I'm not sure if this is the question you're asking, but "Midnight Express" is probably the most overtly racist film I've ever seen which came out of the Hollywood mainstream. The film essentially portrays the entire nation of Turkey as a land of corrupt, violent rapists with no moral compass to speak of. I literally don't think there's a single even slightly sympathetic Turkish character. The film took major dramatic license with the non-fiction book it's based on (it's my understanding that the real guy never claimed to have been raped in prison).
"For a nation of pigs it sure is funny that you don't eat 'em."
Not to sound like a midwit smartass, but I think they call it "displacement" in psychology. For further context, he'd already written the Platoon script but couldn't get it produced. Then he was offered the ME job because of the Platoon script.
I remember being shocked when I first saw the movie (after reading the book) at how evil it made the Turks and how crazy they made William Ha-yes. It was like everything was turned up to 11.
Just want to comment on a few things that strike me as I go along while I watch the video.
1. As an English kid growing up in the 70s, these events — winning colonial wars — were still remembered with pride. That pride may have evaporated in later decades but, in 1964, it was only 20 years since the British Empire ruled huge chunks of the world. Are Romans proud of their empire? Persians? Assyrians? Mongols? Zulus? Should they have been? We were.
2. You don't mention the Victoria Cross. The VC is the highest award for bravery in the UK. To calibrate: only fifteen VCs have been awarded since World War Two but eleven were awarded at Rorke’s Drift.
3. Maybe the best comparison is with 300 Spartans fighting off the Persians at Thermopylae. Was the portrayal of the Persians racist? (Spoiler: it was). The 2,500 years that have passed make that racism OK and we can celebrate the bravery of the Spartans while putting aside the atrocities they committed in the name of Empire. It has only been 150 years since Rorke’s Drift. Give it a few more centuries and we’ll be allowed to celebrate it again. Whatever you think of colonialism, those guys were brave.
4. For a modern movie that depicts overt racism accurately, watch any one of a dozen movies about Vietnam.
5. Regarding the lack of explicit racism in the movie (separate from the colonialism), maybe the actors and makers of the movie had genuine respect for each other and thought the movie could tell the story without overt racism.
6. One of you commented that he was surprised the British could make such a racist movie in 1964 and maybe the British were just slow in getting the message that racism was uncool. In 1964, Americans were still killing the Vietnamese. It was also the same year that the Civil Rights Act passed. I’m fairly sure there was still racism in America after that. Maybe the British werent so slow after all.
7. About Zulus running into gunfire. Our soldiers did that in the trenches in World War One. See also: D-Day.
8. I note that you are American… A lot of your commentary has a real American bias, wondering how it fit with the American culture of the time. Zulu was a British movie about British history and it fit with the British culture of the time. Zulu is still very famous in my country — both the war and the movie. It’s not just a cult following. It’s not just about being overrun by Africans. This is about a once-great country that built a great empire and then lost it.
The racism I'm think of is not so much calling the other side names. It's treating them as almost an inferior species. I think most of the Vietnam movies do that.
I'm still reading the Unmitigated Pedantry post, but my understanding that the artillery was usually less than successful but the infantry had to go over the top anyway (e.g. The Somme).
Again, I don't recall The Green Berets treating the Vietnamese as an inferior species. Arguably later Vietnam movies like The Deer Hunter or Full Metal Jacket go further into "othering" the Vietnamese as distinct from Americans (it's a point of mockery for a pro-war US officer to say "Inside every gook there's an American trying to get out"). The Green Berets takes the perspective of South Vietnam being a small country aggressed against by the big Communist powers and thus in need of US help like European countries were in WW2, so Vietnamese allies are an important part of the story.
It's not that "the infantry had to go over the top anyway", infantry was ALWAYS supposed to be used in conjunction with artillery, as artillery can't hold territory and the enemy will always reclaim any trench they fled once bombardment finishes.
It's been 5-10 years since I saw "They Live, but I didn't take it to be left-coded. But thinking on it, it probably comes across as less left-coded in 2024 than it did in 1988.
