Norbit was a grand atrocity

like 9/11*

You may already know by now that I have a 9/11 fixation, which I wrote about for Countere last year.

I by no means intend to trivialize the moral evils of mass terror nor the suffering that people went through. Rather, I was attempting to play devil’s advocate and wake us up to (1) the aesthetic implications of violence and (2) how certain impulses—while being immoral—are extremely natural, human, and useful (in some circumstances), and rather than being condemned and expunged, should be sublimated or unleashed in appropriate spaces (spaces of anti-structure, festivity, the carnivalesque, the underground).

I’d like to make a similar argument about heinously politically incorrect and socially irresponsible films like Norbit.

But let’s not get things twisted: Norbit (like 9/11) was an atrocity.