Did anyone else notice the bruhaha erupting over something that Greg Easterbrook wrote in his New Republic blog site last week? He was ripping apart “Kill Bill” and Mirimax and Disney for glorifying violence, but he did it in a way that some folks screamed anti-semitism. So ESPN not only fired him, but they removed all traces of his ever existing from their web site. But now, some of the people who were upset over what Easterbrook wrote are even more upset that ESPN fired him.
All this seems really odd, considering that it just seems highly unlikely that the New Republic is a hotbed of anti-semetic activity, and that even Easterbrook’s harshest critics believe that he was a victim of just poor wording.
That said, I hope Slate picks up TMQ, cause that was my favoreite football column by far. Even with the bizarre Star Trek rants he does.
Archive is still there. Oddly Week 2 is above Week 6. Guess we won’t know for sure until tomorrow afternoon when the new issue is due. Do you have any links to this brouhaha btw?
Easterbrook basically called Michael Eisner a bad person for allowing Kill Bill to be made, because its a violent movie and he’s a Jew and should know better because of the Holocaust. (Yeah, it doesn’t make much sense to me either).
Sad story. I like the football portions of TMQ, the rest of it is too precious or too “Nerd pretending to be a cheerleader obsessed fratboy” for me.
This line from his “apology” column disturbs me:
“oblivious to the psychological studies showing that positive depiction of violence in entertainment causes actual violence in children.”
I’ve been studying this topic a lot lately. There aren’t any conclusive studies like this. All of them can be picked apart or have been deemed inconclusive at best. In fact, there’s a lot of studies, just as inconclusive, that indicate the opposite. Whatever. It just shows that Easterbrook can be a bit too agenda driven. Is his conclusion really that Christians and Jews shouldn’t make violent movies because of their religion?
Well fuck, he claims to be a Christian, what the fuck is Easterbrook doing ogling cheerleaders in front of the kids reading his TMQ column then?
Congratulations to Easterbrook for finding the jew/ninja connection that’s been lurking unvoiced in our collective unconscious for so long now. I hope he will continue to shed light upon the senseless deaths of countless make-believe hired assassins and perhaps one day bring to their spirits, and to their families, some sort of closure.
Most importantly, Easterbrook appears never to have seen either Scream or Kill Bill. Unless he saw some kind of director’s cut, at no point in the movie is an entire family graphically slaughtered for the amusement of the killers.
Yeah Kill Bill sorta opens with that. I mean they don’t show it, but it’s implied, and they do mention it a few times in the movie with quick flashbacks to pregnant Uma getting beat silly. They’ll probably show more of it in Vol. 2.
Unless, of course, you were objecting to the “amusement” part. He seems to imply that the characters just go around killing people at random. The bride certainly doesn’t do this, although some of the bad guys might. I mean, did they really have to take out the entire wedding party to stop Black Mamba from leaving? Probably not, but they’re the bad guys. So now bad guys have to be virtuous? I don’t know, whatever. The guy’s railing against Kill Bill is almost incoherent. I’ve read more lucid posts in console war threads on the gaming age forums.
It’s not for the amusement of the killers(they are trying to kill Uma and possibly some other targets, they kill everyone else because it’s not good bad guy form to leave witnesses around).
It’s not shown, as such, cannot be graphic. In fact, no single murder of anyone at the wedding is shown, Uma is shown beaten and shot, but the other X(like 7, IIRC) people who were slain are killed off camera.
It’s not an entire family. It’s a wedding party.
Easterbrook also repeatedly mentions that movies these days promote the idea of killing innocents as a fun lifestyle choice. With the exception of Natural Born Killers, I cannot think of a single movie that comes remotely close to that. And if that’s what you thought Natural Born Killers was about, you aren’t very bright.
In Kill Bill, no innocents are killed by the hero. Some innocents are killed by the bad guys, but that’s sort of the thing that establishes them as the bad guys. In Scream, many innocents are killed by, again, the bad guys.
