Late last month, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane wrote a profile of Scarlett Johansson. Maybe you heard about it; if you did, it was probably not in terribly complimentary terms. Slate’s Katy Waldman called out its “inappropriate-uncle creepiness”; Talking Points Memo’s Kay Steiger deemed it “gross”; over at The New Republic, Esther Berger crowned it “the worst profile I can remember reading in The New Yorker.” The problem with Lane’s fawning, empty piece, in a nutshell, is that it’s basically a highbrow version of a Maxim or Esquire cover story: Lane’s thesis is that Scarlett Johansson is super-duper hot, though couched in dressed-up verbiage like “Johansson looks tellingly radiant in the flesh” and “using nothing but the honey of her voice” and “she seemed to be made from champagne.” What makes the whole piece particularly irritating is that there are interesting things to be said about Johansson right now; she has two movies coming out today which couldn’t be further apart on the modern movie-making spectrum. And, compellingly, one of them can be read as a kind of tacit commentary on precisely the kind of empty objectification that the Lane profile traffics in so freely. … Read More