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If your character talks like "Messa so happy master", its a racist stereotype. Subversion is a defense.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:21
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Jar Jar has no masters and only ever uses the term as a rank or title for the Jedi, and is never shown to be subservient, even when being shown what constitutes as manners and social niceties in human society. He also comes from a race of people who have never been subjugated by another race, despite co-habitating a planet with technologically superior aliens (there's never really any animosity shown between gungans and naboodians, it seems like a live and let live setup on the planet), and eventually becomes an elected government official, whose accent becomes more subdued the longer he's around other alien races (as most accents do when emersed in someone else's culture). As far as "meesa" goes, my grandmother still says me instead of I despite speaking English for the past 80+ years, I'll be sure to call her a disgusting racist stereotype the next time I see her. I'll do it while she's making her home made tortillas too. The nerve of her!
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Oct 19, 2016 03:36
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If your brain shuts off when you hear someone talk a certain way you've probably never actually met people who talk differently from you.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:37
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Lol why is it so hard for you people to admit the obvious poo poo we even got people saying racist minstrel speak is just the way other people talk. I have never heard anyone say "yes massuh, meesah is free!" Before. Jesus christ.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:43
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Jar Jar not da wacist. You da real wacist.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:45
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Phi230 posted:Lol why is it so hard for you people to admit the obvious I don't think that's a quote from any Star Wars movie, so it's weird you'd make one up instead of using all the horrendously racist dialogue that is surely to be found by scanning the script.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:46
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Phi230 posted:Lol why is it so hard for you people to admit the obvious Again, Jar Jar had no masters and you're arguing with a false equivalency. Thanks for saying my grandmother speaks like a minstrel tho. That goes up there with "minorities are the real racists" in poo poo that can only be read on the Internet.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:48
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Bongo Bill posted:You're looking at superficialities. What typically motivates characters who embody those stereotypes? What kind of inner lives do they lead? http://www.vice.com/read/ahmed-best-jar-jar-binks-interview quote:Joe Morganstern of the Wall Street Journal referred to your character as a "Rastafarian Stepen Fetchit." He wasn't alone in calling foul over the potential racial implications of Jar Jar. As someone who is very much conscious of being black in mass media, how did you take that? Ahmed Best is a cool, smart guy who knows his film and entertainment history, and thus knows how to place minstrelsy into its proper context. Minstrelsy didn't just disappear. It had a large and indelible impact on our culture that exists in entertainment even today in characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy (the latter of which Jar Jar was in large part based on). Charlie Chaplin's comedy (another big influence on Jar Jar) was in fact also influenced by the comedy stylings of minstrel performers, as were many (if not most or all) other Vaudeville performers. Minstrelsy was bad not because it portrayed people as acting like fools, but because it was a bunch of white actors mocking black people, stereotyping them, and portraying them as if they were some sort of inferior "other." The Jar Jar character doesn't actually do any of that. He's just a slapstick goofball played by a black man, who is also one of if not the most sympathetic and relatable characters in the movie. You can inevitably draw superficial comparisons to the minstrel shows of the past, but you can do that with any Vaudevillian, slapstick comedy character. The only reason people don't is because they're ignorant and only notice the connections when the character seems in any way "black" to them. As a result, black people aren't ever allowed to play the fool without being unfairly criticized by both white and black people for it. Only white people, or beloved cartoon characters who have long since lost any racial connotations due solely to the passage of time, are allowed to play these roles. Furthermore, Jar Jar speaks in a made-up dialect specifically because Lucas never thought it made much sense how sci-fi aliens who hailed from completely different planets and cultures always seemed to speak in the same General American or Received Pronunciation dialect that the main characters did. He explains this on the commentary track for Episode I. It's the same reason the Neimoidians speak in dialect. Lucas thinks dialects and non-English languages are cool. It's why the aliens in the old Star Wars movies always spoke languages that were essentially just recordings or imitated recordings of native speakers of languages like Quechua, Zulu, and Kalenjin. No one ever cared about that, though, because, again, they were ignorant, and largely had no idea those were actual languages that were being "appropriated" and presented as the languages of weird alien characters. They only began to notice when the aliens started speaking actual English lines that way. homullus posted:Watto is inexcusable. Why? He's a blue elephant-bird who happens to superficially resemble some racist depictions