The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly — except that situations do not always follow one another in clear succession, but often there is a happening profoundly twofold, confusedly entangled.-- Martin Buber, I AND THOU.
You wanted money. Where was it all to come from? You have drained your sisters’ little hoard (all brothers sponge more or less on their sisters). Those fifteen hundred francs of yours (got together, God knows how! in a country where there are more chestnuts than five-franc pieces) will slip away like soldiers after pillage. And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin to work? Work, or what you understand by work at this moment, means, for a man of Poiret’s calibre, an old age in Mamma Vauquer’s lodging-house. There are fifty thousand young men in your position at this moment, all bent as you are on solving one and the same problem—how to acquire a fortune rapidly. You are but a unit in that aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what efforts you must make, how desperate the struggle is. There are not fifty thousand good positions for you; you must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot. Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. Honesty is nothing to the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius; they hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it. To sum it all up in a phrase, if they fail to smother genius in the mud, they fall on their knees and worship it. Corruption is a great power in the world, and talent is scarce. So corruption is the weapon of superfluous mediocrity; you will be made to feel the point of it everywhere.-- Vautrin to Rastignac, Honore de Balzac, PERE GORIOT.
It's a hard world to get a break in,
All the good things have been taken-- "It's My Life," sung by the Animals.
Here's yet another of my recycled titles, only loosely connected to this essay from 2015. Instead, I'm expounding further on my negative estimation of Jordan Peele's 2019 horror-film US, reviewed here. I wrote in part:
Even before listening to Peele's ruminations about "privilege" on the DVD, it was pretty evident that Peele wasn't telling a generic horror story in which the main characters just happened to be Black Americans. The Wilsons are clearly being punished for their affluence, while Peele's sympathies lie with the marginalized doppelgangers. Peele's politics... [assert] that everyone who possesses any level of privilege does so at the expense of some other person.
During his DVD remarks, Peele maunders about the supposed moral underpinnings of his film, though he's absurdly fuzzy about what the moral is. This site transcribed said remarks:
"One of the central themes in Us is that we can do a good job, collectively, of ignoring the ramifications of privilege," Peele continued. "I think it's the idea that what we feel like we deserve comes, you know, at the expense of someone's else's freedom or joy. And the biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege, like the United States, is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn't luck that has us born where we're born. For us to have our privilege, someone suffers. That's where the tethered connection, I think, resonates the most is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin. You never forget that and we have to fight for the less fortunate."
This superficial screed speaks to my review-observation that Peele never feels it necessary to explore how the Wilsons became so well-off, or to say much, if anything, about what either Gabe, Adelaide, or both of them do in order to earn their daily bread. The insidious implication is that the Wilsons have wealth merely out of "luck," and that hard work plays absolutely no part in it. Indeed, though the Wilsons are black, by ascending to an upper middle-class position they become functional white people, who implicitly also have their superior wealth out of "luck." I suspect that people who think like this subscribe to an exaggerated idea of how much privilege white people have received as the result of "the good old white guy's network," as if one just signs one's name onto a sheet and starts collecting paychecks.
Though Peele is promoting a simple-minded racial myth, the example of Buber shows how such an opposition can have more profound ramifications. The relationship of "the haves" to "the have nots" would be something Buber would call an "I-it" relationship. Peele is almost certainly implying that the relationship of the Wilsons to their deprived doppelgangers is comparable to the relationship of slave-owners to their slaves. Clearly the Wilsons' ignorance that the doppelgangers even exist is no excuse, in the same way those damn white people can't be excused for not constantly acknowledging that the country was built upon the labor of slaves.
Now, had Peele actually made a film in which someone was "fighting for the less fortunate," one might agree with his ethical stance. However, US does nothing of the kind. It's all about the doppelgangers' violent, largely aimless revolution-- and even though they're faux black people attacking real black people, clearly the Wilsons, by having stuff, represent the status quo. Nothing shows this revolutionary attitude more than the way Peele orchestrates the "accidental" playing of a rap song, "Fuck Tha Police," which repeatedly expresses black anger at, and plans for black violence against, law-enforcement officers who also represent the status quo. I for one fail to see how Peele can claim he's telling people to fight for the less fortunate, and at the same time spotlights characters who want nothing but violent usurpation of persons more fortunate.
"It's a hard world to get a break in,' the Animals sang, but little did they know that it was possible to blame the status quo for how hard it is. Just as Buber is more subtle than Peele regarding the "I-It relationship," Balzac is many times the superior of Peele regarding the dynamics of good fortune. The speaker of the quote above is the sinister, possibly criminal manipulator Vautrin, who attempts, in Mephistophelean fashion, to convince the naive young law student Rastignac to participate in a conspiracy. Balzac does not, in the end, champion Vautrin's "I-it" point of view, and favors rather the "I-thou" interaction of Rastignac and the eternally suffering Father Goriot. Yet the French author constructs Vautrin's argument with a rigorous honesty that Peele may never be able to achieve. There are many other factors beyond "the old boys' network" that can keep some people from good fortune. Rather, it's too much supply and too little demand: Rastignac is just one of a potential fifty thousand young men who seek prosperity, and Vautrin urges him to follow the path of corruption, since obviously the young man is anything but a genius.
Could Peele have made a movie that discussed so-called "white privilege" in more realistic terms, rather than one that simplistically insisted that it was the source of all suffering for people of color--even causing suffering, in an indirect fashion, to those persons of color who actually grab the brass ring of prosperity? I suppose it's possible. But most film critics bend over backwards to accomodate filmmakers who practice Peele's brand of identity politics. So he will probably go on making more movies like US, endlessly wallowing in victimage and the blame game-- and never, ever being having a moment of artistic honesty.
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