Birth Of A Dark Knight Nation: a review.
Jul. 28th, 2012 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingYeah, kind of not a fan. Acceptably executed action movie, but really, REALLY racist. And classist. Not as misogynist as you'd expect from a DC product, but that's not exactly high praise or a difficult bar to clear.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-29 02:05 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krystallnacht
Date: 2012-07-29 03:25 pm (UTC)An old man told me "It was the rich against the poor and it was easy to push it."
"To justify it?" I asked
"No - never it was justified"
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Date: 2012-07-29 06:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-30 07:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-30 01:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-30 01:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-30 02:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-30 02:07 pm (UTC)All the heroes are white[1], or background characters who die before getting a line. The only non-white heroes are cops, who loyally serve the all-white cop leaders without speaking. All non-white people who speak are villains. Most brown-skinned people are Suspiciously Arab and wear Terrorist Garb and are Dangerous Savages. White people who are villains are shown to be brainwashed gullible idiots[2][3] who are only parroting the lines fed to them by the Suspiciously Arab characters and who go along with the Suspiciously Arab brainwashers because they are jealous of the success of rich (and thus morally superior) white men .
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Minor Spoilers in the footnotes
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[1]: Morgan Freeman is a token exception - but his role in this movie is to fail, to play into the villains plans, to fail again, and to give up, then fail. He is not permitted to accomplish anything. Lucius Fox's only purpose in this movie is to show that non-white people shouldn't bother TRYING to be heroes, it's not going to work because they're inherently incapable of it.
[2]: Exception: Bane, because only a white man is permitted to face Batman as an equal and present a challenge. And also, he is revealed in the end to be a brainwashed gullible idiot tricked by several Suspiciously Arab sorts.
[3]: Or parasites feeding the jealousies of the Useful Idiots for personal gain, cf The Scarecrow.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-30 06:30 pm (UTC)This is the first time I've heard anything that could be read as the suggestion that "action movies" are anything other than a subgenre of "Hollywood".[1]
Do you mean action movies are part of Hollywood that is sometimes out-misogynized[2] by the rest of Hollywood, or that action movies are different from Hollywood, and if the latter then how?
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[1] I will note that while places which are not Hollywood do turn out action movies, when I hear about those in North American media, they tend to be prefaced with an adjective indicating where they were made.
[2] Somehow "better" sounds inaccurate, and if I'm going to get wordy, this shall be my word.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-31 08:24 am (UTC)Bane was brainwashed by Arab sorts? Admittedly I couldn't understand most of what he was saying but I thought he was just following Marion Cotillard (French) who was enacting the plan of her dad Liam Neeson (Irish).
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-31 01:01 pm (UTC)This isn't just "nobody but Batman can solve the problem", that's a red herring. Robin and Catwoman and Gordon don't solve the problem, either, but they also don't automatically fail and/or help the enemy at every turn. They produce useful results and accomplish important things. Fox, on the other hand, is shown to be completely incompetent at running Wayne Enterprises without Bruce Wayne and equally incompetent at maintaining, improving, or repairing the equipment he has "inherited". Hey wait, "the black man creates nothing, and only destroys things that white men have built even when he tries not to - he can't help it", where have I seen that before?
Bane was brainwashed by Arab sorts? Admittedly I couldn't understand most of what he was saying but I thought he was just following Marion Cotillard (French) who was enacting the plan of her dad Liam Neeson (Irish).
Marion Cotillard's darkened-for-film skin[2] and wandering middle-eastern accent pegged her as Suspiciously Foreign from scene 1. And while Neeson the actor is white, Ra's al Ghul, the character he is playing, most definitely is not. And that's not just a "comics intruding" thing, that's "he's a middle-eastern terrorist whose name is pointed out on-screen as being Arabic" - and all the rest of the League Of Shadows and the occupants of the prison are wearing keffiyeh (and waving guns, for the League) while trying to rape and kill (the prisoners) or while they're plotting the downfall of America (the League).
The League Of Shadows are unsubtly, to the point of hamfistedness, painted as "arab=terrorist=evil" and as a cartoon terrorist cell of happily suicidal sorts.
This movie is *stuffed to the gills* with racist stereotypes[3]. Some of that is from the source material and a lot of the rest is, I suspect, unconscious, but it's THERE. (And it would have been possible to just NOT go to the lazy shorthand and pander to stupidity, but then it wouldn't have been DC.)
[1]: That, this time, he didn't make, didn't design, didn't create - he just took it from the actual inventors and put it in a warehouse. Which is an extra side attack on Fox that I missed at the time.
[2]: To the point where, not knowing the actress, I thought she actually was middle-eastern, not just in brownface for the film.
[3]: And also poverty stereotypes. Let it never be said that the movie is ONLY racist, because wow I haven't seen depictions of the poor that.... nuanced.... since Prince Of Darkness and their establishment-as-fact that homeless people are literally a lower form of life, closer to insect than human in a very physical way that makes Satan's mind control work better on them.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-31 04:40 pm (UTC)I mean, no-one is going around calling Batman "that Welsh superhero", regardless of where Bale was born.
ETA: It might be interesting if they did. "Look! The Americans need to be saved by the noble foreigner, who successfully navigates their business world and is only brought down because he is self-sacrificing and then underhandedly attacked. It is kind of a shame that the only thing the movie thought was worth showing about generic non-rich Americans who aren't cops is how they quickly react to a terrorist invasion by forming a kangaroo court to support the invaders and gunning down police officers in the streets, but at least the noble Welshman (with his staunch but elderly British assistants, the butler and the bobby) is there to save them after they have been manipulated by the cunning European and Irish! (It's a redemption thing, you see. Those cunning bastards even managed to get an Englishman to follow them, so of course the Americans never really had a chance.)"
"And there are some nice Americans. The young pretty ones who manage to be useful. A bit. After instruction on how to behave from the savvy people of the United Kingdom. And the old one gives the noble Welshman an almost-built enough toy that he only has to do the smart person work, which is good! Because that damn old Yank then looses all the toys to the cunning terrorists, thank god for the Welshman being able to salvage things."
*amused*
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-31 06:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-31 08:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-01 01:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-01 02:24 am (UTC)Bane was brainwashed by Arab sorts? Admittedly I couldn't understand most of what he was saying but I thought he was just following Marion Cotillard (French) who was enacting the plan of her dad Liam Neeson (Irish).
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-01 06:27 am (UTC)