of Jews, but who speaks with a stereotypically Italian accent and is actually portrayed somewhat sympathetically despite being a slavemaster. Even the ADL said the accusations of racism were stupid. Given all this and the fact that George Lucas obviously wasn't actually making any anti-Semitic statements with the character, it's just a weird thing to get seriously upset about. Watto is an entertaining and even strangely likable character. Some people have noted a connection to Fagin, particularly Alec Guinness' famous portrayal of the character, and that's pretty plausible and even likely. But Oliver Twist is still a classic story, and Fagin is still a classic character despite the obvious and cringe-worthy anti-Semitic overtones of his portrayal. I don't see anything wrong with referencing the character. He's an archetype. Artists shouldn't be afraid to play around with it and comment on it as long as the ultimate message isn't anti-Semitic, and I think that's what Lucas did. I mean, hell, look at Ben Kingsley's critically-acclaimed portrayal of the character from 2005, in a film directed by Roman Polanski, who is of course Jewish:  Here's British Jewish reviewer Norman Lebrecht commenting on Kingsley's portrayal: http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/050929-NL-twist.html quote:As for Fagin, there is no telling where he came from. Dickens admitted that he knew no Jews at the time. Yet, like Shakespeare before him, he allowed the villain a certain endearing avuncularity. One feels Fagin's sorrow as gives up Oliver to the custody of Sikes. Rachel Portman's attractive score studiously underplays the accompaniment of Jewish music to Jewish misery. That sounds a whole lot like Watto in Episode I and Episode II. And this is what Kingsley had to say about the role: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/movies/a-face-lift-for-wretched-old-fagin.html?_r=0 quote:However, he said: "I think we have to destroy the stereotypes and replace them with archetypes. As an actor, my struggle is to put archetypes on the screen in the mythological sense. My struggle with Fagin was to present the Collapsed Father." I think that's exactly what Lucas did. Watto is one of the major archetypal father figures portrayed in the prequel trilogy. It has nothing to do with him being a blue-skinned Jewish space elephant-bird, or whatever. I mean, Jesus, just repeat that last phrase in your head a few times and that alone should reveal how ridiculous the whole controversy is. Jews don't actually look anything like Fagin does. Fagin is essentially just a particular form of Grotesque Human archetype which a bunch of racists labeled "Jew" at some point and tarnished forever. And that's all sci fi aliens are: Grotesque Human archetypes, which is why sci fi series like Star Wars and Star Trek are constantly getting so much flack for various alien species which some people interpret see as being racial stereotypes. That's kind of just what happens when you take the basic human form and distort it in various ways to look "alien." I personally see Watto as potentially being a sort of commentary on that, albeit on a very minor level. It gets into a lot of the same territory that band Die Antwoord does in their performance art music videos, which of course they get a lot of flack for too. Racial issues are actually a lot more complicated than our increasingly dumbed down and simplified national discourse would have you believe, and when you're running around constantly condemning obviously good-intentioned people as being malignantly racist, you should sit down and maybe think about things from a different angle and maybe see if perhaps there's more than one acceptable way to talk about these issues, especially when it comes to subversive commentary. Cnut the Great fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 03:49
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Blazing Saddles features a dude in redface, Gene Wilder putting on a mincing queen act, Madeline Kahn saying "you people", and Cleavon Little asking where all the white women at. These are racist and homophobic things. Is Blazing Saddles thus an irredeemably bigoted movie?
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Oct 19, 2016 03:50
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temple posted:If your character talks like "Messa so happy master", its a racist stereotype. Subversion is a defense. You are reducing the character of Jar Jar Binks to a stereotype just because he talks funny. In short: temple posted:Jar Jar not da wacist. You da real wacist. Yes, unironically. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 03:51
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Phi230 posted:Lol why is it so hard for you people to admit the obvious Jar Jar never calls anyone "massuh." He pledges a life debt to Qui-Gon Jinn, the exact same way Chewbacca, the hooting gorilla man from the jungle, does with Han Solo. Is George Lucas trying to draw a comparison between black people and Wookiees? Is he trying say black people are like hooting gorillas from the jungle whose proper place is enslavement to the white man? No, because that would be an idiotic conclusion to draw. Anyway, even after pledging this life debt, Jar Jar is openly contemptuous of Qui-Gon's bizarre religious faith and sarcastically questions his and Obi-Wan's wisdom and judgment at several points. He's not exactly a docile servant.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:55
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I'm in CineD and I've never seen stereotypes in media.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:03
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temple posted:Jar Jar not da wacist. You da real wacist. Racism is pretty bombad. Wait, did that mean good or bad, gently caress
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Oct 19, 2016 04:13
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RBA Starblade posted:Racism is pretty bombad. I think it was an intensifier, like "very."
