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Black People die first

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Cinematic stereotypes reflect and shape common prejudices. Perceptions can be influenced by portrayals of Asians as nerdy, black men as dangerous and Latinas as fiery. So, how does Hollywood portray various groups?

In recent years, there has been increased attention on racism and sexism in Hollywood films, which can be reflected in who acts in front of the camera, who directs behind it and how people are represented on-screen - and often all three. To illustrate how stereotypes have developed in Hollywood, DW analyzed tropes used in more than 6,000 Oscar-eligible movies since 1928.

Hollywood history provides many examples of racist caricatures. Black and Asian people have been repeated targets. Take the 1961 Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's and the bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi, whose stereotypical "Engrish" accent was intended to mock Japanese people. He is notorious, and there are so many more examples.
From racist caricatures to lingering stereotypes
"Racism, in the form of job exclusion and racially stereotyped roles, has defined the Hollywood film industry since its birth in the early 1900s," the sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen writes in her book, Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism. Indeed, Asian characters in the early days of Hollywood mostly appeared in the form of racist cliches - either as mysterious, menacing villains or as laughable caricatures such as Mr. Yunioshi. In addition to everything else, that character is played by the entirely white American actor Mickey Rooney, thus making it an example of yellowface: a non-Asian person impersonating an Asian person.

This practice used to be quite common in Hollywood. Production teams were reluctant to hire minority actors of any kind, instead often opting to use white actors in their place. This practice became self-reproducing: Sociologists have found that prejudices break down when people of various ethnic groups have increased contact with each other.

But Asian communities have historically been frequently marginalized in the United States. "Even today, most images of Asians and Asian Americans on screen weren't created by Asians or Asian Americans, but by people who don't know much about them," says Kent Ono, who studies media representations of race at the University of Utah. "This creates a very strange idea of who Asians and Asian Americans are for those who don't know any Asian people. And it also creates a very confused and estranged relationship by Asians and Asian Americans to Hollywood, because they can't fully identify with this bizarre representation of themselves."

The information on these stereotypical cinematic devices has been compiled in the community-generated wiki TVTropes.org, from which the names of the various tropes detailed in this article are drawn. Users there can document any recurring motif they observe in a piece of media: Which TV shows claim Elvis is still alive? Which video games feature a creepy child character? Does a movie feature a white actor dressed up to look Asian?

In 2012, for example, the movie Cloud Atlas drew criticism for making many of the non-Asian actors up as Asian characters for part of the film. Many critics argued that, as there are already so few roles for Asian actors, let alone roles that are not caricatures, white actors should not be cast to play Asian characters. That came up again when Scarlett Johansson starred in the live-action film of the classic Japanese manga series Ghost in the Shell and then Tilda Swinton played an originally Asian character in Doctor Strange. And the list goes on.

A trope that began to appear more frequently in the 1960s and '70s is what TVTropes calls the " Mighty Whitey, Mellow Yellow" dynamic: a powerful white main character with a submissive Asian love interest. Before the 1950s, strict self-censorship in US cinema forbade romantic pairings between people of different ethnicities, or "miscegenation," which meant that there were even fewer roles available to Asian actors. When self-censorship gave way to the current system for rating motion pictures, instances of the trope increased, which indicated that this stereotype of Asian women had already existed before it was depicted on the screen.

Other tropes also became more prominent in the second half of the century. In the 1970s and '80s, the popularity of Bruce Lee and martial arts movies in general led to the entrenchment of the "All Asians Know Martial Arts" trope.

But the most common way of representing Asians and Asian-Americans in US media today is as the "model minority," Ono said: "They might be scientists, doctors or in some technical field. By and large, they're good students, come from good families and don't have any economic problems." This stereotype is not specifically recorded in the TVTropes wiki, but it overlaps with the "Asian and Nerdy" trope, which has occurred more frequently in recent decades.
Minority groups underrepresented
What this analysis cannot show is the share of movies that have nonstereotypical nonwhite characters. These don't typically get documented in the TVTropes wiki. In general, it's difficult to make any large-scale assessments of whether there are fewer stereotypical depictions now than there used to be.

What researchers do track, though, is the number of nonwhite actors cast and how many directors and writers of color see their films produced. "The greater the range of different roles, the less likely people are to think that a group is just one of these representations," Ono said. Conversely, there is all the more weight on individual characters for groups who are rarely represented on-screen.

Hollywood still has a long way to go, according to the Hollywood Diversity Report from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): The share of female and nonwhite characters on-screen has risen quite steadily over the past few years, but also quite slowly. Even though Asians, for example, make up more than half of the world's population, and just under 6 percent of the US population, only 3 percent of all roles in 2017 and 2018 were played by Asians. Black characters made up 12.5 percent of all roles, which approaches proportionate representation for the US population. But in many cases, the portrayals are quite problematic.
Black characters die first
As with Asians, black characters often weren't played by black people in the early days of Hollywood. In fact, they barely appeared at all, except as caricatures played by white actors in blackface. This practice originated in the American theater tradition of minstrelsy, in which racist stereotypes about black people were a staple.

Blackface occurs much less frequently now, after a long period of criticism of the practice: In Dear White People, for example, college fraternity members throw a blackface-themed party, which the film, as well as the Netflix series of the same name, use as the basis for a discussion of racism at colleges across the United States.

But, as Hollywood has featured more black characters and cast more black actors, it has also emphasized other stereotypes. To this day, black men are often portrayed as scary or angry and black women as loudmouthed and sassy. If a movie features one token black character, it's likely to be the black best friend. And, if people die in a movie, the black character is still likely to go first. Even with awareness of racial stereotypes rising, Hollywood persists with these tropes.
If Africa is featured, it's dangerous and untouched by civilization
Hollywood's stereotypical depictions of black people mostly refer to black Americans. Tropes that are about Africans are rarer, partly because few Hollywood movies have African characters. The most common trope about Africa, though, is what TVTropes users have dubbed "Darkest Africa": Movies portraying the continent as a mysterious and dangerous isolated land with only limited ties to "modern" civilization. That depiction has become less common, however.
Latino characters are defined by their sex appeal
Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the US, making up around 18 percent of the population. A look at 2,682 movies since the year 2000 finds that tropes about Latino characters focus most often on their sex appeal. For women, this translates as the "Spicy Latina" trope: a temperamental temptress who can hold her own and always looks sexy.

Men get the role of the seductive "Latin Lover," often a fling for a white woman. Additionally, films tend to ignore the diversity of Latino cultures throughout the Americas: A particular brown-skinned, black-haired look is presented as defining the appearance of all Latinos. TVTropes users call this trope the "Latino is brown" stereotype.

The stereotypes perpetuated in movies are particularly hurtful to historically oppressed and marginalized groups. But there are enough tropes in Hollywood to go around. And for groups who don't feel the detrimental effects of being stereotyped in their everyday lives, seeing themselves poorly represented causes much less pain.
Germans in movies are still often Nazis
The most common stereotype about Germans in movies since 2000 is that they are all Nazis. That is closely followed by the character of the German scientist, filed under "Herr Doctor" on TVTropes. The latter was probably influenced by the real-life scientists who fled to the US during the Nazi regime, most notably Albert Einstein, who was born in Germany.

