So this is a self-indulgent, proud father kind of thing, but what the hey.
Two anecdotes about my nine-year-old son’s critical acumen.
— My son was talking to a friend about the movie “Brave.” My son hadn’t seen it yet, so he asked his friend how it was. “It’s okay,” the friend said, “but it’s got a girl hero.”
My son paused for a moment. Then he said, with a fair bit of outrage, “You don’t like it because a girl’s the hero? That’s sexist!
—I mentioned Django Unchained for some reason, and my son said, “what’s that?” I explained that it’s a movie about slavery, and about how slavery was bad. I added, “The funny thing about that is that there really aren’t very many movies about how slavery is bad.”
My son narrowed his eyes and said, “Is that because most movies are made by white people?”
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Cute!
Sounds like he’s ready to start blogging!
Yeah, but has he started blaming everything on “Enlightenment rationality” yet?
Derik; just about.
Jones; we’ll get there.
I was unsettled when reading “Ideological critiques of Brave and Django Unchained by a 9-year-old….”; oh, no! He’s learning to warp reality through the lens of ideology!
But those are nicely pithy, dead-on accurate perceptions.
give him his own column
Given Hollywood’s shoddy track record, maybe it’s just as well that they’ve left that subject alone. “Amistad” wasn’t that great, was it?
Didn’t see Amistad. There’s also The Color Purple, and of course Lincoln now.
It’s true Hollywood in general can’t be trusted; there are tons of shitty films about the Holocaust. But the fact that the Holocaust is the profound tragedy of choice for shitty filmmakers is not a coincidence, I think (as I explain more or less here.)
Hey, I think Beaty is filled with just as much shit as you, Noah.
Spielberg is the predominant black filmmaker working in Hollywood.
I somehow mixed two entries together.
Yeah; go repost the Beaty bit on the right thread and I’ll respond to it there.
Spielberg…he did Amistad, right? I doubt it can possibly be as bad as Schindler’s List, but there’s no way I’m seeing it to find out.
If you like movies about heroic white men fighting slavery, you’ll love Amistad.
Right…that’s about what I expected.
Yes, though displaying Spielberg’s usual filmmaking verve, “Amistad” has more than its share of…problematic qualities.
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Most seriously, Amistad presents a highly misleading account of the case’s historical significance, in the process sugarcoating the relationship between the American judiciary and slavery. The film gives the distinct impression that the Supreme Court was convinced by Adams’ plea to repudiate slavery in favor of the natural rights of man, thus taking a major step on the road to abolition.
In fact, the Amistad case revolved around the Atlantic slave trade — by 1840 outlawed by international treaty — and had nothing whatever to do with slavery as an domestic institution. Incongruous as it may seem, it was perfectly possible in the nineteenth century to condemn the importation of slaves from Africa while simultaneously defending slavery and the flourishing slave trade within the United States.
In October 1841, in an uncanny parallel to events on the Amistad, American slaves being transported from Virginia to Louisiana on the Creole seized control of the ship, killing some crew members and directing the mate to sail to the Bahamas. For fifteen years, American Secretaries of State unsuccessfully badgered British authorities to return the slaves as both murderers and “the recognized property” of American citizens. This was far more typical of the government’s stance toward slavery than the Amistad affair.
Rather than being receptive to abolitionist sentiment, the courts were among the main defenders of slavery. A majority of the Amistad justices, after all, were still on the Supreme Court in 1857 when, in the Dred Scott decision, it prohibited Congress from barring slavery from the Western territories and proclaimed that blacks in the United States had “no rights which a white man is bound to respect.”
The film’s historical problems are compounded by the study guide now being distributed to schools, which encourages educators to use Amistad to teach about slavery. The guide erases the distinction between fact and fiction, urging students, for example, to study black abolitionism through the film’s invented character, Theodore Joadson, rather than real historical figures. And it fallaciously proclaims the case a “turning-point in the struggle to end slavery in the United States.”
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http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/74
Moreover, more than once the film made me wonder just how “liberal” Spielberg is. In one scene, an abolitionist cynically suggests it might be better for the anti-slavery cause if the Africans lost their case; it might inspire further outrage against the vile institution.
And at the time the film was made, the noxious right-wing propagandist George Will praised the movie, particularly the scene when ex-Prez John Quincy Adams comes forward, gives a speech before the Supreme Court, and *Poof!* justice reigns…
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A truthful film
For the third time in eight years Hollywood has produced a nuanced, truthful film about America’s racial history. ”Glory,” released in 1989, was the true story of a black regiment in the Civil War. And also in 1989, ”Driving Miss Daisy” was an utterly convincing depiction of a long relationship of a black servant and a white Atlanta family…
The movie has two heroes, Cinque, the leader of the shipboard insurrection, and the American legal system… [Which, as noted above, was actually overall very pro-slavery.]
Adams’…argument, rich in subsequent irony, was that states’ rights protected the Africans from the federal government… [Hooray for states’ rights! Down with the Feds!]
Mr. Spielberg is helping to fill a void created by a dereliction of duty on the part of academic historians… [You mean the “make us feel good about ourselves” void?]
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http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-12-18/news/1997352150_1_amistad-spielberg-supreme-court
Much in the same fashion that he argued that we didn’t need all those troublemaking civil rights organizations; all it took was Rosa Parks to refuse to go sit in the back of the bus, and *Poof!* — segregation was defeated.
Elsewhere, about the image Will was helping further:
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…the popular image of Rosa Parks as a simple seamstress whose singular and spontaneous act launched the civil rights movement that brought down the walls of segregation.
This popular presentation of Parks as a quiet but courageous woman, whose humble righteousness shamed America into doing what was right has become a mythic fable present in nearly every high school history textbook, museum exhibit, and memorial.
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When in actuality that was no spontaneous bit of rebellion, but carefully preplanned with other black activists. And (as the article explains)…
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…what if we knew more about the real Rosa Parks—a militant race woman and sharp detective whose career as a human rights activist spanned seven decades?
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More at http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/01/opinion-its-time-to-free-rosa-parks-from-the-bus/
Indeed, does not the Hollywood preference, understandable for simplifying a narrative, to focus on a few heroic figures rather than mass movements against injustice, feed the Right’s “divide and conquer” tactics?