TV Review: 24

Who’s Your Daddy?! A Terrorist! entry by DesiItaliana from Pass the Roti.

The first time I watched the show “24,” I was with other people. When one of the agents had a brown man on the floor, someone in the room said, “Why does it always have to be Middle Eastern people?” I replied, “I can’t believe you guys are watching this show.” That person responded, “It’s fiction!” Then why would you say that it’s always someone who is Middle Eastern if this fictional show is not reflecting reality?

Anyone with more than two brain cells can tell that this show has a blatant political agenda, with not so subtle arguments which justify racial profiling and the suspension of civil rights for the sake of “national security.” I mean, what do you expect? It’s on Fox, for god’s sake!

So it comes as no surprise that the New Yorker recently featured an article discussing the politics of the show’s producer, Joel Surnow, a self described “right-wing nut job” whose “politics suffuse” the whole show. The article has caused an earthquake in the media because U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, along with three military and FBI interrogators, met with the producers of the show in November- they think that fiction is blurring into reality way too much. Apparently, the show’s gratuitous on screen depiction of torture “hurts” the image of the US and is encouraging torture practice:

…it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he [Finnegan] suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24″?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted.” Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer’s: “Whatever it takes.” His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, “I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.” [Link]

Yikes.

I agree that this is disturbing- how Hollywood often is the vehicle which mobilizes collective jingoism during war time, and how it justifies, safeguards, and defends the actions of the establishment. And while it is difficult to assess just how much TV fiction can and does seep into reality and vice versa, it is true that the mass media’s has the ability to condition what we think and the way we see things. And ‘24′ is one of the most popular shows on American TV. Scary. Apparently, the show is tapping into the sentiments of the average viewer.

But here is one aspect that many newspapers pick up on that I want to emphasize: racial profiling. And if you are of South Asian descent like I am, you definitely cringe when you hear someone say, “Why does it always have to be the Middle Eastern people?”

On screen torture after September 11, 2001 has multiplied to an excessive rate:

Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common on American television. Before the attacks, fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization. Now there are more than a hundred, and, as David Danzig, a project director at Human Rights First, noted, “the torturers have changed. It used to be almost exclusively the villains who tortured. Today, torture is often perpetrated by the heroes.” The Parents’ Television Council, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has counted what it says are sixty-seven torture scenes during the first five seasons of “24″-more than one every other show. Melissa Caldwell, the council’s senior director of programs, said, ” ‘24′ is the worst offender on television: the most frequent, most graphic, and the leader in the trend of showing the protagonists using torture.” [Link]

USA Today reported in 2005 that “Fictional ‘24′ Brings Real Issue of Torture Home:”

Alistair Hodgett of Amnesty International credits 24 and A&E’s MI-5, which follows the British security service, with realistic depictions that provide “a clearer idea of what torture involves. … They do more to educate than desensitize.” [Link]

“Desensitize”? I’m not sure about that. It seems like it becomes glorified and justified: presumed suspects on the show- who are, of course, weeded out by racial profiling- can be tortured because when they are, they invariably confess to something; that is, they are always guilty (evidently, the show never throws light on the fact that torture can elicit coerced false confessions from an innocent person).

These “suspects” on the show are defined as being of Middle Eastern origin (with accents that are a curious hybrid between Arab, Indian, and Russian). But what happens when the actors who play these suspects are of South Asian background? Kal Penn plays a villain on ‘24′ who is part of an “Islamic” group and may be involved in a terrorist plot. Penn is actually of Indian origin. There are plenty of males in my family and social circle who have his phenotype. But according to ‘24′, people of this phenotype always have something to hide. It’s just a matter of time (or torture technique) that their nefarious plans come to the surface. You can chuck the constitution, civil liberties, and due process of law out the window because they are inconvenient obstacles to getting the job done. Innocent until proven guilty is no longer a legal right.You’re guilty until proven innocent. The principle in practice now is: people of South Asian phenotypes are Muslim and therefore suspects; and these suspects are never innocent. So go ahead and torture them for the collective good- it’s a “necessary evil.”

It goes without saying that the fundamental problem is not that people of South Asian descent are getting racially profiled, but that racial profiling exists. No one ever puts up a picture of a white guy when they talk about “terrorism”, even though many of the acts carried out by the US military can qualify as “terrorism” (such as bombing 3 million Vietnamese) and the guys on those “missions” are mostly white. Yet our brown faces serve as the symbolic mugshots of “terrorists.”

So don’t be surprised if FBI agents pay your daddy a visit– if he’s Desi, he just might be a terrorist!

Read the wonderful discussion at Pass the Roti.

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Children of Men (2006)

Excerpt of: Review of Children of Men by Amanda Marcotte, via Pandagon.




