Ethnic humor is, I think, generally effective under a couple of fixed circumstances: a) when it comes from within the minority group being parodied, as with the best of Woody Allen and the Jews, b) it expresses something true that is difficult to say under polite or serious circumstances by carrying something far beyond its logical conclusion or realistic bounds, c) it subverts our expectations or understanding of the group in question, or of the teller. I think 30 Rock in particular has done a terrific job with ethnic humor, whether it's Irish (Season 1, Episode 17, when Alec Baldwin, his father, and his brother, played by Nathan Lane, announce the names of their fists, which are, respectively, St. Patrick and St. Michael, Tip O'Neill and Bobby Sands, and Bono and Sandra Day O'Connor, falling under categories a and b) or African-American (the running feud between Tracy and Twofer fulfills all three categories at once), especially in Tracy's plans for a Thomas Jefferson movie, which refer to the former president as a "jungle-fever haver," while also mocking African-American actors like Eddie Murphy...What's most amazing to me is that there were actual "black" Transformers in the old cartoon, back in the 80s, who weren't really offensive. And yet as the clock's moved forward, Bay is actually, creatively, gone backward. Oh well. I think I should probably care more that this guy is eviscirating my childhood. I just don't. Maybe it wasn't all of that to begin with.
The African-American coded robots in Transformers do none of those things. There's nothing clever about suggesting that black people can't read (unlike the 30 Rock episode where Tracy, who writes a column and complains about George Will, pretends he can't read to expose Liz's racism and to get out of work) or to have stereotypically ghetto characters threaten "to pop a cap" in someone or call someone a "pussy." All that coding is racist, sure, but as a cinematic choice, it's worse: it's boring.
« Open Thread At Noon | Main | Wait, I Still Function! » I'm Not Going To Get Offended Because A Transformer Can't Read07 Jul 2009 01:00 pm
Larry Wilmore said that last week out in Aspen. He was responding to a question from the floor. He makes a good point. Moreover, I think stereotypes are generally the result of lazy writing. To the extent that Michael Bay is doing Transformers, I generally expect any black people in camera-range to come off pretty poorly. That said, Alyssa's take is worth reading.
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I've been told that the old cartoon holds up well, though I don't quite dare look.
I think what bugs me the most is the way they market this as a 'family' movie and then throw in all kinds of lazy and offensive crap in it. It's giant robots fighting each other! Do the producers really think this concept won't have any appeal unless they make it racist and show off as much of Megan Fox as they can while holding onto a PG-13 or whatever?
The original cartoon is, retrospectively, poo. That said, the cartoon Transformers: The Movie is frigging awesome on so many levels, and beats the live-action movies (though I don't hate on the first one). It was a brilliant reboot of the whole franchise. Similarly, the new G.I. Joe: Resolute cartoon movie that came out recently makes for an awesome revamping of the franchise that I really hope continues. It would appear that, for those of us who grew up in the '80s on cartoon awesomeness, we must rely upon cartoons again to save our nostalgia. Because those live-action mofos are screwing it up.
I remember being stunned as a kid because some character exclaimed "Shit!" or something like that.
You weren't stunned by the whole killing of beloved characters thing? The first 20 minutes are completely mind-blowing!
Meh. I was more of GI Joe and He-Man fan. Didn't care if Transformers died so much. Did it stop me from watching the movie? Of course not.
It was Optimus Prime, and he said "Damn!"; I still remember because I was also stunned. My six-year-old brain was trying to comprehend why it was OK for Transformers to cuss.
Persia, don't underestimate the power of sheer laziness and stupidity. It takes a special kind of idiotic cupidity to make garbage like either Transformers movie.
No doubt. IMO the first movie was worse. I couldn't help but notice that whenever a black character spoke, everyone in the theater laughed. It's like giant, killer robots from another planet are here but we can count on black folks to be shuckin' & jivin'. I think Tyrese might have given one order in the beginning that wasn't a joke.
The original series, while a walking, talking toy commercial, was so much more entertaining and smart than this horrible excuse for a Transformers film (Jazz was clearly coded as black, but he was a cool brother as opposed to a caricature). One, Bay and company have never had much respect for the fan base (people's exhibit number one--the crime that is Jetfire in ROTF). In this regard, GI JOE looks far worse. Two, the film itself is poorly written even for a summer blockbuster.
