My wife and I watched Kinds of Kindness last night and I'd say we both found it to be the opposite of comforting -- perverse or otherwise. I loved Lanthimos' Poor Things, liked The Favorite very much, and kind of liked The Lobster. But the nearly three hours of unrelenting nastiness in Kindness was hard to take. As for its connection to the nastiness Trump has normalized, I take your point.
Auden coined the phrase The Age of Anxiety in his book length poem about the 1940s and it seems like that age has persisted in many ways. Somewhere along the way we also entered a post-modern Age of Irony, and in the 21st century an Age of Anger (described by Pankaj Mishra in his brilliant 2017 book by that name). It feels like these “ages” are cumulative, like layers atop each other. But now I think we’ve added a new (and of course ancient) layer: an Age of Cruelty. How else to describe things like the latest pro-Trump rallying cry by young men, “Your body, my choice”? Or the troll culture perfected by Trump, Musk, and the very online New Right? Or the idea of mass deportations, of even legal immigrants, and immigrant concentration camps? Or these cabinet nominations that on their face seem absurd, trolling taken to a new level? Or the full-throated support for the literally murderous cruelty of contemporary Israel?
Appreciate this a great deal. And it reminds me of a quote I stumbled upon in book research. In the '70s, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit suggested that the men of the proto-Nazi Freikorps were motivated more than anything by a fear and distaste of women and their growing participation in society. Many of them would go on to form the nexus of the future Nazi Party, including SS chief Heinrich Himmler; his rival Ernst Röhm, the head of the Storm Troopers and a closeted homosexual; and Rudolf Höss, who would eventually become commandant of Auschwitz.
Absolutely - that's a deep vein. There's a fascinating/disturbing way in which queerness shows up in the film; all three tales include threesomes or foursomes with a lot of homoeroticism in them. Conventional monogamous hetero sex is depicted as either dull or passionless or violent/dangerous. To me this points to the tense homoeroticism of fascist movements, in which the Leader is depicted as the uber-manly Alpha, who is then adored and emulated by his male followers in ways that are themselves quite passionate.
My wife and I watched Kinds of Kindness last night and I'd say we both found it to be the opposite of comforting -- perverse or otherwise. I loved Lanthimos' Poor Things, liked The Favorite very much, and kind of liked The Lobster. But the nearly three hours of unrelenting nastiness in Kindness was hard to take. As for its connection to the nastiness Trump has normalized, I take your point.
Auden coined the phrase The Age of Anxiety in his book length poem about the 1940s and it seems like that age has persisted in many ways. Somewhere along the way we also entered a post-modern Age of Irony, and in the 21st century an Age of Anger (described by Pankaj Mishra in his brilliant 2017 book by that name). It feels like these “ages” are cumulative, like layers atop each other. But now I think we’ve added a new (and of course ancient) layer: an Age of Cruelty. How else to describe things like the latest pro-Trump rallying cry by young men, “Your body, my choice”? Or the troll culture perfected by Trump, Musk, and the very online New Right? Or the idea of mass deportations, of even legal immigrants, and immigrant concentration camps? Or these cabinet nominations that on their face seem absurd, trolling taken to a new level? Or the full-throated support for the literally murderous cruelty of contemporary Israel?
I think that cruelty has become the point.
Appreciate this a great deal. And it reminds me of a quote I stumbled upon in book research. In the '70s, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit suggested that the men of the proto-Nazi Freikorps were motivated more than anything by a fear and distaste of women and their growing participation in society. Many of them would go on to form the nexus of the future Nazi Party, including SS chief Heinrich Himmler; his rival Ernst Röhm, the head of the Storm Troopers and a closeted homosexual; and Rudolf Höss, who would eventually become commandant of Auschwitz.
Absolutely - that's a deep vein. There's a fascinating/disturbing way in which queerness shows up in the film; all three tales include threesomes or foursomes with a lot of homoeroticism in them. Conventional monogamous hetero sex is depicted as either dull or passionless or violent/dangerous. To me this points to the tense homoeroticism of fascist movements, in which the Leader is depicted as the uber-manly Alpha, who is then adored and emulated by his male followers in ways that are themselves quite passionate.
Oof. Appreciate this framing so much, even if it's uncomfortable....