A curious trope has to do with Germans' supposed love for Baywatch and Knight Rider star David Hasselhoff. In 1988, Hasselhoff released his version of the song "Looking for Freedom," which was originally recorded by the German Marc Seaberg in the 1970s. Hasselhoff performed the song at the Berlin Wall just weeks after it fell at the end of 1989. The song fit the zeitgeist and was indeed popular in Germany for a time. Now, the "Germans Love David Hasselhoff" trope is used by the TVTropes community as a shorthand for any person or character who receives unexpected popularity outside of their home country.
A British accent is an indicator of evil
Surprisingly, the most dominant trope about the British is not the classic posh accent or the stereotype of uptightness, though both are on the list. No, British characters overwhelmingly seem to be a popular choice for villains. This is so pervasive that the British actors Ben Kingsley, Mark Strong and Tom Hiddleston even starred in a 2014 Super Bowl commercial poking fun at the trope.

A British accent even seems to signal villainous intent in animated characters: The Egyptians in The Prince of Egypt, the Dreamworks rendering of the biblical story of Moses, have British accents; an animated car with a British accent is the bad guy in the Pixar movie Cars 2; and The Lion King, Kung Fu Panda and Rise of the Guardians all feature British-sounding villains, just to name a few films.
Russians: Tough, rough and played by non-Russians
Finally, Russians in movies are still very much defined by Cold War-era images in Hollywood. The most common stereotype is the "hard-fightin', heavy-drinkin', manly, boorish" character, as the corresponding TVTropes entry describes it. These characters often bear the brunt of the suffering during the movie, getting injured or generally leading hard lives.

Curiously, movie Russians are quite often played by non-Russians. In Rocky IV, the Swedish Dolph Lundgren started his action career as Russian boxer Ivan Drago; Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Heat and Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises are other examples. During the Cold War, there was a predictable shortage of actual Russian actors in Hollywood. But, even in newer movies, non-Russians are often cast to play Russian characters.
Diversity pays
Changing gears would be in Hollywood's best interest: According to the report, movies and TV shows with fairly diverse casts bring in more at the box office and get higher ratings from audiences. However, Hollywood is still a long way from representing the diversity of the world - or even that of the United States. White people are still considerably overrepresented in front of the camera, as well as behind it. That fact, too, has an influence on how stereotypes are perpetuated.

A few events in recent years have given rise to optimism that this might change. When she won the Oscar for her performance in Fences in 2017, Viola Davis became the first black woman to win the triple crown of acting over the course of career, including her two Tony Awards for stage work and the 2015 Emmy for her role in How to Get Away With Murder. In 2018, the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians became a box office hit with an all-Asian cast. And the Vietnamese-American actor Lana Condor has the lead role in the successful teen romance To All the Boys I've Loved Before on Netflix.

As the figures from UCLA's Diversity Report indicate, proportionate and accurate representation is not yet the norm. "We're still facing huge challenges," says Kent Ono, "and there are always going to be people that go back to the historical trove of representation. But I'm more hopeful now than even two years ago. There are great independent people doing the work to push out those representations. And sometimes, Hollywood listens."

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What Hollywood movies do to perpetuate racial stereotypes - DW - 02/21/2019

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Cinematic stereotypes reflect and shape common prejudices. Perceptions can be influenced by portrayals of Asians as nerdy, black men as dangerous and Latinas as fiery. So, how does Hollywood portray various groups?

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race tale as old as time of " uptight rich white employer learns to love through black employee's life-force "

Somewhat use of 'magical negroes,' who " often seem "to have an uncanny ability to say and do exactly what needs to be said or done in order to keep the story chugging along in the hero's favor"

Also use of black ex-con

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click to enlarge

The Upside (2019) is, at times shot for shot, a remake of the wildly successful French film Intouchables (2011), itself a remake of the French documentary À la vie, à la mort (2003), about the quadriplegic Corsican businessman Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and his Algerian caregiver, Abdel Sellou. Not only did Intouchables become the second-highest-grossing film of all time in France, 52 percent of voters in an Fnac poll deemed it the cultural event of the year. Across the English Channel, however, the film received a more mixed reception. Nigel Farndale wrote for the Telegraph, "The film . . . has been breaking box-office records in France and Germany, and one of the reasons seems to be that it gives the audience permission to laugh with, not at, people with disabilities." Anthony Quinn of the Independent, on the other hand, wondered, "Why has the world flipped for this movie? Maybe it's the fantasy it spins on racial/social/cultural mores, much as Driving Miss Daisy did 20-odd years ago-uptight rich white employer learns to love through black employee's life-force."

From its first moments The Upside works hard to dramatize the differences between black ex-con Dell Scott (Kevin Hart) and white billionaire businessman Phillip Lacasse (Bryan Cranston). Dell has recently been released from prison and must collect signatures to prove he's looking for work. Phillip is quadriplegic and must hire someone to assist him with daily tasks. Clearly apathetic, Dell mistakenly interviews to be a "life auxiliary" for Phillip, who hires him on the spot, much to the chagrin of Yvonne Pendleton (Nicole Kidman), Phillip's business manager. It quickly becomes clear that Phillip needs much more than someone to feed and bathe him. Although Dell rapidly earns Yvonne's disapproval through his tardiness and reluctance to perform medical tasks (there's an entire section about catheter insertion and manual evacuation), it's precisely Dell's penchant for rule breaking that attracts Phillip. As the film progresses, Dell gets Phillip high, hires sex workers to massage his ears (his only nonparalyzed erogenous zone), and lampoons the high-class conventions of Phillip's life (laughing during a production of Die Zauberflöte, starting a dance party at Phillip's staid surprise birthday party, scandalizing Phillip's rich neighbor, etc).

After learning of Phillip's epistolary relationship with a love interest, Lily (Julianna Margulies), whom he's never seen nor spoken to, Dell calls her against Phillip's will, though Phillip proceeds to leave her a message. They arrange to meet and while Lily initially seems comfortable with Phillip's condition, it quickly becomes apparent that it's too much for her, which provokes Phillip to angrily storm out of the restaurant, hitting a few diners and waiters in the process. The event sends Phillip into a tailspin, and he ends up firing Dell and driving away Yvonne, refusing to eat, and growing a "breakup beard." Eventually Maggie (Golshifteh Farahani), his physical therapist, comes to exhort Dell to rescue Phillip from his depressive episode. What follows is all fast cars and paragliding, an adrenaline junkie's wet dream-Phillip's paralysis need not prevent him from normative masculine risk-taking.

This trope of an African-American character whose primary narrative function is helping a white character is far from unique to The Upside. To use a term popularized by Spike Lee, these "Magical Negroes" often seem "to have an uncanny ability to say and do exactly what needs to be said or done in order to keep the story chugging along in the hero's favor," in the words of Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz. The adjective "magical" (or sometimes "mystical") is purposefully chosen: These characters often literally possess special powers. Consider Albert Lewis (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who serves as a spirit guide to Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) in What Dreams May Come (1998), or Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) as the hotel cook who teaches Danny Torrance about "the shining" in the eponymous film (1980).