The steppin fetchit bots as I like to call them, are patently offensive, yes because the stereotypes are so lazy and recycled, and two, I was more struck by the laughter from the audience at these characters. There were some awkward looks to and fro on the part a few folks, but in mass the audience was laughing and egging on Skids and Mudflap. To this ghetto nerd this was more troubling than Bay's cacophonous mess.
ROTF is itself an easy target for parody.
Chauncey DeVega
I'm sorry, I'm not into sci-fi or comics or anything, but....
Seriously? The black dudes are named Skids and Mudflap??!!
There are no words.
I was just reading a post at Fen of Color on livejournal, where an author asks, "how can i write characters of color in sci-fi without having them be merely whitewashed?" She wants to include cultural touchpoints but fears she will stray towards stereotyping.
I don't know how to keep a character of color from being whitewashed, (because that depends on individual/cultural circumstances, and oh...i don't know...research).
However, I do know that the first rule, the Prime Directive in fact, is "Do No Harm."
If, as a creative, you find yourself reaching for stereotypes to animate your characters of color, STOP THERE. Put down the gold toof and the broken dialect, and BACK AWAY.
That's a good question, I think. I'm a novelist--published by a few of the big houses--and it's something I think about. Do I not avoid writing characters who are too much unlike me? That's just as bad, a world of perfect homogeny. Of course, there's research, but more than that I think there's a basic level of competence and respect for one's characters. I imagine that most writers who rely on the gold toof do the same with white characters--but with whites, the shallow cliche reads as a 'type' instead of a 'stereotype'.
One reason I read this blog is to remind myself how little I know. This doesn't happen so much right now, but for a while Ta-Nehisi was writing two posts a day that I simply couldn't comprehend. That's humbling, for a writer, in a good way. (He also wrote a few about language that I loved ... hint, hint.)
I'm not able to write a black main character. I just don't have the knowledge or the chops yet. I'm not sure if the black characters I do write are whitewashed: they certainly lack the most overt signifiers of race. I might throw a Gloria Naylor book on the nightstand or have the financial worry be about paying for Howard, but that's usually the extent of it. I don't know. It's tough, but I guess it's always tough to write characters who aren't you.
ah, if you read Coates, then you have seen some jumping off points for where a black perspective may differ from a white perspective because we have differing histories in america.
some examples (not all from Coates' site):
how do i feel about the police (friend or foe?),
do i buy into the beauty myth (blondes have more fun?)
does my vote count? (minority status and gerrymandering)
does the "american dream," really include me?
your characters may approach these questions differently based on their experiences of race, class, education, geography, ect.
I recently finished reading "Lush Life" by Richard Price (he wrote Clockers, wrote for the Wire). Good book. I was struck by how on point he was with dialogue. Even in places where I wanted to be offended, I couldn't. I'd heard the exact same inflection, word choice, sentence structure, whatever on the subway, in school around the corner from my house growing up. But at no point did I get the impression that he was suggesting that all black folks sound like character X or that all Irish cops sound like character Y.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think there's problem when people worry about whitewashing black characters. If this character's day to day concerns and/or speech when written is generally indistinct from the character's white counterpart the author didn't sketch out a real black person? That can't be right.
Also, culture in sci-fi. Joel Shepard presented a pretty decent view of a multi-ethnic future in the Cassandra Kresnov books (Crossover, Breakway, Killswitch).
i did question myself about including dialect in that comment, but i think there is a difference between the accurate use of black english in Clockers, and the inaccurate (or outdated) use of black english by Michael Steele (or Michael Bay).
one is reflective of realism, the other is a stereotype.
While reading the book, I remember thinking that Price could have written for The Wire. Imagine my surprise when I found out the he, in fact, did right for the show. He, and writers like him, are proof that an author can successfully write characters outside of their race and culture.
I was just reading a post at Fen of Color on livejournal, where an author asks, "how can i write characters of color in sci-fi without having them be merely whitewashed?"
