How responsible must a show/film be to the zeitgeist?
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  How responsible must a show/film be to the zeitgeist?
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Author Topic: How responsible must a show/film be to the zeitgeist?  (Read 166 times)
T'Chenka
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« on: June 29, 2020, 05:50:28 AM »
« edited: June 29, 2020, 05:55:40 AM by Foosi Behar, the Grand Mufti Of Atlas »

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in regards to the 2018 film Green Book. I watched the 2020 Netflix transgender documentary Disclosure last night, and there were several critiques of films for having a cross-dressing or trans killer in them (Dressed To Kill, The Silence Of The Lambs) at a time when trans people weren't in a lot of media.

Basically, the argument is that a film has a responsibility to be very mindful of how something  it always seen is represented on screen, as it may impact how people view that thing. The counter-argument would be that a creator wants to tell the story they want to tell with the characters they want to use, and it's not fair to say to a writer "just wait 25 years until there are much more normalized trans representations on screen, and then it would be more appropriate to have a movie with a trans killer in it amoungst a sea of other non-killer trans films".

In regards to Green Book, the big critique of the film was that it centered on a white racist protagonist, who is learning to not be racist when he befriends a black man. The argument is that we don't need these kinds of "flawed white guy hero" stories in our zeitgeist right now and it would have been better to tell the story from the black man's perspective and make the racism a more front and center part of the film. The counter-arguments are numerous. Firstly, it was a true story if one if the writer's father (the white guy) and "uncle" (the black man), and he wanted to tell their true story with minimal embellishment. Would it be appropriate to tell a"true story" film to change it's story to appeal to what the culture "needed" in 2018? Don't the writer and producer have the right to make a good movie with a good message as they see fit in a free country without worrying about how their film might not be "woke" enough?

PLEASE share your thoughts as I 've had this on my mind for a long time, and I really need to hear all different opinions from different perspectives in order to think this through and form a more solid opinion. I lean one way in this debate but I don't feel as if I've thought through everything enough, which is where other persoectives can help a lot. I also know that the correct answer isn't 100% one side or the other, as it's clear to me that both sides of this argument have to factor into the "correct" position at least a little bit.
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Mr. Reactionary
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« Reply #1 on: June 29, 2020, 11:16:17 AM »

I mean, in Silence Clarice Starling literally says trans people aren't violent and Buffalo Bill isn't actually trans. Seems like even in 1991 they were careful not to implicate that community.
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T'Chenka
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« Reply #2 on: June 29, 2020, 01:15:27 PM »

I mean, in Silence Clarice Starling literally says trans people aren't violent and Buffalo Bill isn't actually trans. Seems like even in 1991 they were careful not to implicate that community.
The doc also acknowleged this, but then attacked Clarice for calling trans people "passive".
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dead0man
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« Reply #3 on: June 29, 2020, 03:51:05 PM »

Artists should feel (and actually be) free to do the art that they want to do it.  If enough of society finds their art appealing, it will be successful.  Often times, the Nannys will shine a light on a piece of art we missed, this is a good thing.  Other times, artists will be so concerned the Nannys might be coming that they self censor, that is a bad thing.  Sometimes the Nannys are even right.
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CrabCake
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« Reply #4 on: June 30, 2020, 08:17:15 AM »

A good example from British history would be the character of Fagin from Oliver Twist. Dickens cribbed the character from a series of real life Jewish petty criminals of the time, and as he tended to do with all his characters he turned him into a caricature. Like, if you read Oliver Twist, Fagin is a truly awful guy - he isn't the rogue you might know from the Lionel Bart musical - and he is constantly identified as "the Jew" and so on. Anyway, Dickens got correspondence from Jewish friends alike that this was clear Anti-Semitism, and he immediately started to recant - because the novel was published in serial form, a modern reader will notice that the allusions to Fagin being a Jew and the more obviously anti-Semitic descriptions vanish midway through.

Quote
Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in June 1863 urging that "Charles Dickens the large hearted, whose works please so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country ... has encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew." Dickens responded that he had always spoken well of Jews and held no prejudice against them. Replying, Mrs. Davis asked Dickens to "examine more closely into the manners and character of the British Jews and to represent them as they really are."

His last complete work, Our Mutual Friend in what he admitted was an attempt to redeem himself, has a ridiculously saintly Jewish figure, Mr Riah, who is a target of Anti-Semitism (i.e. the villain uses Riah's ethnicity to make him a scapegoat iirc). The fact that Dickens himself seemed to recognize the damage that Fagin had done (and he did real damage - not since Shylock has a British Jewish caricature metastasized in the public quite so noxiously) suggests he felt responsible in some way to the zeitgeist. Of course, this is partially because Dickens' whole schtick was empathy for the victims of society, so he presumably didn't want to be tarred as a total hypocrite.
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Del Tachi
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« Reply #5 on: June 30, 2020, 09:58:48 AM »

Art is not suppose to be socially responsible.
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Mr. Reactionary
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« Reply #6 on: June 30, 2020, 11:24:03 AM »

Art is not suppose to be socially responsible.

Isn't it strange that the right are the ones defending art against ignorant censorship rather than the other way round.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #7 on: June 30, 2020, 11:30:35 AM »

Hardly at all ... the point is that it is ART.
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