Perspectives, Perspectives

[selenak]

In the last week, I read several glowing reviews of Master and Commander both in the print media and online. (As with Pirates, we'll have to wait in this part of the world to see it.) Now some of them noted that the action of said movie in comparison to the novel which is its source has been moved from 1812, when the British were fighting the Americans, to 1803, when they were fighting the French. Which in unison with something wychwood recently said to me reminds me of a larger matter: the inherent assumption on the part of film studios that an American audience won't accept Americans represented either not at all (see also: insertion of American characters as with the recent LXG), or as the antagonists. I wonder - is this assumption realistic, in your opinion?

Because the optimist in me thinks the studios might be underestimating their audience here. It might also be that I'm German, and let me tell you, if German audiences were to object to being presented as the bad guys in movies/TV shows/novels, or not being presented at all, we'd have missed out most of post WWII 20th century pop culture. And that's true for other nations as well. So in theory, there should be no reason why a well-done movie in which the antagonists are American and the protagonists are not shouldn't become a crowd-pleaser with an American audience. (Given that movies like Gladiator - ancient world, hence no Americans - or the LotR films - Middle-Earth, hence also no Americans - made plenty of box office in the US, I'd say it's already proven American audiences can identify with non-American characters and their stories even if there isn't a single American in sight.)

In other news: I do love the City Watch novels in the Discworld series. It didn't surprise me, though, that there isn't that much fanfic despite Terry Prattchett's popularity (that is, not that much fanfic if you compare it with other book-based fandoms like HP - there is some), because it's probably fiendishly difficult to do justice ot the witty dialogue and the way Pterry renders his characters and their relationships. But every now and then, a gem appears and makes me a happy fangirl. In this particular case, it not only features two of my favourite characters, Vimes and the Patrician, but also takes out that stalwart fanfic chestnut - lock up two people with a prickly relationship, make them think they're about to die - in a way which reads fresh and immensely entertaining. Enjoy here.

Incidentally, while reading it it occured to me that Vimes and Vetinari are the Avon and Blake of the Disc. You know, if Blake was the cynic and Avon the sort-of-idealist. *g* Ability to manipulate and push buttons for higher cause - check. "I hate you, but I'll better save your life because if anyone kills you, it's going to be me" - attitude - check. And I'm sure that either in Feet of Clay or Jingo, Vetinari says something along the lines of "get back to your position"...

Lastly: shocking thought of the day: mimime argues that the real life equivalent of Sirius/Remus would be Bush/Blair, here.

Comments

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

The American audience will certainly consume and enjoy films in which there's neither an American protagonist nor antagonist--the Harry Potter films are a good example of that. Although perhaps the pre-existing characters and established audience ensured the film's success.

I think Americans can enjoy films in which we're the bad guy *as long as* it's not a historical film. Or, rather, I could see a successful film being made about a minor event, but God forbid someone make a film which portrays, I don't know, the Mexican-American War from the Mexican side. Americans have no sense of humor or perspective about our own history; we prefer our myths unsullied.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Hm. So how about Little Big Man which does show Custer, certainly an American myth, from a distinctly unflattering light?

Though of course the Indians are Americans as well, so I'm not sure it counts.

Some years ago, I saw a great play, The General from America, in London, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, about Benedict Arnold. He's a tragic and ultimately sympathetic character in it. Presumably that one wouldn't have a chance to get filmed?

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

In the current climate here, I don't think Little Big Man would do well at all, and in fact I think it'd come in for some fairly vicious criticism. I suspect the remake of The Alamo is going to be horribly inaccurate & jingoistic, which is about what the average Merkin wants out of his historical films these days.

I doubt a historical play or film that put Benedict Arnold in a good light would stand much of a chance to be filmed.

Of course, I live and work in rural Texas, so perhaps my surroundings are skewing my judgment.

[searose.livejournal.com]

I am trying very, very hard to even think of a popular movie that portrayed Americans in an unflattering light. A movie that played in America.

Umm, 'Good Morning, Vietnam' did have a few scenes where a Vietnamese character let an American have it. But the protagonist was a good American, so the barbs were ultimately misdirected.

'A Man Called Horse' with Richard Harris, I believe, was a story about an Englishman going native and helping out Native Americans in trouble with white Americans. It's been a while since I've seen that movie.

'Daisy Miller' had an American girl causing trouble amongst Europeans. The movie also bombed, if I recall correctly.

'The Madness of King George'. Well, we weren't exactly helpful to the King's mental plight. But, we were still British subjects then.

Several of the Vietnam era movies paint American soldiers in unflattering terms, but those movies also fail to portray the Viet Cong as heroic partisans.

This is really hard! There has got to be something out in film where an American is unrepentantly evil with the {insert nationality here} Hero winning the day.

'A Fish Called Wanda'. Kevin Kline's character, the Ugly American idiot criminal. How about that one? Didn't he get flattened by a steamroller in that flick?

[selenak.livejournal.com]

A Fish Called Wanda: ah, but Wanda herself - not the fish, the other one - was American! Still, it's true, British John Cleese won over American Kevin Kline....

