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Notes -
“Citizen Vigilante" - some musings (omega-doxxing myself, hence the throwaway account)
I was 14 years old and bored on a Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house. We cajoled their older sibling into driving us and Shanghai’d a couple girls into a ‘date’ at the nearest movie theater.
Back in those days, one either called Mr. Moviefone for showtimes - please say the name of the movie you’d like to see, now - or just took pot luck when showing up.
And you really didn’t have to call Mr. Moviefone, because pot luck was always something great. For context, that year some of the top movies were: Spider Man 3, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, The Bourne Ultimatum, 300, I am Legend, Night at the Museum, National Treasure 2, American Gangster, Blades of Glory, Superbad, Ocean’s Thirteen, Evan Almighty, Beowulf, 3:10 to Yuma, The Kingdom, No Country for Old Men, The Heartbreak Kid, Charlie Wilson’s War, Michael Clayton, Stardust, Children of Men, Zodiac…yadda yadda, left quite a few out.
But on this particular afternoon the terrifically memorable movie we took pot luck on was some generic fantasy action thing called ‘In the Name of the King’ by director Uwe Boll. I don’t remember anything really about the movie except it starred Jason Statham and at one point my friend nudged me and said ‘this sucks, should we just leave?’. My buddy's instincts were spot on as that movie somehow lost more than $50 million back when that was a lot of money and Mr. Boll won worst director of the year.
To this day it's the only movie I ever walked out of after paying for, other than a few years later when watching the 2010 Robin Hood with Russell Crowe, but that was only because the guy working the sound system had it turned up to ‘permanent hearing damage’ levels. More to that story, but for another time.
Anyway, the point being my only previous exposure to Uwe Boll was that his product was genuinely unwatchable. Coming back to the present, you can imagine my surprise in seeing his name attached over and over in reference to the hottest new piece of media to-the-right-of Rosa Luxemburg.
‘Citizen Vigilante’ starring Armie Hammer (yeah, that guy from ‘The Social Network’ who got MeToo’d) is (roughly) about an American who goes to Europe and conducts a highly restrained and well-planned vendetta against foreign gang rapists and their institutional enablers.
The film begins with an extended sequence of a pretty-but-harried mother and her six or so year old son shopping in a typical tiny European grocery store. The boy asks for chocolates and the mother indulgently relents, but when he asks for another treat she says he’s had enough. Her son helps pack up their purchases in their reusable bag while she makes small talk with the portly-but-friendly cashier. As they're walking home, a visibly foreign man stabs her in the neck, and she bleeds out while her son tries feebly to understand what just happened.
This isn’t meant to be a summary of the movie as you can get that anywhere, and anyway it is not that complicated. This is about the cultural implications. I’m gonna make a listicle so you can pick and choose any part you’re interested in discussing:
The movie is passably watchable enough that Mr. Boll must have really learned from his many, many failures to put this together. There are too many Dutch angles, too many quick cuts, the chronology is a mess, the dialogue is wooden, the soundtrack is a crime, but altogether this is a solid 5/10. Although I’m really trying not to be ideologically biased, the acting was quite good (especially the rape victims, which is relevant if a bit morbid), a fair portion of the scenes held some real tension, the effects were up to par enough to not take you out of the story, and, there was a verisimilitude that’s sorely lacking in a lot of contemporary productions.
The topic covered is absolutely explosive, en vogue, and has some pretty undeniable aspects. Regardless of the numbers of victims or perpetrators involved, there is a culture of sexual violence common to non-European countries that’s produced some shockingly poor results. Not just upon introduction, but also with what I will laconically describe as a cheeky bit of help from above along the way.
There’s a recurring motif in the film of social media accounts actively encouraging the protagonist about his work that's been reflected in reality as some fairly mainstream voices have picked up the call. Jack Posobiec is hardly a hard-right figure and he’s been tweeting about it all day.
