Movies, race, and cultural appropriation
Mon, Jan. 8th, 2007 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterSooooo tired. May have to up sleeping from eight hours to ten, which sounds ridiculous to me. But seriously. I have had my requisite cup of caffeine, and I still can't concentrate.
I was going to write separate posts on Blood Diamond and Casino Royale and cultural appropriation and post-colonialism and race, but looking at my current record, I may as well just do short blurbs and get it over with.
No spoilers for any of these, just cut for length.
Blood Diamond: I found this to be a very well-done, well-written movie on the diamond trade in Sierra Leone in the late nineties. I don't know much about that (need to research more), but I liked that the movie looked at the corrupt government and the insurgents and how both of them make life worse for the people living there, and how it looks at the availability of foreign aid, how so much of it peters out, how there's never enough to go around and everyone is tired. I also like that it looks at how consumers play into the diamond business, how global conglomerates manipulate information or look the other way and provide financing for rebels, how the arms traders and mercenaries play in as well. It's incredibly complicated, and the movie does a good job of showing this and showing how much the Western world plays into it.
I was very wary that the Leonardo DiCaprio character (Danny Archer) and the Jennifer Connelly character (Maggy Bowers) would end up eclipsing the story of the movie, which centers on Djimon Hounsou's character (Solomon Vandy). It nearly does in the middle of the movie, and it seems like once more, the white characters get to have agency and voice and complex moral dilemmas while the black characters only exist to be in sympathy-arousing situations and to further the white characters' emotional arcs. There are some scenes in particular that made me wince, where we see Solomon being silent while the other two speak about his plight, and he never gets a say in any of it. Thankfully, the movie avoids doing this and makes the story Solomon's in the very end.
Go see this; it's my favorite movie of the year.
Casino Royale: Or, in which I am mean and rain on everyone's parade again. In general, I really liked this as a Bond movie (yay no squirming naked women in the credits) and I'm excited about the new direction of the franchise.
Instead of squeeing, though, I'm going to go on about the things that really bugged me. I spent the entire first action sequence squirming in my chair. It's set in Madagascar, and there's this long sequence in which Bond chases an African man wearing a backpack, which has all sorts of bad visual connotations for me (police brutality, colonialism, etc.). Then he blows up half of an embassy. He gets slapped around by M for it, but more for the publicity aspect than anything else. The villain of the piece is also seen financing a guerilla group very briefly. Later on, there's an action sequence in which the guerilla group sends (African) hitmen after the villain and the hitmen end up being killed by Bond.
All of this made me extremely uncomfortable, particularly because it was just set-up for the casino poker scenes. None of the African groups have any sort of voice; we only see them trying to get revenge on the villain of the piece. They don't even have enough power to be the main villains; they're just the henchmen.
Furthermore, that entire opening sequence with Bond chasing the guy? It has all sorts of ugly associations, especially because Bond is an agent of MI:6. He's a British government employee, and he's down there in Africa blowing up embassies and killing African people. I know, I know, action movie blah blah, but that's why it bothers me so much. It's so casual and so quickly glossed over; the entire political struggle of a country is used as quick backstory for the villain and as a shiny action sequence. This is unthinking cultural appropriation that doesn't bother to examine the history of Britain as an empire and as a colonialist nation and really doesn't seem to care. And please don't tell me it's just a (insert noun here); how many more people will watch this and not watch Blood Diamond? Say what you will about it, the fact still remains that the Bond franchise has immense cultural power.
I was trying to think of ways to use the Bond franchise to play with some of these things throughout the movie, because this team doing Bond is obviously interested in playing with the franchise. I want a person-of-color Bond. I want POC M and R and all the other recurring characters. We've had Halle Berry and Michelle Yeoh before as POC Bond girls, but how about going a little further and making a larger commitment?
I mean, I was happy that while I was thinking this, they made Felix (the CIA agent, recurring character) black, but as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sophia_helix pointed out, he's incompetent at poker and ends up giving his money to Bond. Also, I want a female Bond someday, or a movie with M's backstory. And you know, they could have grounded a conflict in African politics without making it fluff, but they chose not to. Or they just didn't think about it. I'm not sure which is worse.
The Painted Veil trailer: I haven't seen this movie at all, so this is all taken from the trailer and the Roeper and A.O. Scott review on the Ebert and Roeper TV show.
Once again, we get a movie set in China, and guess what? It's about ex-pat Britons and their emotional struggles, and the Chinese village suffering from cholera really only seems to be there as a gloriously scenic backdrop so that Naomi Watts and Edward Norton can angst beautifully in front of the camera and demonstrate their saintliness by helping all those poor uneducated Chinese peasants. This is, of course, taken from a book by M. Somerset Maugham, a white writer.
I think there was an indie movie last year about white expats in Shanghai and their emotional traumas (The White Countess), the emotional traumas of white vampires while there's this little thing called the Boxer Rebellion going on ("Darla" and "Fool For Love" from Buffy and Angel), and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. On the one hand, there is the counterbalance of movies like Crouching Tiger and Zhang Yimou's films, which are probably seen more than these indie pictures (not sure). But still. It's not just using other countries giant rebellions and political problems as a backdrop, since that happens all the time and I would be tempted to do that.
It's doing that while seeming to forget that hey, these white characters you're focusing on? They are part of the same nation that's colonizing in the period you're setting your movie in, did you maybe think about that? Because I do, and quite frankly, when the majority of movies set in "exotic" locales are on the expat colonizers, I really have a problem with that.