Oh man, because that went so well the first go-round this year?
there were a couple of rounds this year, the most recent was called MammothFail '09, but this happens because writers in the 21st century are:
a) still writing stereotypical characters and/or genocidal colonial narratives
b) don't understand that people of color have been reading sci-fi and fantasy since the beginning of the genre.
there's not a strong sense of accountability when things go wrong, but readers of color definitely CAN TELL when an author picks up the gold toof.
-- and it is a turn off.
Yeah, I know. I don't mean to shout down the discussion or anything, I was just surprised someone hadn't heard about that trainwreck and/or was bringing it up so "soon" afterwards.
Hey, I don't know if it was you, or someone else, but there was an amazingly awesome link put in on an earlier thread (like, before the Colorado excursion) regarding the race-fail blow-up. It was mostly one woman's overview, with quite a few excellent (and hilarious) links from there. I've tried searching the archives to no good end. Google leads me in several different directions. Can you help a sci-fi jerk out?
here is a link to mammothfail
@cocolamala: Thanks for the link. I find this phenomena fascinating, being a person who doesn't connect with current written science fiction and fantasy, professional or otherwise.
Did anyone also hear that for Meghan Fox's "audition" she went over to Michael Bay's home and washed his car while he taped her?
Oh I heard that too! It's super creepy and shady (ugh!), but probably an apt audition for her role in the movies.
What happened to that tape is what I want to know.
multiple people heard this? are you guys joshin me? i cannot comment further upon this until i SEE THAT VIDEO. TMZ get on the case pleeeez!
Nah, it was all that TNC. Transformers was a big deal, and I use that tense very intentionally. They were a badge of nerd-dom for the younger set; we may not have known it at the time, but looking back on it, I could have predicted a lot about myself based on trying to introduce other kids to Transformers. Other kids in the sandbox played Cowboys vs. Indians, I played Autobots vs. Decepticons with anyone who would listen to me explain it long enough. I guess that makes me nerdy and more PC haha.
I don't know if you've seen the animated movie--I did when I was still in single digits, so my memory isn't as clear. But I remember thinking, damn, they killed Optimus (hardly a spoiler as it happens really early), this movie is weird. I like that. I know it was probably just to sell knew toys, but even looking back on it, I like that a movie was so willing to alienate a devoted audience, in a good way.
I don't like saying this, but it's obviously true: Transformers sold out.
Yeah, they did kill Optimus (I was a kid and was devastated) in the cartoon movie specifically because they wanted to start a new line of
toys.
Transformers was a toy commercial and not much more, really. I loved it as a child and credit it with my intense love of cars to this day.
I know I'm going to be in the minority here - but I liked the movie. I expected nothing more than action, big robots, and stuff getting blown up. I left my brain in the car, got some popcorn and had fun, and that's it.
Michael Bay is never going to win any academy awards, *ever*, but you have to admit, the man knows how to blow sh!t up.
The thing is though, I do have an appreciation for Bay. I think both Bad Boys, especially the second one, is great brainless action. For some reason it didn't work in Transformers for me.
"I was a kid and was devastated"
SO glad to see I wasn't the only one. I stopped watching the cartoon after that. I know that the Transformers story basically centers around the fate of Optimus Prime but seeing him get killed for some reason bothers me far more than any other of my childhood fictional heroes. Still does.
I wrote a big long comment about how Bill Cosby used to be one of the funniest men on earth and I grew up listening to his stand-up on LPs, but apparently even the best and the brightest can get lazy and offensive because when I went to see him perform a few years back, virtually every joke was some spin on the cultural trope that husbands are to be pitied because wives are hectoring bitches who won't let them be barely-grown boys.
But then I realized that this might seem relevant to me but only to me, and I was indulging my need to tell the story, and deleted it.
But now I've come back to tell it, in truncated form, because there really is a certain relevance! To wit: It is not enough to have good material, it is not enough to be smart and/or talented. In the movies, as in stand-up, as in the rest of life, you have to have all of those things, plus a willingness to do the damn work. I am more surprised when all that comes together, than when it doesn't.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force has a black character (i think) who doesn't rely on stereotypes to get it across. I suspect that Frylock is black, even though his "race" is unstated. His style remind me of the deadpan humor that the black actor on the Office employs.
