![]() ![]() “Well, hey,” you might say, “Wonder Woman was the best part of BVS, and Harley was the best part of Suicide Squad, and even if they never make a Black Widow movie or female-led solo film, ScarJo does cool stuff in every Avengers movie every couple years, so what are these feminazis complaining about?” If you somehow want to argue this very basic, not-really-ambiguous-at-all-if-you-think-about-it concept, you can fuck off back to your egg account.Īnd because art and culture made by and aimed at straight white men is so dominant and all-consuming, it can be easy to wrap yourself in this bubble of same-ness and never leave, or to look at the meager scraps extended to other genders and ethnicities and consider the problem solved. Culture is dominated by us, and mass-produced to our heteronormative tastes and buying whims. The Trump fans and Gamergaters are no doubt already tearing their hair out over the idea that there is any kind of cultural bias in favor of us, straight white men, but they can get bent. Movies are greenlit based on the likelihood of appealing to me, commercials are cut specifically to entice me and people like, people with my skin color and crotch set-up are overwhelmingly the people in charge of writing, directing, and producing films and television. I’d say, on rough estimate, that anywhere between 90–95% of modern pop culture is created at least in part with me in mind. Basic fact.Īnd that lack of shit-taking extends on a cultural level. Straight white men have to put up with less shit than probably every other race and gender and orientation combined. I don’t say this as some kind of attempt at liberal guilt or self-effacement, but simply as an acknowledgment of fact. ![]() If genetics were a lottery, brother, I hit the jackpot. To be honest, and to my shame, I’m one of those people. In dramatizing the same “self-governing black society” in which he grew up, Jenkins brings the audience into a world and experience they might never in a hundred years even have considered. Jenkins’s story is about a self-governing black society, no matter how fractured.” Whites would have introduced a different dynamic to Moonlight. In a piece for The New Yorker, “Moonlight Undoes Our Expectations,” Hilton Als touched on how the absence of white faces underlines Moonlight’s thematic and sociological themes, writing, “There are no white characters in the film, and this is a radical move on Jenkins’s part. This critically-beloved, awards-accumulating, word-of-mouth hit, this Oscar-favorite, hadn’t felt the need to show a white person until two-thirds of the way through the runtime. We were deep into the film, almost at the end of the second of the three vignettes that make up the movie, and as the teenage incarnation of our lead Chiron (Ashton Sanders) is led away from his school in handcuffs, I noticed that one of the arresting officers was a white man.Īnd I realized that this was the first white face I’d seen in the film. Something struck me as I watched Barry Jenkins’ mournful, hopeful Moonlight in the movie theater.
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