Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantasy film directed by George
Miller and starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. The screenplay was co-written
by Miller and his daughter Augusta Gore, from a novella by Booker-prize winning
author A.S. Byatt. Longing opened in the US on August 26, 2022.
The plot: British scholar Alithea Binnie
– her first name is from the Greek word for "truth" – visits
Istanbul. Alithea (Tilda Swinton) accidentally conjures Djinn (Idris Elba).
Djinn offers Alithea three wishes. Before Alithea makes her wishes, Djinn tells
her the story of his life. Thus, truth meets Magic. Miller uses this fairy tale
motif to interrogate mortality, love, desire, solitude, renunciation, truth,
and fate.
The film has received moderately positive reviews but Variety predicts
that it will be a box office bomb. Not many viewers are going to see it. I've
seen it twice. It's a sweet movie, and Djinn's tales are dramatized with spectacularly
beautiful images.
Oh, one more thing about Three
Thousand Years of Longing. It is racist. It is orientalist. It is exoticist.
It is white supremacist. It is colonialist. It is misogynist. It is fatphobic. Or
so Woke reviewers insist.
I'll argue here that Longing's relationship between Alithea and Djinn tells us much about how our current culture understands sexual and romantic relationships between men and women. The reception of the film, and, yes, even the trailers shown before the film starts offer other insights. Spoiler warning: this piece will reveal the end of Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Longing is directed by George Miller. That
Miller would make such a contemplative film about big ideas is unexpected. Miller
directed or co-directed all four Mad Max films. Mad Max: Fury Road is
one long chase. The virtuosically choreographed chase scenes in Fury Road are
largely "practical special effects," that is they were created with
real vehicles, real scenery, real humans, and real explosions. Miller used a minimum of CGI, or
computer-generated imagery. Fury Road is better seen than described; get
a taste of its action here. Miller's filmmaking skill wowed his
fellows enough to earn Fury Road six of the ten 2015 Academy Awards it
was nominated for.
Miller, in addition to the dystopian,
post-apocalyptic, violent Mad Max films, produced Babe, and
directed its sequel. The Babe movies are almost unbearably touching fantasies
featuring an adorable pig who aspires to be a sheepdog. Miller also directed, co-produced,
and co-wrote the Academy-Award-winning Happy Feet, an animated film
about singing, dancing penguins. I had to see Longing to discover what
such a multi-talented director would do with the intriguing material in Byatt's
thought-provoking novella.
In Three Thousand Years of Longing's opening
scenes, we discover that Alithea is a cool, isolated creature. When, during an
airport reunion, a warm-hearted colleague (Erdil Yasaroglu) touches her in a
friendly way, she swats him, in a way not at all friendly. When he expresses
genuine concern for her after she faints, she is snippy and marches off. When
he attempts to purchase a gift for her in Istanbul's bazaar, she doesn't even
look at him.
One gets the sense that Alithea is the
type of woman that other humans tolerate rather than befriend. In our
diagnostic era, one wonders if this highly successful scholar has Asperger's
syndrome.
When Alithea recounts that she was a
lonely child whose only friend was imaginary, and that her one brief marriage
ended when her husband left her for a more responsive woman, we are not
surprised. We see her gazing at the world from the window of a café, at lovers
in public, and at parents with children. She looks pensive, but not
particularly sad.
Alithea wears A-line skirts almost to
her ankles, sweaters, long-sleeved blouses, buttoned all the way up, and
flat-heeled shoes. Amidst the drab grays and blacks of her garb, Alithea also
includes the occasional choice in bright red or pink. These wardrobe highlights
suggest to the viewer that we don't know everything there is to know about
Alithea.
Istanbul's Grand Bazaar claims many
superlatives: "world's biggest … world's oldest … world's most popular."
Its vivid, exotic sights and sounds could easily provide the stage for any
retelling of One Thousand and One Nights. In all of this color,
fragrance and stimuli, Alithea selects one fire-damaged glass bottle as her
memento.
Alithea is staying in the "Agatha Christie room" of her hotel. The
hotel implies that Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in this
room. In charmingly fractured prose, the hotel's website reports, "The
Agatha Christie Room, where many details of its epoch resume to live, is
waiting for its guests to have an opportunity to feel literature wonderfully
those interested in detective novels."