Although he doesn't have magical abilities, Dell might as well, given how keenly he's able to sense what Phillip needs even when he says the opposite (Phillip rebuffs Dell's initial offer to smoke weed only to request it from him directly later). Dell's sexuality also gradually rubs off on Phillip, distinguishing Dell from the usually sexless Magic Negro only by moving into the territory of another stereotype: the hypervirile black man. Dell openly hits on Maggie as soon as he meets her, and our own voyeuristic desires for Dell are satisfied during a lengthy scene in which he struggles with his high-tech, German-speaking shower. Dell's presence not only gets Phillip to escalate his relationship with Lily, but also brings the romantic arc to a close when Dell reenters at the end to save Phillip and redirect his affections towards the obviously interested Yvonne.

While Intouchables suffers from many similar problems, it also has a heart that makes it much more enjoyable to watch than its U.S. counterpart, and we're left to wonder why. The most optimistic answer would be that after decades of overuse we're beginning to grow weary of such racist caricatures. Let's hope that's true. v

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race disability the upside kevin hart bryan cranston

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In its depiction of race, The Upside doesn't have one

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click to enlarge The Upside (2019) is, at times shot for shot, a remake of the wildly successful French film Intouchables (2011), itself a remake of the French documentary À la vie, à la mort (2003), about the quadriplegic Corsican businessman Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and his Algerian caregiver, Abdel Sellou.

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(Photo: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)

It's no secret that black women's representation on screen has lacked the depth and complexity of their experiences in the real world. While flattened or stereotyped portraits of black women have a specific and pernicious history in the United States, the power of American cultural exports ensures that, from Hollywood blockbuster films to raunchy reality TV, black women around the world end up facing the consequences of these erroneous perceptions. Despite being vigorously challenged for over a century, stereotypes such as the "Jezebel,""Sapphire," and "Mammy" routinely plague depictions of black women in art and media, as (some) writers, directors, and showrunners update those stereotypes for the current age.

Television, heralded for offering more diversity and discernment than film in its portrayals of minority groups, still struggles with a tendency to reinforce stereotypes. Even the explosion of reality TV since the early aughts-with its carefully constructed but real characters-has not strayed far from portraying black women according to rigid typecasts rooted in the white Western imagination. Beyond these caricatures though, on reality shows where contestants compete for (usually heterosexual) romantic relationships, black women regularly contend with an ugly reality: the politics of desirability, defined as the narratives a society projects about who is an ideal partner, based on how the culture has constructed ideas of beauty, intellect, personality, and character.

The result is that black women's experiences on these shows are distressing (or at least deeply uncomfortable) to watch. And if reality TV is meant to offer a form of escapism, black women's enjoyment of these shows will necessarily be limited, as they are often forced to relive some of their own dating fears and traumas in watching others endure the same on screen.

One consequence of desirability politics is the existence of a hierarchy of ideal partners. Just as real dating experiences are most biased against black women (and Asian men), when black women are present on dating reality TV shows, they are often treated as tokens-people to make up numbers, or to serve as a familiar cliché for white viewers. But it's also true that many of these shows have often historically excluded black women (along with other demographics of color) entirely. It's almost as if there are two choices for black women's representation on these shows: You can be an oversimplified character, curated to live up to a stereotype, or else absent.

ABC's The Bachelor franchise for example, which debuted in 2002, famously faced a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit in 2012 for "the deliberate exclusion of people of color from the roles of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette [which] underscores the significant barriers that people of color continue to face in media and the broader marketplace." Though a judge dismissed the suit under the protection of the First Amendment, the franchise subsequently made incremental improvements over the years in diversifying its cast. These moves included making Rachel Lindsay, previously a contestant on the most diverse cast yet of The Bachelor, the first-ever black Bachelorette,in 2017. Still, the way the show portrayed Lindsay involved more than a few racist elements, and she spoke out against these last year, decrying her depiction as an archetypal angry black woman in the finale of the show.

Lifetime's Married at First Sight-a show true to its name, where relationship experts marry off complete strangers who first meet at the altar-is not without racism either, even through nine seasons that have featured a relatively diverse cast. In fact, Married at First Sight makes plain the different rungs occupied by black men and women in the dating hierarchy, and unveils the role of colorism in this discrepancy. In terms of desirability politics, colorism works like this: Darker-skinned women, farther from an idealized whiteness than their lighter-skinned counterparts, are classed as less desirable partners. Last year, for example, a black male contestant openly revealed in his pre-marriage interview that he would not want to date a woman darker than him. Additionally, one of the show's relationship experts, Pastor Calvin Roberson, who is black, told Madame Noire in an interview, "One of the biggest problems we have on the show when we're trying to match is finding black men who want black women." Given that 75 percent of black men in the U.S. marry black women, the men on this show are outliers. Thus, not only does the show perpetuate an ugly stereotype about black women's marriageability; at least in one case, it clearly enabled the dating hierarchy to be weaponized against dark-skinned black women.

But even less-serious dating shows, ones as far as possible from having their contestants contemplate or commit to marriage, don't offer affirming experiences for black women as contestants or audience. The popular British show Love Island, which launched in 2015-and premiered its American version in early July of this year-features singles who must "couple up" to remain in a luxurious villa for a chance at winning £50,000, and of course, finding love. Prior to this season, the United Kingdom version had only ever included a handful of people of color. This year, it has featured the most black and mixed-race contestants in the history of the series (though the show still falls short in East and South Asian representation). In fact, until last year, when dancer Samira Mighty was selected as part of the opening cast, there had been no dark-skinned black woman on the show. Her time on Love Island appeared unpleasant, as Mighty experienced continuous passive and active rejections, including from her typical dating preference, a type she once described as "blondes." Mighty's dilemma was that men on the show also preferred "blondes," and "brunettes" too-in their case, this was a shorthand for white women. Eventually, she chose to leave the show of her own volition.

This year's cast included Ireland's Yewande Biala (of Nigerian, Yorùbá descent), and Newcastle's Amber Gill (of Trinidadian and English descent), the latter of whom became the first woman of color to be part of the winning couple as of yesterday, while the former was "dumped" from the island earlier in the season when her romantic interest chose someone else. Biala, like Mighty, struggled to find and cement a stable connection, and their experiences, however different, are ultimately connected. If Mighty's time in the villa was characterized by invisibility-to the point where her only mutual romantic connection was barely aired on the show-Biala was hypervisible, often portrayed as cold and detached, whereas a different racial framework might have just as easily have interpreted and portrayed her as shy and cautious. Both women's experiences resulted in plenty of commentary in British media, as many black British women shared their apprehension of watching how women who look like them get treated, and some questioning the usefulness of this representation entirely.

