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Content advisory: untagged spoilers for like a dozen movies below!
The other day I watched A Man Called Otto, Tom Hanks' 2022 remake of a Swedish movie (En man som heter Ove, based on a book of the same name) about an elderly man whose suicide attempt is interrupted by an Iranian immigrant, who gradually teaches him to live again. The Hanks edition hits a variety of CW notes; the Iranian is replaced with a Hispanic woman, the Swedish ending depicting Ove's reunion with his deceased wife in the afterlife is gone, and a homosexual character is replaced with a trans character (hashtag-gay-erasure). But there is one CW note in particular that really stood out to me. At the end of the movie, Otto dies and leaves his house and his car to the Hispanic woman, as well as enough money to fund the education of her three Hispanic children.
Maybe this would not have stood out to me had I not coincidentally recently re-watched the 2013's middling dystopic sci-fi, Elysium. If you've not seen this one, it is a story about an unusually talented blue collar laborer played by Matt Damon, presumably because everyone liked him as an unusually talented blue collar laborer in Stillwater, Good Will Hunting, and, uh, that artist guy in Titanic maybe? (Kidding!) Anyway this time blue-collared Matt lives in a Los Angeles peopled entirely by Mexicans (except for him), who spend most of their time trying to cross the border of space (illegally) so they can get high-tech medical treatment aboard the space station where all the billionaires moved when Earth got too crowded or warm or, who knows. For unimportant reasons, Matt finds that he's dying, so he goes to his
coyoteuhhuman traffickerspaceship launching ex (crime) boss to... Jesus Christ, who wrote this movie? Anyway, the moral of the story is that Matt gives his life to save the life of a young Hispanic girl while also making everyone on Earth a "citizen" so that suddenly the boundless healthcare resources the billionaires have been hoarding for no reason at all can be immediately deployed to cure all illness on Earth, the end.So this got me thinking about other movies I've seen with the same central beat: selfish single white male with nothing to lose learns to care again by temporarily filling the role of mentor or savior to a not-white young person, then gives (often, loses) everything so the not-white youngster can inherit a brighter future. Gran Torino (2008). Snowpiercer (2013).
But while many lists of "problematic white savior" movies include these titles, I feel like there's a distinction to be drawn where the not-white character is treated as a successor, rather than as a success. In Finding Forrester (2000), there's a not-white successor, but the "white savior" doesn't especially give anything up. In The Blind Side (2009) the "white savior" isn't looking for a successor (despite the professed concerns of the NCAA).
And I don't think that it's quite the same phenomenon as "expendable man dies for the woman he loves." Never mind that I already mentioned Titanic (1997)--the Bond movie No Time To Die (2021) might be what I'm talking about if Bond had died to save Nomi instead of Madeleine, but (to the best of my recollection!) he did not. I suppose Luke Skywalker biting it to preserve Palpatine's bloodline might be an example of what I'm talking about--definitely would if Rey was not-white, and definitely would if the sequels had focused more on Finn becoming a Jedi.
So I feel like I've identified four clear examples of the trope I'm spotting (to review: A Man Called Otto, Elysium, Gran Torino, Snowpiercer). I know better than to expect TVTropes to have a "non-straight-white-hypercapable-male successor" trope, but I did look around and do not think that Changing of the Guard, Take Up My Sword, Taking Up the Mantle, White Man's Burden, or similar tropes quite apply. Likewise, many people will identify the trope I have in mind as a (correspondingly problematic) "white savior" story, except that most "white savior" stories aren't BIPOC successor stories. Rather, this is taking the expendability of men--long a cultural staple in the West--and mixing it up with a not-even-remotely-subtle hint at White Replacement.
