Poor Gregg Easterbrook. He's on a losing streak. First he weighed in on Kobe Bryant, and said that since "no" is ambiguous, we need a phrase that means, "no." To wit:

There has to be a better way than the word "no" to communicate to the man that he has crossed the line, and that better way must be widely agreed upon. Here's my proposal: If the line is crossed, women should say, "This is rape!"

He earned a ration of abuse for that, and though he seems to mean well, the logic of that post is, I think the right term is non-existent. He accepts excuses, assumptions, fatalistic acceptance of systematic inequity - and seems to be spending too much time hanging around with lawyers. "No" seems to be as good a word to convey the concept "no" as any.

Then, a couple days later, came another Easterbrook faux pas - he sets in to abuse Quientin Tarantino, "the single greatest phony in the history of Hollywood?" - hammers away for 7 or 8 paragraphs and then starts hammering away at movie executives, for whatvever it is, making money by filling films with blood and guts (and severed limbs, gauging from Kill Bill). And having achieved warp velocity, so to speak, he gets all moral and shit, and goes after a variety of Jewish executives by name:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.

This has raised a shitstorm over Easterbrook's head - the New York Times weighed in - plenty of bloggers weighed in. Most of the complains focus on Easterbrook's use of stereotypes of Jews as money grubbers - or the doulbe standard that Jews are somehow obliged to behave better than Christians.

He's since apologized, pleading carelessness and the hazards of writing without an editor - maybe that's it, though I'm not too sure. The world is full of people writing without editors, and I am not sure they - all the thousands of bloggers, including some with pretty significant readerships - mangle what they say quite this bad... or maybe they know how to back off from a bad idea quickly and properly, I don't know.

In any case. I think some of the abuse he's taken is a bit unfair. Studio executives are certainly money grubbers, and seem universally to put profit ahead of any kind of civic duty, so it' not as if he could have written the article without noting the profit motive. I don't know if his critics are quite suggesting that he shouldn't criticise Eisner or Harvey Weinstein for greed and amorality because thye are Jewish, though it might slip close to that sometimes. Of course he did more than that - he suggested that, being Jewish, they should have more sense of civic responsibility than others have - so, he brought it up... Obviously, their ethnicity and religion has nothing to do wth their jobs and how they do them - so he pretty much deserves what he gets.

However, and time is running out on me this morning, so I am going to have to defer the completion of this thought - however, I say, reading the original anti-Tarantino screed makes me wonder something: has he seen Pulp Fiction? It does not seem so from his gripes. This paragraph sums up his opinion of QT:

Tarantino does nothing but churn out shabby depictions of slaughter as a form of pleasure--and that, for decades, has been what the least imaginative and least talented of Hollywood churn out. Supposedly it's "revolutionary," or something, that Tarantino films revel in violence to a preposterous degree, but that's like saying it is revolutionary for a presidential candidate to revel in complaints against Washington bureaucrats. Nothing about Hollywood is more hackneyed or trite than preposterous violence--and that's all Tarantino has ever put onto film.

It's an interesting paragraph - it's the lazy man's take on Tarantino, and one that is, after all, quite sharply at odds with the actual films - especially Pulp Fiction. You can push this quite a ways, which I may do if I get some time later, but for now I'll just state it -Pulp Fiction is probably most interesting for the way it is explicitly structured on acts of mercy. There are 3 stories, and al 3 climax on the act of saving or sparing another person's life. Not to mention the "miracle" that saves Jules and Vincent. There's plenty of violence, enough of a body count to justify its place as a monument to mayhem - but the dramatically significant moments are almost all about not killing people.

Basically, if you don't acknowledge - or notice - this, nothing else you say about Tarantino is worth a damn. Nothing Easterbrook says about Tarantino is worth a damn. And with nothing at the base, nothing above it is going to stand either. Someday, somewhere, someone may make a convincing argument that the depiction of violence is, indeed, a moral crime, and not, mostly, lazy, pandering, childish filmmaking (but not always those things) - but whoever makes that case is going to have to at least describe the films he or she trashes accurately. Easterbrook doesn't know what he saw, so how can he say what it means?