I’ve seen some feminist bloggers take on the movie Children of Men, but none so far from an explicitly feminist point of view, so I thought I’d take that on. I expressed anxieties earlier that a film that raised hysteria about underpopulation when we are in fact a world facing overpopulation might be reactionary, but upon seeing the movie last night, I have to state outright that I was utterly wrong. If nothing else, people who express anxieties about “underpopulation” in America and Europe are usually anti-immigration folks, and this film took an unabashed pro-immigrant stance, which I appreciated.

First, a note about the aesthetic value of the film—even if Children of Men were every bit as reactionary as the blurbs make it out to be, it would be a movie worth viewing. It was perhaps the best paced film I’ve seen in a long time, and really captured the feeling that one would have if caught in a situation like the hero’s, where all decisions have to be made on trust and instinct. It was moving and beautifully filmed, and the subplot about the leftist revolutionaries who are so dedicated to ideology that they forget the humanity that made them leftists in the first place could probably fit into a reactionary film. Could, but probably wouldn’t, since the subplot is rather too subtle for your wingnut crowd. After all, there’s a division between the grounded socialists and the People With Egos, a distinction that would be lost in a genuinely reactionary film. In sum, this movie would have been great no matter what the subtle political themes.

With the perfunctory disclaimer out of the way, the film was very pro-feminist on a number of levels, including the fact that it passes the Mo Movie Measure. But what I found really interesting was this—it presents something of a bait and switch to the audience, in terms of gender expectations. The title loudly proclaims the movie to be about the Children of Men (very patriarchal sounding), but the one child in the movie is born to a woman who is dismissive of the idea that the identity of the father is even relevant. And it makes sense, actually, that if there hadn’t been a baby born on earth for an entire generation, the paramount importance of paternity would fade away and the obvious fact that maternity is more time-consuming and immediate would become undeniable. The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels. But this movie offers an alternative interpretation of the virgin birth—one where “virginity” is irrelevant and one where a woman’s stake in motherhood is fully respected for the sacrifice and hard work that it is.

In the large sense, this movie isn’t really about fecundity, but about hope. Babies are nothing but a symbol of hope, really. The movie is about what would happen to a world without hope, and the disturbing conclusion is that it wouldn’t be much different than the world we have now. And while both men and women are capable of feeling genuine hope—the sort of hope that rests with a child, which is to say the reality-bound hope, the hope for small joys and long life—the movie rather explicitly frames false hope as a result of male dominance and male control.

There’s a number of different ways the movie critiques male dominance as inherently damaging and egalitarian relationships between men and women as the only real source of hope.

The leftist revolt against female leadership is self-destructive. The movie gets underway when the main character, Theo, runs across his American ex-wife Julian, who is the leader of a pro-immigrant group. You get the strong impression that Julian is a wise, down-to-earth leader and never forgets the love of humanity that brought her to be a human rights activist. Naturally, she’s taken out by a faction of her group that wants to ignore their core humanist values in order to start a violent revolt. The fact that the anti-violence faction has all the women (and some men) and the pro-violence faction is entirely male doesn’t strike me as an accident, but a symbolic alliance with the feminist value of insisting on respect for women, even as some facetiously claim that feminism somehow impedes other struggles for justice.

Read the rest of the article at Pandagon.

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Silent Hill (2006)

Excerpt of: Silent Hill Movie via Official Shrub.com Blog by Andrea Rubenstein [tekanji].

You would think that a movie that has women as the main protagonists would be a progressive step forward in terms of the portrayal of women in film. With Silent Hill, you would be wrong.

I went into the movie with the skepticism of a fan who has seen many of her favourite video games (not to mention books) ripped to shreds when they reach the big screen. I had heard that the movie was pretty good, and I was cautiously optimistic over the female protagonist who didn’t seem to fit the “sexy woman who kicks ass” paradigm that seems to have become a requirement for female heroes. I was even more interested when it was shown that the other protagonist would be a cop who, it seemed, just happened to be female.

Despite the lack of the lead pipe (I know, how could someone say they were being true to the series and not give the lead pipe some airtime??), I remained cautiously optimistic as the storyline got going. The cinematography was excellent. It was fun to recognize the monsters populating the town. The plot was both close enough and far enough from Silent Hill 1 to bug me a bit, but I never got the chance to play through all of the game so I could take it.

But, then, near the middle I started getting a sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw the themes that were emerging. By the end of the movie I wanted to throw something at the screen. Spoilers and mild rape triggers follow!

I. The Characters
The characters in the movie were both the best and the most frustrating part about it. Women, not men, were the spotlight characters; from the main protagonist, to her helper, to the main villain, and beyond. It’s rare in films of this genre, even films that are trying to make a point about gender, for there to be so many visible women in main, supporting, and extra roles.

