Homophobia masked as comedy

I saw Bruno a few days ago, and I thoroughly disliked the experience. The movie had received excellent reviews from many respected movie critics, some of whom claimed that the triumph of Bruno was that it mocked societal acceptance of homophobia.

It was my experience that the only thing that Bruno seemed to mock were the homosexuals it purported to defend. Although I lost track of the number of scenes where gays were portrayed as lascivious perverts, I cannot think of a single scene where there was a sympathetic gay character.

I am reminded of one scene in particular (spoiler alert!) where a naked Bruno is portrayed seated in a hot tub with his adopted African toddler and two naked men. In this hot tub scene, despite the presence of a child, the men in the hot tub pose in lewd positions that would raise the ire of any Children's Aid Society. This scene was unsettling on many accounts, one of which was the fact that such a scene does nothing to quash public fears about the ability of gay men to properly raise children. Another problem with the scene was that there was no follow-up attempt to correct this child-predator stereotype of gay men. Bruno was homophobic without questioning homophobia, and therein lied the offense.

There were many other equally tactless scenes in the film, some of which mocked not only homosexuals, but blacks, foreigners and theists as well. It was as though the screenwriters of Bruno decided they would try to denigrate as many groups of people as possible in 81 minutes of film reel.

Some people will say that the goal of Bruno was not to mock classes, but to mock our caricatures of these classes. That is, it was not Bruno's exaggerated gay mannerisms that were funny, but the fact that we attribute such mannerisms to gays. If this indeed was the intent of the Bruno screenwriters, they failed in a very important respect: At no point in the film was the audience presented with a normal homosexual male who, in contrast with Bruno, would have caused the audience to question stereotypes about homosexuals. If there had been a sympathetic gay character named Joe, for example, who was not overly flamboyant and sexual like Bruno, the film would have done a better job questioning societal acceptance of homophobia. Instead, every gay character in the film was portrayed as either a child abuser, a sexual pervert or a superficial fashionista.

It is tempting to defend Bruno on the grounds that the screenwriters have a right to free speech (a right I heartily support) and, as a result, nit-picky 'liberals' like me should just stay away from the movie if we don't like it. However, as I will discuss in my next post, I believe that there is a critical difference between what you have the right to do, and what you should do. Too often, the right to free speech is used to justify morally questionable behavior.

It's the broken system, stupid

In 1953, the Executive branch grew a little stronger thanks to United States v. Reynolds. In this civil suit, the U.S. government refused to release confidential documents to the plaintiffs, claiming that doing so would endanger national security. The courts agreed to defer to the government's judgment, and the case was dropped.

United States v. Reynolds gave rise to the the State Secrets Privilege, the civil court equivalent of the Classified Information Procedures Act. Basically, this decision granted the U.S. government the right to exclude from court proceedings sensitive information that could endanger national security.

Almost fifty years later, the evidence the government withheld in United States v. Reynolds was declassified and released. As it turns out, this evidence contained nothing confidential; rather, it had embarrassing details that would have sunk the government's case. Clearly, the government's action here was an abuse of power, and given that, it would have made sense to ensure that some checks were placed on the State Secrets Privilege.

Unfortunately, it is much easier to bestow power than it is to take it away. The government managed to ease the fears of the civil libertarians. The abuse of the SSP was blamed on the power-hungry politicians of the past and the government promised that in the right hands, the State Secrets Privilege would make America safer. And the power continued unchecked...

The Bush administration welcomed the SSP, and invoked it a record number of times during its tenure. As we are now beginning to find out, much of the evidence that was hidden from the public eye with the SSP was not confidential at all; it was evidence that would have embarrassed and compromised the Bush administration had it been released. And yet the power continued unchecked...

The fluffy and charming Obama admistration fares no better than the Bush administration in reining in the SSP. In Mohamed v. Jeppesen, the Obama administration took this power a step further and tried to dismiss not only evidence, but the entire case itself (to which the government is not even a direct party) ostensibly due to national security secrets. And the power continues unchecked...

If there's one lesson I've gathered from the State Secrets Privilege debacle, it is that if the system is broken, fix the system.

If the American political system is such that you need a perfect human being to make sure you don't start a war or torture people, then the system is broken. Maybe every 200 years or so, we may be lucky enough to find political leaders benevolent and intelligent enough to largely stamp out corruption and injustice in our country, but why wait 200 years for that? I don't disagree that it is unlikely we will ever find laws and constitutions perfect enough to render even a Pol Pot or Mussolini innocuous, but if we could reduce our dependence on the fleeting sense of virtue in power-hungry politicians, we would be better off. President Obama was the message of hope for many optimistic Americans, but I wonder if we should not be on our guard a bit more.