GoldbergBlog

While I know this news is a couple of days old, I felt I had to share some thoughts about Diablo Cody’s recent missive where she fires back at all those who have retaliated against her for being successful. It’s a very strong statement and one I encourage you to read.

However, it seems to slightly dodge one important issue. While Cody seems to be retaliating against the obvious jealousy of the “Film_Fan78″ variety of internet fanboys, she doesn’t seem to really go into the amount of sexism she’s facing and then kicking in the face with one of her patented kung-fu kicks.

Sexism, for those that are wondering, is NOT disagreeing with women or even disliking a woman. I feel like I have to clarify this point because our news media and political campaigns seem to fail on daily basis on the definition of “sexism”. Here’s a very simple test for determining sexism: if the circumstances were the same except the subject in question was a man and not a woman, how would you react?

And the truth with Diablo Cody is that she would be the new geek god. If Juno had been written by a man and from the perspective of Bleeker’s character, Juno would probably be hailed as one of the current crop of classic geek films and fanboys would be drooling at her next projects rather than leaving us mature people to do the heavy lifting and get excited for Jennifer’s Body and The United States of Tara.

But there is a flip-side to this article and it’s going to be odd because I’m criticising a criticism of a person’s critics.  We are truly through the looking glass.

Sometimes, you just have to let your critics go.  Her entire article, for me, is the very reason, you don’t respond to the haters.  Even if they were legitimate critics (and I have no doubt that there are about half of them with the words “sophmore slump” already macro’d into their Microsoft Word simply because God forbid anyone be as successful as Cody on their debut film), you have to let them go.

I once received an e-mail from a gentleman who was upset about my negative review of his independent film.  It was a straight-to-DVD film, I reviewed it for one of the sites I was working for at the time, and thought that was the end of it.  But this gentleman felt the need to seek me out and explain how hard he had worked and that I was reviewing a bastardization of his vision, and so on and so forth.

And I simply explained to him and as I will explain to Ms. Cody right now, don’t waste your breath.  The way you rise above your critics is by leaving them behind.  You can accept their criticism, study it, use it, or discard it, but if you engage it, then you’re lending it credence.  Cody is clearly a million times more successful than those who try to diminish her accomplishments, but this isn’t a case of throwing one good punch against a schoolyard bully and he’ll leave you alone.  This is one of those instances where she should have written all this out and then never published it, not for her privacy but so that it doesn’t give the pricks the satisfaction of knowing they got under her skin.

Cody just needs to keep doing her thing and eventually the haters will shut up because success speaks for itself.  I’m greatly looking forward to Cody’s upcoming projects and hope that she’ll remain above the fray in the future since she’s already above most of us already.

Tags: Internet, criticism, movies //