I'm reading Vendler's book now, to redeem myself for the annoyingly strong language of my last post. (It turns out that blogging like angry is a little like skiing while drunk. It makes things interesting, but you run into things that you normally might have avoided.)
Today's complaint: Richard Schickel's LAT piece on Stephen Bach's bio of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Like many of the moderately problematic articles I end up reading (cf. the Chronicle's Socrates' teaching evaluations piece), I stumbled on it from AL Daily.
Schickel's contention, as he starts the piece--I'm quoting the two opening grafs, just to show that I'm not taking anything out of context:
"Leni Riefenstahl was a slut. Steven Bach is too graceful a writer and too nuanced a psychologist to summarize this life so bluntly, but, for the reader of his brilliant biography of the Nazi filmmaker, that conclusion is inescapable.
We are not speaking primarily of her sexual life, though it was relentlessly busy (her taste ran to hunky jock types and, equally, to men who could advance her career). That epithet applies also to her blind — and blinding — ambition. There was no one she would not try to seduce, in one way or another, in pursuit of fame, fortune and power — including, of course, smitten, impotent Adolf Hitler, who was über alles among her admirers."
Unfortunately, his defense of this (presumably intentionally) problematic claim must have been cut, because the remainder of the piece only briefly touches on the idea of "seduction" which seems crucial to his interpretation. He summarizes Bach's argument, at least so far as it critizes those advocates of her films who claimed that their art was distinct from their Nazi imagery and offers up a sketch of Riefenstahl. (She was a propagandist, he writes, who "stood deluded at the center of evil and saw it only as a source of funding" and who hid behind her ambition behind her self-adopted role as "Grand Maestro.") But he never explains his use of the term "slut" further until the conclusion, in which he states:
"Which brings me back to the point at which I began. Leni Riefenstahl used and was used heedlessly and amorally. That would have been true even if she had functioned in a liberal democracy, where she would have acted just as she did in Hitler's Germany, insisting that her aspirations were for only the finest things. What she received for her efforts were the metaphorical mink coats and diamond bracelets of the whoredom that never speaks its name — because it cannot imagine the word applying to an artiste of such impeccable idealism."
Ignoring the bizarre, almost Hegelian grammar of that last sentence (personified Whoredom confronts its antithesis in the Idealist Artiste) and the irrelevant claim in the second (for Riefenstahl's "delusions" matter only to the extent that she was an apologist for the Third Reich), I'm struck by how wholly inappropriate those diamonds and minks are.
In calling Riefenstahl a slut, Schickel is reaching for the worst word he knows. He feels its connotations strongly--she is contaminated, he means; she is amoral, mercenary, and foul. She is, for Schickel, a bad woman and a bad woman. The only part of the word he doesn't mean, in fact, is its meaning. He is cursing.
It is a bad curse, and a troubling one, but more than that, it is an admission of his failure as a critic.
That fuck.
