So I finally figured out Three Billboards.
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And I would argue while he treats domestic violence flippantly (as he treats all violence flippantly, which we find unacceptable because of our intense interest in attending to and remedying certain kinds of violence on a systemic/societal level)...
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He is very interested in how this particular woman exists within the ubiquity of violence in her life. And he’s very interested in how that racist cop, as a purveyor of violence, exists within the ubiquity of violence in his life.
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So we get fairly nuanced explorations of those individuals. Not of domestic violence as a phenomenon, nor of police brutality as a phenomenon, but of a survivor(/purveyor?) of brutal, capricious domestic violence and a purveyor of brutal, capricious police violence.
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And of all the adjectives before violent, McDonaugh is (by far) least interested in “domestic” and “police.” We as a society are very, very, VERY interested in those two adjectives.
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And here’s the deal: as an exploration of how grace, forgiveness, and growth are achieved in the context of ubiquitous violence, this film succeeds.
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As an exploration of domestic violence, sexual violence, police violence, etc., it fails so utterly miserably that it can only be explained by a profound lack of fucks given about those things.
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And McDonaugh’s evident lack of interest in black interiority period compounds this problem. He violates the “nothing about us without us” doctrine egregiously.
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And so we’re left with a film not about violence but about redeemable, redemptive, and redeemed interiority in the presence of violence, which ignores the particulars of sexual violence, domestic violence, and police brutality, and which cares nothing for black interiority.
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In the present climate, such a film can only be a moral offense. The near-total ignorance of and indifference towards that moral offense on the part of Hollywood, the critical establishment, and white moviegoers is a moral outrage.
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Black folks are dead in the street. Violence matters, but specifically police violence matters.
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We lose untold lives every year to gendered violence and intimate partner violence. Violence matters, but specifically IPV matters.
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More than one HUNDRED women and girls were assaulted by a “doctor” who was protected by his employers and their status as elite athletes capable of things most of us couldn’t dream of didn’t protect them at all. Violence matters, but specifically sexual violence matters.
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If Martin McDonaugh has no interest in those facts and realities, he should not write films or plays that touch on those subjects now or in the future. And certainly we should not reward him for doing so as callously and indifferently as he has...
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Even if it is in pursuit of a valid, interesting, and well-executed question about how interiority works in the presence of ubiquitous violence. Fin. (Did you know Twitter’s new thread feature actually has a limit on tweets you can put in a thread????)
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(This was basically long enough to submit as an article somewhere. Fuck.)
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End of conversation
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