I think the reason I even noticed the pattern is that I have a long fascination with Rudyard Kipling's infamous poem, "The White Man's Burden." Specifically, the people I know who regard the poem as highly racist almost always also talk a great deal about "privilege," without ever seeming to notice the noblesse oblige implied by the idea of checking that privilege. There seems to be a deeply unresolved contradiction in "woke" spaces, whereby whites are simultaneously obligated to elevate others, and forbidden from even imagining they have the capacity to do so. In the trope I'm trying to track, the acceptable excuse seems to be that the (grizzled, lonely, etc.) white man gets something from the successor, namely a "new lease on life," such that he can then return the favor by then literally dying and dedicating his entire legacy to assure the future of someone else's children, children who are not even his co-ethnics.
(TVTropes does have a Cuckold page, but this is also not quite what I'm talking about... I think!)
So here are your discussion questions for the day:
Is there a name for this trope already? Have I missed a TVTropes pages somewhere? A RibbonFarm article? An obscure media studies dissertation?
I can't watch every movie, or even remember all the movies I've watched. Can you think of any other movies/TV shows/other media to add to the four I've identified?
I also can't think of any inverted examples. Can you think of any media in which the trope is inverted? How often do hypercompetent heroes "of color" learn to love whites and then give up their lives to ensure that several white children can afford to go to college? (Does the Wizard from Shazam! count, maybe, kinda?)
Perhaps most importantly... is there any possibility at all that the phenomenon isn't blatantly deliberate agenda-pushing?
Naturally, you are not limited to these questions--this is a discussion board, not a MOOC. But I've managed to stump myself so I'm interested in what you all make of this.
I highly doubt Clint Eastwood was trying to hint at white replacement in Gran Turino. By reducing everything to white and not-white, I think you're missing some nuance in terms of dying urban white ethnic communities, romanticism for the glory days of blue collar Midwestern America, what the real meaning of American values is, etc etc.
It's honestly a very conservative movie and there's plenty in it that doesn't just skirt boundaries today, but outright leaps over them. For example, Clint gets out of his beat up old American truck to point a gun at a bunch of young black men -- acting like stereotypical hoods, of course -- then subsequently chastises a young white kid for acting black (although not in so many words). It's also the last movie I've seen to feature what used to be a super common phenomenon of blue collar American men calling each other very offensive slurs as a term of endearment/form of screwing around for fun. It actually is still decently common in the right circles, it would just never be portrayed positively or innocently in a movie anymore.
I guess it can be confused as a movie for Great Replacement messaging, but only because the replacement has already happened in a lot of American urban areas. Clint represents a relic of a piece of America that is already gone, it just happens to pattern match to modern fears.
Edit: To add on a bit more....
I think Gran Turino is ultimately about how the last generation of American immigrants has some important things to pass on to the current generation of American immigrants. It is absolutely positive on American values and, indeed, the thing that the movie portrays the Hmong as superior to Clint's own family at is exactly that: family. It doesn't really make Clint seem worse than the Hmong, just Clint's family, who have gotten selfish and stopped caring about their father (ignoring and dismissing him, to the degree of wanting to stick him in a home and forget about him).
It still portrays everything about those values in Clint as, if not superior to what the Hmong family has, at least having some important things to pass on to the Hmong children about being Americans. Clint's actual children have abandoned that aspect of their heritage and so he passes it on to someone who will have it, instead.
Maybe so! But what about the writer, Nick Schenk? Wikipedia suggests:
And I guess I would add--it's not that the hint is deliberately "white replacement" so long as it is in some sense a matter of "making way." In discussing with others in the thread, I'm increasingly persuaded that a better way for me to frame this trope is "white dude has his humanity restored by relationship with non-white/female/etc. successor, and in the process realizes that his highest calling is to benefit them." And also that my focus on the white dude's death is probably me being too specific about which costs the white dude is depicted as paying.
A move can teach "racism is bad" by curing it, but in order to show the racist character's redemption, the newly-non-racist white dude is inevitably going to give up something, and maybe give up everything. Can someone be non-racist and also be as indifferent to one's minority neighbors as one's white neighbors? A Man Called Otto walks an interesting line here, too, as Otto is clearly depicted as a misandrist, but totally cool with everyone at the level of their individual characteristics.
