We have a half-black guy running for president now, is the excuse

[trinityvixen]

Or do we even need excuses any more?

Blackface has a hideous, hideous history. I won't deny that. And "comedies" like The Love Guru and You Don't Mess With The Zohan definitely are falling prey to the stupidity of white people who think pretending not to be white makes them somehow exotic. That's exactly how they're billed in their trailers--the race thing isn't even addressed which means that the film isn't adressing it.

The other example, Tropic Thunder takes the opposite track and has, in every trailer I've seen, addressed the fact that Robert Downey Jr. is playing a white guy playing a black guy. What to make of that? I can't see as it's the same thing as "blackface" as was, though my defensiveness is probably due to a) the trailer being fucking funny (unlike anything I've seen from Zohan or Guru), and b) Robert Downey Jr. could probably sell me a bridge to Brooklyn.

From what I understood, the point of this use of blackface is not to mock, deride, or relegate black men to side roles or to lampoon them with clownish, racist stereotypes but to mock and make clowns of white people who think they can "relate" to black people as though they were a homogenous group of reparations-seeking, hostile aliens. The focus is definitely on making the white guy look ridiculous for assuming he could be black with just makeup and effort.

But the article raises a good point: this is being explored in a comedy where said white guy is going to be the butt of jokes, but no real point is being made about the history of racism in blackface. And the fact that the character will be lampooned is an excuse to have this character, not a reason. Hrm.

Comments

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

I had a theatre teacher tell us once that it wasn't even legal to do blackface (just as part of a general theatre lesson, not that anyone wanted to do it). He may have been mistaken, of course. The odd thing to me is just how many people make a living of playing up to inaccurate stereotypes. Mike Myers is a classic example. So much of what he does is based on stereotyping. I don't mean to sound like a stick in the mud, but some things are just going too far.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Mike Myers is welcome to poke fun at things of which he has some experience. He pokes fun at Canadians and Scotsmen (he's both), and we laugh. He dresses up like a 1930s maharajah--or the isolated American idea of one--in 2008 and we're going to have issues. I don't disagree with you at all. And yes, there are definitely things that, while I don't advocate them not being made (or censoring them), I just find do go too far.

Take, for example, Adam Sandler playing a mildly retarded boy in The Waterboy. I've never seen anything half as offensive. (That one about Johnny Knoxville pretending to be retarded to win the Special Olympics...yeah, I just won't touch that one.) Because what is it? It's an opportunity to laugh at someone with a challenged development. Sandler squeals like a pig and throws his large body around, confirming stereotypical portrayals of the mentally handicapped as violent, noisy children, when, in fact, were it not for our prejudices as able-bodied people, we wouldn't assume that someone with learning disabilities is forever arrested in adolescence. Surely, Sandler has shown himself to be a lot more immature than many a child (let alone a grown person) with a learning disability.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I can tell you quite straightforwardly that it is perfectly legal to do blackface--the 1st amendment protects your right to expressive conduct. In Canada, it might be a different story.

As for the three movies, none is poking fun at a traditionally protected ethnicity. Tropic Thunder appears to be making fun of actors (it's Galaxy Quest meets Indiana Jones, from how the trailer looks), and The Love Guru flat out says that Mike Myers's character is playing a white guy who went to India as a kid and became a guru. Making fun of religion, perhaps, but it's fairly clear from the trailer that Myers isn't trying to play any ethnicity other than white. And yeah, Sandler is making fun of Israelis, but he's Jewish and everyone hates Israelis, so it's OK. Rob Schneider making fun of Arabs is less OK, but then Rob Schneider acting is a crime against the art in the first place.

That being said, I have less of a problem with stupidly inaccurate comedies than with stupidly inaccurate dramas (for example, Munich, which attempted a moral equivalence between terrorists who killed civilian athletes at the Olympics and special forces who killed the terrorists.)