Alithea, dressed in a hotel bathrobe,
cleans her purchase using her electric toothbrush. Out pops Djinn. Djinn offers
Alithea three wishes. Unlike just about every other character ever offered
three wishes, Alithea declines. She says she studies stories and she knows that
wish stories are always cautionary tales. Further, she says, she is content.
She is free of desire.
Djinn is flummoxed. It is only by
carrying out his duty of granting three wishes that he can be relieved of the
curse of imprisonment in a bottle. He tells Alithea that he was condemned to
the bottle because he loved the Queen of Sheba, played by the spectacularly
beautiful Ugandan model, Aamito Lagum. King Solomon competes with Djinn for
Sheba's love. Extra-biblical folklore identifies Solomon as a magician. For
example, Solomon was able to converse with ants. In Longing, Solomon
uses his magical powers to confine Djinn to a bottle and to claim Sheba for
himself.
Elba's performance is spectacular. No,
we don't believe in genies, but we believe Elba as Djinn. The look on his face
when he tells Alithea what it was like to be trapped in a bottle for centuries
is heartbreaking. Elba conveys the wounded lover world-weariness of Frank
Sinatra in his "Wee Small Hours" mode. The viewer feels for Djinn,
but also for anyone unjustly trapped in an imprisoning life circumstance by star-crossed
love, injustice, and powerful schemers. Djinn is intelligent, quick, wise and
dignified. Djinn shows care for his "masters," all women, all of whom
get him entangled in no-win love stories. In short, Elba's Djinn is a very
sympathetic figure.
Eventually Djinn's bottle falls into the
hands of a Turkish slave girl (a beguiling Ece Yüksel) who is in love with Mustafa,
the sultan's son. Thanks to Djinn, Mustafa impregnates her. Hurrem, the sultan's
favorite concubine, wants the sultan to favor her own sons. She conspires for
the father to murder Mustafa, as well as his slave lover. Djinn is never able
to grant this doomed girl her third wish, and he remains, again, trapped in his
bottle, hidden under a heavy stone floor tile in the sultan's palace. The
historical Mustafa was indeed killed by his own father's command, allegedly
through the machinations of his father's favorite, a former Slavic sex slave
who, as depicted in the film, had red hair.
Time marches on, and a new sultan's two sons
are competitors. Ibrahim is simple-minded and unlikely to produce the necessary
heir. As encouragement, his mother locks him in a fur-lined room. He has a fat
fetish and the room is filled with naked fat women.
Murad, the other son, is a bloodthirsty
drunk. He is shown striding a long line of kneeling prisoners of war. The
viewer assumes that, after the camera looks away, the brutal prince will
decapitate these prisoners. The helpless prisoners lined up call to mind photographs
of ISIS's Egyptian Christian prisoners similarly lined up and then decapitated.
Again, the details of this Djinn story
are reflected in Turkey's history. Murad IV was known for his brutality and he
did drink himself to death. The film shows him killing a boatman with an arrow;
one historian reports that in fact "Murad used to amuse himself after
dinner by going out and murdering people in the streets, or by potting boatmen
or pedestrians who happened to come with range." Kosem Sultan was
initially a Greek sex slave. Kosem did try to cure her son Ibrahim's impotence
through pornography and newly purchased sex slaves. She also profited from his
fecklessness by assuming power herself.
After various palace intrigues, one of
the fat concubines falls on the paving stone hiding Djinn's bottle. The stone
cracks. Rather than making wishes, the concubine wishes Djinn to the bottom of
the Bosphorus. A fish swallows him; the fish finds its way to a household cook.
Djinn's next human "master" is Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar). Zefir is the
youngest wife of a rich old merchant. In public, she wears niqab – that is,
only her eyes are visible. At home, she inhabits a lonely tower. The old man occasionally
arrives to bend her over and penetrate her from behind. She endures this with a
scowl. Her wish is for knowledge, which Djinn grants her. Trapped as she is,
the knowledge all but drives her mad. Though Zefir and Djinn share a torrid
affair, in a moment of high emotion, she wishes she could forget ever having
met Djinn. Her wish is disastrously granted. Zefir's story, that of an
intellectually gifted woman imprisoned by gender apartheid, was agonizingly
painful to watch.
