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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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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 coyote uh human trafficker spaceship 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:

  1. Is there a name for this trope already? Have I missed a TVTropes pages somewhere? A RibbonFarm article? An obscure media studies dissertation?

  2. 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?

  3. 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?)

  4. 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 would like to suggest an alternate theme here - that instead of a monolithic antiwhite hostility being the driving force behind these tropes, there's a great-replacement-adjacent but ultimately pro-western eregore flexing its wings. The idea is indeed that whites are on their way out, but instead of relishing their fall, that western institutions should be reformed and redeemed in order to be inherited by new generations of nonwhite successors. The inheritence bit being the crucial point - don't burn it all down! Dont cut off your civilizational nose to spite its current white face! And most importantly, leave the institutions standing so that the current owners (with their newly minted diversity credentials) are not displaced.

The undisputed champion of this trope must be Lin Manuel Miranda. Within 30 seconds of learning about Hamilton, I thought 'damn, they really want young nonwhites to buy into this America thing, guess they're getting spooked about who's going to fund their pensions'.

Elsewhere, Moana has the hypermasculine but clownish Maui revealed to be the direct cause of all the world's problems; his atonement is a footnote to the story of the female protagonist mastering all of his skills, using them (along with her innate goodness and wisdom) to repair the damage he foolishly caused, and then passing those skills on to her people so they can reclaim their rightful place in the world.

Encanto, meanwhile, deals with class conflict and the divine right of aristocracy. After some central-american revolutionary-types (for no reason at all) purge their village, a mysterious gift is granted to the family matriarch that separates her family from the common people, both in terms of giving them exceptional abilities* and also a really nice house where they don't have to do most of the chores. But that's ok, because they will selflessly devote their abilities to the good of the people, who will be loyal and devoted in return - which is only fair, as 'they have no gifts but they are many'. And ultimately, the matriarch's gift is be passed down to her granddaughter so the system may be perpetuated.

Naraburns has a good post downthread about Gran Turino having a similar arc. I think a lot of the "The Future is Female/lgbt/nonwhite' media can be taken in this light, not exactly as a condemnation of western culture but as a plea to preserve it, in spite of the flaws of its creators.

*There's a whole cast of east-coast upper-class tropes: the motherly doctor, the beautiful socialite, the perceptive journalist, the workaholic who carries donkeys around (not too much of a stretch to be a business executive)... and how could we forget, the brilliant but tormented visionary who really always wanted to be an actor. Oh Lin Manuel, you scamp.

The elites are always looking for fresh blood so they don't have to pay off the social debts they owe to the existing lower classes. Populations are like money in this way. You can inflate away your debt if you control the supply.

You should see how The Kids These Days react to Avenue Q.

Which I really enjoyed.

I hadn't heard anything about that, how are they reacting?

From r/Theatre a month ago:

The song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” is, when looked at through a current day lens, pretty fucking gross. It absolves the audience of whatever racist ideas they have because, hey, everybody does it, and it doesn’t mean you go around committing hate crimes! It’s very much a white liberal version of progressivism, and it takes for granted the idea that racism being bad is a forgone conclusion. Avenue Q means well, but its time has passed.

Racism obviously existed, but it was easier then to believe we were making progress against it. That belief made shows like Avenue Q, which frames racism being bad as a foregone conclusion, possible. It was palatable to the primarily white audiences that would go see it, in the same way that the era made TV shows like South Park and Chappelle’s Show cultural phenomenons. This idea that you can believe in progressive politics and also say wildly racist things as long as you make it clear that it’s “just a joke” was a hallmark of the 00’s, and we aren’t in that time anymore. The show is dated and it would need a very heavy rewrite to be relevant again.

The show depicts a specific malaise with politics and society from 20 years ago, and some of that still holds up. But it also is rooted in a (largely white, middle class) understanding of race and racism from the time, where racism is a personal failing (and a potentially minor one if joked about) and not a major systemic problem.

Basically a bunch of very serious “we used to laugh because we didn’t know how racist it was to seek a colorblind society, what privileged fools we were” with some hemming and hawing about Trump and DeSantis.

Here’s one I’ll respond to specifically:

I get that this pushing of the audience’s buttons about racism is the intent with Christmas Eve, but in a post-Trump world I can’t get behind it. It comes from a place of assumption that the audience will have a problem with that sort of racism, and I don’t think it’s realistic or responsible to trust general audiences like that right now.

This person is literally upset that there might be racists in the same audience as them, actively being racist by laughing at the Asian immigrant and getting away with it without anyone to lecture correct them about how wrong it is. This is a level of paranoia the CIA would have been giddy to inspire during their MK-ULTRA experiments, a level of internal division the Soviets would have loved to sow during the Cold War.