The movie is anti-consumerist more than it's anti-capitalist. There are both rightist and leftist criticisms of consumerism, but over time anti-consumerism has become more right-coded in the US. I think this is partly because of the growing gender gap in politics and resulting female domination of American socialism. Women are generally more prone to consume than men, asceticism comes harder for them. Lenin was famously ascetic, but today's socialist AWFL just can't go without her daily Starbucks latte and her Macbook Air, and she of course loves to travel (and not on the cheap -- that wouldn't be safe!)
But on the male side, there's the influence of Reddit and the leftward drift of nerd consumer culture. If a 34-year-old man (who may or may not be "transitioning") just has to "Catch 'Em All", with a bookshelf of overpriced figurines, and is active on Reddit discussing the next highly anticipated thing to consume, he's probably a leftist today, but in 1988 the equivalent personality type was more of a libertarian.
The anti-consumerist ascetic Kaczynski was no rightist, but today the online right mostly views him as a quixotic figure and continues to approvingly cite his criticisms of the left and can relate on some level to the urge to retire to a shack in the woods. Meanwhile the left doesn't even remember him.
This is before we get into the way thoughts about elites have changed, but that's been more rapid and is, I think, specifically tied to the way corporations and institutions went Woke and the Trump realignment. In 1988, when you saw a dinner party full of rich white people, you thought "Ah, Reagan voters." Now, while it's somewhat muddied, it's a lot more plausible that they're all Biden voters (and probably even more plausible in people's imaginations than in the actual statistics).
I never understood the criticism of consumerism, or how it was politically divided. My guess is that it’s all in the eye of the beholder: “My trip to Bali/enormous F150 is actually a great use of money that makes me more productive/happy, but their subscription to Disney+/Daily Wire is a complete waste and they’re literally paying for propaganda. Plus if they stopped buying their daily Starbucks/BlackRifle coffee, they wouldn’t be stressed about cash”.
I think I'd agree that unless you're living in a literal Unabomber shack, there's some level of hypocrisy in all criticisms of consumerism. Though I also think the sort of people you're highlighting here are the maximally hypocritical, and people actually do differ in this dimension. They're also normies living in probably the most consumer-oriented society in the world, in which normies are by definition going to be oriented towards consumerism. To be anti-consumerist is to be countercultural, so I think that's why you need to contrast countercultures on the left and right.
When I think of the new anti-consumerism on the right, maybe it's epitomized by someone like Raw Egg Nationalist. I don't know how many men are guzzling raw eggs by the dozen, but I'd say anyone who puts that into practice has skin in the game on anti-consumerism in the domain of nutrition, even if he's still hypocritical in other areas of his life. And now the idea of eating raw eggs has been politicized and you might even say, spiritualized. There's a certain sense on the right that consumerism is physically and spiritually enervating, which I don't think was present to nearly the same degree in the 1980s.
The most racist non-silent movie I've probably seen is "The Mask of Fu Manchu," which was released by MGM in 1932. I don't know if that's too far back for you, the movie has sound but is black and white. It was based on a series of novels about Fu Manchu, a Chinese supervillain who leads a secret society trying to take over the world. Fu Manchu gives a speech near the end that embodies pretty much every white anxiety from back then. The only non-racist thing it does is allow Boris Karloff to speak perfect English in his natural accent when playing Fu Manchu instead of broken English. It's a well-made example of a 1930s adventure movie, and it's fun to watch Karloff chew scenery.
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I suspect one reason that "They Live" is so famous is the reputation of its writer/director, John Carpenter. Carpenter has made some of the greatest horror and action films of all time, like "Halloween" (1979), "The Thing" (1982), "Escape from New York" (1981), and "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976). I think a lot of people hear about "They Live" because they enjoyed his other, better movies, and want to see more of his work.
