self - not challenge it. But in his rush to condemn Winterbottom's film as pro-terrorist propaganda, Denby misses the major question posed by the film (a question that to my mind makes the film something other than "propaganda"). The film chronicles the experiences of three young men from Tipton, England, in Pakistan (where they go for a wedding in the weeks after 9/11) and Afghanistan (where they go, they say, to help the people, now under attack by American forces). The three are eventually caught by Northern Alliance troops and handed over to the Americans (who bring them to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). At Guantanamo, the three men are accused of being members of Al Queda. A pre-9/11 videotape shows them (they are told) at a rally held by / for Osama bin Laden. They are subjected to all the torture, violence and depradation that have become synonymous with "America" for many in the world. And they are eventually released (they were actually in and out of prison back in the UK at the time of the rally in Pakistan). Statistics at the end of the movie (corroborated by Human Rights Watch) suggest their experiences were not unique. At the time of the movie only 10 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay had ever been charged with a crime (out of a possible 700 plus). Not one was convicted.

What Denby cannot get over is what these three men were doing in Afghanistan in the first place. What do they mean by "help out"? And why does everybody they are with have automatic weapons? The movie doesn't explain this. It highlights this awkward aspect of their account. What were they doing indeed? But here's what Denby misses in his fixation on this detail: does the eventual treatment of these three men become justifiable if they were in Afganistan to fight for and with the Taliban? That is, can we only condemn the systematic abuses at Guantanamo Bay (and elsewhere) if we can establish with absolute certainty that these men are innocent? This question is entirely lost in Denby's moralizing critique. And yet not only is it the point (should torture ever be justified), it is one of the most pressing moral questions of our age. As Zizek argued in the LRB a couple of years ago, once torture is even admitted to the table (for true enemies of the country), admitted to the discussion, we (the people) have already lost.

Simple propaganda. Hardly. Still over Denby's head? Seems like it to me.

I was hoping that Denby would get to review Winterbottom's newest film ("A Mighty Heart," about the slain journalist, Daniel Pearl). But it went to Lane.

Denby's latest piece is on Michael Moore's "Sicko" (more propaganda!). You can read it at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/07/02/070702crci_cinema_denby/
I have not seen the movie yet so I cannot comment on it (I have mixed feelings about the Moore movies I have seen, but this is a subject for another post). For Denby, "Sicko" is Moore's worst movie yet. As with his review of "Road to Guantanamo," (and nearly every other review he's written), Denby says nothing about the craft of filmmaking: the setting up of shots, pacing, camera work, palette, etc. But boy is he mad about Moore's pranks! Bringing 9/11 workers to Guantanamo Bay and then to Cuba for care? How silly. Except that Denby doesn't get the joke (he is annoyed with the way Moore acts like he didn't already know that Cuba had universal health care; he expresses wonder and surprise). Nor does he (again) get the point. "In the actual political world," he writes, "the major Democratic Presidential candidates have already offered, or will soon offer, plans for reform". A few lines later he says that "Changes in political consciousness that Moore himself has helped produce have rendered his latest film almost superfluous". Does Denby know something the rest of us don't? Every Democratic candidate has offered or will offer a plan for health-care reform? He cannot be serious. Moore's argument is for a single-payer system that renders the health care industry itself superfluous. Are the Democrats offering such a system? Nothing even close. Democratic-party health care reform, if it is ever even pursued, will very likely follow recent reforms in medicaid, the EPA, and energy: that is, industry lobbyists themselves will write the legislation. That's the American way. Health-care companies know more about health care than public officials. It's their business, after all. No Democrat that I know of is challenging this basic principle. If you want confirmation look at campaign contributions.

There are already lots of high profile think-tank intellectuals at the Cato Institute and elsewhere writing to discredit the political and economic arguments of Moore's film. Fair enough. Let's have a debate where an end to the private health care industry is on the table. Denby's smug dismissal of Moore's arguments (and his ignorance about where the debate stands currently in the Democratic party) will add nothing to such a debate, however. And if you take away these dismissals there is little left in the review to qualify as content. Perhaps, then, it is Denby himself who is superfluous.

Except that people like me keep reading him.