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Oct 19, 2016 04:15
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temple posted:I'm in CineD and I've never seen stereotypes in media. This is dumb. Stereotypes are bad when they're oblivious, harmful, and employed earnestly . For example, the original Fagin, and Alec Guinness' Fagin, are characters of a badly stereotypical nature (though it must be said that doesn't mean they're completley artistically irredeemable). Fagins like Ben Kingsley's (and arguably Lucas's), though, are clearly not the same thing, because they're commentaries on stereotypical depictions of the past, intentionally infused with more sympathetic qualities. Not saying you can't disagree in any way, but I think that at the very least singling out characters like Watto as instances of virulent and unforgivable racism is ridiculous, and largely only happens because they're highly visible targets of opportunity by people who have an underlying grievance with the film anyway. Cnut the Great fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 04:18
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Bongo Bill posted:I think it was an intensifier, like "very." Well poo poo I just hosed that whole thing up then. 
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Oct 19, 2016 04:21
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Cnut the Great posted:This is dumb. Stereotypes are bad when they're oblivious, harmful, and employed earnestly . For example, the original Fagin, and Alec Guinness' Fagin, are characters of a badly stereotypical nature (though it must be said that doesn't mean they're completley artistically irredeemable). Fagins like Ben Kingsley's (and arguably Lucas's), though, are clearly not the same thing, because they're commentaries on stereotypical depictions of the past, intentionally infused with more sympathetic qualities.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:30
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temple posted:Jar Jar is an oblivious and earnest character. I guess Watto too but I really didn't care about him enough to remember. I think you're misspeaking because Cnut is not talking about the character personalities, he's talking about the employment of the stereotypes.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:32
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Cnut the Great posted:
It's inexcusable not because I think it's racist or intended to be racist, but because it treads wayyyyy too close to anti-Semitic caricature. Watto is a hard-bargaining cheapskate slave-owner. I get the comparison to Fagin but beyond that I don't think the comparison to Oliver Twist goes much past "boy they sure do treat children badly in this galaxy." Add to that the fact that aliens are perpetually code for race in sci fi anyway and I think Lucas invited massive misunderstanding for little benefit. There's no excuse for that.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:32
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temple posted:Jar Jar is an oblivious and earnest character. I guess Watto too but I really didn't care about him enough to remember. He isn't referring to their personalities.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:34
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Bombad meant "superb" or "great". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uEwLQAxc78
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Oct 19, 2016 04:34
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homullus posted:It's inexcusable not because I think it's racist or intended to be racist, but because it treads wayyyyy too close to anti-Semitic caricature. Watto is a hard-bargaining cheapskate slave-owner. I get the comparison to Fagin but beyond that I don't think the comparison to Oliver Twist goes much past "boy they sure do treat children badly in this galaxy." Add to that the fact that aliens are perpetually code for race in sci fi anyway and I think Lucas invited massive misunderstanding for little benefit. There's no excuse for that. But would you think that he was treading close to being anti-Semitic if he talked like a midwesterner instead of a noo yawkah? Because it seems weird to locate the stereotype in these personality traits but hang the stereotypicality solely on the coding of an accent and potentially visual design.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:35
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RBA Starblade posted:Racism is pretty bombad. Racism is bad, and it says something that after all these years, the prequels are still forcing some to confront it by dealing with their fear of people talking different than they do.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:36
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Brainiac Five posted:I think you're misspeaking because Cnut is not talking about the character personalities, he's talking about the employment of the stereotypes. Stephen from Django is satire. He's outrageous and gets his comeuppance. He even has a moment of humanity. Jar Jar is the comic relief sidekick. He's an alien version of Short round or Data (from the Goonies). Edit: The ethnic sidekick. temple fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 04:37
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temple posted:No, my statement works both ways. George Lucas is married to a black woman, famously said "Black women are for grown ups", and believes himself to be a champion for black film. And he had a jive walking and gullah talking buffoon played by and modeled after a black man in his movie. No, it doesn't, but okay, whatever, George Lucas should have his throat slit and burn in the fires of hell. Fine. Ahmed Best should probably face that too, because he was responsible for the mannerisms people locate the minstrelsy in. Whatever. Jar-Jar being a sidekick is strange because he's directly responsible for so many plot movements in the movie, and has an actual narrative arc. He's structurally the closest to the main protagonist of the film and is structurally equivalent to Luke Skywalker in TPM's reworking of elements from ANH. A lot of these criticisms seem to come not from analyzing the movie but insisting that surface resemblances mean identicality.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:42