One thing you might find interesting is that in 1996 Carpenter made "Escape from LA," a stand-alone-sequel to "Escape from New York" that shows considerably more political nuance than "They Live." The main character, played by Kurt Russell, is a soldier of fortune in the near future who gets caught up in a conflict between the USA and some far-left third world guerillas. The POTUS is a theocratic dictator clearly modeled after Pat Robertson, so at first it seems like Russell's character might join the leftist guerillas, whose leader looks and dresses a lot like Che Guevarra. However, it turns out that the guerillas are a bunch of violent authoritarian psychopaths. In the end the hero washes his hands of both factions in the most dramatic way possible. Carpenter seems to be saying that, while the American right is bad, the left is also crazy.
You should watch the movies of S. Craig Zahler. Adored by rightist and begrudgingly admired by leftists. His former producer now runs the media entertainment division for Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire. He's worked with some of the biggest actors that lean conservative Kurt Russell, Mel Gibson, and Vince Vaughn.
The one that was the most politically divisive was Dragged Across Concrete and starts off with a scene of police brutality against minorities caught on a cellphone and the consequences for those police officers. It also has a great scene on gender politics in the workforce.
You should get Farha Khalidi and that other chick to make an adult movie, altho really, they were so mid in your interview yet their IG's make them look so hot, unreal what filters do. Good classic military film? The Battle Of Algiers. It's been about 20 years since I saw it, but I thought it was good. Supposedly the director was a leftist and made the French look bad and Algerians like freedom fighters.
Battle of Algiers was made by a capital-C Communist Party member. He has a general strike lead to French defeat at the end, which is not what actually happened (instead the French got sick of fighting after the rebels withdrew to bases in other countries from which to launch attacks, and De Gaulle let the Algerians vote for independence).
Battle of Algiers is still an effective thriller film 50+ years after it came out. What really struck me when watching it was how even-handed it was. I went into it expecting it to be a typical "colonialism bad, freedom fighters good" movie, but it wasn't like that at all. The French are absolutely brutal in their attempts to suppress the Arab uprising (torturing the captors for information, a tactic the colonel openly admits to and defends in a public press conference), but the Arab uprising isn't whitewashed or sanitised: they are depicted (among other things) blowing up a coffee shop with only civilians inside, and I don't think the audience is meant to come away thinking that the ends justified the means.
It is indeed surprisingly even-handed for a movie that is also slanted to produce a Communist message. Perhaps Pontecorvo didn't identify fully with third-world nationalism even as that was aligned with leftism at the time.
Bizarre. Have you ever considered not applying “why do antisemites like….” or “why is _____ popular amongst the far-right?”
Have you considered the possibility that your boogeyman doesn’t exist, or that you’re simply labeling “people who disagree with my worldview” as “far-right?”
I’d love to see the supporting evidence for your claims, other than your “trust me bro” statement of option as facts.
That would be interesting to see. I haven’t seen an analysis of Twitter replies, but perhaps there’s some data on that. However, Twitter isn’t real life, so I suspect the attention from respondents would be targeted (heavily biased) anyway, thereby undermining the value of the data.
The movie was written and directed by Cy Edenfield an activist from the American Communist Party to try and portray the evils of aparteid, colonialism and racism.
I see that Edenfield did have a Communist background, but I don't see the film taking any stance against apartheid (which wasn't instituted until after the British permitted South Africa to be governed by the Boers).
"If there are prominent counterexamples of works that have actually been “racist” in a way that term would be understood by a normal American, rather than someone who is a committed leftist, please let us know and we may check them out."
Check out 'Exodus' sometime, Otto Preminger's 1960 blockbuster, about the founding of the terror state of Israel; where Arabs are equated with nazis & zionists are idealists. What a hoot!
I'm not sure if this is the question you're asking, but "Midnight Express" is probably the most overtly racist film I've ever seen which came out of the Hollywood mainstream. The film essentially portrays the entire nation of Turkey as a land of corrupt, violent rapists with no moral compass to speak of. I literally don't think there's a single even slightly sympathetic Turkish character. The film took major dramatic license with the non-fiction book it's based on (it's my understanding that the real guy never claimed to have been raped in prison).
