My colleagues here at ThinkProgress are writing about Roger Ebert, the great critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who died today at 70 after many years of surviving cancer, as a liberal, and his voice is undoubtedly a loss to liberalism. His vocal interventions on politics, particularly as he took to Twitter, a medium where he bloomed after losing the use of his voice, seem to have taken some of his readers by surprise, even angered them. But to me, it’s impossible to read Ebert’s writing as a critic and not be struck by his politics, and how his political and aesthetic understandings came together to inform his understanding of what made movies work, what made them brave, and what made them fail.

Ebert’s reviews were always deeply alive to human concerns, rather than exclusively aesthetic ones. Re-reading his review of The Godfather, it’s striking that Ebert praises Francis Ford Coppola’s structural decisions. But he takes time to note a moment when the movie turns away from violence: “Notice how the undertaker is told ‘some day, and that day may never come, I will ask a favor of you,’ and how when the day comes, the favor is not violence (as in a conventional movie),’ but Don Vito’s desire to spare his wife the sight of his son’s maimed body.” And he asks the reader “Now here is a trivia question: What is the name of Vito’s wife?” In the midst of one of the greatest movies ever made about men, it’s critical to him to ask what the treatment of women means for the male characters, and for the movie, which made strategic decisions to eliminate major sections of Mario Puzo’s novel told from the perspective of women.

He could be as attuned to the ideas in movies as he was in their entertainment value, as in his analysis of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, in which he identified a flaw that shifts this movie, long considered a landmark in Hollywood’s treatment of race, away from a discussion of race at all. “What it boils down to, then,” he wrote,”is that the two fathers are overcome by implied attacks on their masculinity. The race question becomes secondary; what Tracy really has to decide is if he feels inadequate as a man. Kramer accomplishes this transition so subtly you hardly notice it. But it is the serious flaw in his plot, I think…Here is a film about interracial marriage that has the audience throwing rice. The women in the audience can usually be counted on to identify with the love story, I suppose. But what about those men? Will love conquer prejudice? I wonder if Kramer isn’t sneaking up on one of the underlying causes of racial prejudice when he implies that the fathers feel their masculinity threatened.”

He wasn’t a litmus-test reviewer, judging movies on single decisions or statements, but balanced different elements of a film in making up his judgements. This kind of thinking was clear in his reading of Gone With The Wind in Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews. Ebert was scathing about the movie’s uncritical use of Margaret Mitchell’s text, which describes the slave-holding South as “a l and of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” writing acidly “One does not have to ask if the slaves saw it the same way.” And he was not kind to the balance of concerns in the film. “The movie sidesteps the inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the sweat of forced labor (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting calluses on her pretty little hands than for all the great crimes of slavery).” But he read the film as a film, noting how some elements of it weighed against others, saying “to its major African American characters it does at least grant humanity and complexity. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, is the most sensible and clear-sighted person in the entire story.” In that same review he championed the need to depict even “values and assumptions fundamentally different from our own,” because “A politically correct GWTW would not be worth making, and might largely be a lie.” It’s a piece I wish every person who condemned Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty as an endorsement of torture had read before putting fingers to keyboard.
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Rep. Allen West (R-FL) appears to have some fairly strong opinions about what it takes to act like a lady, and he expressed them in an email to his colleague, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) yesterday. “You are the most vile, unprofessional, and despicable member of the US House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up,” he wrote to her. “You have proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!” Given the restrictiveness of Mr. West’s vision of ladylike conduct, I thought it was important to provide him with a primer on things ladies are allowed to do.

1. Put one over on clueless heirs to beer fortunes, trick them into marriage, blow their minds with the fact that you have an actual sexual history, and then seduce them all over again:

2. Provide vicious rhetorical beatdowns to young ladies of inappropriate class backgrounds who seem in imminent danger of marrying your nephew:

3. Decide that a fully realized sexual life is an integral part of being human:

4. Understand that position’s all well and good, but that it ultimately can’t stand in the way of modernity:

and

5. Never, never, never surrender, even if it means that people decide you’re a pushy, capitalist tramp.

6. Stand up for their sisters’ honor:

It’s not surprising that West made the mistake of assuming that being a lady means a pliant, adorable cream puff. Lots of folks do. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz is heir to the best part of the lady tradition: the tough as nails one.

As sometimes happens when pieces from this blog make their way into the wider universe, some folks got verklempt about the idea that there could possibly be political meaning in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. This is sort of entertaining, given that Rowling has talked explicitly about the impact of working at Amnesty International on her fiction, written scathingly about class and Tory policies, and, as Zack Stentz points out, modeled the Black sisters on the Mitford sisters and Dobby the House Elf on the friend of Jessica Mitford’s who recruited her into the Communist Party. But I think there’s a larger issue here, the fact that some people are quite uncomfortable with the idea that art is political.

Andy Daglas, with whom I was discussing this, said he thinks that’s in part because “I think some don’t like the idea of politics having a moral dimension, which storytelling brings to forefront.” And the AV Club’s Rowan Kaiser agreed, saying, “I think a not insignificant number of people view politics as sports, and either are on one team or hate both.” There’s an extent to which that’s true, but I also think with works like the Potter series, or the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books, which draw an explicit line between capitalism and violence against women, folks who don’t share the politics of those authors have a choice between acknowledging those works’ politics and as a result enjoying the works less, or rejecting the idea that a specific piece of art or all art is political. Of course, that’s something that works in multiple directions. I love Gone With the Wind, even though its racial politics are awful*, but I can’t deny what’s in front of me for the sake of my own comfort. I find China Mieville’s nihilism in Perdido Street Station profoundly disturbing, in that I think it becomes an argument against struggling for justice, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate his world-building, and that frustration made me feel the climax of the novel intensely, even if it meant I was angry.

As Rowan put it later in the conversation, “I’m fascinated by the potential motivations of people who deliberately reject concepts of interconnectedness.” And that’s something Rowling herself addressed in her Harvard Commencement address when she said, “Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.” She was speaking about politics and empathy, but I think it’s true of fiction. If you pretend the scenes of torture in the Harry Potter novels are abstract, or that J.K. Rowling may dislike poverty but has no opinions on its actual effects and the policies that would ameliorate it, you may delay a reckoning with your own beliefs and the impact they have in the real world. But you’re also denying yourself the great moral and emotional force of the novel. Art isn’t grown in a vat to wander neutral into the world and retreat from it untouched and untouching.

*I think there is an argument to be made that the entire novel is a juxtaposition between slaveholders and people who do their own labor in the capitalist system, with Mitchell ultimately arguing that the latter are more suited to a modern era, making the novel a rejection of Confederate nostalgia. After all, Melanie Wilkes dies, and Scarlett ends up disgusted with Ashley and in love with Rhett, while her Cause-crazed Atlanta neighbors end up becoming more flexible, tough people when they start their own businesses. But I digress.