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So...I saw the Woman King and...it was a deeply American movie.
As expected: totally historically uncredible. Not just the obvious flipping of the Dahomey into the victorious good guys, but falling victim to the same congenital failing that Western media had since maybe Kirk Douglas's Spartacus framed the man as a proto-abolitionist (though iirc this goes back to Marx) : just a total inability to reconcile criticisms of slavery in practice with criticisms of slavery as such. Or, more generally: an inability to recognize the distinction between bad and evil; things that are bad for us have to be seen as universally evil (the other recent historical epic - The Northman - escapes this problem entirely, interestingly)
In the movie the King - who is portrayed as a progressive - defends himself by stating that Dahomey no longer sells its own people (which some internal slavery critics note is weakening the kingdom in the long run) and is told by his more-progressive general that slavery is an evil in and of itself, and so Dahomey needs to transition totally away from slavery into selling palm oil (something they apparently actually tried and abandoned because it -predictably - was not as profitable)
Characters don't just oppose the oppression of their own, they oppose the oppression of "Africa". They don't just want freedom for themselves, it's about freedom as such. Silly but absolutely predictable for American cinema.
Similarly, the plot is just riven through with standard American tropes. Rebellious girl is too good for an arranged marriage so is sent to the Amazons. There she constantly bumps up against the rules of the regiment since she wants it her way but eventually proves herself (without giving up her independence). There's of course a dashing stranger for her to be attracted to, because sexual taboos (the Amazons are celibate) in Hollywood exist to be strained against.
It's probably because this movie was so distinctly American that I was actually defused and really couldn't care as much how inaccurate it was. In essence it just seemed like a black version of an existing set of tropes that already didn't deserve to be taken seriously. Seen in that light, it was actually pretty fun (my one story complaint is that the lead actress looked far too young and small).
I left the movie wondering if this needed to be a culture war issue at all? Couldn't everyone just written it off as a silly, Braveheart-esque vision of history? It's stupid in very similar ways to other American historical fodder.
I think the movie is an obvious victim of a tit-for-tat strategy: well, you won't let us have our slave-bearing ancestors, you won't let us keep the status but contextualize them as products of their time, they have to be evil. You won't let us white-wash them either, cause that's dishonest. So we'll be damned if we let you create a new set of (mythical) heroic ancestors when we're denied that with people who actually existed and actually were ambivalent about slavery.
Helped along by the insistence of the crew that they were reflecting history - with perhaps the worst possible example (the Dahomey king's quote on slavery is incredible and I can see why everyone quoted it.)
One wonders how differently this movie would have been taken in a world where people didn't try to topple statues of people who didn't live totally in accordance with modern values. I expect the heat would be less if we could all take a sardonic stance towards the past.
Out of curiosity—why’d you go see it?
Your observations are in line with a Hollywood that is choosing such plots out of opportunism rather than strategy. I assume whether a script gets optioned is more due to estimates of butts-in-seats than expectations of social impact. This isn’t a claim that Hollywood is apolitical; such a process leaves plenty of room to smuggle in bias. But I think it’s a mistake to interpret movies like this as engaging in cultural myth-creation.
In other words, Hanlon’s Razor applies.
At risk of starting another airing of grievances, I have to mention Rings of Power. It’s nakedly playing with modern American politics, but is it trying to construct a broader narrative? Do the writers actually think making villains parrot modern immigration slogans will turn high fantasy into a progressive on-ramp? I’m inclined to believe that they are instead targeting those little feel-good bursts of tribalism. In a saturated market, the goal isn’t to make art that lasts a lifetime, but to cash in on whatever sentiment is on hand.
For an older example, consider a classic of “Lost Cause” filmography: Gone with the Wind. It unambiguously romanticizes antebellum plantation culture; its source material is even more explicit about framing the KKK as noble protectors. Yet it remains more acceptable than a certain other Lost Cause film because this messaging is viewed as a side effect. Southern belles and hard times gripped the public consciousness in the ‘30s, so the film leveraged them. This is the essence of a “product of its times” defense—the argument that art followed culture rather than the other way around.
Modern political pandering is subject to the same forces. A chunk of the market demands (or is assumed to demand!) this aesthetic, and by God, Hollywood is determined to step up. If that means bolting progressive dialogue onto existing settings, or implementing more diverse casting, or hiring nobodies out of JJ Abram’s cadre, then that’s business as usual. The other relevant law here is Sturgeon’s.