"For a nation of pigs it sure is funny that you don't eat 'em."
Some ascribe the darkness of the script to Oliver Stone working through his year as an infantryman in Vietnam.
I'd believe it, but what did those poor Turks ever do to him?
Not to sound like a midwit smartass, but I think they call it "displacement" in psychology. For further context, he'd already written the Platoon script but couldn't get it produced. Then he was offered the ME job because of the Platoon script.
I remember being shocked when I first saw the movie (after reading the book) at how evil it made the Turks and how crazy they made William Ha-yes. It was like everything was turned up to 11.
Just want to comment on a few things that strike me as I go along while I watch the video.
1. As an English kid growing up in the 70s, these events — winning colonial wars — were still remembered with pride. That pride may have evaporated in later decades but, in 1964, it was only 20 years since the British Empire ruled huge chunks of the world. Are Romans proud of their empire? Persians? Assyrians? Mongols? Zulus? Should they have been? We were.
2. You don't mention the Victoria Cross. The VC is the highest award for bravery in the UK. To calibrate: only fifteen VCs have been awarded since World War Two but eleven were awarded at Rorke’s Drift.
3. Maybe the best comparison is with 300 Spartans fighting off the Persians at Thermopylae. Was the portrayal of the Persians racist? (Spoiler: it was). The 2,500 years that have passed make that racism OK and we can celebrate the bravery of the Spartans while putting aside the atrocities they committed in the name of Empire. It has only been 150 years since Rorke’s Drift. Give it a few more centuries and we’ll be allowed to celebrate it again. Whatever you think of colonialism, those guys were brave.
4. For a modern movie that depicts overt racism accurately, watch any one of a dozen movies about Vietnam.
5. Regarding the lack of explicit racism in the movie (separate from the colonialism), maybe the actors and makers of the movie had genuine respect for each other and thought the movie could tell the story without overt racism.
6. One of you commented that he was surprised the British could make such a racist movie in 1964 and maybe the British were just slow in getting the message that racism was uncool. In 1964, Americans were still killing the Vietnamese. It was also the same year that the Civil Rights Act passed. I’m fairly sure there was still racism in America after that. Maybe the British werent so slow after all.
7. About Zulus running into gunfire. Our soldiers did that in the trenches in World War One. See also: D-Day.
8. I note that you are American… A lot of your commentary has a real American bias, wondering how it fit with the American culture of the time. Zulu was a British movie about British history and it fit with the British culture of the time. Zulu is still very famous in my country — both the war and the movie. It’s not just a cult following. It’s not just about being overrun by Africans. This is about a once-great country that built a great empire and then lost it.
(Still watching…)
The one pro-Vietnam War film I'm aware of is "The Green Berets" from 1968 with John Wayne. It's propaganda, but I don't recall it being racist.
My understanding is that in WW1 the infantry was supposed to rely on artillery to suppress enemy fire when going over the top: https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-i-the-trench-stalemate/
The racism I'm think of is not so much calling the other side names. It's treating them as almost an inferior species. I think most of the Vietnam movies do that.
I'm still reading the Unmitigated Pedantry post, but my understanding that the artillery was usually less than successful but the infantry had to go over the top anyway (e.g. The Somme).
Again, I don't recall The Green Berets treating the Vietnamese as an inferior species. Arguably later Vietnam movies like The Deer Hunter or Full Metal Jacket go further into "othering" the Vietnamese as distinct from Americans (it's a point of mockery for a pro-war US officer to say "Inside every gook there's an American trying to get out"). The Green Berets takes the perspective of South Vietnam being a small country aggressed against by the big Communist powers and thus in need of US help like European countries were in WW2, so Vietnamese allies are an important part of the story.
It's not that "the infantry had to go over the top anyway", infantry was ALWAYS supposed to be used in conjunction with artillery, as artillery can't hold territory and the enemy will always reclaim any trench they fled once bombardment finishes.