Good one cocolamala,
Frylock is black--and he is responsible and mature which is a nice change. I have always thought that Meatwad was coded as a young hispanic/latino and MasterShake as the stereotypical white frat boy big state u type.
I always thought Frylock was black and Shake was white, but it didn't occur to me that Meatwad had one race or another coded into him.
yeah, i read meatwad more as the child of fry and shake's unholy union.
LOL. Dan W, Transformers was a big deal in my house and this was illustrated to me when my brother complained bitterly to our mom LAST YEAR about her refusal to buy him a real Transformer toy, buying instead some Japanese knock-off. He's 36, with a long memory.
Getting back to the new film version, a friend told me this is the highest-grossing worst-reviewed movie ever. even worse than "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" (Check out Metacritic.com if you don't believe me.). I fell out after reading Roger Ebert's review.
This movie is typical of a forgettable summer flick. I'd take the offense more seriously from a serious film. But I think it's fair for TNC to call this lazy because I get the impression the writers didn't even try. It's just regrettable that Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay are laughing all the way to the bank on it.
30 Rock consistently gets the racial humor very very right. And although I always feel like I shouldn't find them funny, the Wayans Clan can usually pull more than a couple LOLs out of me if I end up somehow watching one of their flicks.
About ten years ago, it seemed like the transformers animated movie had a brief resurgence among hip-nerd-dom. We were all convinced that it was pretty intelligent and transcended its genre. Notably, Orson Welles voices a character, and it's Scatman Crothers' latest film (he was the chef in and hero of The Shining).
You forgot Leonard Nimoy as Galvatron and Judd Nelson as Hot Rod!
Also, Orson Welles is not just "a character," but Unicron, a planet that frigging eats other planets! Some of the visuals used for Unicron are still used today. The opening sequence in the new Star Trek film, as the Romulan ship appears, is clearly an homage to Unicron devouring that planet in the beginning of Transformers.
For my money Elmore Leonard gets the black idiom down perfect--at least the Detroit variant....
What stands out for me about Transformers 2 is that the screenwriters have since stated clearly that they did not write the characters the way they were performed on screen. I'm not even sure they had the same names. Bay then, appears to have done this on purpose. Which doesn't mean much in the big sense of things.
But he won't be getting anymore of my loot. (I'm not even sure I'd bootleg Transformers 2.)
http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org/jivetalking-twin-transformers-raise-race-issues-ap
Actor Reno Wilson, who is black, voices Mudflap. Tom Kenny, the white actor behind SpongeBob SquarePants, voices Skids.
Wilson said Wednesday that he never imagined viewers might consider the twins to be racial caricatures. When he took the role, he was told that the alien robots learned about human culture through the Web and that the twins were "wannabe gangster types."
"It's an alien who uploaded information from the Internet and put together the conglomeration and formed this cadence, way of speaking and body language that was accumulated over X amount of years of information and that's what came out," the 40-year-old actor said. "If he had uploaded country music, he would have come out like that."
It's not fair to assume the characters are black, he said.
"It could easily be a Transformer that uploaded Kevin Federline data," Wilson said. "They were just like posers to me."
"wannabe gangster types"
but isn't that a stereotype drawn to cover up black kids who were enmeshed in the War on Drugs? the roots of gangster rap are honestly founded in that experience. but this portrayal is not.
And what's with the goofy-looking faces on these two?
Yknow, how the actor describes it is actually how I took it when I saw the movie. It was an imitation of a parody of a stereotype of a facade, to me. To me, those two coded as twelve year old white kids imitating rap videos. That may come from my life experience as a 29yo white guy - the closest I can come to personal offense at a portrayal is when I see a lazy Steve Urkel nerd characature on the screen.
So to me it wasn't offensive, it was just flat and predictable most of the time. Oh, look, funny talking shenanigans. In fact, it could have been waay more annoying, but the voice actors I think actually did a pretty good job with what they were given, and had good comedic timing. I did laugh more than once.
My only problem with the twins was the gold teeth and the Mogwai faces. That bugged the shit out of me. But the pussy line was dope. I cracked up. It was perfect.