Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Good Does Not Mean Simple

Last week we talked about how Hollywood only shows one kind of racist: the neanderthal. Our general conclusion was that Hollywood lives in terror of being misunderstood. Today's article relates to that, as you'll see. Today's article is about the way "good people" are portrayed by Hollywood. It irritates me.

Have you ever noticed how good people (other than the hero) get portrayed by modern Hollywood? You know who I'm talking about. These are the people the hero must defend, the people the villain slaps around, the people we will see in the happiness montage when the film ends... salt of the earth types. These people are typically older whites, with a rainbow of color mixed in behind them. Their leader is a man in his 50s who has gone gray. They keep their heads down and smile softly. They are childlike. They keep their hands clasped before them like they are praying. They move slowly... shuffling. They speak in short, simple sentences that are packed with gratitude, hope and helplessness. Yep. Awww.

Let me describe this another way: they are f**ing useless. They are neutered and passive. They are the definition of meek. They are so meek that I honestly find myself wanting to smack them around on principle. It's no wonder films are full of so many villains. These people are sheep, and as Eli Wallach says in The Magnificent Seven, "If God did not want them sheared, He would not have made them sheep." I hear ya, Eli, I hear ya.

Look, here's what bothers me. First, "good" does not mean "simpleton." It does not mean "meek." Those are not even synonyms for good. There are many simpletons who do evil things, just as people who are meek are typically passively aggressive... not good. Good is about doing the right things, caring about those around you, standing up to evil. Good is not about shuffling your feet or weeping that you need help from a hero. That's pathetic, not good. In fact, people who are good are typically a hell of a lot stronger and more confident than those who aren't because being good requires you to stand up for what is right, not succumb to what is easy. Being good is anything but being passive. In fact, I would argue that you can't be passive and be good. If you are passive, the best you can be is neutral.

It frustrates me that Hollywood is misrepresenting what it means to be good and selling it as such an unpleasant thing. It also frustrates me that the whole idea is rather fascist. Yeah, fascist. Superman saving good people from a power they struggle against but cannot defeat alone is cool... it makes him a superhero. Superman saving people who are too fricken timid stand up for themselves is a tale about how useless the public is and how they need superior men to lead them. That's a creepy, fascist message.

You know where I think this comes from? Did you ever seen Willem Defoe play Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ. He started this. He presented Christ as a meek simpleton... and everybody ran with this. Since that movie, so many people really have come to think of Christ as a man who never raised his voice, never complained, and never spoke back to anyone. And since Christ is considered the model for good, that has become the model they use when they want to show these "good people". Grrr. For the record, that wasn't Jesus. How do I know? Because I've read the Bible. Christ was passionate, with a gift for oratory. He was aggressive. He called a spade a spade. He attacked the money changers in the temple. He stood his ground against the Romans. Those aren't things these meek, pathetic creatures Hollywood is selling as "Christlike" could ever do.

Hollywood isn't good at portraying subtlety anymore. So when they portray villains, they make them cartoon villains so everyone knows what they mean. And when they portray the "good people" the hero needs to help, they go in the other direction. They try to make them Christlike so no one could possibly think they are anything but good (as an aside, making them useless also makes the superhero seem stronger by comparison). But they are using the wrong model. They aren't making them good or Christlike. No. They are making them useless. They are making them the kind of people who deserve the blame when evil prevails because they don't stand up to. That's not "good." "Good" is people who are confident in their convictions and stand up for them. They don't allow evil to control them or others around them. Meek is people who are too afraid to speak their minds.

You know what else is interesting? I've been watching a lot of Gene Autry films lately. It's fascinating to me that in the supposed age of "black and white simpleton thinking" (i.e. not the modern sophisticated world), things were much more nuanced. The public in Autry's films weren't helpless. They weren't pathetic. To the contrary, they were a little hot-headed actually. They had had enough and they were looking to set things right on their own. It took Gene to come into the picture and to calm everything down to make sure everyone acted correctly. When I look at old Superman shows, again, the public was doing their best to solve the problem. They didn't have the firepower to defeat the bad guys, but they were trying. No one stood by helplessly wishing to be saved. That's a twisted stereotype modern Hollywood inflicts on the past in a sneering way, but it's really modern Hollywood that it applies to.

I think this tells us something worth noting about Hollywood. Hollywood today doesn't seem to get the difference between good and meek, and they see the public as meek, helpless, and unwilling to help themselves. I find this frustrating because it flies in the face of reality. The American people are action oriented. They stand up for what they believe. They help those in need. They try to stop evil where they see it, and are constantly working to make the world better. Why does none of that appear on film anymore?

22 comments:

Kit said...

I think another problem is that Good=Simpleton=Naive Dumbass.

AndrewPrice said...

Yep. There's a real condescension in the way "good people" are presented by Hollywood at the moment.

Kit said...

Cough! -Ned Stark- Cough!

AndrewPrice said...

LOL! Ned Flanders.

Kit said...

I don't know about Ned Flanders as he, at least in the mid-90s, was rather clever and self-reliant.
But there is a reason TVTropes has the term ="Flanderization"

AndrewPrice said...

