'Eat Pray Love' and 'I Am Love': Class Warfare
If your experience is the same as mine, and you do not garner your cultural criticism solely from the pages of O: The Oprah Magazine, you've heard of Eat, Pray, Love largely through negative press coverage. A veritable battalion of sudden class warriors have emerged in recent weeks to bash Eat, Pray, Love for its portrayal of cluelessness in rich white yoga-lady form, a near-universal object of derision if ever there was one in this culture.
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That appropriation of leftist language in these reviews has irked me. It's done so even though I am also the kind of person who will agree to see Eat, Pray, Love only if someone's paying me to do so, and no one has, as of yet, so no dice. I'm going to suggest to you anyway that all this blather about the "self-indulgence" and "privilege" of this film, when delivered by these white, and largely male, film critics, is disingenuous, and, even worse, philosophically empty. I'm going to do it having not seen the film, of course, but then again, I'm not so much interested in defending the film itself. It may very well be crap. The point, I think, is that if it is crap, it's important to describe why that's so without lazy rhetoric.
I'd love to call this straight-out misogyny, and in fact I'd have backup, and not only from feminist blogs! A.O. Scott at the Times noted that "the kind of class consciousness that would blame Liz for feeling bad about her life and then taking a year abroad to cure what ails her strikes me as a bit disingenuous -a way of trivializing her trouble on the grounds of gender without having to come out and say so."
But I think it might be a little more than that.
Read the full post over at The Awl.
My thoughts: There is a lot of truth in the article's characterisation of the response to Eat, Pray, Love being disingenuous. It really does seem to be a co-option of progressive rhetoric (of anti-appropriation, of feminism, of anti-classism) rather than the critics being genuinely interested in "interrogating social privilege". What I find interesting, though, is the author's dismissal of misogyny as being the answer to the view of EPL as a "rich white woman's movie". The backlash to Hollywood movies that are marketed at women (EPL, Sex and the City 2, maybe even the Twilight movies) seems to me to be rooted in sexism to a large degree. Movies where white men travel to "find themselves" are a dime a dozen; what sets Eat, Pray, Love apart from them aside from the fact that a women stars in it?