One. How does Hirsh Sawhney support his claim that the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire is guilty of peddling “poverty porn”?
The film over-simplifies the cultural shifts in India, avoiding nuance and instead embracing clichés, trite images of bleak poverty that “titillate foreign audiences.”
The slum actors were underpaid and therefore exploited.
Boyle, the movie’s director, “grossly oversimplifies poverty and our relationship with it.” He scapegoats thugs and low-lifes for poor people’s misery but in fact the culprits are “corrupt government officials, gargantuan multinational corporations, and suspect IMF structural adjustment programs.”
By ignoring the real culprits, American and British audiences can delight in the “poverty porn” while feeling innocent: “As a result, his movie does allow us to believe that we have been responsible global citizens by engaging with the intensity of third world slums.”
There is also this condescending message that “the West is the solution to India’s problems.”
Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die” (407)
One. What is the implicit condescension of the wise black person, as mentor, in American film?
Why isn’t the black person the “leading man,” the primary hero? I mean, if the black person is so wise, as he is portrayed in the film, then why doesn’t he take center stage?
It almost seems as if the wise black people who populate American films were put on Earth to serve the white heroes who take all the glory.
Spike Lee, African American director, has coined this wise assistant “The Magical Negro.” He is a “saintly African American . . . who acts as a mentor to the questing white hero,” who seems to be disconnected from the community that he adores so much . . .”
Lee uses the obsolete and offensive “Negro” term to refer to a time in American history when the word meant a black man who was still subservient to whites. More specifically, Spike Lee is referring to a relationship between a “master and a servant.”
Another implicit condescending and racist part of this relationship is that the wise black person never uses his special powers to help himself, to help raise himself up. It’s as if he lives to give all his wisdom, strength and energy to the white hero man.
American cinema and literature has obsessed over this motif for over a hundred years. For example, Stephen King’s fiction is a “factory” of black wise men.
Two. What is the danger of applying to motif to President Obama?
The President, on an implicit level, is not a leader but a subordinate who uses his “wisdom” to appease the dominant power structure.
Applying this motif to the President is a way of undermining his authority in a passive-aggressive, dishonest fashion.
We have to see the above in the context that when Obama beat Romney, the challenger Romney, who lost, still had a higher percentage of the white vote than did Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. So there is still a racial divide in this country; the difference is that America isn’t as white as it was during Reagan’s reign.
Three. What other psychological motivation is there behind white people’s longing for the black wise man myth?
Whites feel guilt because they know that on many levels people of color have a bad deal. Some black commentators, for example, commenting on the innocent young, unarmed man, shot in Ferguson, Missouri, said that black people live in a “terror-dome.” This dome of terror, especially, exists in the world police arrests and incarceration. Blacks and whites commit same level of drug crimes but for those same crimes there is a radio of 10:1 greater blacks than whites in prison. Today there are more black men in prison than there were black slaves at the height of slavery.
Therefore, the happy-go-lucky wise black person is a comforting, albeit racist myth, for a lot of black people.
Mitu Sengupta, “Race Relations Light Years from Earth” (412)
One. What is the basis of the author’s claim that Avatar is a racist film?
The movie has coded race types that fuel a “white guilt fantasy.” The dominant men who rule the culture and are responsible for ruining the culture are white men. On one hand, they are guilty of being destructive; on the other, they are the “ones in charge.”
The blue people are “people of color” who have been colonized by the whites.
Stereotypes abound: White people are, in the words of David Brooks, “rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic, and that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades.”
This motif of the white man saving the colonized people of color is a common motif and is among other things patronizing, racist, clichéd, and, to use the words of the author, “reinforces pernicious stereotypes of the ethnic ‘other’ as disorderly, meek, and stupid . . .”
Two. Is there anything in the depiction of the Na’vi that mitigates the predictably racist premise?
First, unlike other “White Messiah” films, the Na’vi live in a superior world than the decaying landscapes of the malignant “Sky People.”
Second, the Na’vi need nothing of the white man: Their “pantheism, community solidarity, and oneness with nature . . . are celebrated wholeheartedly, while the American way of life . . . is condemned.”
Three. How does Jake Sully conform to the dichotomous hero described in Robert B. Ray’s “The Thematic Paradigm”?
He is both conquering and submissive; he is both a rebel and a conformer; he is both a fighter and a peacemaker; he is both a killer and a lover; he is both an imperialist and an assimilationist; he is both a teacher and a student.
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