Aug 4

Aug 4 Misogyny, Toxic White Masculinity and Cultural Appropriation: My Observations of the American Film Institutes 100 Best Films

As many of you know, I studied film, so I’m not surprised this unholy trinity is present in many of the ‘great’ films. Just by how much. How inconsequential female characters are, and how they are (mis)treated. The brutality and lack of remorse demonstrated by male characters, often the ‘good guys’ and the refraction of other cultures through the prism of the white perspective. The sheer tonnage knocks me down.

At times, it is suffocating — the amount of biased and patriarchal messages suffused in the narratives of these culturally significant and beloved films. It’s no wonder we find ourselves where we are in 2020, still having to say out loud that Black Lives Matter and #metoo. Our whole lives long we have been spoon fed a steady diet of dangerously prejudiced texts from movies to song lyrics to Coke commercials. So, what follows are not film reviews, just observations that (I hope) explain why our beliefs on gender, sexuality and race are so entrenched.

On some level we can still appreciate these films, even with their inculcated, imbedded hatespeak — we are intelligent beings after all, able to appreciate the worthiness of a film when taken as a whole, while calling out the insensitive, often dangerous messages buried within. I’m not saying ‘don’t watch these films, they are bad’ — I’m suggesting that if you do watch them, that you keep a weather eye out for prejudices you might have missed.

If you are not familiar with The American Film Institute (AFI), you should be! They are a terrific resource for inspiration and information and their Lists are a balanced distillation of 1000s of films. Their mission, to “champion the moving image as an art form” is admirable even if they fall short here: “We believe in the revolutionary power of visual storytelling to share perspectives, inspire empathy and drive culture forward.”

I figured with some time on my hands durning this crazy summer, I would work my way through the “AFI'S 100 YEARS...100 MOVIES — 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION: The 100 Greatest American Films Of All Time.” Finally fill in the gaps, and watch all the films on their list I haven’t seen at all or recently. I started from the bottom with #100, Ben-Hur, and am working my way up to #1, Citizen Kane.

So. Here we go.

Ben-Hur (Wyler 1959) — #100

The female characters have no, zero percent, agency in this film. They are simply virtuous, hand-wringing puppets.
Caucasian actors appear in brown face to present cartoonish, one-dimensional ‘Arabs’. Ouch.
Insensitivity after Columbine not withstanding, Charlton Heston was a crappy actor whose hammy performances dominate the story in a very bad way, Ben-Hur included.
The character of Jesus, only seen from the back, is clearly light skinned with the flowing auburn tresses of a Breck Girl.

Blade Runner (Scott 1982) — #97

Brilliant set design and world-building for sure, but the Asian infused dreary dystopian future is hard to stomach. The Japanese panic of the 1980s is imbedded in every scene of this dark and violent landscape. The world has gone to hell in a hand basket, so let’s use some cinematic shorthand and make the Japanese the root of the problem. Yuck.

The French Connection (Friedkin 1971) — #93

Ya, the car chase scene… amazing. But like the famous car chase, this film is noisy and brutal and violent. The detectives, ‘Popeye’ Doyle (played by Gene Hackman) and Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider) demonstrate a level of commonplace police brutality (almost exclusively on people of color) from beginning to end. These are not bad cops, their brutality is not the focus of the film, it’s just the cost of doing business. Based on a true story — this is presented as de rigueur, how the police force works in 1970s New York. It was wrong then and it is wrong now.