But this was proven to be a double edged sword; none of the female characters were just incidentally female; it was all part of a larger reaching set of tropes and symbolism which will be discussed in more detail later.

First I’d like to give an overview of the female main characters. While a reading of the male characters is necessary for a full understanding of the portrayal of gender in the movie, I’m focusing specifically on what was done with the women and therefore in the interest of space I won’t be discussing the men.
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II. Symbolism
The two main themes of motherhood and witchcraft are female oriented and therefore undoubtedly played a role in selecting the gender of the main cast. Although not necessarily bad themes in themselves, they create a troublesome picture when they manifest in the movie and also the way that they juxtapose with the recurrent themes of Christianity.
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III. Female Fault
If it was one thing that this movie sent home, it was that all the bad things that happened in Silent Hill were the fault of women.


Read the rest of the article at Official Shrub.com.

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Falling Down (1993)

(AD's note: This is a very comprehensive post, please read the post in it's entirety & make sure to check out the corresponding 'movie stills' at the writer's blog!)

Excerpt of: At the Movies - Falling Down - Review via The Unapologetic Mexican by Nezua.

FALLING DOWN is a story (supposedly) about the decline of America as seen through the eyes of an "average," middle-aged, hard-working, suburban/outer city White man. It works on a few levels. At times I will speak of a conscious narrative and an unconscious one. The Conscious Narrative, as I use the phrase, will take notes on the cinematic and narrative elements that add up to show us a man breaking down much as his society is. He is a part of that breakdown as well as a cause of it as well as a reaction to it. Bill Foster is on the edge of both madness and awareness. He is meeting the ultimate disillusioning and disenchantment and dissolution of the American Dream, to which he gave full and total allegiance. He is also losing his mind.

The Unconscious Narrative, as I use the phrase, is not always unconsciously wielded, but sometimes I think it is. What I mean by this is that under and along with the first narrative I speak of, there are the messages that women are superficial, weak, ineffective creatures; that Blacks are criminals, pawns, and a threat to America's fiber; that Asians are either smart and by the side of the White Male, or Otherly conniving overcharging storeowners (also weak and easily dominated); that Latinos are thugs and women-haters, also a threat to America's fiber and cultural makeup; the usual nasty hype about Gays; that a privileged attitude is normal, that misogyny is normal, and some others. At times this is purposely achieved. And I offer the benefit of the doubt to these writers that at other times they are just writing women, for example, as they think of them and see them.
The front cover lets us know that our protagonist is "an ordinary man at war with the everyday world." "Ordinary man" is key, as is "the everyday world."

The back cover blurb sums up the theme as "Are we falling apart?" and tells us the protagonist is"slipping over the edge" and "ready to get even" with the "pressures of big-city life" that "can anger everyone."
Continue Reading at The Unapologetic Mexican...

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V for Vendetta (2005)

Published in the Hour, by Stuart Trew.

The Wrong Vendetta

A certain amount of shock and awe followed the release of the Wachowski brothers' screen adaptation of the comic series V for Vendetta. After all, the film is at heart about collapsing a fascist, puritan state - with terrorism if necessary - and draws blatant parallels between Nazi Germany and "war on terror" England and America. Big fucking deal, as they say.
I would have eaten this shit up too if it hadn't reeked of the very puritanism the original creators of the comic book V attacked so viciously back in the early '80s. Writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd didn't shy away from the word "anarchy" like the Wachowskis did, either for its negative connotation (anarchy = chaos) or maybe its implicit moral ambiguity (anarchy is simply democracy taken seriously). Or maybe because it would have required leaving in all of Moore's crucial female characters.

Anarchy, for it to work, requires respect, which in turn produces equality (between genders and races). Whether they realized it or not, the Wachowski brothers (who also gave us the Matrix trilogy) ignored the equality part when they removed the original comic's obvious and foundational feminist elements. Yes, women's lib is practically the driving force behind the comic V for Vendetta. The film, by ignoring this, reinforces the institutional sexism of both our world and theirs.

Continue reading here....

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Smoke Signals (1998)

Smoke Signals - Review via diaries of an eccentric nerd athaba hijibiji by zooeylive.


I was watching the film Smoke Signals yesterday. I am embarrassed to admit that I have not seen it before. But somehow everytime it was screened at UO, I missed it. For someone like me, working on historical trauma, it is an extremely interesting film. For the protagonists of this film, colonialism and genocide are not things of the past but forces with which they have to deal in very concrete ways within their everyday lives. Sherman Alexie's screenplay succeeds to weave a complex net of material realities, traumatic histories and pop-cultural references and as we get within that net as spectators, we begin to realize that there is no respite anywhere for us. The colonialism is a historical-material fact, but it is also a highly textualized reality. In fact, within Smoke Signals, the materiality and the textuality are often inseparable. The film also reminded me a lot of Gerald Vizenor's concept of "survivance"--a combination of survival and resistance--which sums up the textual strategies of not only a lot of Native American writers and artists--but also writers and artists from different parts of the Third World. I know know, I am generalizing and we are all supposed to focus on "specificities" right now. And without losing track of my basic comittment to specific materialities and histories, I would also like to throw this out--maybe it's high time that we begin to look into colonization as a global process? Maybe it's high time that we begin to look comparatively into the different experiences of colonization rather than through exclusivist racial or national frames?