Easterbrook is pretty much knee-jerk against violence in entertainment period. He’s done this before. Apparently he’s for objectifying women, making crude remarks about them, and making suggestive comments about how they can service him in their offtime (which is does weekly and is pretty much equally unChristian as violence is). But if you pretend to beat women up in a movie… well, that’s where Gregg draws the line.
I don’t find either stance offensive. I don’t mind ultra-violent movies aimed at adults and I don’t mind Easterbrook’s frat boy come ons and comments in his columns. I’ve always been more offended by Gregg’s penchant to rename things so I have to keep a list to know who he’s talking about. Moufloons=Rams, Blue Man Group = Seattle, Chesapeake blah blah Indigenous Persons, etc.,
It’s fine to be anti-violence and gore. But I draw the line when you suggest a film company President should block or stop a film director from making the movie he wants to make because of the religion of said film company President. I mean, really, Easterbrook is mad at Tarantino for making Kill Bill and all the critics for praising it. It’s stupid to take your battle to Eisner and Weinstein (even if you agree with Easterbrook) because, man, those guys probably dictate content too much anyway… why encourage them to take more of a personal stand? Let the auteurs do their thang dammit.
Of course ESPN shouldn’t have fired him. But it is ironic. I guess Eisner took a religious stand at the implied anti-semitism (which I agree with Kaus, was more of a case of the stupids than anything resembling hate), which is what Easterbrook was encouraging Eisner to do to Tarantino over the violent film.
I’m going to miss TMQ today though. Dammit.
Thanks for the compliment Jason, I’m proud of that article too and grateful to Bauman and Yans for giving it the green light.
Easterbrook is pretty much knee-jerk against violence in entertainment period. He’s done this before. Apparently he’s for objectifying women, making crude remarks about them, and making suggestive comments about how they can service him in their offtime (which is does weekly and is pretty much equally unChristian as violence is). But if you pretend to beat women up in a movie… well, that’s where Gregg draws the line.
As stupid as this little blog entry of his was, the burgeoning movement to reframe him as some sort of Neandrathal (it’s totally out of control over at atrios.blogspot.com, for one) is misguided and wrong.
I haven’t read any of that blog-stuff Jason, but I’ve seen him make silly anti-violence arguments before. It bothered me enough then to have built up some annoyance at him, which I’m expressing now, and I do really think the Cheesecake ogling is hypocritical if you’re going to start claiming people need to control content based on their religious backgrounds.
He’s a brilliant political analyst and, man, does he know football, but I’ve always hated his “holier than thou” editorial style. Yeah, like that SUV article he wrote. That was just as annoying and smug, even though I’m not in the “for SUVs” column myself.
Mainly I’m just really mad that I can read TMQ today because he did something this bone-headed.
“Easterbrook also repeatedly mentions that movies these days promote the idea of killing innocents as a fun lifestyle choice. With the exception of Natural Born Killers, I cannot think of a single movie that comes remotely close to that. And if that’s what you thought Natural Born Killers was about, you aren’t very bright”
I think the Matrix movies can also be shown to do this. Such as the Lobby scene in the first one. Neo didn’t show any remorse in taking out those security guards even though they were innocent. Yeah it can be argued that the agent could use the humans to “teleport in” as a justification for killing them. But it still didn’t feel right in the movies to see the hero’s killing them wth so much style and lack of remorse.
Cathcart- I’m not really disagreeing with you, my point is it really wasn’t even sorta, unless you use extremely liberal definitions of “graphic” and “family” and have a complete misunderstanding of the motivations of the killers. I don’t believe Easterbrook has seen Kill Bill, for the record.
tronnc-
Eh, they do it without remorse, but it’s not for their own amusement. They are killing security guards who are working for the great evil, even if the guards don’t know it. It’s not just that they were all potential agents, it’s also that they would attempt to stop Neo from rescuing his friend.
