6 Insane Stereotypes That Movies Can`t

6 Insane Stereotypes That Movies Can't
Seem to Get Over
By J.F. Sargent, October 15, 2012
We’ve talked before about how some negative stereotypes from the past are, somehow, still
showing up in today’s movies, and even in recent video games. But those are our grandfathers’
prejudices, just in a modern form, like an old man cursing at an Asian nurse with a megaphone
(that’s why we don’t visit, Grandpa). It turns out there are other, more subtle ways that Hollywood
has been enforcing wrongheaded ideas right under our noses, and sometimes in our favorite
films.
Like ...
#6. Everyone in Africa Is Uncivilized or a Warlord
In Hollywood movies, Africa is a lousy place to be. One of the most iconic scenes in action movie
history comes at the end of Independence Day, when we see that the invading army of aliens
has finally been defeated by a concerted, collaborative effort by the entire world (but mostly the
U.S., and mostly Jeff Goldblum), and we get a montage of the wreckage on different continents.
America gets a military base ...
... Australia gets some of that crazy architecture ...
... and Africa gets ... naked dudes brandishing spears?
Apparently, this barren land is the closest thing the aliens could find to a major population center
in Africa. That’s because for Hollywood, the entire continent hasn’t advanced much since Jesus
was still around. The opening to Casino Royale, for instance, introduces us to Africa with the
image of a bunch of black guys betting on a fight between a mongoose and a snake.
The one area where Africans have caught up to the rest of the world is guns: They don’t have
any modern buildings yet, but they’ve figured out how to attach a rocket launcher to the side of
a truck. This is only natural, since half the continent’s population consists of corrupt soldiers.
Congo, Black Hawk Down, Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda ... all these movies spend the whole
time telling us that Africa is scenically beautiful, but terrible in every other way.
So What’s the Deal?
In the same way that Hollywood needs to dumb down a novel to turn it into a hit film, they also
dumb down Africa’s reality, because they assume that you’d be bored by a realistic portrayal of
the continent (or you simply wouldn’t believe it). They do have things like poverty and corruption
and giraffes in Africa, but they also have universities and industries and modern cities, like
Nairobi:
Imagine if every single movie set in America was filmed in Alaska and focused on gang violence
-- that’s how Africans feel every time they watch a Hollywood movie about warlords fighting in the
desert. Which is a problem for their tourism industry: A board member for the Association for the
Promotion of Tourism to Africa even takes the time to explain that there are “middle class people
in every African country commuting to work every day, complaining about taxes and watching
their kids play soccer every weekend.” That’s right: Instead of focusing on the rich wildlife and
history, the tourism industry actually has toremind people that coming to their country isn’t a
freaking death warrant.
#5. Movie Women Can Only Talk About Men
In the ‘80s, feminist comic artist Alison Bechdel introduced a test for movies consisting of three
little rules: The films only “pass” if they have (1) at least two female characters who (2) talk to
each other at one point about (3) something other than a man.
It seems pretty simple, but here are some movies with “strong” female characters that don’t pass
it: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Dark Knight Rises, The Lord of the Rings (all three),
Pirates of the Caribbean (1, 2 and 4), Tomb Raider, Underworld and every movie on this list. Most
of them fail at the “talk to each other” part. If the test was reversed (male characters who talk
about something other than a woman), all of those movies would pass.
But most of those are genre movies, which are mainly aimed at men. What about romantic
comedies, which are usually aimed at women? Nope: When Harry Met Sally, Kate & Leopold,
Marley & Me, 50 First Dates, (500) Days of Summer ... even ones specifically made as vehicles
for female stars, like How to Lose a Man in 10 Days with Kate Hudson or Material Girls with
Hilary Duff don’t pass the test.
Obviously, the Bechdel test on its own doesn’t prove that a movie is sexist (or, for that
matter, bad), but it does show that, in general, women in movies tend to be defined by their
relationships with men, whereas men can be defined by a variety of things (their work, their
weapons, their Adam Sandlerness).
So What’s the Deal?
Turns out this isn’t a coincidence. Apparently, film schools specifically discourage screenwriters
from writing scenes where women talk about something other than men, because they believe
that this is an easy way to lose the attention of the audience fast.
It’s just one of those film industry tricks: Use a calendar to show the passage of time, show a
bomb to create tension, don’t write female characters that sound like real people. What’s more,
according to a study by the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, women made
up only 29.9 percent of the speaking roles in 2007’s top movies. As a reminder, 51 percent of all
people are women.
Again, it’s about playing it safe: Movies have been making money with male leads for decades
(with both male and female audiences), so why change it now?