On the American version of Love Island, which is notably more diverse in representation in its first season than the U.K.'s (even if the narration and banter are objectively not as entertaining), the experiences of another dark-skinned, overtly coded black woman, Alana Morrison, do not veer too far from Mighty's or Biala's, though she does face her own unique, if predictable, challenges. Morrison, attracted to the sole black man on the show, gets dumped at the first opportunity possible, when two new women are added to the cast. On one hand, Morrison, portrayed as lacking in romantic experience, made the mistake of putting all her eggs in one black love basket. On the other, none of the other men showed any romantic interest in her, and given what we know about how hierarchies of dating are reproduced on television, this is par for the course.

Still, as we decipher these portrayals of race on reality TV and analyze their consequences, one question lingers: Why should anyone care at all? Very few of these shows are representative of the average person, and are instead premised entirely on accepted forms of youthful attractiveness under a white-supremacist, heteronormative, able-bodied framework. This framework does allow some black women to fit in, for a certain amount of time at least, especially when superficial diversity in the form of tokenization meets the capitalist interest, but the black women in question usually experience eventual negative outcomes. Maybe black audiences should divest from seeking representation on these shows entirely and let them be the lily-white escapist fantasies they began as.

Yet inasmuch as television replicates harmful stereotypes, and in this case has implicitly endorsed the racial dating hierarchy, we also know that the medium has been an agent of change in teaching tolerance. In a 2015 study for the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities, SUNY-Stony Brook University political scientist Jeremiah Garretson examined 30 years of TV portrayals and their effects on social tolerance from the 1970s to 2000, and determined that TV "has the potential to be used to increase political tolerance, and eliminate racism, sexism, and heterosexism." This relationship between TV and the culture, widely accepted as a reciprocal one, can therefore also alleviate some of the racist and harmful experiences of black women on these reality shows, and among the audiences that watch them-at least in theory. What's more, these shows don't need to undergo massive transformations to achieve these changes.

What if most of these shows included men and women who had broad and diverse dating experiences, or who were legitimately interested in expanding those experiences? (How to determine legitimate interest is a worry for another day.) What if, for black women specifically, these shows simply included men of all ethnic backgrounds who have indicated that dark-skinned black women are their primarily preferred "type"? One wagers that the outcomes of these shows might not be so inevitable for the black women on them, and the portrayals of these women, in turn, could finally go beyond the stereotypical and one-dimensional, all while still meeting the producers' bottom line.

Until then, even when women of color may against all odds claim a singular victory, watching black women on these shows, at least for some black women in the audience, is an exercise less in escapism than in emotional cutting.

Pacific Standard's Ideas section is your destination for idea-driven features, voracious culture coverage, sharp opinion, and enlightening conversation. Help us shape our ongoing coverage by responding to a short reader survey.

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Why Can't Reality TV Stop Stereotyping Black Women?

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It's no secret that black women's representation on screen has lacked the depth and complexity of their experiences in the real world. While flattened or stereotyped portraits of black women have a specific and pernicious history in the United States, the power of American cultural exports ensures that, from Hollywood blockbuster films to raunchy reality TV, black women around the world end up facing the consequences of these erroneous perceptions.

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‘her character was meant to be social commentary on the plight of blacks and to show the struggles of the inner city’

Hollywood’s lean on racial stereotypes – the angry black woman

On the show her son is deeply upset by his mother playing this stereotype and even though she understanding the implications of her role, she is seemingly grateful for the only acting job she's ever been given.

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I'd seen previews of Netflix's GLOW as I scrolled on social media. My friend Malcolm suggested that I check it out. Women Wrestlers? It seemed like a yawn, but it was far from it. I'd like to say early on that I loved the show, especially Tamme's character (Kia Stevens).

Even though she had no lines initially, I could tell that she was more than a background actor. Her look was too solid and her personality kicked ass before she even said a word.

I was glad when she finally got a line, and I was giddy when I realized she was a series regular. But that all turned to disgust when Sam, the Director, introduces us to her wrestling alter ego: The Welfare Queen.

I wasn't even surprised because I knew that garbage (said in a French accent like gore-bahj) was coming. I got mad briefly, but then Sam being the manipulatively smooth talking white male his character was written to be said that her character was meant to be social commentary on the plight of blacks and show the struggle of the inner city. *I paraphrased*

But Sam's words mirrored a similar conversation I had with some Hoteps online about the movie "No Good Deed" starring Cookie Lyon and Idris England. Yes, them. The Hoteps had somehow gathered that the movie was a ploy by the system to show black men abusing black women to encourage police brutality in black communities. The Hotep community's arms should be tired from all that reaching that they do.

Anyway, I argued that movies are social commentary on current conditions (just like Sam!) but they are also jobs! Many reasons black actors aren't offered the role as the leading assailant, the starring serial killer, or the headlining kidnapper is because producers fear the backlash they'll receive for casting a black actor in such a role. Which was the case of both Idris in "NGD" and Micheal Ealy in "The Perfect Guy."

Watching, I wondered what backlash the producers of GLOW feared would come from Tamme as The Welfare Queen?

And as the show went on, Tamme queened the hell out of her role by slapping hoes while wearing rope chains, dawning a fur coat and slanging food stamps in opponents' faces, and bragging about finessing the system while adjusting her Burger King Crown (shout out to Pattie LaHelle).

It was funny, but it was also hurtful. I hate stereotypes and I hate it more when we embrace stereotypes, even if it's for a check. While watching "GLOW" I kept telling myself, "This is a job. A black actor is working." Adding that Tamme's character is also funny helped me to ease into the role of a viewer and less of a critic.

This was a role Kia Stevens couldn't turn down. It might be the step she needs to climb those steep Hollywood stairs. Very similar to Uzo Aduba who almost turned down the role of Crazy Eyes on "OITNB" and Naomie Harris who initially passed on the role of Paula in "Moonlight." Just look at them now. So, gone Kia. Gone girl.

But that doesn't excuse television's lazy lean on racial stereotypes to attract viewers, neither does it explain viewer's attraction to racial stereotypes - especially minorities. GLOW itself leans on the angry black woman (Cherry), the doe eyed, submissive Asian (Jenny), and the machine gun toting Indian terrorist (Arthie). And according to the reviews, the people love it.

Arthie, Jenny, and Cherry

As a TV and Film writer, I have been encouraged to play into black stereotypes by industry "insiders." On a teen drama I'd written a la ...pick any white teen movie, an older white woman said "teenage black girls don't go to the mall every Saturday. They have other things that they have to do." She meant they have to watch their three kids and meet Madea for another family reunion. Of a coming of age script set in Buckhead, an older white man told me that "a middle class black family isn't realistic. The father is a doctor, the mother is a professor. It's not believable." As if the Cosby Show wasn't based on Bill Cosby's actual life. And lastly, of a script about friends being friends and doing what friends do, a black woman, a sistah, said "Are they gay? They talk like they're gay. Straight black men don't use correct English." You too, La'Brute?