It's been 5-10 years since I saw "They Live, but I didn't take it to be left-coded. But thinking on it, it probably comes across as less left-coded in 2024 than it did in 1988.
The movie is anti-consumerist more than it's anti-capitalist. There are both rightist and leftist criticisms of consumerism, but over time anti-consumerism has become more right-coded in the US. I think this is partly because of the growing gender gap in politics and resulting female domination of American socialism. Women are generally more prone to consume than men, asceticism comes harder for them. Lenin was famously ascetic, but today's socialist AWFL just can't go without her daily Starbucks latte and her Macbook Air, and she of course loves to travel (and not on the cheap -- that wouldn't be safe!)
But on the male side, there's the influence of Reddit and the leftward drift of nerd consumer culture. If a 34-year-old man (who may or may not be "transitioning") just has to "Catch 'Em All", with a bookshelf of overpriced figurines, and is active on Reddit discussing the next highly anticipated thing to consume, he's probably a leftist today, but in 1988 the equivalent personality type was more of a libertarian.
The anti-consumerist ascetic Kaczynski was no rightist, but today the online right mostly views him as a quixotic figure and continues to approvingly cite his criticisms of the left and can relate on some level to the urge to retire to a shack in the woods. Meanwhile the left doesn't even remember him.
This is before we get into the way thoughts about elites have changed, but that's been more rapid and is, I think, specifically tied to the way corporations and institutions went Woke and the Trump realignment. In 1988, when you saw a dinner party full of rich white people, you thought "Ah, Reagan voters." Now, while it's somewhat muddied, it's a lot more plausible that they're all Biden voters (and probably even more plausible in people's imaginations than in the actual statistics).
I never understood the criticism of consumerism, or how it was politically divided. My guess is that it’s all in the eye of the beholder: “My trip to Bali/enormous F150 is actually a great use of money that makes me more productive/happy, but their subscription to Disney+/Daily Wire is a complete waste and they’re literally paying for propaganda. Plus if they stopped buying their daily Starbucks/BlackRifle coffee, they wouldn’t be stressed about cash”.
I think I'd agree that unless you're living in a literal Unabomber shack, there's some level of hypocrisy in all criticisms of consumerism. Though I also think the sort of people you're highlighting here are the maximally hypocritical, and people actually do differ in this dimension. They're also normies living in probably the most consumer-oriented society in the world, in which normies are by definition going to be oriented towards consumerism. To be anti-consumerist is to be countercultural, so I think that's why you need to contrast countercultures on the left and right.
When I think of the new anti-consumerism on the right, maybe it's epitomized by someone like Raw Egg Nationalist. I don't know how many men are guzzling raw eggs by the dozen, but I'd say anyone who puts that into practice has skin in the game on anti-consumerism in the domain of nutrition, even if he's still hypocritical in other areas of his life. And now the idea of eating raw eggs has been politicized and you might even say, spiritualized. There's a certain sense on the right that consumerism is physically and spiritually enervating, which I don't think was present to nearly the same degree in the 1980s.
The most racist non-silent movie I've probably seen is "The Mask of Fu Manchu," which was released by MGM in 1932. I don't know if that's too far back for you, the movie has sound but is black and white. It was based on a series of novels about Fu Manchu, a Chinese supervillain who leads a secret society trying to take over the world. Fu Manchu gives a speech near the end that embodies pretty much every white anxiety from back then. The only non-racist thing it does is allow Boris Karloff to speak perfect English in his natural accent when playing Fu Manchu instead of broken English. It's a well-made example of a 1930s adventure movie, and it's fun to watch Karloff chew scenery.
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I suspect one reason that "They Live" is so famous is the reputation of its writer/director, John Carpenter. Carpenter has made some of the greatest horror and action films of all time, like "Halloween" (1979), "The Thing" (1982), "Escape from New York" (1981), and "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976). I think a lot of people hear about "They Live" because they enjoyed his other, better movies, and want to see more of his work.