The film draws parallels between the
fascinating women Djinn has loved over the centuries and Alithea. The Queen of
Sheba, otherwise stoic, shows arousal with a subtle gulp in her throat. Alithea
performs the same gulp. Hurrem has striking red hair, as does Alithea. Alithea's
knee bounces when she studies, and she runs her finger across the printed page
in a distinctive way echoed by Zefir. Similarly, hanging in Alithea's London
home, before she ever meets Djinn, is a painting of her eye, under one of Djinn's
eye. These little tells inform us either that Djinn and Alithea are fated to be
together, or that this is all Alithea's imagination.
After hearing Djinn's romantic tales, Alithea
has a wish. She wants Djinn to fall in love with her, as he has fallen in love
with these other women. He does so. Alithea and Djinn move to London. London's
abundance of television, radio, and cell phone signals is destructive to Djinn,
as he is made of "subtle fire," not "dust," as are humans.
Alithea releases him to live in his Djinn dimension, but every now and then he
returns to visit with her. During one such visit, some boys kick a soccer ball,
and Djinn kicks it back to them, suggesting that he may very well be real, and
not merely a figment of Alithea's imagination. On the other hand, Robert Pitman's provocative analysis argues
that Djinn is not real.
In reporting why I gave this lovely
little film six stars rather than ten, I have to say something that is
difficult for me to say. Our current, post-Christian culture is saturated with
cheap sex, and if I criticize a cultural product for its treatment of sex, I'm
almost always going to say that sex was used in a shallow, commercial way. Sex
in contemporary culture is comparable to displayed diner cakes. The
discriminating guest does not purchase them. They look good but taste fake. For
me, a rewarding depiction of human intimacy is less about spendthrift
availability or graphic details. It's more about how well the scene
encapsulates something human and is earned by the plot. The problem with Longing,
for me, was not, as usual, a cheap slathering of ersatz sex to make an
inferior product commercially viable. Rather, the problem here is the absence
of sex.
Idris Elba, in addition to being a
superlative actor, is charismatic, and a former Sexiest Man Alive. He's very well cast as a
hunk of burning love who has delivered supernatural satisfaction over the
course of three thousand years. Tilda Swinton is charismatic as well, but she's
better suited to playing, as she often has, ethereal, androgenous beings, as
she did in Orlando and Dr. Strange.
Tilda Swinton as Alithea Binnie is
sexless. Not "sexless" as in "The Sleeping Beauty, waiting for
Prince Charming to awaken her with a kiss," but rather "sexless"
as in "Doesn't much like sex and is quite happy getting along without."
There are people like that. Things other than sex arouse their libido:
knitting, cleaning, costuming dogs in anthropomorphic attire.
Alithea Binnie's best Prince Charming would not be smoldering Idris Elba, but,
rather, Bill Nighy as a scholar in tweed who would give her a hug – and not too
often – and share her breathless excitement at the perfect footnote.
Onscreen chemistry is a phenomena our
scientific age has yet to explain. Rock Hudson was gay and Doris Day had some
lousy marriages, including one husband who tried to beat his child out of her
pregnant body and another who cheated her financially. And yet onscreen Day and
Hudson were Hollywood yoni and lingam. How? Why? Who knows? Elba and Swinton
never conjure an intense onscreen chemistry that would generate the kind of
sacrifices that each character makes for the other.
I wish for an actress who, unlike
Swinton, did not appear so very content in her isolation, but who telegraphed a
scintilla of curiosity about what it would be like to surrender to Djinn's
magical seduction. I think of Katherine Hepburn as a prim missionary opposite
Humphrey Bogart as a drunken expat in 1951's The
African Queen, or Deborah Kerr as Sister Angela and
Robert Mitchum as a Marine stranded together on a Pacific island controlled by
Imperial Japanese troops in 1957's Heaven Knows Mr. Allison, or Greta
Garbo as a rigid Soviet communist and Melvyn Douglas as a charming gigolo in 1939's
Ninotchka.
In each of those films, the female star
is utterly convincing as a happily independent woman who is immune to male
attraction, but who chooses to take the risky leap, succumbs, and changes.
Sister Angela is still a nun at the end of Mr. Allison, but the
ending suggests that the future might change that. As she tells
Mitchum that, though she plans to remain in her convent, he will always be, in
her heart, her "dear companion," she, dressed entirely in a nun's
habit, shows more warmth to Mitchum than Swinton shows to Elba in all of Longing.
