Grumbling

[prog]

Is it weird that the Indiana Jones movies never struck me as particularly racist, but the Lego Indiana Jones video game sometimes makes me squirm a little?

Part of me suspects that neither is worse than the other in this respect, but the Lego game stands out more for being (a) brand-new and thus contextualized in 21st century cultural awareness, and (b) acted out by animated children's toys.

Also, except for watching Raiders a coupla years ago at a friend's house (which may have been the first time I ever saw it start-to-finish), I don't think I've watched the movies as an adult. My sense of heywaitasec was calibrated much looser when I was younger.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I don't see how the movies could be remotely true to the time or the genre they are emulating and NOT be racist. But I see it as "fun racism"--racism that invites us to laugh at the genre stereotypes, to see them as the ridiculous pastiches they are.

[jadelennox]

I think I know what you're trying to say. Could you maybe try to say it without coining a phrase like "fun racism", though? Because I think the mind-bogglingness of that term kinda detracts from your point.

(For the record, I disagree, but I think the point's arguable. But the terminology is still a little cringe-inducing.)

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I agree the terminology is cringe-inducing. I cringed as I wrote it. I was deliberately copying the equally cringe-inducing "fun torture" that gets applied to Quentin Tarantino's attacks on human decency, which sums up so much of what's wrong with his films.

I often have three or four conflicting thoughts and motives that come tumbling out in the space of one or two sentences in an LJ comment, so it's typical that I started out defending the movies and ended up using a term that should indicate what is wrong with them, and then tried to salvage that term when it was so clearly wrong.

For the record, I don't much like the second movie, and haven't seen the fourth. The first and third are, I think, defensible.

Don't worry about the coinage, though: no one pays sufficient attention to what I write to pick up on the terminology.

[jadelennox]

Indiana Jones is hella racist, but we love it despite itself. Watch Temple of Doom with racism lenses on some time. Or the most recent one: animalistic grunting non-verbal victimized superstitious tribals with no characterization or point.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah--the fierce cannibals of the Ooga-Booga tribe have turned up remarkably often even in very recent films (the King Kong remake; the second Pirates of the Caribbean), and it's getting hard for me to disregard.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I can forgive the second one -- despite itself -- more easily than the fourth, which is "despite twenty years of people pointing out the racism in the second one."

[jadelennox]

Point. Very pointy point.

*sigh*

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Part of it, I think, is that for so long Lego's toys had this sort of super-benign internationalist vibe to them; their lemon-yellow people were supposed to be of no particular race (though there were lapses, like the literally red Indians that existed briefly), the early space sets didn't have designated bad guys, the implied violence in things like the castle and pirate sets was kind of soft-pedaled, etc.

I still find it a little strange to see Lego sets with licensed media themes and Lego sets that are styled to be over-the-top badass, though they've done a fair amount of both since the early 1990s.

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[(Anonymous)]

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