Curtis Hanson

Curtis Hanson, who passed away this week, made the type of movies that are becoming more rare these days: neither genre nor totally arty. There was L.A. Confidential, which launched the career of Russell Crowe and put Guy Pearce on the map; 8 Mile, which convincingly portrayed Eminen's early life; Wonder Boys, with Michael Douglas playing a rumpled professor; The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, one of the best thrillers ever made; and The River Wild, a thriller set on a whitewater rafting trip. I'd watch any one of these movies again in a heartbeat.

L.A. Confidential and the thrillers come closest to genre, but not in any kind of cliched way. I always think of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) in tandem with Fatal Attraction (1987)—two movies made within a few years of each other whose villains are disturbed women in the throes of a personal crisis, wreaking incredible evil but retaining their complexity and even a touch of sympathy.

But in some ways Wonder Boys is my favorite. It's lovable for its appealing mess of a main character and also for its . . .  I don't know, mildness is actually the word I think of. It's not intense or a rush or hilariously funny or spectacular or sexy. It's just a story, one that offers the lovely and increasingly rare allure of the mid-range. Though I haven't seen it yet, this is the kind of movie I imagine Florence Foster Jenkins to be. Mild, funny, charming, and not without depth.

I also appreciate that that he adapted Jennifer Weiner's In Her Shoes, a lovely film based on the novel by the quintessential "woman's author." That Hanson saw past the cultural framing of Jennifer Weiner's work as maudlin and feminine, that he saw it as art worthy of cinematic treatment, is one of the most admirable traits of Hanson's career.

Suspicious Reading

A lot of talk about literature and culture is knee-jerk. From grad schools to websites, we've learned to take an almost hostile view toward items of popular culture, especially if the cultural product is American and middle-brow (and, I would argue, feminine). We think we have a superior view of a book or movie and can see (unlike the masses) how reactionary it really is.

This viewpoint is the foundation of critique. It is the approach that sees art as disguised ideological messages or conundrums that even the author is likely to be unaware of. Reading becomes an exercise in unpacking the harmful dominant messages that the seemingly innocent text is foisting on us.

There's a lot of merit to that approach. As a feminist critic myself, I do critique all the time. And I still remember with admiration one of the first pieces of critique I read, Terry Eagleton's analysis of The Mill on the Floss.  But it's become a really unthinking and reflexive mindset—horribly superficial and self-satisfied. So it was with great pleasure that I read Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique, which takes apart pretty thoroughly critique's death grip on our critical faculties.

Felski's argumentation is too varied to convey here, but to give a taste of it: She discusses Eve Sedgwick, the queer theorist who has begun to question the hegemony of critique: "Sedgwick wonders at the ease with which suspicious reading has settled into a mandatory method rather than one approach among others. Increasingly prescriptive as well as excruciatingly predictable, its effects can be stultifying, pushing all thought down predetermined paths."

"Pushing all thought down predetermined paths" says it well. How many people's response to, say, Twilight is immediately (and predictably and stultifyingly), "It dresses up stalking as romance." Well, it really doesn't, but of all the narratives we've been taught to be suspicious of, romantic ones top the list. Romantic narrative is nearly always interpreted as being bad for women, despite the fact that women seem to love it (a love that is then framed as stupidity or naivete or lack of self-esteem). This kind of interpretation amounts to scanning the horizon for key words or key situations that the critic then gloms onto and pastes a label on. What it's missing is thoughtfulness and an attention to evidence.

Felski's book is academic (which means, among other things, it's way too long and jargony), but it's a good documentation of our efforts to break through the cage of critique and interact more freely—and intelligently—with art.