I went to see the movie Notes on a Scandal, starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, on Saturday. The theater was packed for the matinee showing. There was one poor guy who was walking up and down the rows looking for a seat, and I finally stopped him and said that I had room to move over and he could sit beside me. There was one seat in between us, and he pointed to it and said, "That seat can be for the young lady." And I, not thinking as per usual, blurted out, "Yeah, we just need to find ourselves a young lady!" To which he replied, "Um, I'm talking about my wife." To be fair, the guy was about 55 years old. What 55 year-old guy calls his wife a young lady? And it wasn't like she was some 25 year-old trophy wife, she was the same age as him. I wouldn't even call a woman my age "young lady". But to each his own I s'pose. They turned out to be really nice people though. Their names were Brook and Pam. She told me that the theater was so packed because the movie got really good reviews in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

The movie is about a British schoolteacher (Cate Blanchett) who has a sexual relationship with one of her 15 year-old students. Another teacher (Judi Dench), a deeply-closeted lesbian loner, uses her knowledge of the relationship to blackmail Blanchett's character into being her close friend. There are so many reasons why this whole plot is just nauseating and hateful. For one thing, cinema has a long and shameful history of portraying queer characters as perverted, violent, and pathological. As this article says:

More cruel than kind, such dramas as "The Sergeant," "The Killing of Sister George" and "The Fox" portrayed gay life as a shadowland of despair and pathology. There was usually a suicide at the end, and the more "questionably" gay protagonist often waltzed off with a straight partner -- "saved" at last.

As Shirley MacLaine's schoolteacher (just moments away from the self-strung noose) succinctly put it to bewildered Audrey Hepburn in "The Children's Hour" (1962), "I've ruined your life and I've ruined my own... Oh, I feel so damn sick and dirty I can't stand it anymore!"

Even if one grants that the "pathological queer" stereotype is no longer as prevalent or as dangerous as it once was, the "demented loner" stereotype is still very much in play in our society. There is a book, Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto by Anneli Rufus. I heard about the book from Catherine; I have yet to read it, but I have been reading a lot about it. The book talks about the extremely negative portrayals of loners that occur all the time in popular culture. It also talks about how loners feel constant pressure to abandon their perfectly happy solitary lifestyle to join groups and become a nonloner. In her description of the book, Rufus says:

Mainstream culture loves nonloners. Joiners, schmoozers, teamworkers, congregants and all those who play well with others scoop up the rewards. Meanwhile, loners get dissed. All the time. At school, at work, at church or temple, in movies, loners are misunderstood, misjudged, loathed, pitied and feared. Reporters and profilers calmly and constantly call us perverts, losers, stalkers and serial killers... Nonloners call loners crazy. Cold. Stuck-up. Standoffish. Selfish. Sad. Bad. Secretive.

Needless to say, I was coming into the movie with a pretty strong bias. But it's still possible to enjoy a movie while loathing its politics. Gone with the Wind, after all, strongly implies that African-Americans were much happier as slaves before the Civil War than they were as free citizens after the war. Notes on a Scandal, however, was a poor movie even if you forget about its politics. The movie is told from the point of view of Dench's character, as, in a voice-over, she reads from her diary entries that describe her innermost thoughts as events progress. This is problematic because we start out knowing that her character is a needy, amoral manipulator who has her sights set on Blanchett's character. This has the effect of sapping all suspense from the plot. We know that this is a movie in which lots of dramatic stuff is going to happen, so we know that the evil, manipulative character is going to be manipulating the pretty, naïve character. The deus ex machina that allows this to occur is the young teacher's affair with her student. There is no particular motivation for this affair to occur. It's presented as if any flighty, pretty, woman teacher who is moderately unhappy with her marriage is bound to have an affair with her student. The movie could have been an entertaining film noir if it had been told from the perspective of the young, pretty teacher. For one thing, there may have been some justification for the disastrous affair, rather than having it just be a plot device. For another thing, Dench's character, the manipulator, would have been seen through the trusting eyes of Blanchett's character. Rather than an evil crone, Dench's character would have appeared as a kindly, older mentor who takes pity on the young, overwhelmed teacher. Later in the movie, when her true evil motives become evident, it would hit the viewer hard, both in the realization of the true nature of Dench's character and in the realization of just what a pickle the young teacher has gotten herself into. Alas, that is not the movie I watched. The movie I watched is a run-of-the-mill, connect-the-dots, pseudo-intellectual pulp horror. More simply, it was a reprehensible, bad, crummy movie.

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