(Interestingly, the so-called "anti-racist" view does seem to be that it's not enough to just not be racist--you have to actively work to benefit the BIPOCracy.)
To me, Clint’s character wasn’t redeemed. He had lost purpose. He had nothing to do. He was longing to do something that matters again. Retirement rendered him meaningless because he defined his being by purpose.
He got a purpose again; he didn’t find his highest purpose.
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This.
The whole point of the ending of the film is that while Walt's blood children/grandchildren may a bunch of ungrateful moral degenerates, his spirit and values and legacy will live on in Tao, Sue, and the Young Catholic Priest for whom he served as a friend and mentor.
So it's a positively-spun Great Replacement narrative, as was originally claimed.
The young catholic priest was white
And is celibate and will not procreate or have descendants of his own.
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No its not, because its about the immigrant kid becoming more "American" than it is about America becoming more "diverse."
Walt starts the movie as a racist and ends the movie as a racist. But he's not racist in the conventional blue tribe college educated democrat sense of the word espoused by both white nationalists and the woke. No "blood and soil" here walt is racist in the way that guys like Frederick Douglas, Teddy Roosevelt, and Rudyard Kipling get called racist (and race traitors), for going on about hyphenated american and the white mans burden.
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Apparently a lot of critics saw this in Knives Out, where the wealthy WASP author leaves his estate to his diligent South American nurse instead of his spoilt kids.
Of course, that interpretation only makes sense of you subscribe to the American view that Spanish people are their own race instead of just another European ethnic group...
South Americans are heavily mixed with natives, hence most of them are no longer white.
That's true in some countries but not others, the average person in Argentina is very much not mestizo.
And Ana de Armas (born in Cuba) who plays the nurse certainly isn't. She's as European as Mitt Romney.
She has an illegal immigrant mother in the movie so I think it's clear what they're going for without having to break out the 23 and Me results.
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She's a fair skinned Latina, not white. Whiteness is about pure European heritage. Biracial people that pass as white are still not white, for example.
Mitt Romney is white, as far as I know none of his ancestors are non-European or descended from Europeans. Does he have a Mexican grandpa I'm not aware of?
Romney's father was born in Mexico, which as far as I know has birthright citizenship. The fact that it was in a Mormon settlement started by his great grandfather fleeing American anti-polygamy laws in 1885 probably complicates things, though.
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If you met me there is zero chance you'd describe me as anything other than white. I find myself extraordinarily doubtful whether you can visually identify who has "pure European heritage" out of a group of North Americans.
I probably would think Buck Angel is a dude, it's not about outward appearance it's about what you are. For sex, its chromosomes, for whiteness, it's ancestry
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Two seconds on Wikipedia and you'll learn she's the grand-daughter of Spanish immigrants on her mother's side. Now, maybe her father has some admixture of Native American blood, but going by the demographics of Cuba it's highly likely he's Spanish-descended all the way through. So yeah, guy, she's as European as Mitt Romney.
Now, if you really want to insist that de Armas is a "fair skinned Latina" go right ahead, after all I'm sure you would also class Meghan Markle as Black as Michelle Obama.
It doesn't say anything about her father, is he native Cuban? I would assume so.
Whiteness is not a self-id thing, it's genetics. A drop of poo spoils the milk.
Meghan Markle is black. And don't capitalize it, it's uncouth
I am sure that the Koreans, during the Japanese annexation of Korea, would be relieved to learn that the Emperors of Japan are in fact Korean.
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You're arguing the one-drop rule? Well, I suppose historical survivals do crop up now and again.
The Native American or Indigenous population in Cuba (amongst other areas) was Taino, and they seem to have been either exterminated or so intermarried into the replacement African labour (because the Taino kept dying off when the colonists tried putting them to work) and/or the incoming Europeans that they don't exist anymore.
Now, maybe Ana's father claimed to be one-sixtyfourth pure Taino prince(ss) (as I believe dear old AOC was doing recently in her laundry list of 'new identities I'm claiming today') but if we're talking "one drop", you have to accept "dilution".