The movie was ‘banned’ in Germany (the director’s home country) by being denied a rating so it therefore couldn’t be released. What do the kids call the ‘Streissand Effect’ these days?
There’s a door opening here for more media like this. Sometimes righteous movements find odd champions, maybe the guy who is colloquially known as perhaps the worst director of all time just became one? If this is the only cultural response to “One Battle After Another” it’s already firmly in the ‘not bad’ category. But if it’s only the first?
Curious for your thoughts, any signal here or just noise?
It sounds like a pretty straightforward remake of Taken.
It's an interesting affirmation that everyone understands and acts on racist phenomena.
"Taken" doesn't code 'the outsiders are harming us' i.e. whites, but this movie does. So the almonds of some German bureaucrat got activated and the movie is a no go.
It's probably the most ubiquitous and interesting dynamic in western media production and no one talks about it. But the incredible dance around never having the outsider victimizing whites is the greatest commonality all modern movies share. And if that is ever a theme, it's explored in such a way as to demonstrate that whites feeling victimized and acting on those emotions are wrong in some way.
On the flipside there's no shortage of 'brown person victimized by cruel evil white folk' movies.
Everyone understands this. Everyone knows. The only difference is whether ones brain can see the patterns or if it can and chooses to ignore it because 'evil white people' codes as real on some level in ones brain.
Taken is totally about a threat to white girls by scary foreigners, though.
Maybe to an American? When I saw the movie the entire concept felt a bit far fetched and cheap.
In reality the ones 'taken' are usually young eastern European women forced into commercial rape, i.e. 'sex work'. But in the movie it's evil eastern European men taking an American girl? Not to say that there aren't a lot of evil eastern European men driving up western European crime, there are. But the movie felt like a sanitized version of that reality.
Regardless of that, calling the foreigner a foreigner or an immigrant like is done in the movie is different from actually depicting him as a foreigner. The distinction is best exemplified via depictions by Cleon Peterson.
In an American context, the traffickers are clearly 'generic foreigners'. They could be Eastern Euros, they could be middle eastern, they're from a part of the world Americans don't understand and that's what's important. They might code as brown, probably do to most Americans.
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My theory is that whites are the most prone to racism (scientific racism pioneered by whites, etc) and so they should be protected from media that triggers their racism.
Depends on what you mean by scientific racism. From my understanding of the term, White people didn't 'invent' 'modern science' because of racism, I would argue. It's because of other factors we generally associate with intelligence, industriousness, agreeableness and so forth. Scientific 'racism' is just a byproduct of that. So whilst there is some racist expression to be found in old 18th century anthropology, I'd argue most of that was also refuted by the better scientists at the time, who could make fact based observations about human population differences.
To clarify the point: Noticing that groups can differ on objective metrics free of 'group bias' is a very not racist thing to do. Even if those differences are 'racist'. Whilst ignoring or arguing against objective reality, based on 'in or outgroup bias' is a racist thing. So ironically, most people who are against 'scientific racism' are acting out a very base racist impulse, since they are not capable of parsing reality past it looking like a slight against their ingroup.
To that extent I'd argue most whites are less racist than other groups. As they are more capable of parsing reality and more capable of entertaining abstract concepts. A good example of this are mock jury trials.
“When racial issues arise in a trial, white mock jurors are on guard against the possibility of prejudicial feelings and maintain the appearance of fairness [...] Black mock jurors, on the other hand, do not demonstrate egalitarianism in any condition.”
On top of that, a lot of research into the topic drives at a similar conclusion:
The study linked above also shows highlighted that in mock jury trials, the whites are a minority in their racial fairness. At least when compared with American blacks. Who are a lot more prone to racial bias in their decision making.
Considering all of that, I'd say it's clear whites are not being protected from their own racist tendencies, a concept explored in the movie 28 Days Later but are being marginalized, otherized and attacked precisely because they are not racist. This is easily proven by simple logic. If whites were racist, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place.
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