January 30: We’re All Trying to Find the Mullahs Who Did This

Al-Shabaab in Minneapolis; “Go back to China!”; On 9/11, Jamaal Bowman says “Hmm…”

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The Big Story

By killing three Americans and wounding more than 30 others in a Sunday proxy attack against a U.S. base in Jordan, Iran seems to have seriously hurt the Biden administration’s feelings. On Sunday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, now apparently conscious, posted the following on X:

I am outraged and deeply saddened by the deaths of three of our U.S. service members and the wounding of other American troops in an attack last night against U.S. and Coalition forces, who were deployed to a site in northeastern Jordan near the Syrian border to work for the lasting defeat of ISIS.

We suppose we would be outraged and deeply saddened, too, if we were in Austin’s position. After all, the United States just a few weeks ago secretly shared sensitive intelligence with the Iranians warning them of an impending ISIS attack on their territory. How did the Iranians repay this kindness? By blaming the United States for the attack, launching ballistic missiles near the U.S. consulate in Erbil, Iraq, and then dispatching its Iraqi goons to kill American troops. As Tablet’s Tony Badran and Lee Smith observed:

Given that the administration is trying so hard to be friends with Iran, it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that it’s now running damage control on the attacks. To be sure, some very tough words are being thrown around. Biden vowed Sunday to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and manner of our choosing.” But who, exactly, are “those responsible”? That one, if you believe “U.S. officials,” is a regular mystery wrapped in an enigma—absolutely impossible to say. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that U.S. officials “have yet to find evidence thus far” that Iran “directed” the attacks. And here was The New York Times on Monday: 

One senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, said on Sunday that the United States did not believe that Iran was intending to start a wider war with the attack in Jordan. But he cautioned that analysts were still gathering and evaluating the information available to determine whether Iran ordered a more aggressive attack or a militia group decided to do so on its own.

We just don’t know! Maybe the proxy forces that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps funds, trains, and controls through its external operations branch just decided all by themselves to kill the troops of a nuclear-armed superpower rival. That’s how the patron-client relationship works: The client simply decides things “on its own.” And why would the client do that? Because it’s just so upset by the war in Gaza—Iran’s sectarian death squads, after all, are famous for their humanitarian concern. In fact, if you think about it, it’s really all Israel’s fault for provoking Iran’s proxies, never mind that it was an Iranian proxy, Hamas, that started this entire war. As the Journal reported Tuesday: 

The U.S. warned Iran, publicly and through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which handles U.S. interests in the country, that it would retaliate against any aggression. Iran told the U.S. that it couldn’t control how its allied groups across the region would react to the Israeli offensive in Gaza, said a person briefed on the Swiss backchannel, and that, “those groups may take it upon themselves to escalate if there is no cease-fire.” 

But don’t laugh: The Iranian line is also the American line. Axios reported Monday that while administration officials fear that the consequences of a direct retaliation against Iran and its forces would be “unpredictable,” they “believe a cease-fire in Gaza is key to reducing regional tensions.” 

We’ve previously referred to this synchronization of U.S. and Iranian messaging as the “two-step.” As we wrote on Nov. 3, in response to a speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah:

Nasrallah’s speech … was a prime example of what [Tablet Levant analyst Tony] Badran has referred to as the Biden-Obama faction’s “two-step” with the Iranian “Axis of Resistance.” Axis forces hit Israel. Then they tell Washington, “Keep Israel on a leash if you don’t want regional war,” and start shooting at U.S. troops. Washington announces that while it has Israel’s back, its primary objective is to prevent regional escalation, and it leaks to the press that Israel is an out-of-control client hell-bent on dragging America into World War III—just look at all those Iranian proxies shooting at U.S. troops.

President Biden announced Tuesday that he had decided how to respond to Sunday’s attacks but offered no further details, saying only that the United States wants to avoid a regional war. Asked whether he held Iran responsible for the attacks, Biden said, “I do hold them responsible, in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it.” 

