I, Tonya seems to implicate the viewer in Harding's
cultural abasement, rhetorically asking: It should've been about the skating, but you didn't really care about that, did you?
Flat, blank facades on buildings conceived as commodities — or just oddities — rather than works of civic art; flat modernist pictorial abstractions; the flattening of
cultural history into pseudo-history packaged as what Henry dismissed as «applied sociology» — all spoke to him of something far more ominous, the
abasement of man and the crude negation of his proper relationship to nature as embodied in the great tradition.