One drop in a gallon of water is homeopathy, and it's generally agreed that isn't real medicine. Or do you treat all your aches and pains and sniffles with dilutions? On the basis of "one drop of poo spoils the milk, one drop of active ingredient in a hundred part dilution cures my ills"?
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You seem to be trying to see how edgy you can be. Your posts throughout this thread are low quality and seem merely to be trying to get a rise out of people. If you really want to argue one-drop racial politics, you can argue that, but make substantial points. And you are allowed to capitalize or not capitalize black as you see fit - and again, if you have a problem with capitalizing it, you can write an argument for why you don't like it, but don't try to tell other people what to do because "it's uncouth."
You've already been told to stop doing this. I am now pretty convinced this is a trolling account, but being ever too lenient, this ban will be for two weeks. Next one, assuming you come back with the same pattern, will be permanent.
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I don't think you can reasonably conclude that Ana de Armas has any non-European ancestry. She's completely indistinguishable from a native resident of Spain. Her mother's parents migrated from Spain, and her father looks completely Spanish.
I compare her to Mitt Romney because while his ancestry is English and hers is is Spanish, both of those places are in Europe and both ethnic groups are equally European. The fact that you classify him as 'white' and her as 'latina' really highlights how bizarre both labels are.
A better solution would be to list 'European' and 'mestizo' on the census. That would more accurately capture the difference between Europeans from Latin America (like de Armas) and mestizos like Raymond Cruz.
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This has never really been true (until, perhaps, very recently, as a result of the Great Awokening and people turning "white" into a slur). It's something that gets discussed to death but it's not actually a very interesting debate, it just diverts discussion into an argument about words instead of a discussion about substance.
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I don't think pretty much anyone in actual Europe would actually think of Ana de Armas as anything other than white.
I think we should retvrn to Ben Franklin's terminology and establish that even Swedes are swarthy, to say nothing of Spaniards, leaving only Anglos as truly white (and truly European, for some extra absurdity).
This will let us move on to more interesting and consequential distinctions.
I always get a laugh when people try to redefine the countries best representing the "blonde hair and blue eyes"-stereotype as "not actually white".
"The pigmentation of both hair and eyes is lightest around the Baltic Sea, and darkness increases regularly and almost concentrically around this region."
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Simply excluding peninsular people narrows things well enough doesn't it?
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Clint is an actual conservative, though, so I can trust a conservative interpretation is closer to the actual intended meaning of his movie than I would with Knives Out.
He's still a Hollywood actor/director, and it being a "this is how to roll over and die happy about the Great Replacement" story doesn't make it not an example of the trope
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Knives out 2 - Glass Onion also plays into that same 'diversity-person good, white man unfathomably evil' trope. So I am more inclined to trust that accusation.
The more parsimonious explanation is, I imagine, that no matter how Clint personally feels about it, you cannot do some combinations of castings. Or at least it seems you'd need some special circumstances to pull it off.
Whites can be whoever in principle, but you are de facto not allowed to make an all-white story. And in every story that needs a villain, you risk having your colleagues raise eyebrows if you cast a non-white-cishetero-male actor as the main one. Likewise for stories of successors and dying old heroes. So, these little constraints of politesse add up to an overwhelming message that whites are disproportionately bad and will die out, making way for a vibrant, diverse, talented new humanity. Is this done consciously?
I think it can't not be, these media magicians aren't autistic race-blind engineers, they live their whole lives thinking about implications of artistic messages, that's kind of their job.
But most participants need not bother thinking about this part in particular.
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Still common in Australia, I believe.
In real life, yes, that happens, though it depends a lot on the demographic or subculture.
In Australian television or movies?
Not so much.
I suppose I was reacting more to the idea that it's a subculture thing now, when it's...pretty mainstream, I think.
Maybe 'subculture' is the wrong word, but I feel like there's a significant class and gender aspect to it? I wouldn't do it to a woman, and I wouldn't do it with a bunch of well-educated university types. But I would expect it to be common and comfortable among tradies, for instance.
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