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

I don't think American audiences have a problem with movies that have no Americans in them. There are a lot of movies that have been popular that aren't about Americans at all. Also, I don't think there's a problem with presenting The Usual Allies in a bad light -- Braveheart, for example certainly presented the English badly.

Generally speaking, it's hard to cast recent historical events with Americans in a bad light, because people are still so touchy and defensive. For that matter, I would say this goes as far back as the Civil War. I do think, however, that the War of 1812 is fair game -- nobody has the slightest sensitivity about that!

It's amazing how bitter people still are about the Civil War, and how much the problems I've been chronicling in my travels in the South are the result of the desire of the rest of the country to "punish" the South for the Civil War. Which seems ridiculous, since it was 150 years ago.

This goes hand in hand with the quite serious political move to provide reparations to African Americans for slavery. Now, the last slaves were freed in 1864. Would African Americans be required to prove descent from someone enslaved? From multiple slaves? And who, precisely, would pay? Would there be the extensive research necessary to discover which white Americans, precisely, were descended from slave holders? The vast majority of the descendents in the South are as poor as the descendents of the slaves. How would they provide reparations? Or would the government provide the funds? Who would they come from? All taxpayers? If so, why are recent immigrants or the descendents of Poles who came here in 1900 responsible for paying for something that happened before their immigrant ancestors were born? And yet this is a matter of serious debate.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Bitterness about the Civil War: I noticed that when I was in Louisiana. Do you think that's because as an American/American war, no outside force can be blamed for causing it?

Reparations: well, if you take Germany as a precedent, the state inherits a certain moral responsibility and pays as a whole, as opposed to direct legal descendants of guilty parties. But of course the people whom reparations were to be paid to could be identified far more easily.

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

I think it's because we haven't solved many of the problems yet.

For example, our Declaration of Independence says very clearly that when a group of people don't feel that the government represents them, and when they have exhausted legal forms of redress, they have not only the right but the moral responsibility to peacefully divorce themselves from their government and form a new government. That's what happened. 12 states, who felt that the federal government had stacked the cards against them in congress so their interests could not be served, and which, they felt, had imposed illegal election results on them through funny business (the election of 1860) said that they were peacefully withdrawing from the compact they had entered into 80 years before. And the federal government ignored their own history and own founding principles and said that they would prevent this through force of arms.

Slavery wasn't the issue. Slavery was so not the issue at the time that it took Lincoln three years to free the slaves, and even then the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free the slaves in the border states that were part of the Union. That's right. He freed only the slaves that he had no actual authority over, and left the ones that he did. So actually, the Emancipation Proclamation did nothing. It did not, at the time, affect the life of one single person. It was a press ploy to get the Left of his time behind a war which was going badly by embracing the Left's political cause of abolition.

And then there's Reconstruction, the Marshall Plan in reverse. If you want to occupy a country in such a way that they won't have the ability to challenge you militarily for a century, that's the way to do it. Close the colleges and universities. Remove the ability of the states to raise taxes so that they can't afford public schools or other government services. Tax land at such high rates that many people will lose their property to government confiscation. Require that anyone who served in *any* military or civilian capacity under the former government cannot vote, hold office, hold a public job, or enter into legal contracts. It's a fairly close parallel to Russian occupation of East Germany, and that was such an economic success, right?

A century later, the regional economic differences persist. A century later, there are parts of the South that are straight out of the Third World, with no indoor plumbing, few jobs, and, like the county I was in Mississippi, 70% of the population living in poverty. Ironically, many of those living in poverty are the descendents of the slaves that the war was supposedly fought for.

Ouch.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

That would explain why in the John Wilkes Booth section of Assassins by Stephen Sondheim, the Balladeer sings, among other things, "While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews/ Because of you, John, now gets only raves".

In the region of Louisiana I visited, about 45% of the population according to my friend who is a librarian there was analphabetical, and poverty was similarily widespread. She says the first time people there felt properly part of the union was ironically 9/11!

Re: Ouch.

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

I believe it!

Of course, it's not that way in much of the South. Some states have really come a long way, especially since the Second World War. I think that's really the turn around. So many young men left the South and went places -- not just in Europe or Asia, but in other parts of the country. And then the GI Bill sent them to college. Lots and lots came home. And brought with them businesses that wanted an educated workforce. And started businesses and schools. Now, many of American's finest public universities are in the South.

But the problem is the people who were left behind, who lack the skills and training and opportunity to make the better life that they see other people getting. These are the people the politics of hate appeal to, people with no chance at a better life who are ripe for the scapegoating hatred of the Right. As though firing gay people would provide them jobs. It wouldn't, because the jobs they can't get are the ones that would require education they can't afford, based on primary schooling they didn't have. As though not letting African Americans into top colleges would give their children the spaces. It wouldn't, because the high schools their children go to don't prepare them well enough to pass at top colleges.

But instead of spending money to fix these problems and provide opportunities, the Right just scapegoats whatever minority is convenient and keeps the hate boiling, along with the votes. And the Left hates and ignores "ignorant rednecks" and disowns them. We'd rather give to charities that promise to end hunger in Bangladesh rather than give to our own "undeserving" kin. They're the Left's dirty little secret, and we hate them more than anyone else.