So, it seems everyone has a love affair with stereotypes. In every show I watch, I can point them out before the show makes them obvious. Which is why I wasn't surprised with Tamme Queen of the Welfare Republic. But it's still hard to swallow. I was a working actor for 3 years and the roles for young, black men are shirtless thug, church thug, thug with a gun, and thug with a heart. Why even bother auditioning?

Well, I can go practice law when Hollywood scripts me the wrong way. But for those who rely on acting for bread and butter, a stereotype could set them up for life. I can't knock a hustle, especially one as competitive as acting. So, until Hollywood allows middle of the road characters of color, I guess we'll all be entertained by the glow of stereotypes. Oh, and the KKK fight scene? Teary-eyed beautiful.

About me: I'm a lawyer in Atlanta. I develop & manage new artists. I blog. I tweet. I create and curate videos. And I'm a represented Film/TV script writer.

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Welfare Queens and the GLOW of TV Stereotypes

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I'd seen previews of Netflix's GLOW as I scrolled on social media. My friend Malcolm suggested that I check it out. Women Wrestlers? It seemed like a yawn, but it was far from it. I'd like to say early on that I loved the show, especially Tamme's character (Kia Stevens).

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Racist Stereotypes in TV and Film that White People don't see

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Octavia Spencer's latest film is a campy carnival of creepiness and a total hoot. In Ma, the Academy Award-winner stars as Su Ann, a loner who forms an age-inappropriate friendship with a group of local teens by letting them hang out and party in her basement. There are, however, a few sinister conditions attached: the teens must call Su Ann 'Ma' and they must never, ever venture upstairs into the main house. That's because this is no sweet tale of intergenerational understanding; it's a jump-scare-filled psychological horror from the producer behind Insidious, The Purge and Get Out. And for those with a deeper knowledge of US cultural history, there's another level too: 'Ma' is short for 'Mammy', isn't it?

The history of black women on screen is closely tied up with the mammy figure, a racist caricature divorced from the reality of US race relations during slavery and afterwards. Traditionally depicted as a dark-skinned, overweight woman, wearing a headwrap and shawl, the mammy is employed by a white family to care for their children and is utterly devoted to her charges.

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There she was in DW Griffith's cinematically seminal and inherently racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, defending her master's house from Union soldiers, and she was also there in the first 'talkie', The Jazz Singer, as the subject of Al Jolson's blackface serenade. When, in 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor (male or female) to win an Academy Award, it was for the mammy role in Gone with the Wind, and when, seven decades later, Spencer herself won an Oscar, it was for The Help, in which she starred as a maid in the 1960s Deep South alongside Viola Davis, and which the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) called "a disappointing resurrection of Mammy". In between, the mammy image has proliferated on screen, and it continues to appear - part-disguised or totally unchanged - to the present day.

Maybe the most important thing to know about mammy, though, is that she never actually existed. As evidenced in the research of historians including Cheryl Thurber and Patricia Turner, while the care of white children in the antebellum US South was sometimes entrusted to enslaved people, these 'house slaves' were typically light-skinned teenage girls (conditions for enslaved black women were, in any case, so harsh that 90 per cent died before their 50th birthday). Given the poor diet available to slaves, they were also highly unlikely to have been either fat or jolly. All this, according to the psychologist Chanequa Walker-Barnes, "affirms that Mammy was a largely mythical figure with little basis in the lived experiences of black women."
A creation of white supremacy
Indeed, as Thurber has noted, literary depictions of the mammy peaked several decades after slavery, in nostalgic memoirs of the Old South written between 1906 and 1912. Along with other 'controlling images' of African-Americans such as the Sambo, the Jezebel and the Sapphire, the mammy was a creation of white supremacy, intended to bolster and legitimise the status quo. Or, put more simply, the US were so desperate to be absolved of the crimes of slavery, that such an absolver - maternal, asexual, ever-loyal and black - had to be invented.

Mammy fulfilled her soothing function so well, that she was allowed to stay on long after the children had grown up and supposedly moved on. Even now, it's practically impossible for any black actress who isn't Halle Berry to forge a career without playing a few mammy roles - a fact which speaks of the still-shameful lack of black women in behind-the-scenes positions of power in the film industry, says Kali Gross, a Rutgers University history professor and ABWH member. "We need to be in the room at every level when projects involving us are being considered (as well as being involved on ones that aren't about us) and black women have to be in positions to offer critical feedback without fear of retaliation."

Octavia Spencer has played a maid, nurse or cleaner a total of 21 times, including in two of her three Oscar-nominated performances

Recently, there has been some progress on this front, as evidenced by the career of Spencer. In addition to her acting, she is a prolific executive producer, whose credits include Fruitvale Station, Ma and - also controversially - this year's Academy Awards best picture winner Green Book. Yet even she is no exception to the mammy rule. According to IMDb, Spencer has played a maid, nurse or cleaner a total of 21 times, including in two of her three Oscar-nominated performances. What's more, the majority of these characters exist chiefly to serve the narrative of a white protagonist, by offering homespun wisdom or large-bosomed emotional support.

At the very least, Ma represents a welcome change from this sort of typecasting. The fact that it re-teams Spencer with her director on The Help, Tate Taylor, also opens up the intriguing possibility that Ma might, in fact, be a direct response to The Help's critics. In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, Spencer discussed the gap between the roles she's often offered and how she sees herself: "It's one that it's hard to break out of because it's the only box that they want to put you in. And I'm like: 'I don't have kids, I'm nobody's mother! If you ask my friends, they're like: 'You are the last person who should be a mom.' ... I've gotten very used to the needs of one. I am a nurturer of the people who I love so that comes, I guess, a little bit natural, but maybe it also is I'm a control freak. When you nurture, you can also control the situation. It's like I need to take control of this situation because I know best how to do it."
The revenge of the mammy
This nurture/control duality is one that Ma takes and runs with. If, as US cultural commentator Melissa Harris-Perry has pointed out, the mammy, "represented a maternal ideal, but not in caring for her own children. Her love, doting, advice, correction, and supervision were reserved exclusively for white women and children," then Ma flips that. Her terror, cruelty and vengeful rage are reserved exclusively for white women and children. (Or almost; the group's one black teenager meets his own symbolic fate). Not that you need to appreciate the racial dimension to be terrified by the notion of a trusted caregiver turning homicidal. In an age of distracted working parents and hyper-connected teens, the question 'Who's watching the children?' is particularly loaded.

Does this amount to a deliberate subversion of the mammy stereotype? According to Entertainment Weekly, the Su Ann/Ma character was originally written as white and Taylor changed that in order to allow the casting of his old pal Spencer (the two Southerners first met in 1995 while working as crew on the Mississippi set of A Time To Kill). Taylor's comments about the Ohio-set film also suggest he views it as a primarily gender-based satire: "Don't brush [women] under the rug and think there won't be repercussions," he told Entertainment Weekly. "Not with Ma!".

Generations of white people who don't see themselves having benefited from structural racism and race privilege will see themselves in those kids terrorised by a crazy black woman - Micki McElya

Given these details, Micki McElya, author of Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America and new book Liberating Beauty: Feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and Miss America is sceptical: "If anything, the film could just fuel the white populist rage driving so much of American politics right now. Generations of white people who don't see themselves having benefited from structural racism and race privilege... who say things like, 'I didn't own slaves; I'm not responsible for any of this,' will see themselves in those kids terrorised by a crazy black woman seeking revenge for something they didn't even do."