So, to review: Iran is “responsible” in a “sense,” but we don’t know if the country “directed” or “ordered” the attack, which means it might not be “responsible” in another, deeper “sense,” which would presumably be the “sense” that would require the administration to meaningfully retaliate or otherwise alter its policy of pro-Iranian regional realignment. What is it about Iran that makes American officials sound like philosophy of language PhDs after several vigorous bong rips?

We’re sure that if U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, find some truly incontrovertible evidence of Iranian involvement—like, say, a Venmo transaction from Ali Khamenei to the leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, or leaks from the Axis of Resistance group chat—they’ll be sure to let us know. Until then, we’ll expect more dorm-room word games—and more of the same policy that brought us here. 

For Tony’s takedown of a previous round of this nonsense, read here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-america-october-massacre 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Jacob Savage surveys the desert of modern film criticism and despairs

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The Rest

→In related news, The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday ran a long feature on Iran’s Axis of Resistance, most of which will be familiar to regular readers of The Scroll. But we thought the following passage worth emphasizing:

The Journal reported that Iranian security officials had given the green light for the [Oct. 7] assault at a meeting in Beirut the week before, on Oct. 2, citing senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, who also said officers of the Revolutionary Guard had worked with Hamas since August to devise the attack. Those officials and an additional high-ranking Hamas member continue to stand by those assertions.

Other officials quoted in the piece repeated the U.S.-Axis line: Not only was the Axis of Resistance surprised by Hamas’ attack, but also Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was “angered” by it. Sure, why not? In other news, The Scroll can exclusively report that Benjamin Netanyahu was “outraged” and “saddened” by the death of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 and that O.J. Simpson remains “angered” by the shocking murder of his ex-wife. 

→Quote of the Day, Part I:

The war in Yemen is in its 19th month of truce. For now, the Iranian attacks against U.S. forces have stopped. Our presence in Iraq is stable—I emphasize ‘for now’ because all of that can change—and the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades. 

That was National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan speaking at the Atlantic Festival on Sept. 29, 2023, roughly one week before Hamas invaded Israel. 

Quote of the Day, Part II:

I would argue that we have not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that.

That was Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaking at a press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Monday, Jan. 29, 2024. 

→A terrorist from the Somali jihadist group al-Shabaab was captured illegally crossing the U.S. southern border in March 2023—and then released and allowed to roam free within the United States for nearly a year, The Daily Caller reports. The migrant was apprehended crossing the border near San Ysidro, California, on March 13, 2023, but the FBI’s Terrorism Screening Center deemed him a “mismatch” and ordered him released, according to the report. Ten months later, on Jan. 18, 2024, the center “made a redetermination” that the individual was an al-Shabaab member “involved in the use, manufacture or transport of explosives or firearms.” He was arrested two days later in Minneapolis. In fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 172 people on the terror watch list as they attempted to enter the country, but as this story suggests, it’s likely that others have gotten through, either as “got-aways” who never encounter U.S. officials in the first place or, as in this case, as a result of errors from overburdened bureaucrats.

→TikTok’s head of government relations in Israel has resigned over the flood of antisemitic and anti-Israel content on the Chinese-owned app. Barak Herscowitz, a former adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, announced his resignation Monday in a Hebrew-language X post. Jewish Insider reports that Herscowitz was the employee behind a December memo to company management accusing the platform of anti-Israel bias. The memo claimed that TikTok had refused to run ads highlighting the plight of Israeli hostages, deeming them “too political,” even as it allowed paid advertisements calling attention to Palestinian suffering in Gaza. Herscowitz also accused the company of cracking down on pro-Israel content while refusing to remove violent or hateful anti-Israel content—an allegation that has been echoed by other Jewish employees at the company. A December 2023 report from the Network Contagion Institute found that pro-Israel hashtags were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared to other social media platforms, as were other hashtags (such as #StandWithUkraine) that conflicted with the Chinese Communist Party’s international line. 

