This goes back to what I was saying about how a film presents itself. Tarantino makes exploitation movies in the modern era with nods to many other films, so there’s no aspect of truth to the monstrous, stereotypical behavior - and the main villain is a complex and interesting character who is evil and has clear motivations of why he is that way (I mean, the guy sells out Germany to save his skin and does what he does for power and money). At least, that’s my take on it.
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This is problematic to ask. Because I would like to think I am an average person and yet I know from experience and interactions that I am not. Even within my own family! These are people who I grew up side by side with and experienced very similar upbringing and such. Yet we have polar views on politics, religion, etc etc. They of course see themselves as the average person. We can’t both be right. right?
You bring up the two things Anita does…negative stereotypes and whitewashing…they are not always related but can be. And I do not think it is wise to conflate them together; I think its better to handle them independently.
I don’t head to mainstream cinema often except for the band of geek cinema. Marvel, DC, and other pop culture flicks (Harry Potter, Ghostbusters, and the ilk).
Interesting point to think about both the John Wick and Jack Reacher brands…in both cases the good guy vs bad guy are all white males, and in both cases corporate based criminal activity.
Does that paint white male corporate leaders in a bad light to anyone?
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If the only Germans we ever saw portrayed anywhere were Nazis, I don’t think “What’s your problem—are you saying we can’t make movies about Nazis?!” or “Are you saying Nazis weren’t real?!” would be valid points. Because in that case, you’d have to ask why non-Nazi Germans were portrayed so seldom. Isn’t this the real point? It’s not just that making up nasty shit about people is bad.
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How many films from mainstream Hollywood do you recall that portrays Germans as anything other than Nazis?
I think the ultimate point here is that The Freq’s blanket statement of “Hollywood portrays negative racial stereotypes” is factual; I think some of the examples are not good examples (kind of a all chihuahuas are dogs, not all dogs are chihuahuas point).
I agree with @emo_pinata 's excellent point about Tarantino as a film maker in that he makes exploitation films and we seem to be ok with it as a whole. Its an interesting dichotomy around when something is acceptable or not regarding intent.
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It would help. The focus in most media on Islamic terrorists is mostly driven by the fact there are no big, evil state actors to use as villains.
- Nazis: gone.
- Soviets: gone.
- Chinese: no one believed they were a real threat, and now they finance everything.
- North Koreans: please, I’m talking about real, competent threats.
You have to shoot someone in a videogame, or foil some plot in a comic. We have run out of competent, believable real-world villain material. You want to improve the image of Muslims in media? Get us in a war with someone else.
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My point was just that the accuracy of a given portrayal is irrelevant to the larger point. If you had 1,000 movies about Islamic terrorists and each one was scrupulously accurate about its subjects and the historical facts, you’d still have a problem. “Where are the non-Islamic terrorist Muslims?”
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I can’t help feeling that “exoticism” is a bit of a cheap shot when it comes to entertainment media. The mundane has its place in the media, for sure, but I’m not always in the mood for kitchen-sink dramas. Take me to those far away places, the desert sands, the rolling prairies, the Mongolian stupas, the emerald forests… and the strange (as in unfamiliar) people. Dramas about mentally-ill, unemployed graphic workers in the Midlands would doubtless be terrifically realistic and some fans somewhere, but I’m not going to watch them. I’m going to be on the other channel, watching my exotic Lawrence of Arabia, Lost in Translation, and Star Wars.
It also seems a bit slack to lump in exoticism in with Orientalism as though they were the same thing. Perhaps I should gird my loins and really get to grips with Said, but I can’t feel that xenophilia or a yearning for the exotic are a problem in themselves, it’s where that xenophilia might lead that becomes problematic. Where it leads in the examples Sarkeesian gives is laziness in story-telling — it’s always “Muslims” who are the villains, and fantasy Muslims at that.
On the other hand, story-telling is not reality: the actors all wear make-up and the sets are forced perspective painted cardboard; the mature woman is a teenaged boy, and the sub-continental lawyer with the Japanese name is played by an actor from Yorkshire; the paint strokes aren’t a beautiful woman, they’re just paint strokes. And it’s all like that, and has to be to be viable as work; to get it finished to a deadline, you can’t research everything until you have a complete model of the people, the social mores, the economic system, so that you can answer any question about the environment of the movie that might come up, you only do enough research to tell the story you want to tell. And sometimes you’re wrong, and you miss something important that was on the next page when you closed the book; and sometimes you get it wrong, but nobody cares, or knows.
Anecdote: A South Korean friend of mine hated the Bond movie Die Another Day, not for the usual reasons this movie gets flak, but because the North Koreans in the movie were played by South Koreans and they sounded like it; meanwhile, the North Korean General father of the villain didn’t sound like even a South Korean, but Cantonese (because that’s what he was). For my friend, it was probably akin to listening to Sean Connery’s “Lithuanian” accent in The Hunt for Red October. But did I notice, or care? Should I have known? Does it matter that I didn’t?
Hollywood’s racist hiring policies are known and should be shaken up. The lazy tropes should also be shaken up, though they exist in Hollywood because they exist in their audiences’ minds, and they get transmitted back to the audience because they make story-telling easier: “This is the story you know, because it’s a story you tell yourself; got that? Good, because now that’s out of the way, I can tell a new story.”
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I guess when I say “average person” I’m intentionally referring to the unexamined thinking of people within our culture. So the “average person” could hold any number of conscious views; religion, politics, etc, as you mention. But all are subject to cultural and social biases. We are in some part products of our enviornment, unconciously.
They are related in that they function in the same way, by influencing what we see as “normal” and what we expect in other people.
