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You can use text analysis to support just about any alternate reading you want, but at a certain point you have to deal with the bare facts of the text, and something as noxious and gratuitously racist as those robots in Transformers 2 are borderline unwatchable.
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Jan 23, 2014 07:24
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There's a big reveal that the Decepticons are not a race but a class, and it has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. When does that happen?
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Jan 23, 2014 07:35
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Lord Krangdar posted:not because the movie is racist. Society is racist. No, I believe this at all. You can create a plausible textual workaround for it, but it's basically the philosophical version of adapting Star Wars canon to iron out bloopers. The fact is, filmmaker Michael Bay inserted noxious and inflammatory stereotypes in a film for children, and the only way to see it as something beyond shuck-and-jive is to apply metatextual critical thinking that children lack. It's just despicable to put those characters out there in a work like this and lean on deep reading to back it up. I realize this sounds like anti-intellectualism, but I don't think it is, I'm just dealing with the material of the material. I don't think you can brush inflammatory open wounds and stereotypes that are actively harmful off with puzzlebox everything-is-not-what-it-seems readings.
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Jan 23, 2014 07:43
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Huh, I didn't remember that at all. My point remains, though, which is that though that characterization may be made defensible by certain readings of the text, it's completely indefensible when you place the movie in its context. It's a disgusting, sleazy thing to do, one that even in its most charitable reading preys on and legitimizes a particularly ugly and unresolved stereotype which belongs dead. Kids - the target audience - should not see that, they don't have the critical faculties to decide whether or not the film "condones" it, they'll just absorb it as something normal and okay.
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Jan 23, 2014 07:59
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It's "controversial" because I see Terry's thread as a great rhetorical game but one that doesn't really get anyone anywhere. I like Transformers 2 and 3, and I think Bay is one of the most innovative and brilliant voices in American film. I also think hehas a bad habit sometimes of being our Riefenstahl. Deal with what the films are and where they lay. They're giant toy commercials for children. Painting those characters as Fetchit stereotypes may have helped your reading of the film, but the practical downside is that a bunch of kids have this: That is absolutely detestable and culturally damaging. I don't give a poo poo whether the Autobots and Truckman are the good guys or whatever, I give a poo poo about whether the very talented filmmaker Michael Bay laid stones to normalize one of the most insidious and hateful caricatures in US history. I don't believe in reading film like a Rabbinical scholar, I can't divorce this decision from its cultural impact.
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Jan 23, 2014 08:09
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Lord Krangdar posted:When I watch and interpret a film I do so as myself. I don't see the point or value of interpreting a film as a child or those other people, yet it seems to keep coming up (other examples are the Slevin thread, the Star Trek Into Darkness thread). Why would I limit my own interpretation to a child's or a dumb racist misogynist? I can do better. You don't see the point of evaluating the impact of images, that you yourself have expressed are full of meaning, on the minds and character of the children those images are created for? It's the same poo poo with Into Darkness, one can make fifty million canonical reasons "why" Khan was whitewashed, but in practical real life, it's just one less Indian role on screen.
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Jan 23, 2014 08:25
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Lord Krangdar posted:I said exactly what I don't see the point of, there's no need to re-word it into something different. And are you even really evaluating that, beyond just assuming stuff? How do you actually know the impact it had on children? What exactly do you think that impact has been? For a moment there I was about to type why, point-by-point, injecting virulent racism into a kid's movie is a Very Bad Thing To Do, but I'll let you work through it. SuperMechagodzilla posted:I don't think it matters, I don't think children are the real 'intended' audience - Hasbro Studios Presents quote:and I also honestly don't think they're that dumb. Or, at least not dumb enough that we need to fool them. It has nothing to do with being dumb, it has everything to do with being ignorant. penismightier fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Jan 23, 2014 |
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Jan 23, 2014 08:36
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Lord Krangdar posted:My interpretation comes from "the bare facts of the text". You, along with everyone else so far, have skipped over the part where you actually explain or defend your interpretation based on the text itself. Skipped right over saying why the film is racist to pretending I'm defending racist kid's movies (instead of what I'm actually doing; saying why its not racist). Imagining a hypothetical person who interprets the film your way is not enough. Stop loving quoting me back at me, that is incredibly obnoxious. I mean the bare facts of the text as a text, not an alternate universe. I'm talking about the facts of the film as a film, what it's doing and who it's doing it for. "Out of universe," as the sci-fi wikipedias say.
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Jan 23, 2014 08:46
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Lord Krangdar posted:Also funny how before my interpretation was too meta-textual for you, now apparently the exact same viewpoint is too literal. Where and when did I say that? You're trying to pull this loving "I outdodged you" smug game but it's not working because you on a basic level have yet to once address what I said in the first post you responded to. I'm saying now exactly what I said when I started this insane conversation - I don't give a poo poo about your interpretation of the events of the loving second Transformers movie, I'm talking about the cultural merits of sticking a loving classic shuck and jive stereotype in a film CREATED FOR AND SOLD TO children. I don't care I don't care I don't care whether Truckman is a bad guy. I don't care about your reading. I don't care and have never cared about any of that, and have never once addressed the merits of it. I'm talking about the cultural impact of the film, which seems to be something you're completely incapable of even conceptualizing let alone discussing. penismightier fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Jan 23, 2014 |
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Jan 23, 2014 09:05
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