→Speaking of which, footage of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) telling pro-cease-fire protesters to “go back to China, where your headquarters is!” went viral on social media on Monday. Several right-wing clickbait artists on X, including Collin Rugg and Benny Johnson, reposted the clip Monday, packaged it as if it were breaking news (which it wasn’t), and mocked Pelosi for having “lost it” (in Rugg’s words). Perhaps they thought it was newly relevant because Pelosi had suggested on Sunday that some of the cease-fire protesters were “connected to Russia,” but no matter. Four points:

• The footage is from Oct. 17, 10 days after Hamas’ terrorist attacks and when the Palestinian death toll stood at just over 2,000, showing that the “genocide” accusations were baked in from the start.

• The protesters—who showed up outside of Pelosi’s home in San Francisco to denounce the “genocide” and allege that Oct. 7 was “an inside job”—were from the “anti-war” group Code Pink, which is run by Jodie Evans. Code Pink is funded by Evans’s husband, who is …

• … Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based Maoist millionaire with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s global propaganda operation—who, in addition to funding Code Pink and turning its messaging in a pro-CCP direction, has given millions of dollars to The People’s Forum, a Manhattan activist space that has helped organize several anti-Israel protests in New York City.

• Finally, as Scroll reader @jesterhead9 pointed out to this author on X: “Notice how when on TV, Nancy jumps to the ridiculous, Russia, to scare the MSNBC audience, but in person, in frustration, she tells the truth. Although, if she really wanted to get bold, she could shout: ‘Go back to Open Society and Ford!’”

→New York Congressman and member of “the Squad” Jamaal Bowman promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories in blog posts written during his time as a high-school principal in the Bronx, The Daily Beast reports. The posts, which were written before 2014 and deleted by 2016, alleged that World Trade Center building 7 was destroyed in a controlled demolition, said that Osama Bin Laden had been framed by globalist bankers who wanted war, and recommended the 9/11 conspiracy film series “Loose Change” and “Zeitgeist.” They also included a poem, which read in part:

Later in the day
Building 7
Also Collaspsed [sic]
Hmm…
Multiple explosions
Heard before
And during the collapse
Hmm…

Hmm, indeed. On Monday, the congressman said in a statement that he “regrets” his past blog posts.

→In other Squad news, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) is being investigated by the Department of Justice for allegedly misusing federal funds for personal security. Few details are available about the probe, but Bush had previously been accused of misusing campaign funds to hire her husband as her security guard, despite him not having a private security license. Her husband, however, is far from the most colorful of Bush’s security employees. Her “bodyguard” Nathaniel Davis, who received more than $137,000 from Bush from 2020 to 2023, is a former member of the New Black Panther Party who claims to be a 109-trillion-year-old intergalactic master of self-defense with the power to summon tornadoes and read minds. Despite frequently invoking the Rothschilds, Davis has claimed that he can’t be antisemitic because he’s a Jewish “high priest” from the lost Tribe of Issachar. “That makes me a Hebrew,” he told The Washington Free Beacon in 2023. “How can I be antisemitic?”

→What do people mean when they say the “Jewish left”? That’s the topic of our Thread of the Day, from Jewish Forward columnist Alex Zeldin, who is responding to a recent essay in The New York Review of Books on “the Jewish left’s estrangement from mainstream Jewish institutions.” We suspect we’re more pessimistic than Zeldin about what “normie liberalism” has in store for Israel in the long run, but he’s spot-on about the disproportionate influence of a small clique of elite-educated, anti-Zionist Jews with friends in media. The thread is too long to reproduce in full using screenshots, but a link to it can be found here. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

How Fur and Feathers Went in and out of Fashion, by Jenna Weissman Joselit

And what it had to do with the Jews

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Unbearable Fakeness of Film Reviews

We are now told to see movies not because they challenge our preconceptions but precisely because they don’t

by Jacob Savage

In January 2020, Promising Young Woman premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to mixed reviews. The movie had the right message (“a female revenge fantasy”) but it was a sloppy mess (“not always surefooted in its style or substance”). “Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale,” wrote Dennis Harvey in Variety. “[She] wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on.”

