"Carol" and the New Morality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I saw Carol, the Todd Haynes\/Patricia Highsmith '5os lesbian drama, at the tail end of last year. I haven't written about it until now because it was so\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/01\/carol-and-the-new-morality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Carol" and the New Morality\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I saw Carol, the Todd Haynes\/Patricia Highsmith '5os lesbian drama, at the tail end of last year. I haven't written about it until now because it was so\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/01\/carol-and-the-new-morality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-01-16T17:39:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-01-16T17:56:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/01\/carol-and-the-new-morality.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/01\/carol-and-the-new-morality.html\",\"name\":\"\\\"Carol\\\" and the New Morality\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2016-01-16T17:39:57+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-01-16T17:56:55+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415\"},\"description\":\"I saw Carol, the Todd Haynes\/Patricia Highsmith '5os lesbian drama, at the tail end of last year. 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{"id":10212,"date":"2016-01-16T13:39:57","date_gmt":"2016-01-16T17:39:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=10212"},"modified":"2016-01-16T13:56:55","modified_gmt":"2016-01-16T17:56:55","slug":"carol-and-the-new-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/01\/carol-and-the-new-morality.html","title":{"rendered":"“Carol” and the New Morality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I saw Carol<\/em>, the Todd Haynes\/Patricia Highsmith \u20185os lesbian drama, at the tail end of last year. I haven\u2019t written about it until now because it was so jagged\u2013parts really worked, although I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted them to, and the remainder was so off-putting that I just didn\u2019t feel like talking about it. But writing that review of Rat Bohemia<\/em><\/a> helped me figure out why the film didn\u2019t work for me: It\u2019s really two movies, set in two entirely different moral universes.<\/p>\n

In the first universe everything serves Eros, the violent young god. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara (\u201cKatharine Hepburn\/Audrey Hepburn erotic fanfic<\/a>\u201c) don\u2019t have personalities; what they have is power difference, wishful thinking and willful projection, and electricity. The power and age difference is what gives their relationship its heat and pressure. Carol<\/em> is at its most successful when it\u2019s most ~*~problematic*~*.<\/p>\n

ETA: Final Girl is onto something when she suggests that Carol would make a good Carmilla<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This xojane post<\/a> (which I am not recommending you read, since it\u2019s nuanceless and vulgar, but I stole this post\u2019s title from there) complains, basically, that the love affair lacks realism. Sexual realism, realism about \u201cwhat love really feels like.\u201d Yeah, you know, they do not talk things out and learn to fight well and get to know one another as people. Their passion plays out on the road, in escapes from the everyday world of cold feet under the covers. They never go through that long attrition where you slowly agree to ignore more and more things about the person you love, and call that \u201cacceptance.\u201d They never find out what there is to dislike about each other\u2013or to love.<\/p>\n

But the movie wants to eat its morality and have it, too. This is most obvious in Carol\u2019s speech in the lawyer\u2019s office: How dare<\/em> you ask me to deny myself in order to see my daughter! I am a good person, and my love is moral!<\/p>\n

By positioning herself as the defender of gay bourgeois righteousness, Carol invites us to judge her love affair on moral grounds. And what we see is an older person, caught up in the narcissism of erotic passion, seducing a younger person and pretending everybody else will be happy if she\u2019s happy. It is as if the film expects that the lesbianism will sanitize the creepiness of this distorted perspective\u2013Carol\u2019s love is only<\/em> moral, if it\u2019s moral, because it\u2019s lesbian. (That\u2019s basically where Noah Millman\u2019s ambivalent review<\/a> comes down.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very pretty movie. The use of period music was especially pleasing (\u201cOne Mint Julep\u201d!). It\u2019s a Christmas movie, rubbing the audience\u2019s nose in how isolated \u201950s homosexuals were from that ideal of family and fireplace.<\/p>\n

I love this bit in the intro to The Problem of Pain<\/em>, where CS Lewis says that the Hebrew God is so shocking because He combines two incompatible elements of religion: universal morality and personal divinity. Goodness and power, goodness and sublimity. What if Zeus were the Platonic form of the Good? That bizarre, incomprehensible collision of morality and sublimity is the opposite of what happens in Carol<\/em>, where the two layers separate like oil in water.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"