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temple posted:No, my statement works both ways. George Lucas is married to a black woman, famously said "Black women are for grown ups", and believes himself to be a champion for black film. And he had a jive walking and gullah talking buffoon played by and modeled after a black man in his movie. Man, Ahmed Best really hit it on the head with the "we're only accepted when playing the villain" bit. This post is a perfect example of that way of thinking.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:48
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Brainiac Five posted:No, it doesn't, but okay, whatever, George Lucas should have his throat slit and burn in the fires of hell. Fine. Ahmed Best should probably face that too, because he was responsible for the mannerisms people locate the minstrelsy in. Whatever. ruddiger posted:Man, Ahmed Best really hit it on the head with the "we're only accepted when playing the villain" bit. This post is a perfect example of that way of thinking.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:53
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temple posted:Even side characters can have arcs. This is just a switcheroo of sidekick-protagonist relationship. What is just a switcheroo of sidekick-protagonist relationship? It would be great if you could find it in your heart to sin greatly by writing more than a single line in response, so that interacting with you isn't like pulling teeth. Anyways, if Jar-Jar talked white, would he be an acceptable character?
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Oct 19, 2016 04:55
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Brainiac Five posted:What is just a switcheroo of sidekick-protagonist relationship? It would be great if you could find it in your heart to sin greatly by writing more than a single line in response, so that interacting with you isn't like pulling teeth. What is talking white?
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Oct 19, 2016 05:00
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temple posted:Even side characters can have arcs. This is just a switcheroo of sidekick-protagonist relationship. He literally predicted your response. Don't be salty because he had your number.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:00
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temple posted:Protags often have sidekicks and it is entirely lazy reading to switch their roles to produce a profound interpretation. Apply occasm's razor, analyze the scenes, whatever. There are 2 major characters (Jin and Obi-Wan) who have arcs that you are ignoring. Why are you assuming that the Jedi are the protagonists of TPM? Like, by Occam's Razor, they're fulfilling the role C-3PO and R2-D2 did in ANH. You can argue that those two are the protagonists of the movie, but Luke is certainly not their sidekick. And Jar-Jar isn't anybody's sidekick in the movie. He's not a foil character to anyone. His character doesn't exist to provide reflections of another character's traits or personality. He has as much agency as any other character within the story. You're starting from the presumption that the black guy is necessarily the sidekick. You could argue against this by providing, say, an example of how Jar-Jar is a foil to another character. Note that saying "Jar-Jar is a foil to character X" does not fulfill this requirement. Let's say Midwestern Received. Granted, Jar-Jar isn't talking Gullah or Jamaican Patois or Seminole Creole or AAVE, but let's replace his made-up dialect with Midwestern Received.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:06
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Brainiac Five posted:Why are you assuming that the Jedi are the protagonists of TPM? Like, by Occam's Razor, they're fulfilling the role C-3PO and R2-D2 did in ANH. You can argue that those two are the protagonists of the movie, but Luke is certainly not their sidekick. And Jar-Jar isn't anybody's sidekick in the movie. He's not a foil character to anyone. His character doesn't exist to provide reflections of another character's traits or personality. He has as much agency as any other character within the story. You're starting from the presumption that the black guy is necessarily the sidekick. Using Midwestern received would not be Jar Jar.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:15
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Thai distinguishes between b and p, and has distinct r and l sounds, so it's interesting people hear Thai accented English as "Asian". Is it possibly because of the tones in Thai getting it mistaken for Mandarin/Cantonese tones and Japanese pitch-accenting? Or is it because of the meter of the line delivery?temple posted:You stated that Jar Jar isn't a sidekick and is the main character. I addressed that. I could argue a lot of things but I've made my case already, with support. Your evidence is that "other characters have arcs" and "protagonists often have sidekicks", which is convincing to the brain-dead and them alone. Okay, so the character consists entirely of a made-up accent and nothing else? Brainiac Five fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 05:16
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temple posted:You stated that Jar Jar isn't a sidekick and is the main character. I addressed that. You haven't, at all. You've just stated that Quigon and Obiwan have arcs, which is irrelevant.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:23
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I will say this, Lucas got it right with giving the villains the whitest accent possible. y'all some straight villains for real. The devil tricks with a silver tongue.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:29
