Getting Mean about Romances: Call Me By Your Name

I recently watched Call Me By Your Name. It's a good film, more "show don't tell" than The Man in the Orange Shirt (which is a decent enough movie if a tad uneven), not as tightly edited or directed as Speed Walking, due, no doubt, to Call Me By Your Name having two directors with somewhat differing visions.

I echo most critics' assessment that Timothee Chalamet is astonishing while Armie Hammer does a surprisingly effective job at being large, exuberant, astonishingly handsome, and vulnerable all at the same time.

What gets me about this movie is the spiteful dismissals by sub-par reviewers.

I don't mean the legitimate praises and criticisms of the acting, script, adaptation, editing, lighting, music, etc. etc. etc. For instance, some reviewers point to the film's length as detrimental to the movie's pace. And the film does drag--personally, I think it could be cut by at least 1/2 hour (granted, I tend to think this about most films).

Rather, I'm referring to those critics who fall back on an easy quip rather than a thoughtful critique, especially those who sneer at the film as a "packaged romance for gays."*

Yup--it appears that nasty comments about romances are not reserved for women who read Harlequins and admire Jane Austen.

These comments are made by people who supposedly consider themselves pro-gay, just as nasty comments about Harlequins and Jane Austen admirers are made by people who supposedly consider themselves pro-women and/or feminist.

The point of resemblance: nearly all literary criticism includes a group of people who sneer at any book or film or genre that isn't filled with angst, drugs, death, and pointed messages that condemn everything enjoyable.

Generally speaking, this group prefers lecture to story. They are a mirror to the group that desires plots with tidy moral lessons except the prior group operates on the weird insistence that life must, according to them (and the news), be more negative than positive. Every story or film must delve into the many ways that a romance or marriage or birth or good time at the beach will fail because, ya know, there's AIDS and divorce and death and the ozone layer. How dare anybody ever be happy in any given moment?! How dare the director/writer not inform the reader of what a failure the happy moment will turn out to be?!

The problem with this perspective is that it is utter bollocks.

Truly.

People do in fact have happy moments, even entire happy summers. People do in fact look back on events in their life nostalgically. People do in fact tackle issues in their lives as imperfect, maturing humans, not multi-tasking robots. (How dare I feed my cats without considering the state of the rain forest at the same time?!)

Yup, these sneerers are old-fashioned bullies.

The sneering critics are bullies with a pose. They learned, probably in high school, that by adopting a negative pose and the correct negative language, they can convince the right type of audience, "I'm a deep thinker!"

In truth, actual deep thinking is more complex. People live multiple lives at once, happy and sad (as Call Me By Your Name illustrates). They get over heartache. They survive devastation. They sometimes spend more time worrying about getting their laundry done than they do fretting about politics (or even relationships). Even people suffering from life-threatening diseases spend a great deal of time talking about their cats, local construction work, and gardening.

In Unnatural Death (The Dawson Pedigree), Sayers has Wimsey make the following argument:

Read any newspaper today. Read the News of the World...read the divorce court lists. Wouldn't they give you the idea that marriage is a failure? Isn't the sillier sort of journalism packed with articles to the same effect? And yet, looking around among the marriages you know of personally, aren't the majority of them a success, in a humdrum, undemonstrative sort of way? Only you don't hear of them. People don't bother to come into court and explain that they dodder along very comfortably on the whole, thank you.

Wimsey is right. Just because we don't know about all the ordinary, everyday stories of kindness, maturity, love, heartache and survival, doesn't mean they don't exist.

Dumb critics fail to see anything except the headlines--or, rather, headlines through the filter of their depressing ideologies.

Wise critics know that life has more to offer than myopic disgust.

*Truth is, there are good gay films and bad gay films and silly gay films and boring gay films and intellectual gay films and frothy comedic gay films and so on and so forth. My issue here isn't that a gay film might not have as many romantic tropes in it as the average BBC costume drama with low-cut bodices and windswept hair. My issue is with people who think there is something inherently wrong about using and/or exploring such tropes in the first place.