LaVar Hosting Jeopardy July 26-30 Stan Account 👁

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.

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.

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.

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.

And McDonaugh’s evident lack of interest in black interiority period compounds this problem. He violates the “nothing about us without us” doctrine egregiously.

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.

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.

Black folks are dead in the street. Violence matters, but specifically police violence matters.