By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Insouciant crickets: Caveh's cavil
I Am A Sex Addict‘s Caveh Zahedi contests cricket Nathan Lee‘s song stylings in the 243-word notice he wrote for the NY Times. “[W]hile it was for the most part extremely positive [Lee] nevertheless felt compelled to include the obligatory back-handed compliment (“a minor triumph of sincerity”) and the obligatory concluding dig… [T]he obligatory dig took the form of an allusion to one of my favorite songs of all time… “Still, the missing song on the soundtrack is “No Compassion” by Talking Heads: ‘What are you, in love with your problems?/ I think you take it a little too far.'” Well, that’s a great song, and it’s a clever dig. But what are the ideological assumptions behind it?” Zahedi continues: “The main assumption, it seems to me, is that there is something a little bit excessive and unseemly in making an autobiographical film about “one’s problems.” …The reason, it seems to me, is because of yet another underlying assumption, namely that “one’s problems” are one’s own, and are not shared. [Yet] the entire history of storytelling is based on the idea that we all share common traits, and that one person’s story can stand in for other people’s stories… So why the dig?…
The answer, I think, has to do with a fundamental confusion about the difference between documentary and fiction, or, in the case of literature, between memoir and fiction. If I had made a fiction film, I don’t believe Mr. Lee would have complained that the author is too in love with his character’s problems. In fact, being in love with the problems of one’s fictional characters is considered a sine qua non in fiction writing. But in autobiography or memoir, it’s considered a vice… But I believe that there is no essential difference between fiction and documentary. Jean-Luc Godard was fond of saying that every documentary is also a fiction film, and that every fiction film is also a documentary…. Documentary and fiction are two sides of the same coin, and my film, among other things, is a demonstration of that fact…. There is something so inherently reactionary in this societal taboo against self-expression, so on the side of social conservatism and a maintaining of the status quo (with its concomitant pre-ordained forms of etiquette), that I can’t understand why Mr. Lee would write favorably of my film at all, since every frame of the film was conceived in opposition to the ideological assumptions that his review seems to embody… It is a commonplace of psychology that what you accuse others of is usually more true of yourself than of the others in question… None of this would matter very much… if it weren’t for the fact a New York Times reviewer has the power to make or break a film, and that an off-handed remark like that can mean the difference between success or failure at the box office. And it’s not just the fate of the film that is at stake: it’s also the [filmmaker’s] ability to make more films in the future. With such power comes a dizzying responsibility, and it saddens me to see film critics wield their formidable power with such breezy insouciance.”