On the plus side, none of these movies are going to be major successes with the possible exception of Tropic Thunder.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I have already conceded that perhaps, maybe, The Love Guru will poke more fun at the stupid white people who think they can co-opt a millenia-old system of values and become more important than they are. Fine.

But I don't see that the Adam Sandler comedy is poking fun of both sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Adam Sandler is very obviously the hero. He's practically a superhero. (Or Mossad agent, whatever, they're the same thing, right!?)

he's Jewish and everyone hates Israelis, so it's OK
Um, is this supposed to be a joke or is this subconscious slippage because you know I'm a liberal, and therefore I MUST be anti-Israel? Because dude, seriously, painting with a wide brush, much? No, "every"one does not hate Israelis. Right now, "every"one hates Muslims to the point that they're willing not to vote for Obama because they think he is one! In fact, our country, on both sides of the political aisle, is pro-Israel because, well, because we've never not been and probably won't ever not be. Individual moviegoers, moreoever, after seven years of war with various Muslim groups (who are, in the popular, incorrect vernacular, all Arabs), aren't EVER NOT going to see the Israeli as the good guy when the 'Arab' is his foil.

Especially not when it's Rob Schneider. (kill me now)

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was a joke. The more serious version is, "Israelis are considered to be white, so it's OK to make fun of them."

The article does have one real point--if we want to blame someone, blame the people who thought that "Borat" was good. The Borat sketches on TV were generally good; they were poking fun at Americans who went along with Cohen's anti-semitic character. In the movie, it just became a 2 hour Polish joke, substituting Kazakh for Polish because there's enough of a Polish population to take offense.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I just...it's easy to get defensive about this subject. Which is why making an Adam Sandler movie around it is just the penultimate bad idea. (Rob Schneider making it on his own would have been the worst idea ever.)

I never saw Borat. I never saw half of Sacha Baron Cohen's stuff. Less. I heard some interviews with him, and he sounds erudite and wicked smart, but his Borat character never, ever appealed to me. His gay German reporter was actually a better means of exposing the ignorance and prejudices in people because he made an effort to be repellent instead of bumbling. People got more angry upfront with him as a result, and it's almost always okay to mock an angry person versus one who is trying, perhaps failing, just to help someone weird out. You know?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started about Zohan. Jesus christ. Why does Hollywood think it's okay for an American to put on a bad fake accent for comic effect? At least in the Love Guru, Myers is playing a white American who has gone to India, not an Indian. Not that I'll be seeing either of these movies anyway.

The concept of using blackface as an ironic commentary on white stupidity and racism is kind of interesting, though. Even Monty Python used black face, and that wasn't all that long ago.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

What's worst about Zohan, and it's been played down in the trailers (no surprise there) is that Rob Schneider will be playing the Arab foil to Sandler's Israeli hero. That's so fantastically racist and stupid and needlessly provoking, I can't even form coherent screams of rage over it. That's right. The hero is a heroic Israeli special ops guy, and the dirty "Arabs" hope to kill him for some personal glory. Faaaabulous.

Myers' comedy is just not funny. The trailers for The Love Guru have been exquisitely painful. They also riff off of a culture that has, for many centuries, taken spiritual enlightenment very, very seriously. Because they're not Jewish or Christian, it's okay to rape that devotion to spirituality for the sake of "comedy." Because Myers' character doesn't get from nowhere. Ugh, he gets it from Ben Kingsley, who is actually part Indian...(WHY!?)

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Myers is actually a GENIUS and it will be mocked as much as whiteness-aping-other-cultures-for-exoticism will be in Tropic Thunder. Which, I do have to take from the previews, is the point of Robert Downey Jr.'s character being black for the movie-in-the-movie. (One trailer had a confrontation between RDJ and a black actor who was more than a little peeved about a white guy pretending to be black getting more attention than the actual black guy. Fair point, I'd say.) Again, we have to wait for the movie to come out to see how successful the satire is. If it's too subtle, it will be uncomfortably racist. If it's too over the top, it may miss the target of skewering white patronizing.