Flanders was meant to be an exaggeration of the turn the other cheek, let everyone walk all over you type. They did play with the character a lot but mainly to bring irony to the trope.

Kit said...

Ok, point taken.

But I think your larger point is true.

AndrewPrice said...

Thanks. I think so too. I see this all the time these days and in several forms and I really don't like it. Passive does not mean good.

AndrewPrice said...

Kit, There are actually other tropes at TV tropes that may touch upon this. Here's one: Anti-Intellectualism.

K said...

This post actually should be part of your cartoon post.

Sharpening the narrative by rendering the conflict as between one super hero and the evil bad guys instead of a hero and a bunch of almost heros (vs evil) is what I meant by animation having a caricatured plots as well as characters. Since animation was so difficult and costly to produce the story has to be reduced to it's essence which if well done gives a greater sense of conflict and catharsis. Which can result in a more memorable experience for the viewer.

Unfortunately, this idea has been copied by the live action set resulting in everything being a "cartoon".

AndrewPrice said...

K, Good point. It seems that as more cartoons are becoming like real-life films, more real-life films are becoming cartoons.

I do think the main reason Hollywood does this is to make it very clear who the hero is, why he's needed, and to make him stand apart. Unfortunately, it results in a bunch of characters that give the good guys a bad name, that tell the public they are sheep, and that make for bad stories.

shawn said...

No doubt some of this is due to the fact that if the patrons of the diner that is about to be robbed all pulled out their various pistols, Dirty Harry wouldn't have much to do to make him a hero.

The other side of that coin is that despite Hollywood's protestions of "It's only a movie", they know that people will emulate behavior that they witness in films and t.v. If this is false, then why is Rob Reiner trying to get other directors to stop having characters that smoke in their films?

Spike Lee had a movie in which a black male is verbally berated by a black female and he just stands there and takes it although he can see on his face that if the female was a male, he would hit her. In an interview, Lee stated that he didn't want to promote violence against women.

Still, it would be nice to see people coming together to solve a problem- say after a disaster and the community pulls together to rebuild a house, or donate supplies to the family that lost everything.

I can think of one superhero movie that did this: Spider-Man. Ol' web-wed is hanging from a bridge with one hand and the other is hanging onto a cable car. When the Green Goblin tries to ram him, people on the bridge above start pelting the Goblin with detritus. It was a nicely done feel-good scene. But it's the exception and not the rule.

Kit said...

Shawn, The new Amazing Spider-Man did something similar as well.
Minor spoilers: LINK

Backthrow said...

Also, in SPIDER-MAN 2, the train passengers helping a knocked-out Spidey, after he's saved their lives, while protecting his identity. While it wasn't fighting back at Doc Ock themselves, it was more helpful and constructive than just standing around looking worried and helpless.

AndrewPrice said...

Shawn, I think that is a big part of it, that it's easier to make the hero look tough when the people he's helping appear helpless.

That said, I really don't like it. What I do like are moments like you mention in Spider Man or the ferry scene in Dark Knight where average people do the right things.

AndrewPrice said...

BTW, Shawn, I agree about Hollywood. They claim they don't cause gun violence, yet they claim to have the power to reshape minds on other issues. Sounds self-serving to me.

djskit said...

I dunno, Andrew. I agree with your logic - yes, these are not "good" people.

But I think the characters you are referring to is Hollywood's short-hand for "innocent" (as in "by-stander") vs. good. They don't even know what a "good person" would look or act like (other than recyling and haveing the right view on climate change).

AndrewPrice said...

djskit, To a degree that's right. The Hollywood version of "good" is environmental whackos or other liberals. So they probably think of these people as innocent sheep rather than good people.

But that's kind of the point. Their view of average people is rather condescending.

EricP said...

While I love to see Last Temptation of Christ mentioned, agree to disagree with Defoe's take on Christ, which stuck pretty close to Katzanzakis' book if I recall correctly, starting any trends. That would have involved anyone actually paying attention to the movie, at least beyond the insane backlash from Christian and Jewish groups who didn't even bother to see the movie anyway.

Totally with ya otherwise, though.

AndrewPrice said...

Eric, LOL! Yeah, point taken. Still, he's the first example that comes to mind for me. There are others.

As for the backlash, I don't understand that at all. I mean, in this day and age I would be surprised if there hadn't been a backlash, but I don't understand the basis of it.

HuuskerDu said...

The backlash was Kazantzakis was misusing a historical figure for his own ends. The film had a disclaimer flatly stating Jesus wasn't based on the Gospels. Once you jettison the Gospels you might as well do Springtime for Hitler.

An example of a Hollywood movie where the good guys are pro-active is Tremors. Not just Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, but all the other major characters w: Burt, his wife, the college girl, etc., where they cleverly came up with several ways to defeat the Graboids. Burt was supposed to be a caricature of the redneck gun nut survivalist, but he became the most popular character in the whole franchise.

AndrewPrice said...

HusskerDu, Great example, and a very enjoyable film. Burt was awesome.

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