I loved Roger Ebert. Not just “he was one of my favourite writers.” Not just “he was part of why I grew interested in film criticism in the first place.” No, I mean that I interacted with him, and the combination of who he was as a person and who he had been to me my whole life meant that I really did love him. That’s why it has always made me so sad that he had such an enormous gaping blind spot when it came to sexism and even outright misogyny.
This weekend, I was reading The Great Movies III at ren faire. (We camp there, so there’s time in the morning and evening for a little reading.) I’ve read it before, and I’ll no doubt read it again, and mostly, it makes me happy to do so. Still, I was reading the entry about Last Tango in Paris, and I got to a line that just about broke my heart.
Within moments after they meet, Paul forces sudden, needful sex upon her. It would be rape were it not that Jeanne does not object or resist, makes her body available almost with detachment. Indeed, it is rape in Paul’s mind, Paul’s sexual release seems real, here and throughout the film, but we are never sure what Jeanne feels during their sex.
Which is, quite frankly, Roger Ebert refusing to acknowledge a rape. Paul knows it is a rape. Presumably, director Bernardo Bertolucci knew it was a rape. I certainly knew it was a rape when I watched the movie. But because “Jeanne does not object or resist,” and presumably because she returns to have further sex with Paul, Roger did not consider it a rape. So all right, part of it was that Roger was a man of his time, having been born in 1942. But how exhausting to realize that, even as late as 2004, a woman could be considered by him to not have been raped because she froze.
This is the most egregious case I can think of, but it is something that happens pretty regularly when I read his articles. Especially when he’s reviewing movies from the ’70s. He’s pretty famous for calling out the uncomfortable nature of Dorothy Vallens, Isabella Rosselini’s character in Blue Velvet. On the other hand, he only finds dignity in how Gwen Welles as Sueleen Gay confronts her humiliation in Nashville without ever quite bothering to question why Robert Altman put her in the position to be humiliated in the first place.
He expressed awareness of the humiliation of Margaret Houlihan in M*A*S*H, but he was more concerned with the way it made the men feel than the way it made her—and actress Sally Kellerman—feel. He doesn’t even mention Kellerman’s follow-up humiliation from Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter. And lest you think it’s Altman, there is also Fellini. In The Great Movies III, he discusses Juliet of the Spirits, and while he clearly disagrees with Fellini’s take on the title character, he doesn’t seem at all aware of how trapped she would of necessity be. After all, divorce wouldn’t become legal in Italy for another five years. And while her husband could play around, because of course he was a man in a Fellini film, how free was Juliet to do the same?
Roger was not incapable of expressing sympathy with female characters. It was something he did quite regularly, even in the ’70s. However, He also missed a lot about their internal lives. About how the world they lived in was different from the world he lived in. He was open to discussion on the subject, as he was open to discussion on most subjects; that’s one of the things I loved about him. But I think it would have taken considerably more than one person’s explanation before he really saw what he hadn’t been seeing in movies such as Last Tango in Paris and Nashville.