And when did Monty Python use blackface? And to what end?

[avram]

How close does an actor have to be to the character before it's no longer "racist"? Was it OK for Australian Cate Blanchett to play a Ukranian in the recent Indiana Jones movie, or a German Jew in The Good German?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I think, in this case, Roy Schieder as Arab is ludicrous. Not to mention playing out the Arab-Israeli conflict as a flat two-dimensional good vs. evil situation for laughs. Yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say this is too far. But it's a good point, given who fluid Hollywood is of casting actors of one ethnicity as characters of another.

[avram]

I think casting Schneider as an arab might be politically dubious, but I don't really draw a racial distinction between Arabs and Hebraic Jews.

Though the thing about the trailer that bugged me the most was the scene where Sandler is handed a wig, and throws it to the ground and stabs it as if it were a wild animal. Because apparently Israel is some backwards nation where nobody will have heard of wigs.

(On the other hand, there's a commercial for the movie that consists mostly of the Israeli characters saying "nonononononono", which cracks me up a little each time, because it's dead on.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The problem is casting one religious person as the enemy. It's always been problematic when the protagonist was white, but to specifically make the hero Israeli is not even subtly choosing sides.

As to how "accurate" this movie is vis a vis Israelis, I would like to remind you that it's casting Rob Schneider as an Arab. It's pretty much forfeited any claim to accuracy.

[avram]

Hell, it's portraying a Mossad agent as a kind of superhero who can pluck bullets out of the air. I find that kind of absurd worship of Israeli military competence as problematic as the portrayal of the Arab characters as terrorists.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

...that's basically what I said. It's picking sides and coming down firmly pro-Israel, both by making the hero ridiculously AWESOME OMG (note: sarcasm) and the bad guy a boob-ish, D-list actor.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

...this is America (and post-9/11 even!). As far as any of our public discourse is concerned, the Arab-Israeli conflict is a flat two-dimensional good vs. evil situation.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's more problematic in cases where the discrimination is more intense or has a longer, more violent history. There isn't such a huge faction of anti-Ukrainian Australians that Cate Blanchett is going to create half the stir of anyone in blackface.

Not to say that it's not problematic at all, just that it doesn't have the push-button reaction nor the legacy of artistic abuse. Blackface is insult to injury where white/black racism is concerned because it not only perpetuated the racism, it exacerbated it and encouraged audiences to laugh at it. Once racism becomes a joke, it's harder to combat seriously.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

I'm never going to understand your calls for the confrontation of serious issues in comedy films. OF COURSE THE FILM ISN'T ADDRESSING THE ISSUE OF RACE!! IT'S A DAMN COMEDY MOVIE, AND AN EXCEPTIONALLY RETARDED ONE AT THAT!! The only way The Love Guru or Zohan could look any WORSE than they do would be if they tried to treat ANYTHING seriously. Come on, dumbassery combined with a moral lesson? We're not making very-special-episodes of 80s sitcoms here.

That said, I think this sort of humor is generally beneficial. I tend to find it funny because, as someone who isn't racist, I find it absurdist. Playing them up to the degree they do in comedies is downright Pythonesque to me. And the more people laugh at the very notion, the less seriously anyone can take it. Soon they'll start seeing it as absurd, too. That's just as good as (in some ways better than) eliminating it altogether.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The only problem with humor is that you cannot attack the little guy and win audience sympathy. This is a fine line to walk in comedy especially satire, which Tropic Thunder, at least, seems to be setting up Robert Downey Jr.'s role to be (even if the rest of the film is not). There is a difference at creating the goofy character who is us and laughing at him than making a mockery of some other group of which we are not a part and laughing at it. That's why blackface, traditionally, was so horrid.