In the same year, Warner Bros. CEO Jeff Robinov reportedly said that the studio wouldn’t
develop any more movies with female leads after the latest Jodie Foster and Nicole Kidman
vehicles underperformed, which doesn’t make sense -- when John Carter and Battleship
flopped, theydidn’t stop making movies with men; they stopped making movies with Taylor
Kitsch.
Now, Warner did go on to make The Women the next year, which has an all-female cast ... but
all they do is talk about men. So they do develop movies with female leads, you see, as long as
the characters themselves aren’t too developed.
#4. White People Are Better at Being Asian Than Real Asians
Last time, we used The Last Samurai as an example of how movies whitewash foreign history,
but we didn’t mention that there’s something even weirder going on in that movie: Namely, the
fact that Tom Cruise’s character is somehow better at being a samurai than the actual samurai.
Turns out the whole “white character beats Asians at their own game” thing is pretty common: In
Rising Sun, the aggressive Japanese business tactics threaten American interests until Sean
Connery learns to use their own strategies against them. If you haven’t seen it, the entire movie
can be summed up by this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4gTY-SFvzQ
In Kill Bill Vol. 1, the Bride (Uma Thurman) is better at martial arts than not just Lucy Liu, but an
entire army of yakuza warriors. They even have Lucy Liu’s character, who has spent her entire life
training and clawing her way to the top of an international crime syndicate, specifically say that the
Bride is a better samurai than her.
So What’s the Deal?
Hollywood has a big fascination with Asian mysticism, but an even bigger fascination with making
lots of money. Since it’s believed that you can’t have a hit movie without a main character who’s
white, that means transferring all the positive values of the Asian culture to Tom Cruise, Sean
Connery or Uma Thurman and relegating the Asian characters to villains or supporting roles.
Unless you’re Jackie Chan, Jet Li or, more recently, Ken Jeong.
For example, in the ‘70s, Bruce Lee was developing a TV series called The Warrior about a
kung fu master who goes around the Old West kicking ass. Ultimately, it was decided that
America wasn’t ready for a show with a main character who was Asian ... so they developed the
series anyway, but called it Kung Fu and put David Carradine in the lead, a non-Asian playing
a half-Asian martial artist. The network was fine with Bruce Lee as a masked limo driver in The
Green Hornet, but putting him in a main role? No way, that’s crazy talk.
Lee would go on to prove himself as a bankable star, but it was too late: Hollywood had
stumbled upon a magic formula that allowed them to cash in on Asian culture without taking any
risks, and they’ve been using it since.
#3. Non-Heterosexual Characters Either Die or Are Murderers
A few decades ago, it was still extremely rare to see gay or bisexual characters in movies, and
if you did, they were never acknowledged as such -- you just knew it because they all acted like
raging queens. Today, things are different, and Hollywood is more open to gay characters ... as
long as they die or are psychopaths.
Seriously: Think about all the movies where the gay character ends up dead. First there are
the obvious examples, like Milk and Boys Don’t Cry, which are based on real-life hate crimes,
so those get a pass ... but what about Brokeback Mountain, or Philadelphia, or A Single Man?
Or the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where they spent two and a half seasons setting up
one of the most healthy and complex lesbian relationships in the history of television, and then
randomly killed one of the women and made the other murderously psychotic, abruptly fulfilling
both stereotypes out of goddamn nowhere.
Then you have movies like Pulp Fiction and The Silence of the Lambs, where the only gay
characters are murderously enforcing their gayness upon the straight folks and must die. There’s
also Basic Instinct, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Jennifer’s Body, which use non-heterosexual
tendencies as an explicit signal that a character is about to get stabby. Obviously there are plenty
of movies with gay characters who aren’t violent or dead, but the fact that this is even a thing is still
troubling.
So What’s the Deal?
Simply put, killing gays is Hollywood’s way of being progressive. From the ‘80s to the early
‘90s, there was definitely a tendency to use gay characters as villains, from the gay serial killer
in Cruising to the evil lesbian vampire in The Hunger. But then in 1995, the highly influential
documentary The Celluloid Closet pointed out this problem, and its release coincided with a series
of protests about the depiction of gay people in movies like The Silence of the Lambs and JFK
(where a gay conspiracy is responsible for killing Kennedy).
Hollywood caved to the pressure and began including more non-psychotic gay characters, but only
in supporting roles -- author Brent Hartinger argues that today, non-heterosexual characters are
more likely to die simply because they are rarely the protagonist. Harting even points out that within
a period of a few weeks in 2010, the shows Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Big Love, Law & Order:
SVU and NCIS: Los Angeles all killed off minor characters who happened to be gay.
If a movie or show has to kill someone, obviously they’ll go for the least important person, i.e.,
Willow’s girlfriend in Buffy. So, in that sense, gay is the new black.