One thing you might find interesting is that in 1996 Carpenter made "Escape from LA," a stand-alone-sequel to "Escape from New York" that shows considerably more political nuance than "They Live." The main character, played by Kurt Russell, is a soldier of fortune in the near future who gets caught up in a conflict between the USA and some far-left third world guerillas. The POTUS is a theocratic dictator clearly modeled after Pat Robertson, so at first it seems like Russell's character might join the leftist guerillas, whose leader looks and dresses a lot like Che Guevarra. However, it turns out that the guerillas are a bunch of violent authoritarian psychopaths. In the end the hero washes his hands of both factions in the most dramatic way possible. Carpenter seems to be saying that, while the American right is bad, the left is also crazy.
You should watch the movies of S. Craig Zahler. Adored by rightist and begrudgingly admired by leftists. His former producer now runs the media entertainment division for Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire. He's worked with some of the biggest actors that lean conservative Kurt Russell, Mel Gibson, and Vince Vaughn.
The one that was the most politically divisive was Dragged Across Concrete and starts off with a scene of police brutality against minorities caught on a cellphone and the consequences for those police officers. It also has a great scene on gender politics in the workforce.
You should get Farha Khalidi and that other chick to make an adult movie, altho really, they were so mid in your interview yet their IG's make them look so hot, unreal what filters do. Good classic military film? The Battle Of Algiers. It's been about 20 years since I saw it, but I thought it was good. Supposedly the director was a leftist and made the French look bad and Algerians like freedom fighters.
Battle of Algiers was made by a capital-C Communist Party member. He has a general strike lead to French defeat at the end, which is not what actually happened (instead the French got sick of fighting after the rebels withdrew to bases in other countries from which to launch attacks, and De Gaulle let the Algerians vote for independence).
Which other chick?
Battle of Algiers is still an effective thriller film 50+ years after it came out. What really struck me when watching it was how even-handed it was. I went into it expecting it to be a typical "colonialism bad, freedom fighters good" movie, but it wasn't like that at all. The French are absolutely brutal in their attempts to suppress the Arab uprising (torturing the captors for information, a tactic the colonel openly admits to and defends in a public press conference), but the Arab uprising isn't whitewashed or sanitised: they are depicted (among other things) blowing up a coffee shop with only civilians inside, and I don't think the audience is meant to come away thinking that the ends justified the means.
It is indeed surprisingly even-handed for a movie that is also slanted to produce a Communist message. Perhaps Pontecorvo didn't identify fully with third-world nationalism even as that was aligned with leftism at the time.
Bizarre. Have you ever considered not applying “why do antisemites like….” or “why is _____ popular amongst the far-right?”
Have you considered the possibility that your boogeyman doesn’t exist, or that you’re simply labeling “people who disagree with my worldview” as “far-right?”
I’d love to see the supporting evidence for your claims, other than your “trust me bro” statement of option as facts.
I could be mistaken but I think it often derives from comments they receive on Twitter.
That would be interesting to see. I haven’t seen an analysis of Twitter replies, but perhaps there’s some data on that. However, Twitter isn’t real life, so I suspect the attention from respondents would be targeted (heavily biased) anyway, thereby undermining the value of the data.
You both misunderstood They Live. It's actually about a schizophrenic whose hallucinations cause him to go on a killing spree.
The movie was written and directed by Cy Edenfield an activist from the American Communist Party to try and portray the evils of aparteid, colonialism and racism.
I see that Edenfield did have a Communist background, but I don't see the film taking any stance against apartheid (which wasn't instituted until after the British permitted South Africa to be governed by the Boers).
Rob: ' you read Chuck Klosterman's book about the '90's?'
Richard: "I've listened to podcasts about it."
Am I correct that this is an Ethan Strauss, House of Strauss reference?
"If there are prominent counterexamples of works that have actually been “racist” in a way that term would be understood by a normal American, rather than someone who is a committed leftist, please let us know and we may check them out."
Check out 'Exodus' sometime, Otto Preminger's 1960 blockbuster, about the founding of the terror state of Israel; where Arabs are equated with nazis & zionists are idealists. What a hoot!