Hepburn, Kerr, and Garbo were all Golden
Age actresses, but not all Golden Age actresses performed the delicate maneuver
of appearing to be a contented single woman who succumbs to seduction and comes
to love her seducer. When smart-talking Barbara Stanwyck and smoldering Merle
Oberon were cast opposite boyish Gary Cooper, it was the women who did the
seducing. Stanwyck was a corrupt journalist in Meet John Doe and a
gangster's moll in Ball of Fire. Oberon was a rich girl looking to
expand her list of sexual exploits in The Cowboy and the Lady. In the
end, though, virginal Cooper seduced these women right back, conquering their
hearts and inspiring them to change their lives and adopt his integrity and
decency.
In 1957's An Affair to Remember,
Cary Grant, a gigolo, does not seduce Deborah Kerr, a kept woman. They both
surround themselves with impenetrable walls of witty but cynical repartee. On a
cruise, they visit a chapel, where they
are both seduced by God. "We changed course today," Grant
announces. They mature from frivolous, selfish manipulators to two lovers
willing to give up their most precious obsessions for the other person's well-being.
"We changed course today." English
majors are told that they can recognize the main character of a piece. The main
character is the one who changes. Seduction into not just sex but love inevitably
results in change. Neither Alithea nor Djinn change. At the end of the movie,
she's still an isolated scholar. He's still a Djinn. Their meeting was not
transformational.
I tried to think of contemporary
celebrities who could carry out the above-described transformations. Impenetrable
walls erected to protect the most vulnerable aspects of the self melt into
permeable membranes that allow another in. The result: two opposites, male and
female, cleave unto another: a new way of being human. Paradoxically, the risky
vulnerability that allowed the other to penetrate protective walls strengthens
the two who let their guard down. In gratitude, each protects the other through
commitment and faithfulness.
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
acted out that maneuver repeatedly in their films. In 1942's Woman of the
Year, Tracy and Hepburn aggressively spar and compete with each other,
including by trying to drink each other under the table. But in one quiet
scene, they occupy the back seat of a taxi cab. Hepburn sits close to Tracy and
says, "This is good." Tracy pulls Hepburn even closer to himself;
they snuggle. "This is better," he says. Hepburn's face communicates
absolute contentment.
What modern celebrities could play that
scene? What modern scriptwriters could write that scene? What audiences would
care about a scene that did not deliver graphic sensation?
Jennifer Lopez's most high profile
recent role was in 2019's Hustlers. She played a stripper who drugs men
and steals their money. This thief was the movie's heroine. In 2015's Trainwreck,
Amy Schumer plays a drunk who sleeps around and does not want a committed
relationship. In 2021's Scenes from a Marriage, Jessica Chastain played
the wife in a dysfunctional marriage that involves physical abuse, multiple
adulteries, and obsession. The wife chooses an abortion the husband does not
want. As he waits for her, he puts coins into a vending machine and receives a
can of soda. He stares at the machine; the viewer is to conclude that he gets
greater satisfaction, in this transaction, from a machine than from his wife.
Obese Lizzo twerks her naked buttocks. Beyonce's lyrics don't rise above "suck
on my balls," "middle fingers up," and the word "m------------."
Take a look at the top
box office films of 2021, the top box office stars, and the highest paid female celebrities, and
tell me which movie depicts, or which performers have successfully performed,
that kind of transformational, intimate interdependence of man and woman.
A lesser known actress, Sally Hawkins,
has poignantly depicted a woman in love. In 2017's The Shape of Water, Hawkins,
as an Hispanic cleaning woman, is friends with a black woman and a gay man. She
falls in love with a humanoid amphibian from South America who is oppressed by
sadistic, white, American male heterosexuals. The cleaning woman and the
lovable, oppressed, Latinx amphibian jump into a canal together. A
voiceover narration assures the viewer that they "remain in
love" "happily ever after." The Shape of Water won the
Academy Award for best picture, as well as three other of the thirteen awards
for which it was nominated.
