Monday, November 19, 2007

What's wrong with Christopher Buckley

The fact that he's a Buckley automatically makes you assume he's incredibly pleased with himself, and incredibly smug.

I just caught his movie "Thank You for Smoking" after being told how great it was. I had avoided it because, well, Buckley.

So I watched it, and most of it wasn't as bad as I expected... although what I expected was cynicism and an "even-handed" approach to the issue of smoking. Lobbyists are bad but so are reporters, cancer victims, politicians, anti-smoking activists, etc. etc. Well of course, many lobbyists are Christopher Buckley's friends, or friends of his father.

Buckley's approach to right-wing evil is best described in his own words:

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.
Washington Monthly
He knows Bush is wrong for the country, but Kerry is not cool enough so he does something completely pointless instead.

Or as a reviewer in Salon says:
Besotted with its dazzling protagonist and committed to equal-opportunity attack, the film has no point of view beyond the position that everyone concerned is either amoral or an idiot or an amoral idiot. Aiming at all targets and hitting none of them, the movie is as harmless and inconsequential as a candy cigarette.


But Buckley reveals his true nature by what happens to the lobbyist and the reporter who gets the inside scoop on his activities. Although the lobbyist is completely amoral he winds up on top at the end. The reporter, who had sex with him while getting the scoop, is demoted to doing the weather, and the movie gleefully shows her reporting from the middle of the storm.

That's Buckley's true, unvarnished, unmediated emotion right there on the screen - punish the bitch. Sexual women are the true evil in this world. He is a true son of the Catholic Church. And always will be.