But when we do that, we just allow the politics of hate to get a larger and larger foothold. The only way to difuse it is for us to get out there, to take groceries to people who hate gay people and prove that the Right isn't right. Try selling that to rich gay men!

I personally love movies where Americans are the bad guys.

[alara-r.livejournal.com]

I only find it in anime, of course; you're quite right that domestically we just do *not* have American bad guys (unless everyone in the story is American.) This results in weird shit. I once totaled up all the starship captain and other leading character roles in space-based sci-fi, and came up with out of fifteen characters, only four were non-Americans, and of those four two came from British TV shows and one was from a far-flung future loosely based on the American West and so could easily be interpreted as an American. In other words, Jean-Luc Picard is the only non-American leading man/starship captain in an American program where anyone has a recognizable nationality at all, that I could find.

In "Gasaraki" the Americans are the bad guys, or among the bad guys, anyway. This is an anime. I thought it was nifty, although I actually couldn't tell until the very end if the over-the-top Mishima-esque right-wing Japanese nutbar was supposed to be heroic or villainous. (The answer: heroic. Now *that* didn't work for me at all.) Unfortunately the anime featuring Americans as villains tends to have the Japanese doing absurd, insanely nationalistic things, like stealing a nuclear sub their government created jointly with America, and the story supports them. I can't help but think there are better ways to make American villains than to have the Japanese do really stupid things to provoke them and have the story try to claim that the really stupid things were in fact heroic.

Re: I personally love movies where Americans are the bad guys.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Ah, Jean-Luc Picard, proud representative of Old Europe in Outer Space.*g* Do you think that nowadays, they'd change his nationality? It occurs to me that positive French characters, if they're not plucky WW II resistance fighters or from movie adaptions of Alexandre Dumas, are almost as rare as German ones...

Re: I personally love movies where Americans are the bad guys.

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

It's British books. They're easier to read than French books, and the French are usually a little disreputable! Most Americans flash on having to read A Tale of Two Cities in the 9th grade.

Re: I personally love movies where Americans are the bad guys.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Ah, that explains it. We have to read both British and French books in translation, of course, as children, and French adventure novels (i.e. Dumas, Jules Verne) are more fun than Dickens or C.S. Forrester when you're ten to twelve. Also, if you're a girl, and prone to read historical romances, you probably read Anne Golon or Juliette Benzoni as well.

That Dickens with his anti-revolutionary, anti-French propaganda. He has much to answer for.*g*

Re: I personally love movies where Americans are the bad guys.

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

I have always been hopelessly francophile, and adored Dumas and hated Dickens. Actually, it started me thinking about heroes and villains and how we see them having a lot to do with where we're standing.

(That, and a vivid past life in nineteenth century France. Or at least I believe so.)

Juliette Benzoni is an absolute favorite of mine, though I didn't find her until I was in college. I actually found The Eagle and the Nightingale in French first. (While I don't speak more than two words of German, I'm quite fluent in French. And Latin. If I need to speak to a priest....) :)

[lakrids404.livejournal.com]

Has it not ever irritated you, when you have seen old American war movies? That the Germans seems to have vocabulary of two words Halt und Achtung, or with some strange accent, that I personally not have not heard spoken by any Germans. The quiet American http://imdb.com/title/tt0258068/ is, I think, produced by American company. I don’t think that it was very successful, which can have something to do with, that it arrived after the 11/9 (the American, not Chile’s). I have not seen the film, but I have read the book, when I had a period, where I read most of what was translated of Graham Greene. A good book and out from the reviews also good movie.

The patrician and Vimes slash, that just too strange. Slash is something that happens to characters in American tv shows and Harry Potter. There is nothing like fanfiction, to let one see the well-known characters, in a totally new light.
Sam and The Patrician ( a character that seem to get more mellowed, there more Terry Prachett write about him), are two characters that, in a round abound way, respect each other, but I don’t think that they deep down really understand what drives the other character. The Patrician of course knows how to push Vimes buttons, but I don’t think, that he really can understand/accept how Vimes sees the world.
Terry Pratchett do I think, really loves his characters. Even with his over the top villains, do I get the feeling that he understands why they do horrible things, which does not mean that he excuses or forgives them. They are still people but also horrible people.
Carrot is one of the few character, is the one character that seems to get a slightly more ambiguous character, is he really that simple or is he really really complex. Still going for really simple, but it’s nice ( not right ) to have another filter, too look through his actions.

what do you mean...

[selenak.livejournal.com]

American war movies? I didn't notice more vocabulary or a better accent in the new ones. *g*

Seriously now: sometimes it irritates me. Sometimes it amuses me. Depends. And sometimes you get a director using first what we call "operetta Nazis" here in Germany (i.e. the ones described above) and then atoning for it by presenting the genuine article, as Spielberg did - just compare his stooges in the Indiana Jones movies with Amon Goeth in Schindler's List.

Agreed that TP loves his characters, good and evil. As for the concept of DiscSlash being strange, I think that after encountering Narnia slash and het, nothing can shock me anymore...