On The Offensive

There's a perception in the world today that people are too easily offended; you can't mention anything without someone complaining about it. Personally, I don't share this view, but that's not what I'm here to argue about. Instead, I'd like to open people's minds to the possibility that some good can come from people being offended. No, no, not that harmony and mutual respect and all that crap. I mean we can use it as a weapon to get rid of bad pop-culture.

This is the aspect of Political Correctness that gets lost in the debate: A lot of politically-incorrect media isn't that good to begin with. Stereotypes are many things, but at their heart, they're cliches. That's why I'm always perplexed when a comedian laments all the humour prevented by political correctness: I can understand why you might want to fight for the principle, but I wouldn't think you'd actually want to tell decades-old jokes.

I'm thinking about this because of the new movie Split, which seems to be the usual kidnapping/murder horror movie, where the twist is that the antagonist has multiple personalities. Of course, people are complaining about the portrayal of people with the condition, or as it's properly known, Dissociative Identity Disorder. You might assume that I saw an article about how people are angry about the movie, so I wrote this post. But no, I hadn't seen anything about the movie other than the TV spots for it every ten minutes. I just assumed there'd be complaints based on how the condition is being used as an easy story device.

It really doesn't look like a great movie. I'm not a horror fan, so I'm not the best to judge, but it looks transparently manipulative. And it's from critical punching-bag, M. Night Shyamalan. And it's being released in the movie graveyard of late January. And the plot is disturbingly similar to the terrible film-within-a-film that Charlie Kaufman's brother writes in Adaptation.

So putting aside the principles, I think you'd have to root for the folks targetting the movie. Letting them drive this movie out of the theatres isn't going to start a slippery slope to newspeak. So how about you spend this month arguing for freedom of speech in the abstract, and look the other way while activists run this flick into the ground. Let's use the power of offense to benefit us all.

(I swear, they just ran another ad for Split as I was finishing this post.)