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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33044 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 think the White Man's Burden poem is pretty clearly sarcastic, even if some people took it seriously. Kipling is saying that white people shouldn't be killing themselves in order to civilize anyone else.

(I think the reason that a lot of people miss the sarcasm nowadays is that the poem isn't against colonialism. It's against a particular justification for colonialism. He's not saying it's wrong for white people to rule, but rather that white people shouldn't rule in a way that doesn't benefit themselves.)

I think you're wrong on that. It reads as sarcastic to the modern eye, but he was perfectly serious about taking up the white man's burden, for the benefit of "those ye better," even though they'd blame and hate you for it.

There's an entire stanza pretty explicitly warning that it's something of a bad deal. At least in my school days, the concept and the title was discussed but the poem itself was never read nor analyzed. It just becomes a totem of wrongthink.

Take up the White Man's burden—

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—

"Why brought ye us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?"

I'm not sure people would understand the Exodus reference at this point either.

I think the White Man's Burden poem is pretty clearly sarcastic, even if some people took it seriously. Kipling is saying that white people shouldn't be killing themselves in order to civilize anyone else.

While the poem can certainly be read that way (death of the author and all that), Kipling himself really can't. Rather, Kipling saw imperalism as a kind of noblesse oblige, especially in connection with Western influence on humans around the world. In addition to this poem, Kipling directly addressed then-governor Teddy Roosevelt on the matter of the Philippines:

Now, go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on, permanently, to the whole Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pick-axe into the foundations of a rotten house, and she is morally bound to build the house over, again, from the foundations, or have it fall about her ears.

For Kipling, empire-building was a matter of "you broke it, you bought it." A nation simply cannot stand on the world stage, in trade or military or diplomatic matters, without inadvertently impacting humans outside its borders. Some of those humans, not being the subjects of powerful nation-states themselves, are rendered horribly vulnerable to the resulting externalities. The responsible thing to do, then, is to take those humans under your collective national wing (says Kipling). Like children, they may whine about it, but it really is for their own good. And like a sullen teenager, you might whine about it, too, but that's the price of a seat at the grown-up table: you have to clean up your own messes.

In my experience, contemporary "decolonizers" hate the poem because it comes very close to illustrating a common contradiction in their worldview. Decolonizers actually agree with Kipling, at least 90% of the way. Every single demand that wealthy nations "redistribute" wealth is a demand for empire-building, for wealthy nations to take vulnerable nations under their wing. But such demands are routinely accompanied by insistence that no cultural demands be made, no changes be wrought, no missionizing of religion or appropriation of culture or...

But those are just the organic things that happen when wealth is "redistributed." Send dollars to Samarkand, and those dollars will be most effectively spent on importing American goods, American workers, American culture, whatever. Send food, and you will put local farmers out of business. Send military supplies, and you will empower a warlord. Buy their sand for manufacturing, and they run out of beaches; refuse to buy their sand, and their children go hungry. As Thomas Sowell says: there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

He's not saying it's wrong for white people to rule, but rather that white people shouldn't rule in a way that doesn't benefit themselves.

No, he's saying that it's time for America to grow up and start doing the hard work of a mature empire: the thankless task of bringing the Enlightenment (and, you know, Christianity) to the many humans who were still enslaving each other, engaging in cannibalism, and dying of curable diseases in their mud huts. The "white" part, on which people of course focus inordinately today, is just a historical accident. It's the "white man's burden" because literally no one else had taken it up. Here's a more modern rendition (circa 2012 because G7 doesn't fit as well). It came out a bit sarcastic but you can hopefully imagine someone writing it earnestly, and understand how such a person might be the modern day equivalent of Kipling on this matter.

Take up the G8's burden--

Send forth your currency--

Offshore your workers' lifestyle

Across the migrant's sea.

Build schools and homes and fact'ries,

For someone else's child,

But keep their culture vibrant!

It must not be defiled.



Take up the G8's burden--

You owe the world your wealth.

It's your fault they are weeping,

Your fault they're in poor health.

Your Western ways are costly,

Too costly to ignore,

And so you must export them

To every other shore!



Take up the G8's burden--

Too long you have denied

Your global obligations,

Your diplomatic pride.

You're lucky, and you're privileged

(And a xenophobe at heart),

So give some folks asylum

From the conflicts that they start!



Take up the G8's burden--

Not "colonial" in nature--

Instead a kind of penance

For your melting of that glacier,

For your raping of the landscape,

For your scorching of the skies--

For those who strove to prosper

Owe to others now the prize.



Take up the G8's burden--

It's time to pass the buck,

To burn your blue-necked workers

Because--who gives a fuck?

Comes now, to rate your credit

(Expecting not your thanks)

The only voice that matters:

The judgment of your banks!

For Kipling, empire-building was a matter of "you broke it, you bought it." A nation simply cannot stand on the world stage, in trade or military or diplomatic matters, without inadvertently impacting humans outside its borders. Some of those humans, not being the subjects of powerful nation-states themselves, are rendered horribly vulnerable to the resulting externalities. The responsible thing to do, then, is to take those humans under your collective national wing (says Kipling). Like children, they may whine about it, but it really is for their own good. And like a sullen teenager, you might whine about it, too, but that's the price of a seat at the grown-up table: you have to clean up your own messes.

It was particularly explicit on the part of European powers that the Americans would deal with their neighbors or they would, to the point where the French would invade Mexico during the American Civil War. American interventionism of the period was very much informed by Europe.

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