The film, whose release was delayed because of COVID, seemed destined for a streamer—until Carey Mulligan and her publicity team went on the offensive. “It drove me so crazy,” she told The New York Times nearly a year after Harvey’s review first came out. “I was like, ‘Really? For this film, you’re going to write something that is so transparent? Now? In 2020?’ I just couldn’t believe it.”

The gambit worked. The insinuation that Harvey was attacking Mulligan for her appearance (in the movie, she does in fact put on female drag to lure her male victims) sent the online mob after the 60-year-old gay critic. His terrified editors quickly threw him under the bus. “Variety sincerely apologizes to Carey Mulligan and regrets the insensitive language and insinuation in our review of Promising Young Woman that minimized her daring performance,” they wrote in an unsigned note.

Promising Young Woman went on to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture, and Carey Mulligan received a nod for best actress. The note from Variety’s editors, which is still up on the website, reads more as a warning than as a correction.

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Much is made over the disparity between critics’ and fans’ Rotten Tomatoes scores—as if highbrow critics can no longer relate to the unslakable thirst of a middlebrow audience for Hollywood’s superhero IP machine. But it’s not that critics ignore flyover hits (Yellowstone; Sound of Freedom) or elevate poorly made agitprop, which they often do. It’s that they’ve become as safe and predictable as the movies they purport to criticize.

It’s unsettling when you know how a film will be received before it’s even released. For a movie like She Said or Bros or Nyad or Origin (“movies about important events or formerly under-represented groups”) critics will praise a standout performance, talk about how important the subject or the “moment” is, and spend paragraph after paragraph flattering their readership’s political sensibilities. For films like May December or The Irishman or The Fabelmans (“new releases from old white guys who aren’t problematic—yet”) critics will praise the craft, talk about the past, and gloss over the fact that the old guys have nothing left to say.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe The Irishman is actually a brilliant meditation on guilt and identity, and The Fabelmans was a charming nostalgia piece—but the uniformity of opinion is alarming. There wasn’t a single mainstream critic in the entire English-speaking world who found The Irishman an interminable slog? After nearly 50 years, Spielberg finally had a genuine flop—and there was no one left to shiv him? Killers of the Flower Moon was an interesting movie—but you’d never know because critics gave it the same rave reviews they give every Scorsese film.

I enjoyed Barbie. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling were fantastic, and the millennial jokes (mostly) landed. That Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach somehow managed to communicate a “yas queen” feminist message from the mouth of a regressive toy doll is itself a remarkable achievement. But the self-conscious politics of the movie often overwhelmed the premise. This was duly noted by most critics—and applauded. “Those worried that the film would uncritically pedestal Handler’s invention have little to fear,” reassured the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s tough to voice a critique of capitalism from the point of view of a piece of merchandise, a fact that, to its credit, the Barbie screenplay … wryly and repeatedly acknowledges,” Dana Stevens wrote in Slate. Apparently making an anti-capitalist movie about a doll is in fact a great capitalist achievement of anti-capitalism, which is why you should run to the theaters and buy a ticket.

At all costs, Barbie critics—like the filmmakers themselves—labor to make one thing clear: They have no love for the doll itself. “Can you really call out and perpetuate a stereotype at the same time?” asked Justin Chang in the LA Times. “Would it have been better—more daring, and also more interesting—to tell the story from a less classically molded Barbie’s perspective?”

This is nonsense. Given where the culture actually is, the most daring version of Barbie—the version that would have caused a furor—would have been an unapologetic defense of the doll and its history. To pretend otherwise is insulting to anyone with a pulse. But the point isn’t that Justin Chang enjoyed Barbie, or that he didn’t—or even that he believes anything he writes. It’s to demonstrate that he and his readership are morally superior to anyone who might have actually enjoyed the film.

