#108
Post
by therewillbeblus » Mon Mar 04, 2024 9:39 pm
I wouldn't generalize that to being Jewish though, since one's specific social context plays a key role. My experience is (also!) anecdotal and shouldn't be generalized, but this is the first negative reaction I've heard from someone I know who does identify as Jewish! I saw this in a city known for (and at a theatre frequented by) its predominately Jewish population, with my Jewish and Israeli friend whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and I come from a town where every single person I associated with beyond some immediate family members were Jewish until I entered high school (most with familial ties to the Holocaust, an incredibly sensitive subject matter permeating my life growing up, that I couldn't fully grasp - and still, obviously, can't) - and I continue to live in that neighboring community. Not a single reaction has not been 'positive' (read: affecting, with admiration) by friends, family, or clients who've approached me in therapy sessions. I've initiated none of these communications, and have urged nobody to go see this, for a variety of reasons - but mostly because I wasn't enamored with it and have other recs that feel safer and I'm prioritizing. So, at least from my sample in the Boston area, that doesn't hold water.
Also, IFF Boston partnered with the Boston Jewish Film Festival to put it on here for an advanced free festival screening, and I believe they were the group organizing the screening (and it may have been part of their festival, or 'series'). The rows in front of my were volunteers of that festival group, and a few (most likely Jewish, considering this was a section for volunteer positions in a dominant Jewish community) nodded off and began snoring. So, a couple different reactions other than disgusted anger. Your response is equally valid, of course, just not necessarily a representative one.
But the Pasolini comparison gives a good sense of where you're coming from and what you're looking to get (or, not get) out of cinema, perhaps? That film wasn't made to just shock on a surface level, it was made with urgency to shock, like a trauma response sublimated into a sociopolitical ethos against the experience of fascist oppression. I totally get the reaction of, "I don't care, because the surface level is so repulsive" but that reaction should be owned as subjective to personal taste and triggers beyond demographic membership.