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Notes -
I remember listening to a podcast where two (older, white, liberal) hosts were talking about the movie, In Bruges, and they both discussed how the movie can be tough to watch these days because the protagonist, who is supposed to be likeable and sympathetic, says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things. And then one of the hosts had a moment of clarity and verbalized that the protagonist is also a literal hitman who murdered a child, which is substantially morally worse than making a joke about fat black women.
Ironically, the director had real difficulty in getting Colin Farrel to use the word 'retard', because his daughter has Downs Syndrome.
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Isn't that just a matter of what's presently controversial?
In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad. It is not controversial. The film In Bruges expects you to understand that murder is bad. It is, in a sense, already priced in. Add in that fictional violence is often treated symbolically, and not as seriously as real violence, and it does not occasion any cognitive dissonance for you to sympathise with the hitman. Child murder is presented as a flaw, and hating child murder does not position you on either side of a contemporary partisan conflict.
On the other hand, saying nasty things about a fat black woman does position you on this or that side of a present divide. Attitudes to fat people or mentally disabled people or whatever do code as left-wing or right-wing or the like.
Compare the way that, for example, in Mass Effect 3 (2012) you can carry out the genocide of entire species, but you cannot disapprove of gay marriage. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) you can lobotomise people, control people through their drug addictions, and so on, but you cannot misgender Krem. Capital-E Evil choices are fine, as long as everyone knows they're evil, but being on the wrong side of a subject of present controversy, which codes political, is not fine. The low-stakes issues matter more than the high-stakes ones, not because they're more important, but because they sort people.
I think that's possibly an accurate description of the innerworkings of progressives, but I also think that's an excessively Culture War-brained perspective.
In Bruges isn't about whether murder or prejudice are morally permissible. At its core, the film is about guilt and the potential for redemption through a dual character study of Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson). I think the main questions the audience is supposed to struggle with is whether Ray can be redeemed and try to find happiness after living an evil life which culminated in him accidentally shooting and killing a child while shooting and killing a priest, for money.
Ray's racism and fatphobia are played for laughs and fill out his characterization. They indicate that he is gruff, prickly, generally uncaring of others, and he likely comes from a lower class background where such beliefs are normal and tolerated. The film implicitly acknowledges that Ray's prejudices are morally wrong while also casting them as very minor sins against his more serious crimes. A small part of his redemption arc is apologizing to a dwarf who he carelessly insulted earlier in the film.
Or to put it in your terms, pricing Ray's history of murder and penchant for racism is the point of the film. The viewer (and Ray for that matter) are trying to price them in relation to his potential for redemption.
What my prior post was mocking is the idea than a modern culturally left-leaning American finds it more difficult to sympathize with someone who makes casually racist statements for fun than someone who kills people for money and murdered a child. Both of those factors are presented as flaws in Ray's character in the movie, but the film clearly intends for the latter to be much worse than the former, as I think any ethically sane person would. The podcast hosts inverted their moral focuses because they, IMO, have broken progressive values that raise the evilness of bigotry to the stratosphere. Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.
And I get that if I actually sat down with the hosts of Unspooled and asked them, "do you think that saying 'nigger' is worse than murdering a child?" they would come to the same conclusion as me, but that only further highlights how far their progressive values take them from ethnical reality.
EDIT - Also, the idea that being against racism against fat black women is taking a stand in the modern culture is extremely culture war brained and kind of nuts. Vanishingly few people in the US are anti-fat black women qua fat black women, and the few that are have no political power and don't listen to podcasts co-hosted by the head film critic at the Los Angeles Times. If the hosts talked about In Bruges in this way to signal their contemporary cultural war position, then that is a sad condemnation of their world views and I wished they would just get back to understanding the film on its own terms (which, to their credit, they eventually do).
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See also shows like The Blacklist and its main protagonist, Raymond Reddington. Described as an extremely ruthless individual with no qualms about killing or torture, Raymond ran a vast criminal empire that was surely responsible for untold suffering. Yet the viewer is meant to find him sympathetic because he rails against environmental destruction or white supremacists. He has the "correct opinions" on the "politically correct" side, so ultimately it's acceptable to root for him and be invested in his story.
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