It's not that nothing at all has changed since the mammy was first depicted in US culture, but the shift has been more subtle. Back in 1981, Andy Warhol included the mammy in his Myths series, alongside Santa Claus, Uncle Sam and Mickey Mouse. Now, thanks to Ma, this folkloric invention can also take her place in the pantheon of scary movie villains, alongside Freddie Kruger, Michael Myers and Misery's Annie Wilkes. But then, the mammy always was a misogynoir (anti-black woman misogyny) nightmare seeped in the horror of slavery and segregation. It's just taken Hollywood this long to figure it out.
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From mammy to Ma: Hollywood's favourite racist stereotype

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Octavia Spencer's latest film is a campy carnival of creepiness and a total hoot. In Ma, the Academy Award-winner stars as Su Ann, a loner who forms an age-inappropriate friendship with a group of local teens by letting them hang out and party in her basement.

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Racial tropes applied less than two minutes in

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Laughing at Black People: Death at a Funeral Reviewed

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opens Friday at Cinema 99 Stadium 11, Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 IMAX, City Center Stadium 12, Cornelius 9 Cinemas, Division Street Stadium 13, Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13, Hilltop 9 Cinema, Lloyd Mall 8 Cinema, Movies On TV Stadium 16, Pioneer Place Stadium 6, Sherwood Stadium 10, Tigard 11 Cinemas, Wilsonville Stadium 9 Cinema.

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Prologue

The media had already deemed Gen X cynical and ironic, which was true enough, though we were never only that. Nor were we just subversive, obsessed with retro-cool, foul-mouthed, quasi-philosophical, directionless or relentlessly self-conscious, although, like the characters in the movie, we were all those things too. Perhaps we could best be described as wryly knowing. The aggregation of knowledge by that point in history had made us hyper-aware of - as well as cynically complacent about -the crappy socio-economic/historical/cultural hand we had been dealt, at least compared to our Boomer parents. But we weren't earnest about it. We were nonchalant and never sentimental. Our generation was not the type to freak out. We were as cool and as untroubled by the world around us as Pulp Fiction 's Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) calling for the Wolf (Harvey Keitel) to clean up poor Marvin's brains after they'd been accidentally blown all over the back seat of the getaway car.

Secretly, we were panicked that the best opportunities had passed us by. As the first post-Cold War generation, Xers lacked the clearly defined ideological enemy/purpose that had sustained previous generations - as well as Hollywood in the 1980s. We had no Soviet Empire to fear/hate, Vietnam War to protest, or Civil Rights movement to engage. Our inheritance was George H.W. Bush's vague "New World Order," as well as an economic recession - the fallout of the '80s grotesquerie of greed and consumerism. Given all this, we no longer had any use for the square, slick and earnest cinema of the 1980s on which we had grown up. Obviously, the conservative action pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to speak to us, but so did the upper-middle-class teen movies of John Hughes, and even the liberal demagoguery of Oliver Stone, who was way too serious. And needless to say, non-whites, women and GLBTG folk were beyond fed up with Hollywood representations that consistently marginalized, stereotyped and vilified them.

In this context, Gen Xers were hungry to both produce and consume an alternative cinema, which they began to do in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pulp Fiction came along at the height of this indie film renaissance - one that Quentin Tarantino himself had helped define and perpetuate with his 1992 no-budget crime flick Reservoir Dogs (1992)- and it become the apotheosis of the movement. While the movie was not the first expression of our generational personality - for white kids at least, Seattle Grunge had articulated it, as had Daria and Beavis and Butthead on MTV, to name just a few examples - it could be argued that it was the most complete expression. (As I discuss below, African-American Xers, had a different world to worry about in the early 90s, and different cultural expressions.)

Of course, you can also find many of Pulp's Gen X qualities in Reservoir Dogs, or in other badass subversive films of the movement, such as The Player (1992), The Crying Game (1992), The Living End (1992), The Bad Lieutenant (1992), and Deep Cover (1992), to name a few. But Reservoir Dogs is a nihilistic cinematic exercise. It is sadistic and nasty and childish. Its characters are literally paint-by-number: Mr. Pink, Mr. White, Mr. Brown and so on. Even back then, you could admire it, think it was cool, and get off on the violence, the way Tarantino had, watching so many exploitation flicks growing up. But you could never love it.

We loved Pulp Fiction. Not just because it's uproarious or filled with classic dialogue or outrageous situations, but because it is sympathetic to its characters and cares about their fates. Because Tarantino had worked out compelling themes about sin and redemption. Seeing it for the first time, the biggest shock of the movie was not Marvin's head exploding ("You're the motherfucker who should be on brain detail!") or Vincent Vega (John Travolta) plunging a giant syringe into the chest of Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) to revive her from a heroine overdose. The biggest shock was that the story had been building toward such a moving, thoughtful climax without us ever realizing it.

Prelude to The Changing of the Guard

The early '90s produced a number of good to great crime films: Goodfellas (1990), Bugsy (1991), New Jack City (1991), The Grifters (1990), One False Move (1992) and Carlitos' Way (1993), among others. One could even argue that the era was a high point for the genre. But those movies had played it straight. When Pulp Fiction hit, it exploded the genre. Tarantino and co-writer Roger Avery lampoon crime movies by creating characters whose identities as gangsters are derived largely from movies and television they had watched. On their way to shake down some kids who had ripped off their boss, for example, Jules and Vincent talk about "getting into character." Once there, Jules makes intimidating speeches while Vincent stands around glowering. This was standard stuff, but Tarantino's brilliant joke was to make the dialogue between the crimes play like something out of Seinfeld - then at its popular peak - as if George and Jerry were gangsters in their day jobs, then retired to the coffee shop to discuss such minutiae as the etiquette of giving a woman a foot massage and the of pros and cons of eating bacon.

Perhaps, in terms of the capturing the cultural zeitgeist - and in terms of transforming both the genre and the industry - the crime film with which Pulp Fiction has the most in common is Bonnie and Clyde, which had had a similar impact during another moment of generational transition 27 years earlier. Both movies took a fresh approach to the genre, appealed to young moviegoers, were cool, sexy, subversive, outrageous and graphically violent (which in 1967, at the sputtering end of the Motion Picture Production Code, was unheard of). And both movies changed the paradigm of American cinema. As has been often chronicled, perhaps most famously in Peter Biskind's tell-all tome, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the success of Bonnie and Clyde with the counterculture helped usher in the so-called "New Hollywood" of younger, risk-taking filmmakers who had come of age on European and Japanese post-war cinema and who were fed up with behind-the-times Hollywood.

