Okay. Three Billboards, again.
There’s two very dubious defenses I’ve seen over and over for this movie. The first one, of course, is that it’s full of moral ambiguity and nuance, and that the people who feel like its moral lens is blinkered/janky are missing what the movie is trying to do.
This is a bizarre argument, as nothing about this movie is subtle in anyway, and all its character details and plot points are dialed up to 10. It makes its points loud and clumsily and repeatedly.
It’s a movie in which terminal cancer is a way to give a major character some easy sympathy. It’s a movie w/ a flashback to a final, awful conversation in which one person angrily yells “i hope i get raped on the way to x!” and the other person yells “i hope you get raped, too!”
And we know by that point that that first person *was* raped and murdered immediately after that conversation.
This is how this “nuanced,” film lets us know that one of its characters feels guilt.
This is how this “nuanced,” film lets us know that one of its characters feels guilt.
But i want to talk about the way this film treats police brutality and racism. Bc I’ve read defenses that say that the film does not actually give its racist cop character a redemption arc, and that the movie allows people to be “real” in that they’re neither all good or all bad.
But that’s...stupid. We all know that racist, violent cops have inner lives and off hours where theyre doing things besides racist-violent-copping. (In the case of this movie, he reads old comics and argues with his overbearing mama. Get it? He’s pathetic!)
Racist violent cops have family drama and interiority bc...yeah, everyone does.
The problem with this movie is one of the problems with our broader mainstream discourse around police violence: it thinks that shit is what ultimately matters.
The problem with this movie is one of the problems with our broader mainstream discourse around police violence: it thinks that shit is what ultimately matters.
He’s sad about his dad dying? Who gives af? He tortured a black man, and apparently antagonized every other black person in town.
He’s sad bc people are being mean to his friend/boss? He beats up a man and throws him out a window and beats him some more in broad daylight.
He’s sad bc people are being mean to his friend/boss? He beats up a man and throws him out a window and beats him some more in broad daylight.
Why is his sadness important or interesting or novel? I would argue that it’s not, but the movie dedicates a big chunk of its second half to it, so clearly the director thinks it’s really compelling.
The director could have made this cop a run-of-the-mill buffoon, but decided to make him specifically a racist with a history of antiblack violence. That’s, again, the movie dialing every detail up to do the most.
So we should talk abt the treatment of that character detail.
So we should talk abt the treatment of that character detail.
Because in the real world that this movie is commenting on, when cops shoot people or maim people or torture people, the defenses for those police is always about their feelings. “I was scared for my life.” “The suspect made furtive movements.”
And nodding to those feelings — that fear and suspicion and anxiety — is usually enough to keep a cop from even being indicted for violence. That’s how central the interiority of cops is to the way we *officially* deal with police violence.
Anyway, the movie literally has a scene in which that cop is told, after he has visited violence and ruin on people he doesn’t like, that he’s a “good person deep down.”
A victim of one of one of his assaults — still very injured from that beating — offers him some orange juice.
A victim of one of one of his assaults — still very injured from that beating — offers him some orange juice.
And it makes the argument that the movie is allowing its characters some moral ambiguity feel like fake-deep bullshit. Which characters in this movie are extended moments of grace, like orange juice? Which characters are told they have good in them deep down?
I think festival audiences are so used to the centrality of white people’s inner lives treated as the Actual Emotional Stakes that they don’t get what’s janky about a movie set in a town where cops torture black ppl but the plot is about thwarted justice for a white lady...
...and the fact that a racist cop is big mad bc his daddy died.
There’s a lot of reasons this movie is ungood, but what takes it from forgettable fake-insightful pablum to “Crash But In the Midwest” is its dubious moral framing and the way it barely treats these issues with even perfunctory consideration.
It’s going to win a lot of awards.
Apologies for typos.
One more thing. There are three black characters in this movie with speaking lines, IIRC. One is the first to let us, the audience, know that the racist cop is a racist cop — he alludes to an ugly incident in which they crossed paths but that the cop doesn’t remember.
Another is a black woman who works with the main character; they are presumably friends. She gets arrested by the racist cop as a way to intimidate the main white character — we find this out via Post-It so she doesn’t even get a line — and the movie forgets about her...
...that is until she is released from jail after what is presumably a couple weeks. She is smiling and in good spirits and checking in on the main white character. She’s been incarcerated but she’s not angry or anything: you know cops be tripping but hey, girl, are YOU okay?
They are, essentially, props used to demonstrate just how venal and incompetent the cops in the town are. But to the extent they have feelings about it, it’s via their proximity to the main white character.
These two black props make curious flirty eyes at each other while they’re helping the main character in her quest for righteous justice; somehow, the only black people in this town don’t know each other. (The next time we see these props, they appear to be on a date.)
The third black character shows up during the movie’s big arty set piece. He’s a high-ranking cop, and his blackness is clearly meant as a shorthand for his righteousness; when he shows up, the (overwhelmingly white) audience we saw it with went “UH OH!”
He then chews out some white cops, calls them “cracker motherfuckers.” It’s supposed to be catharsis for the audience or something: you tell ‘em, black man! It’s as ham-fisted as everything else in the movie; nothing meaningful comes of it, either way.
The blackness of those characters is the whole reason they’re there. Their blackness is meant to suggest some big IRL ideas that the movie isn’t really all that interested in exploring. And so it’s ultimately not all that interested in them.