We are told to see movies not because they’re interesting, or beautiful, or because they challenge our preconceptions, but precisely because they don’t. Origin, Ava DuVernay’s latest loss leader (somehow adapted from Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction bestseller Caste, and even more astonishingly, underwritten by the Ford Foundation), challenged not a single assumption of its liberal target audience. “What makes DuVernay’s movie so essential is the way it approaches America’s most difficult issue,” wrote Variety. “It can be a little corny, but it’s also inspiring.” The BBC likewise damned DuVernay with faint praise. “Origin is fascinating: not a mere information dump or distanced thesis, but a celebration of academia,” wrote Steph Green. Not a mere information dump? Sign me up!

On and on these supposed raves go, a word salad of political posturing and mealy mouthed apologias (“slightly flat”; “the film wobbles”; “better served as a documentary”). You sense here a tiptoeing around, a fatal desire not to cause offense. The critics are trying to tell us this isn’t a good movie even as they tell us it’s a great movie.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the only critic who felt politically safe enough to take Origin to task after its premiere at Venice (“a twisted sibling of Eat Pray Love, in which the book’s author … leads us on a world tour of historical atrocities”) just happened to be a woman of color, Leila Latif. Similarly, the only mainstream critics who felt politically safe enough to excoriate Disney’s bloated live-action remake of The Little Mermaid—premised on the patronizing conceit that in the year 2023, it was still revolutionary to have a Black heroine—are all Black.

It might be hard to recall, but when it was first released, Succession received mixed reviews (“underwhelming in both execution and intent”; “halfway between the Bluths and Corleones”), with a Metacritic score below that of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. To my mind, Succession’s first season was fantastic, far better than the sometimes-brilliant but meandering show that circled the same will-they-or-won’t-they wagon for three more years. But critics didn’t want to appear politically offside when it came out—all those rich white men! So they hedged their bets accordingly. Once you’re in the club, though, it’s hard to get kicked out. Fargo is on its fifth season coasting on the same joke—and somehow receives the same praise.

A brilliant show like Atlanta receives the same scores as Netflix's preposterous Queen Charlotte. MAX’s The Idol, with its problematic provenance, is panned—but is it really less interesting than Season 3 of Outer Banks? The Idol had a unique artistic vision—a vision many people clearly hated—but where are its champions? Why are The Fabelmans and The Woman King more highly rated on Rotten Tomatoes than the far more interesting Tar and Banshees of Inisherin? Saltburn was a much better movie than Promising Young Woman—but it lacked a political angle so it was effectively panned. More smart people I know vehemently disagree about the merits of Everything Everywhere All at Once than critics, who didn’t want to be cannon fodder for the A24 publicity machine.

To stay on the safe side of everyone, critics have learned to employ the deadening language of the press release. Here’s USA Today, writing about She Said, the anodyne retelling of the Weinstein saga: “A riveting cinematic quest for journalistic truth … should always be embraced.” Or Indiewire on Joy Ride: “This particular Asian American-led film is making history with an all-female cast, including a non-binary actor. Joy Ride is a prime example of how important representation is on screen.” Or Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times, this time writing about Rustin: “The movie’s achievement is to remind us that milestones are invariably the result of hard, often thankless work, preceded by conflict and marked by compromise.”

This anesthetized language, divorced from aesthetic experience, is antithetical to the spirit of art. Were any of these movies beautiful? Did they make the critic feel something? Or did they just check the right boxes?

So what? It’s only movie reviews, right?

Except these reviews don’t only affect the way we talk about film and television. They distort the incentives around what gets made in the first place. Once upon a time, when a big movie bombed, the Hollywood trades would have a field day: There was an almost primordial glee at the chaos, speculation about who at the studio was on the chopping block, who was off to directors’ jail. For all its ugliness, this schadenfreude was a vital part of the film ecosystem. Today, when a supposedly well-reviewed movie goes belly-up, we just hear quiet whimpers about how it “couldn’t find an audience.”