Similarly, a perfect storm of cultural, economic and industry elements coalesced to produce an independent golden age in the early 1990s. The ground was laid in the mid to late 1980s, when a handful of independent filmmakers, such as John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and Gus Van Sant made independent films that began to garner high profiles, largely as a result of home video, by then a fixture of many U.S. households. Recognizing the new audience for them, the Sundance Film Festival and savvy new distributors began launching independent films to national attention, providing audiences with a more easily accessible alternative to the mainstream. Filmmakers from the era include Steven Soderberg, Richard Linklater, Allison Anders, Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, The Hughes Brothers, Kevin Smith, David O' Russell, Bryan Singer, Robert Rodriquez, James Mangold, Nicole Holofcener and Wes Anderson.

One crucial difference between Bonnie and Clyde and Pulp Fiction - and perhaps in some ways the two eras - was that the former was determinedly political, a reaction to the churning events and injustices of the 1960s (director Arthur Penn has talked about how the Depression-era desperation was meant to act as a call for action and resistance). Pulp Fiction, on the other hand, was happily apolitical. Tarantino took his passions and influences not from real life but from movies he had seen. In this way, the two films also mirrored the two generations - one that was passionately clamoring for change, another that was ambivalent toward it.

Like Bonnie and Clyde, which earned 10 nominations, Pulp Fiction's mainstream legitimation blossomed at the Academy Awards. It was nominated for seven Oscars and Tarantino and Avery shared the award for Original Screenplay. Best Picture that year came down to a horserace between Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump (1994). (2)Not surprisingly, Forrest Gump won. Like Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump was also a cultural phenomenon and a pastiche, but unlike Pulp Fiction it is a gentle and sentimental liberal fantasy that whitewashes difficult history: honey to Oscar voters. Again there were parallels to the earlier era, when Bonnie and Clyde lost Best Picture to In the Heat of the Night (1967), another whitewashing of history (the even more egregiously faux-liberal dreck Guess Whose Coming to Dinner (1967) was also nominated). In both cases, the counterculture had elbowed into the mainstream, but it remained the counterculture.

The Race(ism) Situation

Many remember Pulp Fiction as a massive comeback for John Travolta, and it was, launching him into huge commercial stardom in the second half of the 1990s in films that included the indelible Get Shorty (1995) (and the less delible Phenomenon (1996) and Michael [1996]). Travolta also became an action star of sorts (as did virtually all male leads in the 1990s) in such fare as John Woo's Broken Arrow (1996) and Face/Off (1997). Travolta's subtle performance anchors the movie, and he got much of the press. There was a great deal of excitement surrounding the fact that Tarantino showcased his dancing, which had immortalized the actor in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978)a generation earlier. His slow twist with Uma Thurman to Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell" certainly doesn't blaze up the screen the way his disco dancing as Tony Manero had in Saturday Night Fever, but it makes sense both for the older, doughier actor, as well as the character, who was perpetually high on heroin. Tarantino, ever a student of the movies, had the good sense to display the dancers' entire bodies for at least part of the number, showing that Travolta was still charmingly light on his feet despite the added pounds.

The actor who skyrocketed into popularity and has more or less stayed there ever since is Samuel L. Jackson, who has now appeared (or been heard) in almost all of Tarantino's movies, as well as some 75 other post- Pulp Fiction feature films, plus numerous shorts, television programs and video games. By the time of Pulp Fiction, Jackson's stock had been on the rise for several years. He had small but pivotal roles in high-profile films leading up to his break out role as Jules, including in Do the Right Thing (1989), GoodFellas and even Jurassic Park (1993). He had also played Wesley Snipe's crack-addicted brother in Jungle Fever (1991), a role that many felt should have brought him a supporting Oscar nomination in 1992. Jackson would have to wait a few years for Pulp Fiction to bring him that nomination, although there was some grumbling that he had been marginalized in the supporting category and that he should have been nominated for Best Actor, as his co-star Travolta had been.

Of course, one can't discuss Tarantino cinema without discussing the representation of race, and especially blackness. Tarantino's movies, most recently Django Unchained (2012), celebrate and fetishize black people and black culture in ways that many find uncomfortable and offensive. For example, Spike Lee said of Django Unchained that slavery was "not a Spaghetti Western" and he wouldn't "disrespect his ancestors" by seeing the film; Denzel Washington had a long feud with Tarantino over what he also felt were the director's racists sensibilities. Whether Django Unchained and earlier Tarantino films including Jackie Brown, Kill Bill (2003)and Inglorious Basterds (2009) are racist has engendered much cultural debate. At the heart of the issue for many, going back to Pulp Fiction, is Tarantino's incessant use of the word "nigger".

Over the years Tarantino has defended his use of the word, as well as the way in which he has rendered black characters. Regarding Django Unchained, he told Henry Louis Gates Jr. that using the word was "just part and parcel of dealing truthfully with this story, with this environment, with this land." In a 1997 interview about Jackie Brown, he told Charlie Rose, "As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are, all right? And to say that I can't do that because I'm white, but the Hughes brothers can do that because they're black, that is racist."

Indeed, the unremitting use of the 'N' word in Pulp Fiction seems designed to taunt those who would object to it, as though Tarantino is saying, 'How can I be racist when I so clearly love Black people? I've written this movie with great parts for them, that contains not one but two interracial marriages, and if you take objection to my use of the word, you don't get that my movie is meant to be subversive and anti-P.C. and post-racist.' Yet, even for those willing to grant the director some latitude, the scene in which Tarantino himself - playing a white suburbanite, Jimmie - uses the word relentlessly while delivering an angry speech to Jules and Vincent, remains hard to watch. "When you came pulling in here, did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said 'Dead Nigger Storage?'" he chides. The word from his mouth again and again is like nails on a chalkboard. No white man would speak to a black man in this manner; it's just Tarantino's colourblind fantasy. It's not an accident that he is playing the character (who also has a black wife, Bonnie). As many have suggested, he clearly wants to 'cross over' into blackness, to be considered what he and many American men think of as the ultimate cool. But while the characters may be able to divorce the word from its history, the viewer cannot, and the sour taste these scenes evoke undermine the good will that one has developed for the movie up to that point.

Despite his protestations, it is Tarantino's inability to understand the subtle and insidious nature of institutionalized racism that is at the crux of things. When he "demands the right" to write characters who say 'nigger,' he doesn't realize that he does have the right, as a powerful white man working in American movies, to control all the content in the way that traditionally marginalized people do not. The Hughes brothers may have the 'right' to use the word 'nigger' in their films, but, unlike white male directors, black directors have been historically restricted to certain kinds of stories, genres and points of view - that is, when white owned and controlled systems of production, distribution and exhibition have allowed them to make movies at all. The fealty that Jules shows to Jimmie as he rants (wouldn't Jules put a cap in somebody's ass for less?) reveals this power subtext. Similar dynamics in Django Unchained show that racial hierarchies in Hollywood haven't changed that much in twenty years.

