Can't find the place I heard the joke about how in the future Green Book 4 will still be winning the Oscar, only in that one it will be a white guy driving a white guy around. Anyone know where I heard that a couple of weeks back? Spike Lee should realize that will always happen.
I don't care what an old, white, straight, male on the outer fringes of the suburbs of the more degraded part of what gets called "art" thinks about what I said about the possibilities of Women, speakers of small population language communities, LGBTQ, and others who Hollywood will never represent or serve telling their own stories dramatically. He should go screw off into the industry that, as proven by the numbers, will always service the wishes, desires and dreams* of his minority group. Hollywood is an oligarchic lie factory. Those are the stories it tells.
Update: * I should have included appetites. Appetites of straight, white, men is mostly what Hollywood services.
Update 2: Yeah, like I said, white people.
Shakespeare wrote for a largely white audience too, and everything he wrote he wrote for money. His works are often jingoistic, historically inaccurate, unrepresentative of the cultures he's writing about (Richard Burbage was British, not Danish) and women only take up 13% of the lines in his plays. So, another stupid white man.
ReplyDeleteBy focusing on the ethnic makeup of the cast and crew and dwelling on "who" is telling the story rather than the story itself, you ignoring the art. Which is kind of the point.
Yes, Ford's portrayal of the Indians is demonstrably unPC and inaccurate. But 'The Searchers' is still a better movie than 'Smoke Signals.'
Next thing you know you’ll be complaining about Ingmar Bergman focusing too much of his energy on making pictures about Sweden. That must really get your goat, considering how many white people Sweden has!
You say "straight white men" as if it were a pejorative term. Maybe you're right, these SWM didn't contribute shit to Western Culture:
JS Bach, Dante Alighieri, Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Rembrandt van Rijn, James Cagney, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, WB Yeats, Buster Keaton, Hank Williams, Johnny Mercer, Andrew Wyeth, Claude Monet, Claude Debussy, Peter O'Toole, John Ford, George Jones...
Yeah, stupid white people!
I'd have sent this to spam, only I can't resist pointing out one of the most salient facts Diana Price documented debunking the claim the Stratford man wrote the poems and plays is the fact that there is not a single record of him being paid to write a word, a line, a scene, a verse, a play. There is no record of him having a patron, there is no record of payment of any kind of literary production. There are many commercial records supporting his involvement in various other financial transactions and legal contracts, an unusual number for someone like him living when he did, only none supporting the claim that he ever authored anything, including, according so some experts, some or all of the six signatures attributed to him.
DeleteYou have made a category error, of sorts. I criticized Hollywood, not any individual. You've also made another, you are comparing art to crap, something I also pointed out was a common mistake.
Oh, and you've got a bit of trouble relating your list starting with J.S. Bach to what I said. J. S. Bach is known to have composed music that he intended to be sung by women, the pieces he wrote for his second wife to study and play, the parts in many of his vocal works that were at times sung by women and those which were obviously intended to be sung by women, I seem to recall his second wife being a singer, as well.
ReplyDeleteThe painters and poets aren't relevant, either, who didn't produce parts or roles in the way that a playwright or screen scribbler does or a director directs or a producer tries to screw. I certainly don't think you could accuse Dante of neglecting women in his most famous work, considering who acts as his guide to the highest realms. Not to mention those actors who I don't recall ever being accused of writing.
That a white man produces the art he produces has nothing to do with what I said encouraging Women, People of Color, LGBTQ people, the speakers of languages spoken by small populations and other people who Hollywood never represents as anything but exotica - diminishing them in the process, is to encourage them to do what Hollywood does for straight-white-English speaking - rich men of, by and FOR themselves in a medium through which they can bypass Hollywood, entirely. Nothing prevents white men from doing that, either.