Side note: All of these assumptions go out the window in the presence of a genuine auteur. There’s enough slack in the budgets for AA productions of ideological media, and a sufficiently determined (and skilled) writer or director can command a following all of their own. For the biggest of blockbusters, though, studios will continue to choose the safe road of gesturing at their idea of the zeitgeist.
TBH for novelty; it's not like there's a bunch of African epic history films saturating the box office. And I was curious what the film would be like, thanks to the culture warring.
Also: the very high critic score was the final selling point: it removed the main reason I don't go to see movies I'm vaguely curious about.
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Man, your comment made my heart swell three sizes. In a world without culture war and racial spoils this take would be wonderful. But we do have culture war and racial spoils, so I can't take this optimistic a view of it.
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It's not a congenital failing, it's an intelligent system working as designed. Kirk Douglas wasn't stupid- his goal was never to "reflect history", at least in the way you understand that term. He was creating Myth; he was creating stories that had consciously developed, esoteric messaging for intended audiences. In this way, he created a story about a Marxist (or crypto-Jewish) hero standing up to proto-Fascism:
This messaging is also conveyed through Christian symbolism. Spartacus is crucified at the end, after prophesizing that the rebellion would one day overthrow Roman (i.e. European) dominance for good. This is not a failing, it's an exercise of an immensely powerful cultural influence through well-crafted Mythmaking that has audiences rooting for the slave rebellion and against Roman civilization.
That's not to say these myths are always well-crafted. Based on your review, Woman King seems less well-crafted than Spartacus, although it looks like it has a whopping 99% Audience Score in Rotten Tomatoes.
It's turtles all the way down. Mel Gibson's Braveheart is very different than what would have been Kirk Douglas's Braveheart. The stories we tell, and the messages we try to convey through our stories, are intrinsically part of the culture war. Even by consciously trying to avoid it, you are merely participating with a different strategy.
It's not simply an American phenomenon either. Famously, Jesus taught in parable. The Movie Theater is, in some ways, the modern day temple.
You are Edward Gibbon, and I claim my five pounds. Damned Christians, sapping the vigour of Imperial Rome with their milk-and-water 'love your neighbour' and 'forgive your enemies'!
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I find this so incredibly, laughably unlikely that going forward I think I will no longer be able to take the Rotten Tomatoes audience score seriously. Movies that have gotten a >90% Audience Score on RT are things like Apocalypse Now and Dark Knight, Blade Runner and Casablanca. There is not a single movie in the top 15 of the list of audience score over 90% on RT that I don't recognize the name of, and I am not a film buff. The first movie whose title I don't recognize is #30, Snatch, which appears to have been included by mistake as in tiny print at the bottom it says it's Audience Score is actually 74%.
For god's sake Star Wars only has a score of 92%. Star Wars. It's ridiculous in the extreme to assert that a mediocre piece of Culture War Oscar-bait has a 99%. Either I am completely, totally out of touch with the modern movie-goer, which I will concede is a possibility, or RT is manipulating the score of the movie. Considering that RT has been mucking about with their Audience Score formula/rules since at least 2019, it seems the more likely explanation is that RT's Audience Score is simply no longer a useful tool if the movie in question touches on the culture war.
I think certain movies are self-selected to get good reviews. It's why documentaries have almost always been very highly rated (throughout RTs lifecycle) even if they're not that good because the audience that would be willing to watch a documentary on a subject they don't have an interest in and also rate something poorly which affirmed their views is very low. I'd bet for a movie like this it's about the same sort of self-selection. People who can sense or an anticipate the presentism or pandering even just from the idea/poster/trailer are unlikely to see it and unlikely to review it. Also, RTs % system is based on if a movie is rated a 6 or higher, that's all. Every 100% RT movie could be straight 6/10 reviews across the board.
You read the first link wrong, Snatch is a 93% audience rating the 74% is for the critics rating. Just like Blade Runner has an 89% on that list because that's the critics' rating, the audience rating is 90%.
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RT verified audience rating 99%, all-audience rating 85%, IMDB 6.2/10.
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The stories we tell obviously have implicit norms attached, but that is not the same as being part of "the culture war". Or, to put it another way: something being political doesn't mean it's polarized.
"The culture war" imo is mainly about a narcissistic battle between two sets of Westerners. Thus things that are relatively uncontroversial amongst Westerners are obviously culturally laden but aren't really part of "the culture war".
"Women can choose their own partner" may be a culture war topic in Afghanistan...it isn't really a live issue in the US.
That's the sense in which I question whether the movie needed to be a culture war issue.