My only concern is that this is what these movies represent--a new way to laugh at people who aren't white. We're being given tacit permission to do it with the pass on the behavior because we know that, really, they are white. That's what the article and I meant by "excuse"--you are excused and allowed to laugh for that reason and you never check yourself to go "Wait, I'm laughing at a minority group that has been oppressed and held in the underclass (black people)/has been engaged in a vicious, vindictive war (Israeli/Palestinian people)/have different but no less valid spiritual beliefs."

I'm not saying the movie needs to address this. It's free to have as little social conscience as it likes. But I'm free to wonder about how little social conscience must operate in the heads of the creators and the people who go see it and laugh and think that it is harmless. Because it's really, really not if all it is is laughing at the brown people.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Laughing at people who aren't white, laughing at people who are white, laughing at women, laughing at men, laughing at gays, laughing at straights, laughing at nerds, laughing at jocks...it's all the same. If you don't actually believe these stereotypes, you needn't check yourself before laughing at this humor. You're probably someone who finds it funny exactly because you recognize just how ridiculous these depictions are. They're not charicatures of the people of a race, they're charicatures of the stereotypes of those people. So it's not the people you're mocking, it's the ass-backwards ideas about those people.

Where we agree is that they should stop making excuses. They should come out and say, "Yeah, that's the movie we're making. Do you have a problem with a movie that shows these stereotypes to be LITERALLY laughable?"

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Laughing at the person who thinks the stereotype is real is one thing. That's why Tropic Thunder seems to be skating despite it's literally employing blackface whereas something Like Zohan gives me pause. Because I've not seen anything to suggest that this is white guys taking the piss out of white guys.

You're right that I think people need to stop pretending they're not being offensive. Being offensive is, as Lenny Bruce would tell you, often really fucking funny. I just think when you are treading on some serious ground and using it for comedy you better work your goddamned ass off to make it funny or else just accept your limitations and ensuckitude mean that you're not skewering stereotypes so much as living them down.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Critics have said that Zohan is actually surprisingly aware of race issues and that whether you liked it or not its handling of those elements is actually quite deft and subversive. A.O. Scott's review is a good example. A major note to make is that Rob Schneider's "villain", I believe, ends up teaming up with Sandler near the end of the movie in the name of stopping an assassin played by John Turturro, and that Sandler's character is also interested in a Palestinian woman.

The Love Guru just looks like warmed over Austin Powers. I don't think I can be offended by it other than that Mike Myers should sue himself for plagiarism.

Also, the Special Olympics was extremely supportive of Knoxville's movie The Ringer. It had their official seal of approval and they let them use the logo and their grounds and all sorts of stuff. So again, take that as you will.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I am making the logical fallacy that I myself hate, and I should fess up to that: I've not seen Zohan, so I can't cast aspersions. My comments are strictly related to the trailer, which, if the movie is more fair and balanced, you'd think they'd have cut to reflect that. Feh.

The Love Guru is just not funny. I was in a theater where that and the trailer for Zohan played. Zohan got some genuine laughs. Everything for Guru sounded forced. (I just rolled my eyes and prayed for the Indiana Jones trailer. And look how that turned out...)

I didn't know that about Knoxville's movie. Again, I'm being bad and pairing what I know of the guy's other work to what his film was billeted as. I'm not about to rent it, but I'll reserve judgment from here on out about it. Cheers.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Everyone in the entire universe is tricked into becoming a hypocrite on the "don't knock it 'till you see it" issue at least once. This is a law of life.

And I guess the ending is even more ridiculous. They don't fight John Turturro's Phantom, they fight Michael Buffer. Yeah, "let's get ready to rumble" Michael Buffer.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Great, I'm glad you told me that so now I can really not care. Because I really, really don't. Whether he meant it to be a comedy with a purpose or not, Adam Sandler is in an Adam Sandler movie, and nothing will elevate it above that unless it's a movie that he's in that is not "an Adam Sandler" movie. (Though, come to think of it, I never liked Punch-Drunk Love even if he was tolerable in it.)

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Oh, and while again I agree that The Love Guru looks awful, the line "I had a hat like that once. Then my mom got a job" will always be funny to me.