The real meaning of political correctness

In his review of the epic 4-hour movie Che, A. O. Scott chides director Steven Soderbergh for his apparent overidentification with his subject:

… the film’s formal sophistication is ultimately an evasion of the moral reckoning that Ernesto Guevara, more than 40 years and several million T-shirts after his death, surely deserves. Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, “Che” is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale.

I have not seen the film, but from Scott’s own description, it is a meticulous portrayal of Guevara’s revolutions “from the inside” — a perspective from which of course the enterprise appears to be noble and justified. Yet Scott not only wants Soderbergh to show his own skepticism about Che’s actions, he wants him to project that skepticism onto Che himself — portraying him as a nuanced and conflicted character, despite the fact that I’ve seen no particular evidence that Che was a nuanced and conflicted character.

Scott claims that we need a “moral reckoning” on Guevara. Yet do we really lack for skeptical commentary on the Cuban revolution and left-wing revolutionary activities in general in the US? Hasn’t mainstream opinion settled on the conclusion — or rather, the a priori assumption — that, whatever Guevara’s intentions, the Cuban revolution was bad on the whole? This is what political correctness really looks like: dismissing any position outside the mainstream as somehow naive or dishonest, forbidding directors from being sympathetic or identifying with certain types of subjects.

What’s more, real political correctness always operates by implicitly characterizing the position it’s rejecting as the politically correct opinion. Soderbergh has apparently done meticulous research into Guevara’s revolutionary activities and tries to portrary them with the greatest rigor possible — again, this is based on Scott’s own description — yet we get this dismissive nonsense:

“Che,” in effect, represents the position of a person at that cocktail party who feels superior to the others because, unlike those liberal phonies, he really understands, in the depths of his soul, the Cuban revolution and the agonies of the third world. More dogmatic than thou (and certainly than Walter Salles’s 2004 “Motorcycle Diaries,” a vivid and sympathetic picture of the young Ernesto Guevara), “Che” not only participates in the worship of its subject but also spares no effort to insulate him from skepticism.

Assuming Soderbergh has actually done the research that Scott portrays him as doing, how could he not understand the Cuban revolution? Is it simply impossible for anyone to understand it? Apparently we are to believe that there is an absolutely unbridgable gap in human experience between the first and third worlds, and any attempt to bridge that gap is a priori phony and self-serving — the stuff of self-righteous cocktail party liberalism.

The falsity of this line of thought is clear when we consider how Scott would react to an identical film created by an actual Latin American director: here, too, we would be dealing with naive hagiography, though the blame would come from the director’s lack of access to a detached and objective first world perspective rather than his false attempt to overcome that very detachment. Simply put, for the mainstream liberal critic, it is impossible for a film that identifies with revolutionary politics to be a valid and true piece of art.