Word: manichaeanism
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...partners' shorthand for a favorable review, "two thumbs up!" This tactic is handy for branding the show, and an effective marketing tool (it's the words all movie publicists want to banner at the top of their ads), but as critical discourse the slogan has its limits. More Manichaean than the star rating system he and other newspaper critics use to gauge a picture's quality (which, in the 2- or 3-star range does account for the great gray middle most movies occupy), it restricts the critics' appraisal of a film to "I liked it" and "I didn...
...collision, an L.A. pileup, of people and prejudices. The dozen-plus major characters include cops, thugs, politicians, strugglers and stragglers, the rich and the poor of all ethnicities--the melting pot that bubbles over in the film's schematic, 36-hour story line. The viewpoint is Manichaean--black and white, if you will--but with a twist. Haggis says not that there are good people and bad people, but that we are all capable of being both. A racist cop (Oscar nominee Matt Dillon) can rudely grope a terrified black woman (Thandie Newton) one night and heroically save her life...
What really distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. Tolkien's work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity. Martin's wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more. A Feast for Crows isn't pretty elves against gnarly orcs. It's men and women slugging...
...same time, Bush has described the war on terror from the beginning in Manichaean terms not all that different from Boykin's. "Today, our nation saw evil," he said on Sept. 11, 2001. "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them," he told the nation nine days later. Boykin may be understandably perplexed about what line he crossed by referring to evil as "a guy called Satan...
...history lesson or homily, this is unobjectionable. But as drama, the Manichaean tussle of good vs. stupid is too often a recipe for stock characters, lazy thinking, easy exits from thorny issues. It also dodges a question many blacks posed: Who says we have to be the stalwart ones? Why can't we be as selfish, superficial, even prejudiced as everyone else? Equality in mediocrity: an American ideal that anyone can attain...