thefourthvine's Reviews > Movies

First, the easy problem.

In college, I made the same terrible mistake three times: I confessed to a dude that I had not seen Pulp Fiction. Each time, I was assured that I HAD to see Pulp Fiction, and then, by way of proving it, the guy narrated his favorite scenes to me. At length. The kind of length where you could watch the scene five times, then come back to the table and the guy would still be narrating it.

(They were, let me note, always the same scenes.)

Movies (And Other Things) is the book version of those guys I knew in college. It’s basically like telling a guy you have not seen a whole, whole bunch of movies, and then he narrates his favorite scenes from all of them at you in excruciating detail, and in this case I’m not referring so much to the length as excruciating (Serrano is, unsurprisingly, a little more succinct than college boys in thrall to Tarantino and the sound of their own voices), but the specific details Serrano chooses.

Very, very many of his favorite scenes involve someone dying horribly. In fact, going by this book, a lot of his favorite movies are nothing BUT people dying horribly. Like, Serrano is a man who gives movies a lot of bonus points for really unusual and graphic deaths. Which would probably be fine with me if I were very into gore and death. But I’m not. I haven’t seen a lot of Serrano’s favorite movies in part because I don’t want to watch people die horribly.

So, okay, this book is a mismatch with me, fine. That happens and it’s no big deal. I mean, I could write a version of this book, and it would be full of questions like “What’s the most homoerotic look exchanged between supposedly straight women?” and “Which is the best One Single Tear of Manpain?” and “Which dude/dude kiss is best?” Serrano wouldn’t enjoy that book any more than I enjoyed his. We’re just not compatible when it comes to movies.

But. Now the hard part. There’s a footnote in this book where Serrano basically punched me directly in the gut.

(Spoiler cut for mentions of sexual assault.)

(view spoiler)[Here’s the thing: I know Serrano mostly from Twitter and his Ringer writing. I know he’s done some lovely things on Twitter. I tend to think of him as a Good Dude. I also know he’s extremely online. But in a footnote in this book, he says that right after they sent the book to be printed, one of the actors he mentions got fined for sexual harassment. And that made Serrano check to see if other actors he’d mentioned had been accused of sexual harassment, besides the SINGLE ONE he already knew about: Kevin Spacey.

And, yes, of course, a cursory google, which Serrano could have done at any point in his life or while writing the book, revealed to him that many of the actors he wrote about have been. He provides a list of five, all of whom I knew about, and most of whom I knew about before Me Too was a thing, because they’re absolutely FAMOUS for it. Serrano then hopes that there are not others he missed (uh, yeah, there are) and apologizes.

I read that and I thought about this extremely online guy who wrote an entire book about movies and just … did not know, and did not care enough to find out, about ANY sexual assaults the many actors he mentions have done (except, of course, the one assault that is palatable to him because the perpetrator is a gay man). Even though he was right there online during all of Me Too. And I realized, hey, this book is literally not for me. It’s not just a content mismatch, it's an exclusion. I’m not in Serrano’s mental audience. No woman is. Which was a painful thing to learn, given that I like the guy and I also like some of his writing.

The one part of this book that is genuinely good and interesting is the chapter where he does a thing The Ringer does and asks a bunch of people to answer the chapter’s question. Those essays, with their varied opinions, provide depth and breadth and perspective. And, also, some of them are by women. If he’d structured the whole book that way – well, at least he would maybe have had someone to nudge him and go, hey, dude, yeah, you can’t just google this stuff after the fact and then say “whoops, forgot, sorry!” in a footnote. (Someone might also have pointed out his repeated use of an ablist slur in the bonus ebook material.) (hide spoiler)]

But this book isn’t written that way. And it apparently wasn’t written with female readers in mind at all. I wish very much I had known that going in. Would’ve saved me the gore and the plot summaries as well as the punch in the gut.