I'm guessing that Three Thousand
Years of Longing did not depict, in a way that satisfied this viewer or
many others, Alithea succumbing, in an intimately sexual way, to Djinn not just
because Tilda Swinton is, again, an ethereal and androgynous screen presence,
or because the character, as written, seems quite content alone. I suspect that
the film could not work that particular magic because we as a society have
grown suspicious of the transformational magic that occurs between a man and a
woman who "become one flesh" in the best sense of the words. The
woman would have to be shown "surrendering," and the man would have
to be shown "mastering," and the man would have to "surrender"
too, that is, surrender his role as a predator playing the field and wracking
up conquests, and settle into an adult role as a committed helpmate, protector
and provider. Investing in that narrative is just too problematical today.
I saw Longing twice, and in
between I saw 1975's Jaws, so I saw a lot of trailers, including the
trailers for Smile, Barbarian, and Pearl. The trailer for Smile,
evidently a gory horror film, includes an image of a decapitated head. The
trailer for Barbarian promised torture in a dungeon under a suburban
Detroit home. Pearl stars Mia Goth's whose partner, Shia LeBeouf, is
making headlines as a recent Catholic convert. Pearl is a nasty, bloody,
sick movie, the prequel to another nasty, bloody, sick movie, entitled, simply,
X. Pearl's trailer involved Pearl feeding a helpless man in a wheelchair
to an alligator. I did not see a trailer for Bones and All, the new film
featuring Timothee Chalamet, a major star. The film depicts sexual cannibalism.
The film includes, according to the BBC, "some of the
most intense sequences of graphic violence imaginable."
In the past, the Motion Picture
Production Code limited how much sex or violence a film could include. The code
died a slow death, and was history by 1969. Contemporary movies find it
difficult to depict a masculine, heterosexual man and a feminine, heterosexual
woman falling in love and deepening their love through conventional acts of
physical intimacy. Sexual cannibalism, though, is something today's movies can
do, and today's audiences buy tickets to see graphic violence pushed to the
extreme. Audiences seek sensation. After audiences reject one kind of sensation
– heroism, love, community – audiences lap up the most base sensation: graphic
violence.
I also saw a trailer for a new Avatar.
In this film, the main characters are CGI, and are blue. CGI, blue-skinned protagonists
permit the filmmakers to sidestep many thorny race-related taboos. Black
Adam depicts The Rock as a black man who is "born a slave," dies,
and is reborn as an all-powerful god. Till is the angry and lachrymose
trailer for a film dramatizing the lynching of Emmett Till. The Rings of
Power, based on the JRR Tolkien works about Middle Earth, features black
actors. Tolkien's inspiration, of course, was Norse, Old English, and other
ancient European mythology, material that would not have featured black people.
According to Elon Musk, in this new Rings, "Almost every male
character so far is a coward, a jerk or both." The Woman King celebrates
warriors in Dahomey who protected the kingdom's "way of life."
Ironically the Dahomey "way of life" included slavery and human
sacrifice, slavery and human sacrifice that the British attempted to stop. The
trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hints at an over-the-top,
borderline fascist, celebration of a highly profitable black superhero and his
made-up African kingdom. Wakanda, like Middle Earth, is fictional, but no one
would dare station a white actor in that cinematic neighborhood. Amsterdam's
trailer was incoherent, but it was clear that it depicts a powerful
friendship between a black man and a white man. The trailer for Bros
is actually (what a relief) funny. It's being advertised as the first gay
romantic comedy released by a major studio and featuring an all GLBT cast. In
one scene, two characters announce, "OMG do you guys remember straight
people?" "Yeah, they had a nice run."
I did see one trailer for a movie that
focused on a white, male, heterosexual American character: Robert Oppenheimer.
In the trailer I saw, this white man is described, as he described himself, as "the
destroyer of worlds."
Trailers make things very clear.
Hollywood imagines itself to be ideologically left, that is Marxist, but its
appetites are ravenously capitalist. Hollywood's greed is satisfied by sniffing
out popular tastes. American ticket-buyers are no longer restrained by the
morals of the largely Catholic-inspired Hays Code. People will buy tickets to
view extreme violence, so Hollywood churns it out, in spite of ample evidence of the correlation between
violent media and violent behavior. In spite of the left's support for gun
control, Hollywood does not police its own avalanche of contributions to
violent behavior. Hollywood, though, does see profit in some feints at
morality, so it churns out product meant to uplift black people, and to depict
white men as villainous.
