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

[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.