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homullus posted:It's inexcusable not because I think it's racist or intended to be racist, but because it treads wayyyyy too close to anti-Semitic caricature. Watto is a hard-bargaining cheapskate slave-owner. I get the comparison to Fagin but beyond that I don't think the comparison to Oliver Twist goes much past "boy they sure do treat children badly in this galaxy." Add to that the fact that aliens are perpetually code for race in sci fi anyway and I think Lucas invited massive misunderstanding for little benefit. There's no excuse for that. Well, if he's a reference to Fagin then the part where he's greedy is pretty unavoidable. That's the archetype. The reason I don't think it's inexcusable is because Watto isn't actually a specifically Jewish character in any way, and because The Phantom Menace is a movie filled with greedy characters of all walks of life and appearances. The trilogy is all about how Anakin himself becomes the greediest person in the universe. Lucas isn't making any point other than that greed is a part of the human condition and is everywhere. Again, Jewish people don't actually look anything like that infamous stereotypical portrayal. Take away all the historical baggage and it could be a Dick Tracy villain. I think it's dumb that we live in a world where you're obligated to walk on eggshells if you have an alien character with a big floppy elephant nose which in reality corresponds in appearance to no group of human beings who have ever walked this earth. If you want to take away the power of the stereotype, I think people stop being afraid of it and actively labeling it as being Jewish, since it isn't in any meaningful way apart from inside the minds of racists. (And to be clear, I'm not saying you or anyone else with well-intentioned concerns are the "real racists" or anything dumb like that.) That's basically what The Phantom Menace does. If you take Fagin and turn him into a blue alien with hummingbird wings and an Italian accent, then by all means it should become completely innocuous, because there is no longer any indicator of Jewishness nor any intrinsic reason the character should be read as Jewish. It's a way of rehabilitating a classic character with historically problematic* aspects, same as modern portrayals of Shylock do. Notice no one seriously wants to just get rid of Shylock, they want to rehabilitate him by retaining the redeeming aspects of the character. I also don't think anyone seriously argues that Alec Guinness' take on Fagin has no value as a performance, they usually just lament the aspects of it that are beyond-the-pale caricatures of Jewishness. I don't think Watto displays any of those aspects because the context of the character is so seriously removed from anything like that. *(I'm also taking back this word.) e: temple posted:No, my statement works both ways. George Lucas is married to a black woman, See, this is another thing. When I watched Temple of Doom on VHS as a kid I thought Short Round was the coolest. I identified with him and I wanted to be him. He had some of the best lines and he could even hold his own with Indy when it came to kicking rear end. Then I found out he was a horrible racial stereotype who promoted harmful perceptions of Chinese people and I was bad for liking him. Same as with Jar Jar. I was the clumsy awkward kid who no one took seriously (probably a big shocker to many of you) and so naturally I empathized with him and was happy to see him prove his worth to the other characters as the movie went on and become a respected hero in his own right, without fundamentally changing who he was, because who he was was actually perfectly okay. Then I found out he was a horrible racial stereotype who promoted harmful perceptions of black people and I was bad for liking him. I don't know where all these people are who watched these characters and then came away with a negative perception of people of various ethnic identities as a result. I don't think they exist. But there sure were a whole lot of sticks-in-the-mud who just didn't end up liking the characters who wrote a lot of histrionic articles and thinkpieces trying to incite a moral panic. Cnut the Great fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 05:45
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I think I prefer how TFA has people of color actually being protagonists of non-CGI characters instead of whatever is apparently going on with race in the Phantom Menace. Even if all the near stereotypes are meant to force white people to reexamine their view of the world, it's still being centered around white people.
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Oct 19, 2016 07:45
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Yeah for how great Lucas was with all the subversive commentary on race he couldn't make a single main character who was a human not white in 6 movies.
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Oct 19, 2016 07:51
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The decision to cast almost entirely white people in visible roles in the first six Star Wars film was certainly entirely up to Lucas, and in no way influenced by the film industry that very nearly half a century later is still demonstrably reticent to do anything else, yes sir.
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Oct 19, 2016 08:00
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The remarkable thing about TFA's progressive casting is that it's the whole extent of the movie's moral development. Women and people of colour can be protagonists, but the actual storytelling and morals have regressed from the prequels (which despite all their boneheadedness were in the end more morally and psychologically developed than the OT).
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Oct 19, 2016 08:14
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