It reminds me of one of the most insightful moments in Cerebus The Aardvark. Bear, Cerebus’ drinking buddy, is discussing a pop culture fiction with Cerebus at the bar. Cerebus gets more and more upset, and finally Bear figures out why. “You’re not upset because I don’t like the thing you enjoy,” says Bear (I’m paraphrasing). “You’re upset that I do like it, but not in the same way as you.”

and it takes for granted the idea that racism being bad is a forgone conclusion.

I am really confused by this. Is the poster arguing that racism might not actually be bad? It reads so easily into "progressives are just as racist as everyone else" rhetoric.

My interpretation of the post was that that the poster believed that, 20 years ago, there was a naive belief that we could take for granted that everyone agreed that racism was a bad thing that we were making progress at defeating, which Avenue Q seems to be invoking by saying that Everyone is a little bit racist. That is, Avenue Q is saying that we're all on the same page - helplessly forced to be (at least a little bit) racist, but presuming that the audience sees that as a shameful thing to try to fix. And the comedy in the song comes from everyone agreeing that being racist is bad, but also everyone having to come to terms with they themselves being racist, even if a little bit.

The poster seems to want to contrast this to the true and correct view of now rather than 20 years ago, where we recognize that there really are significant amounts of powerful racist racists out there who really do think in stereotypically racist ways like "black people don't deserve human rights," not in the "little bit racist" way of, say, cracking a joke about Pollacks. There's a bit of leap here, but the poster seems to think it's "gross" that the musical is poking fun at "racism" by calling out these little bits of racism for humor, which sweeps under the rug the obviously much more significant factor of racism from truly racist racists (that the enlightened people of 2023 recognize which the ignoramuses of 2003 couldn't).

He's arguing the musical is taking it for granted that everyone believes racism is bad, but since we live in a cis-heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, that view is mistaken.

That would explain it. It's just worded so weirdly, imo.

there's a great-replacement-adjacent but ultimately pro-western eregore flexing its wings

This seems right to me. I think that the Hamilton/Moana/Encanto analysis is interesting, and perhaps I should expand my thinking to focus more on the idea of the "successor." There are surely many movies about white men passing some torch or other to their biological sons, and a "great replacement is real (but please inherit our political traditions!)" could be a natural evolution of those tropes, in an era that tries to downplay heritage (only, at times, to get hoist on its own petard, as in the case of Rey Palpatine).

Hamilton though, being an expensive broadway musical, mainly influenced the opinions of young white women and homosexuals. By casting all the villain characters (British) as white and making the protagonists non-White, it set up clear tension between the two with one side coded as losers. Hamilton reads to me as an obvious example of taking a positive white story (that everyone learns about) and subverting it shamelessly so that the viewer’s feelings can be altered for a social-political purpose. In this case, regardless of some original intention, the effect was that white girls and gays from affluent families were shown a revisionist story in which their white ancestors were evil and the heroes of a tale they heard as children were changed to an array of black and mixed race characters who speak, act, dance, and sing their stereotypical cultural art forms. The positive valence for these minorities increase, that of their white ancestors decrease, and they are left being less interested in the American Revolution (who are filled with the well-mannered white people specifically portrayed as bad).

There were black British characters in Hamilton (see here where the British soldier is a black woman). Also, the primary antagonist is Aaron Burr, not King George III, played by a black man. Unless by "all the villain characters" you literally mean just King George III, which makes me confused on the plural.

And King George III is played by Jonathan Groff, who is quite openly gay.

Antagonist is not synonymous with villain. Aaron Burr is Hamilton's antagonist, but he's never the villain.

If there is a "villain" in Hamilton, it's Thomas Jefferson (he was certainly the villain from the point of view of the real Hamilton) - who is also played by a black guy.

Fair that the two are not synonymous, but Burr is also portrayed as a villain, albeit a sympathetic one.

Edit: Sorry, I misread you. What would be sufficient to show that Burr is a villain and not just an antagonist in Hamilton? At the bare minimum, a whole lot of viewers seem to identify him as a villain, so if the casting choices were made to avoid having audiences see a black actor as a villain then they failed.

In order to be a villain, he would have to be villainous. He would have to portray values that are antithetical to the values of the audience, such as acting in a cruel and wanton manner.

I would argue Burr is closer to a foil than a villain, whose role is filled by George.

Thank you for clarifying.

I thought Aaron Burr's ambition, portrayed as unbridled by beliefs, principles, morality etc was supposed to be that.

Honestly his Act 2 character reminds me of Commodus' lines in Gladiator (obviously Commodus is a far more straightforward villain for a whole host of other reasons, but his virtues are similar).

But I have other virtues, father. Ambition. That can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness, courage, perhaps not on the battlefield, but... there are many forms of courage. Devotion, to my family and to you.

Fair enough. Maybe he's more villainous than I gave him credit in my one viewing of the staged musical.

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