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Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943)

The Good Ole Days that Weren’t

From The Primary Contradiction by Yolanda Carrington.

Exerpt 1:


I urge you all to watch this old cartoon short. Titled Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, it is one of the infamous Censored Eleven cartoons that were taken out of official circulation in 1968, due to their overtly racist images and themes.

It’s hard for me to believe that animated shorts like Coal Black were regular staples at the movie house in the 1940s, given their decidedly child-unfriendly content. In light of our current political and cultural landscape, this sixty-three year old snapshot from history speaks volumes about our society and our culture. So much shit comes out at you here, so pay close attention. I’ll post a full critique of this short later on, but I just wanted y’all to see it first. Off tha chain.

WARNING: Blatantly racist and misogynistic images.

Exerpt 2(follow-up post):

As you probably guessed from watching the clip, the Merrie Melodies cartoon Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943) is a supposed hot jazz retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, animated and produced by Warner Brothers animator Robert Clampett. (The character is named “So White”—the short is titled “Coal Black” because producer Leon Schlesinger wanted to avoid confusion with the Disney film.) This short is one of the infamous “Censored Eleven,” eleven Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts that were yanked from rebroadcast syndication in 1968 to accommodate that era’s swiftly-changing racial climate. Many of these banned cartoons (the Censored Eleven represents a mere fraction of the racist animation produced before World War II) are widely available over the Internet, since most of these works have long entered the public domain.

According to Wikipedia, Clampett was said to have been heavily influenced by jazz performers and hipsters from the 1940s Black jazz scene in New York, as well as the jazz-themed all-Black movie musicals that were wildly popular with audiences during that period. He and his animation team actually visited a Black jazz club in Los Angeles (ahhh….studying the Negroes!) to get a feel for the interaction and lingo. Today, despite having been banned for four decades, Coal Black is rated by animation experts as Clampett’s masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest animated cartoons ever made.

In 2006, we Americans find ourselves in a political situation nearly identical to the one faced by Coal Black’s audience in 1943. I know that for many of you, watching Coal Black was extremely offensive, even sickening. But I really wanted folks to see this short, and I was really hoping that others would recognize what I saw when I watched the clip, which was such a heavy experience for me that I had to watch it over and over again. Honestly, I have never seen anything like it, a piece of media that is so offensive yet so crystal-clear in its political message. I wanted everyone to recognize the eons and eons of memes in the narrative and to make the connections between those memes to grasp the overall message.

For me, Coal Black stands as one of the clearest expressions of the relationship between white supremacy, patriarchy, and militarism. Needless to say, the short is rife with almost every racist meme ever projected onto African Americans. An inventory of the damage:

Continue reading at The Primary Contradiction.

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The Dream Machine

My friends and I love to watch movies. Part of our political work together is critiquing the content of mainstream Hollywood films---yes, your Jaws, your Beverly Hills Cops parts one through three, and your Titanics. You see, many leftists watch films and profess a love and respect for the art form, but usually these folks are talking about "sophisticated" cinema, like arthouse features and political/historical documentaries. Going unspoken in this dialogue is a false division between high art and "low-brow" mainstream culture.

But here's the thing---all culture is political, because all culture is produced by human beings in human societies. Any culture that is produced by any person in a society will reflect the given political reality and consciousness of that person's time. In our time, our political reality is white supremacist capitalist societies, the so-called "First World" of Canada, the United States, and other Western countries. As a result, our entire cultural expressions reflect this reality, especially the mainstream entertainment industry. As the phrase demonstrates, this is an industry, a huge arsenal in Western capitalism-imperialism. High art, low art, and the false division between the two are deeply entrenched within the political reality of Western imperialism.

And let's be honest here---most people watch mainstream movies and TV shows. In fact, most folks' perspective of the world around them are heavily shaped by mainstream culture, those relentless data streams that are pumping daily out of plasma screens, speakers, and LCD monitors from coast to coast. Through movies, television, sports, and music, young people learn what is family, what is normalcy, what is sex, and what is love. These programs shape our desires and our dreams---hell, they don't call Hollywood the "dream factory" for nothing. Mainstream media doesn't merely reflect the popular consciousness; it molds it into being. That's the power of ideology for you.