I was going to write separate posts on Blood Diamond and Casino Royale and cultural appropriation and post-colonialism and race, but looking at my current record, I may as well just do short blurbs and get it over with.
No spoilers for any of these, just cut for length.
Blood Diamond: I found this to be a very well-done, well-written movie on the diamond trade in Sierra Leone in the late nineties. I don't know much about that (need to research more), but I liked that the movie looked at the corrupt government and the insurgents and how both of them make life worse for the people living there, and how it looks at the availability of foreign aid, how so much of it peters out, how there's never enough to go around and everyone is tired. I also like that it looks at how consumers play into the diamond business, how global conglomerates manipulate information or look the other way and provide financing for rebels, how the arms traders and mercenaries play in as well. It's incredibly complicated, and the movie does a good job of showing this and showing how much the Western world plays into it.
I was very wary that the Leonardo DiCaprio character (Danny Archer) and the Jennifer Connelly character (Maggy Bowers) would end up eclipsing the story of the movie, which centers on Djimon Hounsou's character (Solomon Vandy). It nearly does in the middle of the movie, and it seems like once more, the white characters get to have agency and voice and complex moral dilemmas while the black characters only exist to be in sympathy-arousing situations and to further the white characters' emotional arcs. There are some scenes in particular that made me wince, where we see Solomon being silent while the other two speak about his plight, and he never gets a say in any of it. Thankfully, the movie avoids doing this and makes the story Solomon's in the very end.
Go see this; it's my favorite movie of the year.
Casino Royale: Or, in which I am mean and rain on everyone's parade again. In general, I really liked this as a Bond movie (yay no squirming naked women in the credits) and I'm excited about the new direction of the franchise.
Instead of squeeing, though, I'm going to go on about the things that really bugged me. I spent the entire first action sequence squirming in my chair. It's set in Madagascar, and there's this long sequence in which Bond chases an African man wearing a backpack, which has all sorts of bad visual connotations for me (police brutality, colonialism, etc.). Then he blows up half of an embassy. He gets slapped around by M for it, but more for the publicity aspect than anything else. The villain of the piece is also seen financing a guerilla group very briefly. Later on, there's an action sequence in which the guerilla group sends (African) hitmen after the villain and the hitmen end up being killed by Bond.
All of this made me extremely uncomfortable, particularly because it was just set-up for the casino poker scenes. None of the African groups have any sort of voice; we only see them trying to get revenge on the villain of the piece. They don't even have enough power to be the main villains; they're just the henchmen.
Furthermore, that entire opening sequence with Bond chasing the guy? It has all sorts of ugly associations, especially because Bond is an agent of MI:6. He's a British government employee, and he's down there in Africa blowing up embassies and killing African people. I know, I know, action movie blah blah, but that's why it bothers me so much. It's so casual and so quickly glossed over; the entire political struggle of a country is used as quick backstory for the villain and as a shiny action sequence. This is unthinking cultural appropriation that doesn't bother to examine the history of Britain as an empire and as a colonialist nation and really doesn't seem to care. And please don't tell me it's just a (insert noun here); how many more people will watch this and not watch Blood Diamond? Say what you will about it, the fact still remains that the Bond franchise has immense cultural power.
I was trying to think of ways to use the Bond franchise to play with some of these things throughout the movie, because this team doing Bond is obviously interested in playing with the franchise. I want a person-of-color Bond. I want POC M and R and all the other recurring characters. We've had Halle Berry and Michelle Yeoh before as POC Bond girls, but how about going a little further and making a larger commitment?
I mean, I was happy that while I was thinking this, they made Felix (the CIA agent, recurring character) black, but as
sophia_helix pointed out, he's incompetent at poker and ends up giving his money to Bond. Also, I want a female Bond someday, or a movie with M's backstory. And you know, they could have grounded a conflict in African politics without making it fluff, but they chose not to. Or they just didn't think about it. I'm not sure which is worse. The Painted Veil trailer: I haven't seen this movie at all, so this is all taken from the trailer and the Roeper and A.O. Scott review on the Ebert and Roeper TV show.
Once again, we get a movie set in China, and guess what? It's about ex-pat Britons and their emotional struggles, and the Chinese village suffering from cholera really only seems to be there as a gloriously scenic backdrop so that Naomi Watts and Edward Norton can angst beautifully in front of the camera and demonstrate their saintliness by helping all those poor uneducated Chinese peasants. This is, of course, taken from a book by M. Somerset Maugham, a white writer.
I think there was an indie movie last year about white expats in Shanghai and their emotional traumas (The White Countess), the emotional traumas of white vampires while there's this little thing called the Boxer Rebellion going on ("Darla" and "Fool For Love" from Buffy and Angel), and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. On the one hand, there is the counterbalance of movies like Crouching Tiger and Zhang Yimou's films, which are probably seen more than these indie pictures (not sure). But still. It's not just using other countries giant rebellions and political problems as a backdrop, since that happens all the time and I would be tempted to do that.
It's doing that while seeming to forget that hey, these white characters you're focusing on? They are part of the same nation that's colonizing in the period you're setting your movie in, did you maybe think about that? Because I do, and quite frankly, when the majority of movies set in "exotic" locales are on the expat colonizers, I really have a problem with that.