And because most movies never really get panned, whatever redeeming element a critic can point to—a director, a role, often just the idea behind the film—algorithmically nudges even a tepid review into positive Rotten Tomatoes territory. Blue Beetle, this past summer’s flaccid superhero offering, was bumped into positive critical territory because of the immutable racial characteristics of its lead actor. “It’s a shame that Sarandon’s character isn’t more menacing, or the dialogue/narrative more free of cliché,” NME wrote in a review. “But bringing us a first Latino superhero in a DC movie, ably played by the charming Maridueña, is still to be applauded.”

Babylon, last year’s Damien Chazelle bomb, is similarly praised for “shin[ing] a light on the non-white and queer people generally given minimal visibility in vintage Tinseltown narratives,” all within a larger review that also called it “an overworked pastiche” and an “emotional void.” The review is not quite a pan: Babylon gets written up as critically “mixed” with a 60 on Metacritic (trust me, it’s a zero), and studio executives are absolved for green-lighting a disaster. In a world in which nothing is bad, and in which nothing needs to make money, affirming the heroism of everyone’s good intentions ensures that nothing changes—and that everyone in the club gets to keep working.

Writers, for their part, see what critics demand and conclude: “Let’s do more of that.” After its first season, Ted Lasso came under fire for being too light and feel-good. “I would’ve preferred a show about soccer culture in the U.K. that deals more directly with the racial dynamics within its fan base,” complained Inkoo Kang in The New Yorker. And I would prefer that Ted Lasso be about the sound clashes in Jamaica in the 1950s (a subject with great dramatic and musical resonance, at least for me). Of course the writers took the note, at least in spirit, which is how we wound up with a bunch of soccer players discussing ex-girlfriends and cellphones and nude selfies with all the subtlety of a 1990s DARE ad.

A new era of cringe is upon us, and the critics have only themselves to blame. “The power of She Said lies in its moments of potent moral clarity, which arrive in revelatory set pieces,” explained The Washington Post. But moral clarity doesn’t produce art; it produces agitprop, including one of the schlockiest scenes of 2022 (singled out for praise in the NYT). These scenes are everywhere, the dialogue so leaden, the “message” so clear, you wonder why they didn’t save millions in production costs and write New York Times op-eds instead.

This mutually parasitic marriage of art and criticism has led to worse art and worse criticism. A healthy critical culture would have at least some layer of unpredictability—a capacity for both wonder and disgust. Instead, the overwhelming urge is to play it safe, to flatten disagreement into fake consensus.

The films critics do champion are safe and expected. Showing Up, a banal if competent vehicle in which Michelle Williams mopes around Portland while making bad art, seems to be on everyone’s top 10 lists. The stakes in Showing Up are as close to zero as possible. What might it actually mean to realize your life is a failure, that your art is mediocre, that the thing you’ve given your life to is ultimately meaningless? The movie, like the critics who pretend to adore it, is happy not to ask.

No matter how well done, the top-rated film of 2023 shouldn’t be a three-hour French documentary chronicling the everyday operations of a gynecological ward in a Parisian hospital. It speaks to a deep poverty of imagination that Our Body is followed on Metacritic’s 2023 top 10 by two more French documentaries. It’s safer, after all, to praise foreign documentaries and meaningless slice-of-life movies than to engage with the culture where it actually is.

Popular film and television criticism once functioned primarily as an engine of recommendation and secondarily as a means of social and artistic commentary. Increasingly it serves as neither. Lacking secure jobs or professional stature, and existing at the whims of politicized online mobs, today’s movie critics are the opposite of tart-tongued predecessors like Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby, and Janet Maslin. Instead of priding themselves on their willingness to stand up for art against the variable tastes of consumers and studios alike, they surrender to the pack.