Understanding their similar effects is not conflation. And as they ultimately lead to the same end, I don’t know how or why they should be considered seperate.
I think it could be argued that they are already somewhat unpopular thanks to the housing bubble and other market crises. But the protaganist is from the same group as you mention, and there is no easy deliniation between the two beyond the crime.
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Some probably do, but I don’t recall any examples. Evil? Sure, but I mean what else are they supposed to do? But usually they are presented as competent, occasionally even chivalrous, worthy enemies. They don’t really get the degrading and dehumanizing treatment Russians or Muslims get. Presenting someone as evil isn’t all that bad per se.
I hate that movie, but I don’t have a problem with the way the Germans are portrayed. Well, other than all the wrong haircuts.
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A good point. I think a movie about the everyday life of middle-class women in Saudi Arabia would be very enlightening. But with no potential for CGI to bring in the 14-year old audience, I do not expect it any time soon.
Man, lots. Even when just played for stereotypes, there are the chocolate-loving Augustus Gloop types, the stern housekeepers, the death metal bands, the Heidi Klum-inspired models. Any scientist or psychiatrist stands a good chance of being German, and even the evil ones may not be Nazis. There are erudite villains like in Die Hard and mentors like in Django Unchained. In the midst of WW2, there are movies like Schindler’s List and Valkyrie that show us not all Germans were so bad. When a comic book movie like The Avengers stops by Stuttgart, it’s to show someone who won’t kneel to tyranny.
There are a lot of things that could be said about how Germans are portrayed in Hollywood, but that they are all painted with the same Nazi brush is not one of them.
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I am totally prejudiced against Arabs, Muslims and to some extent South Asian people. Since I live in a majority-Muslim area, I’m constantly having to check this prejudice, and being so constantly aware of it, I know where it comes from. It comes from the exact sources mentioned in that video.
Ideally I wouldn’t have these biases to start with. But that’s not an option; there’s no way to unpee the pool.
The next best option is to be constantly thinking about my own prejudice and trying to compensate for it. But however good I get at that, it means being even more hyper-aware of cultural differences than if I were a normal racist, so it’s not good.
A bad option would be to notice my own prejudice, and then smugly think “well, now I’m cured”. I might not vote for overtly racist politicians, but I’d still be prejudging people left and right, and pretending I wasn’t, and I’d have an insufferable, unearned sense of superiority.
The worst option, though perhaps not by much, would be to just accept my programmed prejudices as correct. I’d be a straight-up racist, but at least I wouldn’t be invested in the delusion that I wasn’t, which might actually make it easier to form relationships with brown people individually.
The problem with internet discussion, including the video above, is that it circles endlessly around the last two options, because that’s where all the loud opinion lives, when we ought to be aiming for the second and, eventually, the first.
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Are you for real?
You can’t have non-terrorist Muslims who are… detectives who unravel the kidnapping plot? pilots who save the day? scientists who discover a rift in the time-space continuum? middle-aged women going through a painful divorce? teenagers suffering from amnesia?
Have you ever seen a movie?
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We are viewing this through a lens of time so all those really bad movies that do portray Germans or the Japanese as evil incarnate are lost because they were bad movies and there is no interest to see them, It is the same for all those thousands of westerns that portray Native Americans as heartless killing machines. 80s did it to the Russians during the cold war, 2000s are doing it to Muslims. Hollywood is great at preying on our fears, it sells movies.
"You think in terms of these frames, and they are physically realized in the neural circuitry of your brain."
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We can break this off if it’s not on-topic, but may I ask what about that film you disliked? Was it the portrayal of Germans as noted above?
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I think one thing that American films do with Germans is make them less human. Nazi has become short hand for evil - it’s obvious why, of course. But do you think that all Germans were soulless evil automatons, even all nazis? Or do you think they were people who did terrible things?
There is a scene from Come and See (a Russian film about WW2) where you have a group of Nazis, presumable Einsatzgruppen (the men who came behind the front lines and killed (mostly) Jewish civilians)… The way their action were portrayed were not some mustache twirling evil people. Many of them were drunk (historically accurate, actually) and at least one guy was crying as he carried out his job. In other words, they were people doing horrible things and it had an effect on them. I see no reason, at least in serious dramas that are seeking to be somewhat historically accurate, to not portray people as people instead of stereotypes. People do what they do (good and bad) for complicated reasons and films can reflect that, because I’ve seen them do it. Now, if you’re making a film like Iron Sky or Dead snow… sure, nazis are monsters, because carrying out an attempted genocide is pretty monstrous.
But films have long had high propaganda value, in that they can give people a distorted picture of reality and make them feel things about a particular issue. Going right back to the early days of hollywood, you have Birth of a Nation, which came out right as the Great Migration was kicking off. The fact that the president viewed it favorable and talked about it publicly as a great film had real weight and power and likely helped to further entrench racism, leading to the period in US history known as the nadir of race relations (the 20s). It helped people to imagine the KKK as some sort of brave group of heroes, protecting white America. Well, no. But the KKK was never larger than it was in the 20s, in part because Birth of a Nation helped soften the ground for them. Obviously, we don’t have anything like that now, but it’ is good for us to remember that what we see in films and on TV has real world consequences and pushing for better and less stereotyped representations does help with that, especially in places in America that aren’t very diverse.
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I think maybe I wasn’t clear. There are two points I wanted to make:
- There’s no (good) reason any character (doctor, lawyer, rule-breaking detective, out-there scientist with unconventional ideas about time travel…) can’t be a non-terrorist Muslim.
- The world is still making movies that aren’t CGI carnivals. There are lots of movies made about regular people living regular lives.
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Exactly, repitition in thoughts combined with feelings strenghthen physical connections in our brains. It’s always happening.
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