Film critic David Edelstein is fired from NPR's "Fresh Air" after he tweets a short butter joke on the occasion of the death of Bernardo Bertolucci.

The joke — accompanied by a photo of the famous scene in Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" — was "Even grief is better with butter."

We're told, in the Hollywood Reporter, that there was "a backlash, which included actress Martha Plimpton." I can't see who other than Martha Plimpton wanted Edelstein fired for making a joke about the butter in that movie. That was such a common topic for humor when that movie came out. I still remember how one of my friends delivered her opinion of the movie: "It was excellent, albeit butter-covered." It was such a thing to connect Bertolucci with butter that if I'd written that modern "Dictionary of Received Ideas" I used to talk about, if I'd thought to put in an entry for Bertolucci, it would have been: Say something about butter.

So how did Edelstein go wrong? The movie has a man (Marlon Brando) and a woman (Maria Schneider) struggling through a sexual relationship, and in the "butter scene," the man tells the woman to get butter, which he uses as a lubricant for anal intercourse. I don't think any mainstream movie had ever had an explicit reference to anal intercourse, and here it was on screen, presumably simulated.

You might imagine that the problem with Edelstein's tweet was that it was too lighthearted, when a man had just died. But that wouldn't get you fired — Edelstein has done hundreds of film reviews on "Fresh Air" — and that probably wouldn't put a Hollywood actress into such a state of hostility.

But perhaps you remember what Maria Schneider said about what was done to her. As Hollywood Reporter puts it:

Schneider said in a 2007 interview that the simulated sex scene was unscripted and that she felt bullied by Bertolucci and unsupported by her co-star Marlon Brando. "I was crying real tears," said the actress, who died in 2011.

Edelstein says he didn't "didn't know the real-life story about Maria Schneider" and he didn't remember the scene as showing a rape. And he apologized:

"The line was callous and wrong even if it had been consensual, but given that it wasn't I'm sick at the thought of how it read and what people logically conclude about me. I have never and would never make light of rape, in fiction or in reality."

Is it believable that a big film critic like Edelstein missed the stories about Maria Schneider? I don't follow movies that closely, but I have 3 blog posts about Schneider's charges against Bertolucci, the third of which, from December 2016, has Bertolucci acknowledging the truth of what Schneider said:

"I wanted her to react humiliated. I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn't tell her... to obtain something I think you have to be completely free. I didn't want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage, I wanted her to Maria to feel ... the rage and humiliation. Then she hated me for all of her life."

Bertolucci said he wanted "her reaction as a girl, not as an actress." Brando went along with this. He was 48. She was 19.

From the NYT obituary for Maria Schneider:

The role fixed Ms. Schneider in the public mind as a figurehead of the sexual revolution, and she spent years trying to move beyond the role, and the public fuss surrounding it.... “I wanted to be recognized as an actress, and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown. Now, though, I can look at the film and like my work in it.”

The famous butter scene, she said, was not in the script and made it into the film only at Brando’s insistence. “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” she said. “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”

How guilty is David Edelstein? He's at least guilty of not paying enough attention to the culture to have noticed and remembered this story. Why should people who listen to NPR receive his — rather than somebody else's — opinion of the various new movies that come out over the years? Why should we listen to any critic — or any radio show? I know why I'd listen to the radio show "Fresh Air" — because Terry Gross is a fantastic interviewer. Some movie critic gets to ride in her vehicle? That person is damned lucky. Should it be David Edelstein, a man who did not know of or remember what happened to Maria Schneider? Why didn't he notice? Why didn't it make an impression? Why is he so inattentive to the sexual abuse of actresses by powerful men — by Marlon Brando?!

ADDED: Here's the Martha Plimpton tweet:

*warning: rape JFC, David Edelstein. All day I’ve avoided noting this mans death precisely because of this moment in which a sexual assault of an actress was intentionally captured on film. And this asshole makes it into this joke. Fire him. Immediately. pic.twitter.com/NOITGeb7EY

— Martha Plimpton (@MarthaPlimpton) November 26, 2018

ALSO:Last year, Edelstein got feminist grief over his review of "Wonder Woman." Here's his self-defense (in New York Magazine):

Last Thursday, my review of Wonder Woman was received with both outrage and ridicule, and reading those reactions, I felt sick. Some of the criticisms were unjust.... And it didn’t help that I reached out to Facebook friends with a gored-bull rant of my own that was then circulated. The lesson was learned on that score — and plenty of others....

All my life, I have spoken up against eroticizing violence onscreen, against women and men both. That’s why, a decade ago, I coined the term “torture porn.” I’m sorry that it wasn’t more clear that this line was meant as approving: “With a female director, Patty Jenkins, at the helm, Diana isn’t even photographed to elicit slobbers.”

This is another widely quoted bit: “She looks fabulous in her suffragette outfit with little specs, but it’s not until she strips down to her superheroine bodice and shorts, pulls out her sword, and leaps into the fray that she comes into her own. More focused on world peace than bombs and bullets, she’s on an ecstatic plane of her own.” That was meant to celebrate the liberation — the uncorset-ing — of a superheroine. The revelation of her costume comes after a long scene in which she tries on fabulous clothes and settles on a period suffragette outfit that covers her from head to toe. She looks great — it shouldn’t be a provocation to say that — but she’s only “Wonder Woman” when she strips them off and flings herself into battle. Is she amazing to look at? I thought that was the whole point. Or maybe not....

[I]n the context of this spate of comic-book movies (which I consider a blight, but that’s another subject) I underestimated how much a superheroine at the center of a woman-directed film would mean to many people, and descriptions I considered lively and complimentary would come across as demeaning. Moreover, if Wonder Woman will empower women at this moment in history — in which reproductive rights are imperiled, and an admitted groper is working to undo decades of gains for women — then some of the criticisms of my review are just. I reserve the right to think that this is not, overall, a very good movie. But it is an important one.

Edelstein reserves the right to say what he wants about movies, but he can't say it on "Fresh Air" anymore.