Saturday, January 20, 2007
Idiots and Mexicans
Whenever I hear racist stuff in movies I always wonder how the audience would have reacted and whether the same stuff could be said in quite the same way today. In "True Grit," there were comments/portrayals regarding Chinese men and American Indians. In LPS, the town whore makes a disparaging comment about "idiots and Mexicans" and Duane makes the comment that his "next piece of ass will be yellow." And no one in the world of the film bats an eye, because that's just how things were ... but the movie came out in the early 1970s, when there was a lot of race consciousness and the Vietnam War was going on. Do you think the audience winced a little then? I'm sure much worse things were being said in small-town Texas at the time, if Bogdanovich was going for verisimilitude.
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3 comments:
Oh yeah, and let's not forget the way the Shiite terrorists were portrayed in "Women on the Verge." I'm sure that really resonated in Spain!
Those goosebump-delivering terroristas!
Now I'm trying to think of "period piece" films made anytime lately that use racial stereotypes of the era when the movie wasn't focused on the race issue itself. Perhaps filmmakers work around it, instead, to avoid controversy.
Cl, I bet many do. If the racial attitudes are not part of the subject, they probably try to leave them out.
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