With that ethic in mind, why do the Woke
object to Three Thousand Years of Longing?
Longing, the Woke allege, is exoticist. What is "exoticism"?
Exoticism is an accusation against whites for their appreciation of anything
non-white. Gauguin, who painted the South Seas, is guilty of exoticism. Sir
Richard Burton, who translated One Thousand and One Nights, Joseph
Conrad, who wrote "Heart of Darkness," Herman Melville, who wrote Moby
Dick, and William Shakespeare, who wrote Othello, are all guilty of
exoticism.
There's no non-white analog to the
exoticism accusation. Dave Chappelle imitating whites speaking is not guilty of
exoticism. Guillermo del Toro, a Mexican director, depicting heterosexual American
white men as sadistic oppressors of Latinx amphibians is not exoticism.
Self-exoticizing is okay. Think of the black
singers Josephine Baker, who liked to be seen with a pet cheetah, and Grace
Jones, photographed on all fours and growling. Think of the lyrics of "Lady
Marmalade" a hit song by Patti Labelle. A black prostitute seduces a "grey-flannel-life"
white man and makes his "savage beast inside roar until he cried." The
Black Panther movies, coopting various African costumes and dance styles, is
not blameworthy. Blacks exoticizing themselves is not just acceptable; many
would see it as a sign of "authenticity" or "keeping it real."
"Miller's exoticism of African and
Asian cultures could rub some people the wrong way" writes Fletcher Powell of NPR. "Elba speaks
with a slight accent of indeterminate origin. Like his pointed ears (!) and
shaved head, it flags the djinn's exoticism," reports the Boston Globe. Miller's
"story is romantic, and ironic, and fantastic, so Miller leans into the
exoticism of the setting and the subject," says New York, in a positive review. But the comments become
more negative.
"The film's exoticism of people of
color, a problem that haunts the otherwise fantastical images Miller conjures
in his imaginings of Middle Eastern countries and peoples, takes on an even
more troubling edge … Elba's character is repressed by a white woman … existing
to serve her but not able to be his own person … the casting of a Black man and
a white woman … casts a problematic shadow over the relationship," writes Katie Carter.
Orientalism is an accusation related to
exoticism. Orientalism is more dangerous because the word has been weaponized
specifically to mute analysis of Islam by Westerners. Mere mention of the word "terrorist"
or 9-11 can be silenced with accusations of orientalism. Any accurate depiction
of a harem, of veiled women, of sultans, janissaries, or slave markets can be
written off as orientalism. Lawrence of Arabia is of course guilty of orientalism.
The Woke exalt their Marxist hostility above any art. To them, Lawrence, a
legitimate contender for the best film ever made, is anathema and must be
banned.
El Diario's Javier
Zurro condemned Longing's alleged orientalism. George
Miller is sinful for depicting "women with veils," "battles,"
and "bearded men." Such depictions are "orientalist." They
are "out of an old, stale storybook." "He portrays these stories
the same way any Westerner would have done 50 years ago … we can no longer
resort to the same stories in 2020 [sic]."
Abidah Zaid at Geek Culture writes that Longing
is "extremely Orientalist. It heavily places Middle-eastern people under
the 'Others' category, portrays them as brute and savage, but also exoticises
the people and their culture … The movie reduces Middle-eastern people to campy
costuming, sexual objects and lessons for the White British woman who, at every
second possible, reminds viewers of her intellect." "A much more
engaging" film could come "from a younger or a tuned director who
would engage and perhaps even challenge the topics of orientalism, sex, race
and gender present in the story."
Note that in fact the Middle East and
Muslim communities everywhere are full of "veiled women" and
"bearded men," and jihad, that is, battles, are an inescapable part
of Islamic history. If anything, Longing downplayed the
"otherness" of Middle Easterners. Miller never mentions that two of
his female characters were non-Turkish sex slaves kidnapped as girls and sold
as vaginas-on-demand. Miller similarly never mentions that murdering one's own next-of-kin was an
established practice in the Ottoman Empire. "Muhammed the Third, a
comparatively moderate, tender-hearted man, put to death his nineteen brothers,
some of them infants at the breast." To the Woke, facts, like art, are dismissible;
what matters is fealty to ideology.