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I'm just imagining 1950s Kirk Douglas Braveheart and yeah, that absolutely could have been a movie of the time. Brave independent hero standing up to cruel English king trying to make a claim on their land? The parallels with the Revolution would have been hammered home (but a bit more subtly than modern messaging).
You could even keep Jean Simmons as Princess Isabella of France 😀
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Dahomey is whitewashed in a way that Europeans would never be whitewashed. No one would be okay with a movie about Leopold in Africa where the Africans are responsible for their own appendage-removal (although, ironically, this is the case, but accepting the metaphor…). No one would be okay with a movie about colonists which doesn’t show alleged savagery against Natives, or worse yet, shows Natives as the evil aggressor to innocent white people.
The problem is not historical inaccuracy, but an over-the-top double standard, where they are whitewashing slave owners because the slave owners were black, and making a villain of the emancipators because they are white. It is a racial double standard allotted to black history that is not allotted to white history, because “privilege”. This cuts through the pretense of social Justice and shows that Hollywood just wants to cast whites as villains and blacks as victims, without any deeper principle like social justice or historical truths. The Woman King proves that the guiding principle of Hollywood writing on race really is “white bad”, not “slavery bad” or “teaching history”.
Wait, are you saying Leopold's subjects did maim themselves? Link / source?
I don't know about the maimings, but it seems that Congolese natives were employed by Belgian authorities and did carry out punishments as ordered by their white superiors. Report from the English side, including representations from the Belgians:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50573/50573-h/50573-h.htm
Extracts from what is known as the Casement Report, which makes up a large part of this document:
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Hey nice to see you came over from the sub. Yes I am saying the subjects did maim themselves*. Belgium and Britain were in a propaganda war over African control, so Britain used yellow journalism to tar the image of Leopold. One of these allegations was that the Belgians either directly participated in, or directed their subordinates, to maim natives who did not obtain the monthly required rubber tax.
Leopold replied to the propaganda by creating a commission composed of members from different European nations. This is less biased than a British journalist interviewing people at behest of the British government. The commission found that the Congolese natives who were employed by Leopold, the “sentries”, were abusing the locals and maiming them for their own greed when out on patrols. The commission actually demanded that Leopold no longer permit natives to do their own patrols, in order to reduce the number of native maimings.
This is also backed up by 19th century travel literature on the Congo region which mentions that maiming was the native punishment for all kinds of infractions. The maimings were not due to Leopold’s colonialism, but an absence of Leopold’s colonialism; he inadvertently permitted a savage Congo practice because he didn’t want his (very few, iirc <500?) Belgians to do patrols deeper into the Congo.
In typical language of the time,
https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=BOSTONSH19051111-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------
https://archive.org/details/congoreportofcom00congrich
Roger Casement was responsible for much of the information gathered in the report, and he is not your typical British official, given that he was later executed for treason for supporting the Irish rebellion. After the Congo, he was sent out to Peru to investigate reports of abuses by a British company, so again - not just Brits versus Belgians:
Yes, native Congolese tribes were often savage. But the report also states that the Belgian administration was not concerned with governing the territory, but rather extracting the maximum profit from rubber. The territory was vast, the white officers relatively few in number, so they relied on native soldiers to act as police, and when the soldiers committed atrocities - well, that was how the cookie crumbles.
The Belgian administration anticipated the defence above - that the maimings were due to the savage natures of the natives:
The administration itself was forced to regulate matters:
From the report:
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Thanks for the links!
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I read it as gesturing towards African members of the Force Publique. I lost my taste for browsing the related articles before confirming, though.
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It could just be that enslaving people the same color as you doesn't make Hollywood as angry as white people enslaving black people? Romans get softened portrayals from time to time, as do vikings.
Hollywood hates slavery so much they have to make it seems at least one movie a year reminding everyone not to do it, but only interracial slavery because they are just not bothered by it if it's intraracial? And this belief both saturates the culture of Hollywood - the capital of the US propaganda machine - but needs to be guessed at from outside Hollywood? I would find that easier to believe if we didn't live in the same universe as Rotherham, Zimbabwe, and BLM.
Hollywood hates Slavery, not slavery. The latter, 'slavery' is the institution that probably precedes writing and came into existence with agriculture. The 'Slavery' Hollywood cares about is specifically the portion of the transatlantic slave trade that ended up enslaved in America.
There's no big movies about slavery in Brazil from Hollywood, and that's because Americans care about American slavery, not Roman or Brazilian or even Australian blackbirding overmuch. They don't openly support it or anything, but there's one big key thing that's cared about, and the others have only have salience insofar as they're linked to American slavery.
Yeah that makes more sense than they don't care about intraracial slavery at least.
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