Out of Touch

Why Can’t Hollywood Tell America’s Stories?

 

Time Magazine asks, and comes up with the answer, "[Because] Our onscreen heroes are white men. But most of us aren't"

Oh Please!

If only Chris Kyle had been Mexican, or a woman, or better yet a Chola, then THAT would have made American Sniper a success. Superman would be a money maker if played by a tranny, to reflect the real look of America. See, the problem isn't that Hollywood's version of a hero is someone who hates America, or is a bad father or husband, its that the skin color of the protagonist who hates America is wrong.

Further down in the story the author, Priscilla Peña Ovalle (who teaches media at the University of Oregon) complains that "Hollywood trades in the spectacular, the dramatic, the titillating. Even romantic comedies usually elevate the “everyday” business of love with fantasies of wealth."  Ovalle would instead have movies about more ordinary struggles of ordinary (non-white) dish washers working part time at a minimum wage job.  These are the true heroes we should look up to.

Not to say you couldn't make a good movie starting from that premise.  You could even develop that person into a true blood American with a good heart and a great work ethic.  In fact, its been done over and over.  Stand By Me comes to mind.  But 'white people' is not the main problem with Hollywood - its that they seem incapable of telling a good story, and instead see making a movie as a forum to lecture us with ideology. 

Compare American Sniper with Selma, which both came out at the same time.  American Sniper earned 531% more than Selma.  The problem with the Selma story, like so much of liberal 'narratives' is not that the main characters are black so much as they were fast and loose with the truth in order to present their political views.  The truth in Hollywood, (or Rolling Stone Magazine) is only important so long as it supports the narrative.  However, lies are permissible if they support the cause.

Image from The Telegraph 1/26/2015

"The makers of the new movie “Selma” apparently just couldn’t resist taking dramatic, trumped-up license with a true story that didn’t need any embellishment to work as a big-screen historical drama. As a result, the film falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself."

Hollywood has had a problem with portraying heroes for decades.  Ordinary people want someone to look up to. But Hollywood doesn't want heroes.  Heroes stand up for good.  They stand up for what's right.  But liberalism demands that we must be indiscriminate - because the opposite (discrimination) is bad. That - and the fact they can't tell a good story - is the main problem, not the skin color of the actor. 

As an anonymous Oscar Voter said about Selma, "When a movie about black people is good, members vote for it. But if the movie isn't that good, am I supposed to vote for it just because it has black people in it? I've got to tell you, having the cast show up in T-shirts saying "I can't breathe" [at their New York premiere] — I thought that stuff was offensive. Did they want to be known for making the best movie of the year or for stirring up shit?"

In the meantime, I know we're all holding our breath waiting for Time Magazine's author Priscilla Peña Ovalle's newest project about race and hairstyles in Hollywood.  I'm predicting she doesn't like crew cuts, or something.