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You have to prove that Chris believes his art to be representative of his blackness in order to argue that selling his art to a white man would cause the loss of blackness. You're making this assumption because Chris is black. I have a film you can watch about liberal racism, if you'd like to know more.
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Apr 12, 2017 18:41
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:12 |
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Mind Playin' Tricks On Me and New Jack City used to scare the gently caress out of me. Similarly I could vibe with People Under The Stairs right away but not Candyman until I was much older. I need to revisit New Jack City. I was just reading a interview with van Peebles from a few years ago and he's got a couple of answers where he, in part, says 'if poor black people realized that selling drugs and chasing dollars was bad, then..." It's weirdly out of place with the rest of his critique of structural economic inequalities. Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:There was some article making its rounds a few months ago about Get Out that was praising the "recent trend" of, get this, what the author called "allegorical horror films (re: It Follows, Get Out, the Babadook)." 'Horror films have never been social commentary until 2015' is the hottest and wokest of takes. SuperMechagodzilla posted:"You have to prove that Chris believes his art to be representative of his blackness in order to argue that selling his art to a white man would cause the loss of blackness." And here you're just ignoring the film's timeline. Chris only asks that of Root after he watches the video and the procedure is revealed. Root then denies that race has anything to do with his motive at a point where there is no reason for him to pretend (and, as I've argued, is one representation of colorblind ideology re: people who claim publically to be anti-racist while ignoring that they benefit from racism). But more to the point: you still have not supported your claim that Chris believes his photography to be an essential expression of his blackness. You seem to only make that assumption because Chris is black. I don't know your motives or thought process, but this is a common societal assumption that black artists only do "black" art.
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Apr 12, 2017 19:13
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The neo-soul montage of his artwork at the beginning expresses this, but the joke is the pullback to his apartment and it just looks like he could've bought it from Pier 1 Imports. Right but the art isn't the 'essence' of his blackness and selling it doesn't make him less black. It does require turning over his artistic autonomy; he refuses, so Root tries to steal his body. In the reading of Chris's paranoid construction of Root the literal bodysnatcher, why is Root adamant that race is irrelevant? SuperMechagodzilla posted:I wrote that Chris believes he is targeted for being black. This paragraph does not disprove what I have written. In fact, you emphasize that Root is indeed trying profit off of Chris's identity. Root only profits off Chris's blackness because being black makes him a target for the Armitage family. Root EXPLICITLY rejects racial biotruths. quote:For example: when Chris is sent to the 'sunken place' and reduced to a disembodied gaze, he is paradoxically still embodied - still black. This is literally what Chris perceives his essence as being. The representation of his essence is his corporeal form, which is not paradoxical at all.
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Apr 12, 2017 20:19
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Yes. That's what's being described, the paranoia of "stolen black essence". If that doesn't represent this "black essence", what does? The fact that he can dap somebody up? So, to complete the reading, Chris constructs Root the bodysnatcher to affirm the paranoia of 'stolen black essence' but then imagines that the bodysnatcher explicitly rejects the idea of black essence because [reasons].
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Apr 12, 2017 20:28
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Chris is like an electron that's observing itself. Whenever I picture myself, I think of an amorphous array of colors and numbers. I would literally never think of my body. That's crazy.
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Apr 12, 2017 20:31
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Chris is afraid that white people will exploit his body [because he is black]. versus Chris is afraid that if white people exploit his body, he'll lose his blackness.
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Apr 12, 2017 20:35
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:This is simply characterization so I don't see what the problem is. The film is much worse if Chris is just a woke totem because you end up concluding that he should've taken the red pill or some such nonsense. Magic Hate Ball posted:Replace versus with "and". Well, yes, that's the tension. Racism creates race. Racial hierarchies exist for the sake of exploitation. The Armitage family therefore reifies blackness in their victims in order to exploit them in ways that race has been reified to justify mass incarceration, slavery, and segregation in all facets of society. Sure, we can read them as conservatives (slaveowners and traders) but we can also read them as liberals (northern creditors who profited immensely from slavery; Progressive Era/New Deal/Great Society reformers whose programs were built on racism). The key is Root, though, who accepts that race is a construct and refuses to believe racial myths; and yet, he profits directly from them. He's the most important character in the film. Why? Because he's the representation of the belief that the construction of race creates racism rather than the other way around. If he denies racial biotruths, he can't be racist, as if racism is about belief rather than action. One way of reading the film is that Chris feels disconnected from his blackness and therefore constructs a heightened version of reality in which white people are trying to steal it. Chris's motivations stem from some internal, essential blackness; whereas, the Armitage family is inherently oppressive because they are internally, essentially white. I argue that this reading perpetuates racism and misunderstanding of race and power. It also leads to questions like "is Jordan Peele saying interracial dating is bad?" Where in the movie does Peele present that all white people are bad? He doesn't. We're making assumptions about this community. We're also dragging in assumptions about black people, black art, black living spaces, black relationships, and assuming Chris is representative of all of that (despite, again, little textual evidence of that AND the fact that black identity and culture isn't monolithic [a Key and Peele hit]). Another reading is that Chris is trying to preserve his own autonomy in the face of capitalist exploitation and violence. He's not concerned with his 'essence of blackness' because that's not real. He's concerned with how people create and perceive race. He claims his blackness because that's the world he lives in. If he doesn't claim his blackness, he knows what will happen with the police officer. If he doesn't claim his blackness to Rose's family, he knows they'll claim it for him. In the face of relentless racism at the Armitage house, where everything he does and says is attributed to his blackness from the first moment, he begins to rebel, leading to an escape that involves the visual metaphors of 'white' and 'black' objects losing their racial coding as they're used to tear down the oppression of racism. Most people seem to be arguing for a synthesis of the two, with Chris's internalized racism (and classism) shaping who he is. I don't disagree, because it's impossible for him to exist outside the realities of racism and capitalism. And Chris isn't some flawless superhero or "woke totem." But, I think the movie is far closer to reading two than reading one, and I think that the counterarguments veer dangerously into perpetuating racist assumptions that race is somehow inherent. i am the bird fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 21:39
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Racial equality also involves recognizing that black dudes can have terrible taste.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:19
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:12 |
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The S in SMG stands for shook.
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Apr 30, 2017 12:07
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