#2. Anything (Including Death) Is Better Than Being Disabled
In movie universes, there’s two ways to get disabled: Either you get a sweet superpower out
of it, like Daredevil, or it makes you absolutely miserable for the rest of your life. One of the
most infamous examples is Million Dollar Baby, which ends with (spoilers) the protagonist
becoming a quadriplegic and Clint Eastwood euthanizing her because, you know, what’s the
point of living like that? Never mind the fact that millions of people do just that every day.
But this also manifests in subtler ways: Take the character of John Locke in Lost, a paraplegic
who would rather stay on a remote island filled with smoke monsters, displaced fauna and
all sorts of crazy stuff because he can walk there, which many actual paraplegics found
offensive. Something similar happens in Avatar, where the paraplegic protagonist leaves his
entire life behind and travels across the universe to get a shot at walking again in the body of
a blue alien. There may be other reasons why he made that decision, but they don’t really tell
us because “he can’t walk” is enough.
Lots of times, the disability exists as something for the characters to overcome and show that
they’ve changed: In The Goonies, when Mikey throws away his inhaler, we’re supposed to
understand that he’s a stronger person for not needing it. What it’s really showing is that Mikey
is going to end up in the hospital if he doesn’t get a replacement soon, because asthma is a
goddamn medical condition. The people still using their inhalers aren’t doing it because they’re
not brave enough to have their Mikey moment.
So What’s the Deal?
Showing someone using sheer willpower to overcome something is a great character arc, and
Hollywood applies that to everything, from learning kung fu despite being an overweight panda
to “beating” a real-world disability. The problem is, this arc has some tragic implications for the
real-world people who come out with the message that they are “too weak” to overcome their
disabilities.
The result is that moviegoers think that disabilities are way worse than they actually are, and
filmmakers have to cater to that: For example, while filming an episode of Dollhouse where Eliza
Dushku was blind, the producers brought in an actual blind woman to show the actress how to
move and get around, but the result was that “she didn’t look blind,” and they had to make her act
clumsier so the audience would buy it.
Even in Avatar, real paraplegics thought that Sam Worthington’s character was making way too
much effort transferring from his chair, but that’s the way we’re used to seeing it in movies. It’s a
vicious cycle, and it isn’t going to stop until either Hollywood wises up or people with disabilities
stop living happy, fulfilling lives.
#1. In Fantasy Movies, Everyone Has to Be White
You’ve probably noticed this before, but there are no black characters in The Lord of the
Rings. The only black actors involved in the movies are covered under 3-and-a-half inches of
makeup.
But, you know, those movies are based on books written in the ‘40s ... so how about
something a little more recent, like Game of Thrones? Well ...
The only non-white characters that have shown up so far are the Dothraki (who in the show
at least are more like mocha) and a couple of shady foreigners who come to the land of rich
white folks to take their women and their throne.
Then you have The Chronicles of Narnia, where the only black character is a monster. The
Harry Potter movies, on the other hand, do have black characters, like that one kid who
announces the Quidditch matches, and, you know ... that other kid ...
So What’s the Deal?
It’s all Tolkien’s fault, basically. Most fantasy is still pretty heavily based on the stuff Tolkien
came up with, and even though he was pretty vehemently anti-racist in his life, he’s still a
product of his era: Because of him, when we think “fantasy,” we think “white people with British
accents dealing with savages and fighting monsters.”
A good example of Tolkien’s influence is the fact that the characters in Game of Thrones speak
in British accents ... even though George R. R. Martin is from New Jersey.
This problem is a lot more noticeable in the adaptations than the books themselves because
in TV and films, everything has to be standardized -- just like there’s a special type of lighting
that screams “THIS IS A SOAP OPERA,” fantasy shows need to follow a certain aesthetic, and
part of it involves “everyone is white.” The Thrones books do have non-white characters, but
so far they’ve been almost entirely written out of the show. On the other hand, the two shady
black guys we mentioned before are white in the books ... and coincidentally, they have a much
bigger role there.
And then there’s the opposite scenario: Here’s Harry Potter’s classmate Lavender Brown as
shown in the first five movies ...
... and here she is in the sixth movie, where
she gets a bigger role and hooks up with
Harry’s friend Ron. Notice any differences?
Now, in the early movies she was just a background character with no lines, so there’s a
chance that the producers didn’t even notice that her role had been cast before. Also, her race
isn’t described in the books. However, isn’t it a little telling that when she was a minor character
they said “Sure, let’s make her black,” but when she became important they automatically
assumed that she was white?
Again, that’s because this is the default mode for a fantasy movie: White people with British
accents, fighting monsters.