There is another historical context to consider as well. Yes, the Pulp Fiction of Los Angeles is semi-fictionalized, featuring invented locations and brand names such as 'Red Apple' cigarettes and 'Big Kahuna Burger.' But the real L.A. in the early 1990s was the epicenter of a race war that had sprawled across the country. The national media had perpetuated racism against African Americans by playing up the danger of gangs and black crime to middle class white parents who were already worried about the consumption of gangsta rap records by their teenage children. What went largely unreported of course was that the rise of gangs, drug dealing and violence in the inner cities was the consequence of decades of post-war economic disenfranchisement in the form of "White Flight" to the suburbs and inner-city apartheid of blacks and others, all aggravated by cruel tax policies. These realities, along with the demoralizing realization that the Civil Rights movement and the hopes of the 1960s hadn't increased socio-economic opportunity for blacks, led to despair and crime.

This was powerfully dramatized in movies of the era such as Boyz in the Hood (1991) and Menace II Society (1993), and even the controversial Falling Down (1993). However, none of this, or the national firestorm over the Rodney King beating and subsequent L.A. riots, found even allegorical treatment in Pulp Fiction. At its heart, the movie is an ahistorical interracial buddy fantasy in the mold of the template established 37 years earlier by The Defiant Ones (1958). In that movie, Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play escaped convicts chained together who learn mutual respect and compassion as a result of shared travails. In the movie's liberal fantasy ending, Poitier gives up on a chance for freedom so that he can remain at the wounded side of his white buddy while the authorities come to haul them both back to prison.

One aim of the black and white buddy movie is to tame the black man under the white man's ideological tutelage so that he no longer poses a threat and white audiences can enjoy his cultural blackness without feeling guilt or fear. Therefore the stereotypically threatening black elements embodied by Jules - his "furious anger," his violence, his profanity, his gigantic gun, and so on - can be safely consumed by the white audience who knows that Jules is in on "their side." And yet it would be unfair to lump Jules in entirely with his cinematic ancestors when he does, in fact, subvert many stereotypes of black men: he is thoughtful, articulate, even chivalrous. He is also the moral heart of the film and his steadying presence during the movie's climax saves lives. Finally, unlike in The Defiant Ones, Jules - rather than staying metaphorically chained to the doomed white man - walks to freedom and, presumably, redemption.

It's possible that Jules was such an unforgettable character that we just can't see past him, even when Jackson is trying to play somebody else. Either way, continued obsession with Jackson/Jules can be confirmed on the Internet, which features innumerable memes and video mash-ups of Jules supplanted into many of Jackson's other movies (the Star Wars prequels are a favourite). There are also short films featuring the character (Jules coaching youth hockey, for example), and he appears in endless lists ranking great characters and great dialogue. He even has his own entry in the Urban Dictionary. Jackson/Jules' massive influence and popularity is one of Pulp Fiction 's most lasting legacies.

The Changing of the Guard

Save for a segment of the anthology Four Rooms (1995) and an episode of ER, Tarantino didn't direct for three years after the release of Pulp Fiction. Instead, he became a celebrity presence, clearly relishing his new status as pop culture icon. Internet Movie Database lists the director as having made 175 (!) post- Pulp Fiction appearances as "himself" (mostly talk shows, awards shows and documentaries). He has also acted in a number of movies and television shows, including his own films. He became so ubiquitous in the mid-90s - including on the nascent 'World Wide Web' - that Siskel and Ebert broadcast a special called the "The Tarantino Generation," in which they asked if the director was a "one man new wave or just a flavour of the month?" Ultimately, the critics praised Tarantino's talent and urged him to make more movies and fewer public appearances.

Meanwhile, Pulp Fiction had the same effect of all novel hits: it spawned a number of imitators. Low-budget crime films featuring eclectic male-heavy casts, eccentric characters, ornate dialogue, macabre violence, and non-linear narratives became all the rage through the rest of the decade. Among many others were Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995), CopLand (1997), Go (1999), 2 Days in the Valley (1996), Very Bad Things (1998), The Usual Suspects (1995) and the early films of Guy Ritchie, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000).

And yet, the director's aesthetic and interests have survived mostly intact in his subsequent films - Kill Bill, Death Proof (2007), Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained - which is more than one can say of many of his peers in the movement (as well as one of the traditional definitions of the auteur). By the late '90s, many of the indie film directors began to infiltrate Hollywood (or perhaps, as the Marxists might have it, Hollywood appropriated them, thereby acquiring their labour while neutralizing their subversive instincts). Tarantino is one of the few (along with Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and Nicole Holofcener) still making movies that are recognizably related to their early work. Meanwhile, one would be hard pressed to find the germ of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises or Inception in his Memento. Likewise, Steven Soderberg (The Oceans movies), Bryan Singer (the X-Men movies, Superman Returns [2006]), James Mangold ( Knight and Day (2010), The Wolverine [2013]), The Hughes Brothers ( From Hell (2001), The Book of Eli [2010]), Robert Rodriquez ( Sin City [2005]), Jon Faverau ( Cowboys and Aliens (2011), Iron Man [2008]), Doug Liman ( Mr. and. Mrs. Smith (2005), Edge of Tomorrow [2014]) and many others have long abandoned their indie roots for studio and even blockbuster filmmaking.

Meanwhile, Tarantino, despite his much larger budgets, has remained Tarantino, partly because his narrative and formal style and influences were recognizable after only two movies, and partly because he has obsessively returned to themes (most notably, revenge) and, like many auteurs, featured reoccurring actors (Jackson, Thurman, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Michael Parks, Christoph Waltz, Zoë Bell, Julie Dreyfus, et.al). Most of his movies since Pulp Fiction have received more or less positive reviews (as well as Oscar nominations - both Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds were nominated for Best Picture) though with considerable grousing. Common complaints are that they are overlong, undisciplined, too talky, unevenly paced, racist, in need of more judicious editing, ludicrously violent, pointlessly provocative, disturbingly fetishistic, overly allusive, shallow, immature and morally compromised.

Epilogue

Pulp Fiction was the apex of the indie film renaissance of the 1990s. It was also, in a sense, the movie that killed it - and not just because all the shallow rip-offs and self-conscious homages diluted its freshness. Pulp Fiction helped indie film go big business, with studios pumping more money into specialty divisions and marketing and everybody trying to ape the profitable aesthetics. By the late 90s, the box office slump was over and Hollywood - no longer needing to lean on the movement to generate revenues - went back to making the kinds of films it had always made. By the end of the decade, popular culture was bright and shiny and childish again (boy bands, Brittney Spears, Adam Sandler, Titanic (1997), The Phantom Menace [1999]) and the transformational moment of just a few years earlier, so fertile and subversive, seemed as far away as the '60s. Meanwhile, drowning in studio swill, we await the next movement.

Endnotes

1. About 170 million in 2014 dollars.

2. The other three nominations went to Quiz Show, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption.

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Prologue For many in Generation X, there is the time before Pulp Fiction (1994) and there is the time after Pulp Fiction. The shift in consciousness - personal, cultural, cinematic - was seismic. As the story goes, Gen X was the first self-consciously postmodern generation, hyper-aware of its place in history and obsessed with popular ...

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Playlist with the examples shown in the lecture

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Race and Ethnicity in Hollywood - week 6 - YouTube