Idris Elba's Djinn is accused of being a
"magical negro," that is, a black character who exists only to serve
a white character's needs. Slate magazine's reviewer denounces herself: "I may not be
equipped to explore fully as a white female critic … the exoticization of the genie character as
played by Elba. Is he a Magical Negro?" "Casting a Black British
actor … and having him speak in an invented R-rolling accent of indeterminate
origin" results in a depiction of "metaphysical slavery."
Craig D. Lindsey, a black critic, in Nashville Scene, denounces "the
most fantastical magical negro movie of all time … paler scribes have praised
the film … critics of color aren't vibing … on the outdated magical-negro trope
… racist, misogynistic … fatphobic."
Kristy Puchko at Mashable offers the full menu of Woke denunciation.
Longing, according to Puchko, is a "a harrowing horror story" "rooted
in privilege and racism" depicting a "grim power dynamic" of "of
an enslaved person and a slave master." "Don't be deceived. Though
not even Miller seems aware, Alithea is the villain of this tale." Alithea
"others" and "exoticizes" "China, the South Seas,
and…the Levant" by calling them "strange lands.'' This is "an
early red flag." Funny, one might think that Puchko liked red flags. "Like
the English colonizers before her, Alithea strolls about these foreign lands
with an eye toward acquisition … of pivotal treasure." No, Alithea is in
Turkey to deliver a lecture at a conference. She "acquires" exactly
one souvenir, a small bottle.
Djinn has "broad Black shoulders."
This is bad. He should have had skinny, pale shoulders. "Broad Black
shoulders" are racist. Djinn tells Alithea stories, "pouring out his
heart" only "because of the power she holds in the palm of her hand."
"Miller flattens a variety of Eastern cultures in an apparent effort to
appeal to Western audiences. The film's Orientalism has been condemned on
Twitter." Condemned on Twitter? Well, that seals it. The "Middle
Easterners" in the stories are "papyrus-thin characterizations of
lust, pride, betrayal, and madness." Such "barbaric stereotypes"
"damage" "Middle Easterners." In contrast, Alithea is a "white
savior of the enslaved Djinn."
"This Black man is a literal
prisoner to this white woman's whims … he entreats her to kindness with food,
interest, stories, and … sex … The Djinn's consent is beside the point … She
doesn't set his bottle on her bed, where he might sleep … She places his
glittering prison on a shelf." When goodbye inevitably comes, "Alithea
realizes this is the consequence of her colonizing actions … the enslaver
treated his heart and soul like a tchotchke." The movie's "live-laugh-love"
ending is "white woman nonsense." "It's not the colonizer who's
destroyed, but the very treasure they claim to be appreciating … Three
Thousand Years of Longing is not a tale of epic romance, but one of
enduring racism."
There is a comedy meme on YouTube.
People cut together film trailers and change the genre of the film. One depicts
Silence of the Lambs as
a romantic comedy. In another, Mrs. Doubtfire is a horror film. Puchko is so blinded by
her own Woke self-righteousness that she performs the same vile surgery on Longing.
Puchko alleges that Miller shows "brazen disrespect" by "cherry-picking"
bits of Middle Eastern tales "without considering their greater
significance or context." In fact it is Puchko who shows brazen
disrespect, Puchko who cherry-picks, Puchko who ignores context. She does all
this with the blind, destructive fervor of a Stalinist. Miller should sue her,
movie theaters should bar her entry, and streaming services should deny her.
Puchko has done us this one service. She
has offered us the absurd spectacle of a Woke thought police officer lamenting
that a fictional genie's bottle was placed on a shelf and not on a bed. The
thing is, Miller can't win. Had Miller placed the bottle on the bed and not on
the shelf, Puchko would have griped that Alithea saw Djinn as merely a sex
object. And Puchko uses "tchotchke" and "colonizing" in the
same sentence.
If I were to write a review as condemnatory
as Puchko's and Lindsey's, I would condemn the sick and contagious violence in
movies today. I don't do that because I lack the ability to reverse the flow of
mighty rivers. All I can do is raise my pipsqueak voice and say that our
current cultural overlords are A-OK with graphic depictions of dismemberment
and cannibalism, that artists seem to have lost the ability to depict healthy
human relationships in big budget films, and that a sweet, pretty-to-look-at
but undercooked movie about a genie is enough to push them over the edge.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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