Clearly, you just don't care

Pet peeve: when not consuming/liking/taking seriously a particular movie/book/article about a Major Problem of our Age is seen as akin to not caring about that problem, or to having the wrong attitude towards it. The buzz around the new movie, "Precious," suggests this will be one of those phenomena. In her review of the film on Slate, Dana Stevens apologizes for her lack of enthusiasm for it, which gives some sense of the aura around the work. Failure to go see the movie, or if you have seen it, to both take it seriously and admire it for its fundamental truths about the hard life, is to be conflated with either an inability to understand the film on account of your own privilege, or worse yet, with cold-hearted indifference to the questions of race, poverty, obesity, rape, AIDS, child abuse, illiteracy, and... I haven't even seen this movie, perhaps I'm missing a few.

I'm not terribly keen on seeing "Precious", both because after seeing "A Serious Man" - which I liked! - a few weeks ago, I realized that $12.50 is really too much under even the best of circumstances, and because I've already seen "Precious" compared to "An Inconvenient Truth" - another film you are morally obligated to see and love as evidence of your non-indifference to a Major Problem. This sort of hype awakens all my contrarian impulses, and gives me the sense that however well-made the movie may be, I will be inclined not to like it, because I will sense that Society is forcing me to like it as a way of showing that I feel sufficiently guilty about having never for once moment been black, poor (broke, yes, but not poor), abused, etc. What I object to, then, is not being forced to acknowledge privilege, but being coerced into to seeing and liking a particular movie as a way of proving this. Also frustrating: many who go to the movie because It Is Important will no doubt leave thinking they've shown they care in some profound way, leading to horrible horrible Smug.

All of this is perhaps unfair to the movie's makers - it's the hype, not the movie itself, that's putting me off.