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exquisite tea posted:Her main thesis is that the particular setting of Bright is lazy because it's just a few fantasy tropes slapped onto 99.9% of our own society, instead of creatively envisioning what our world would look like after 2,000 years of alternate history with magic and elves. Essentially, "what if black people, but orcs." See, you kind of hit the nail on the head there: Bright is not an 'alternate history.' It is not simply failing to 'envision' what the world would look like with magic and elves out of laziness - the motivation behind the way the world is presented is to emphasize that there is no difference. This relates back to the example of "Shrek-lookin' rear end." Critics like Ellis are convinced that this line doesn't make any sense, because in this 'alternate history,' Shrek wouldn't exist. The problem is that this is a speculation couched in nothing, looking away from the way the world actually is. Of course Shrek could exist, because #FairyLivesMatter exists. The joke is that Shrek, like, say, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, is something that has to exist in order to support the ideological framework of activism that, conveniently, is invisible from the point of view of the protagonists. These milquetoast, reactionary extensions of solidarity with the oppressed exist spontaneously, but they fundamentally do nothing to effect people's lives.
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Feb 4, 2018 16:03
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porfiria posted:This gets back to the idea that the Orcs et al are pointless. Just have Joel Edgerton play a Mexican at this point. The only thing you lose is Noomi’s adorable elf ears. Well, no. By your estimation, the goblins/orcs in Tolkein's literature are "pointless" because in the climactic battle for the fate of Middle Earth, there are already "regular humans" who choose the side of the Dark Lord, who just happen to be explicit stand-ins for various Asian cultures framed in fundamental opposition to the civilized Nordic pantheon from which Tolkein draws his heroes. What you lose is the direct implication of fantasy tropes as tacit representations of ideology. The Orcs are not "pointless," anymore than the fairies or elves are "pointless." The film is clarifying tropes of fantasy literature as consistent with 'real world' oppression.
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Feb 4, 2018 19:23
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Phylodox posted:Except Lord of the Rings isn’t trying to say anything about race or oppression. What it does say is unfortunate and unintentional, rooted in Tolkien’s biases. Bright is trying so hard to be about race and oppression, but it fails kind of dully. The movie positions orcs as urban gang stereotypes and elves as elite power brokers, but nothing is really said, done, or explored through that. It’s just kind of there. Ellis’ best point in her essay is that the antagonists, while elves, are outliers, unrelated to the ostensible systems of elven oppression of the other races. The only other powerful elf we see is the special agent dude, who’s sketched in so flimsily that we don’t know where he stands or what he represents. Orcs are portrayed as oppressed, but we don’t ever really explore the hows or whys except the whole “they once chose to serve the Dark Lord” thing, which is really unfortunate, because it portrays racism as all stemming from some past event (for which the oppressed are actually culpable, ew) rather than an ongoing system that benefits the oppressors. Intent is not the same thing as meaning. Tolkien does not need to intentionally craft Lord of the Rings as a narrative of the symbolic victory of Western European civilization over the dark Other in order for us to critique this. In the case of Bright, the film appropriates Tolkien's mythopoeic imagery in order to emphasize that this is not merely a phenomenon of Tolkien's "unfortunate" bad thoughts. His literature is just one symptom of ideological values that manifest in systemic oppression and socioeconomic inequality. With criticisms of Bright, what we see is the persistence in attempting to completely disassociate the straightforwardly depicted oppressive order of the setting from the apparently completely unrelated plot, in which the protagonists need to act outside of the law in order to achieve some semblance of justice. Ex: The antagonists of the film are elves, but they are "outliers, unrelated to the ostensible systems of elvis oppression of other races." The burden of interpretation is upon you to substantiate this claim. Which is to say, how can these individual elves not be related to the omnipresent systems of injustice that permeates the entire ideological and structural fabric of their society? The villains of the film can not operate in the manner that they do without the system being stacked in their favor. Their motivations do not exist in a vacuum, dominant ideology is what provides them a smokescreen of validity. It is the exact same phenomenon we observe in the behavior of the police officers. This extends to your flawed apprehension that the racism of the film stems only from a past event. The past event is a rhetorical justification for the actual root of socioeconomic inequality and systemic oppression, which is the straightforward manipulation of political and economic systems in order to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a privileged few. porfiria posted:I mean the Elves are Jews--they're powerful and wealthy but also somewhat oppressed and with a strong sense of cultural identity and access to ancient magics and thaumaturgical techniques. The elves are not Jews. They're the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned wet dream of Nazi occultism. The characters in the film whose experience and treatment that most parallels Jews are the Orcs who, some thousands of years ago, chose the side of the Dark Lord, a.k.a., killed Christ.
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Feb 4, 2018 20:35
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The question is what folks mean by "examination," and even further "serious examination." There is no more or less examination in Bright than there is in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, District 9, or RoboCop, and there is certainly no differentiation in the 'seriousness' of the text. All four of these films are either straight-up comedies or black-comic satires. What all four of the films do is straightforwardly present the social reality of the setting. In RoboCop we might get crass commercial breaks, in District 9 we might get interviews with bigoted and distrustful civilians towards the alien immigrants, but, again, nothing is being 'examined' here. The film is showing you what's going on because it's relevant to the narrative. 'Examination' and 'seriousness' are convoluted values. They assume that the straightforward abjection and crassness of the symbolic order of the film aren't enough. The irony is that Ellis criticizes Bright for its presentation of exposition, when all of the exposition in the film occurs in the context of developing the relationships between characters and foreshadowing events in the story. There is, indeed, very little overt exposition in the film, which turns out to also be a common criticism of the film, that spectators are confused by the setting because of the lack of 'world-building.' The disconnect is that 'examination' is presumed to be paramount in dealing with 'serious issues,' and Bright turns out to be a predominately action-oriented narrative. The opening credit prologue of orc street art turns out to be the most overt example of exposition that we get. But it also, more interestingly, foreshadows the fundamental conflict between Jakoby and Ward. The latter, after all, sees the former as a potential traitor because, as it's revealed in a tense stand-off, Jakoby falsified a report in order to protect an orc street tagger from being railroaded by the system. The problem here is not the lack of examination in the text. Examination is what you do by engaging with a narrative that is inherently, structurally limited to only conveying a certain amount of information, leaving it up to the spectator to elaborate on what is implicit. The problem is actually that Bright is too nuanced. Like the social dangers faced by the orc street artists, the Fogtooth gang and their leader are railroaded by confused spectators into being stereotypical thugs, when what actually happens in the movie is that Dorghu is angry because he's trying to make his neighborhood a neutral and peaceful territory, and the elves/cops hosed it up. On the other hand, Poison does not want the wand so that it will grant him wishes of wealth. He just wants to walk again. By adapting fantasy tropes to the social realities of a contemporary urban city, Ayer is able to present nuances that undermine dominant ideological constructions of how street crime manifests and operates. They aren't even gangs anymore. They're clans, autonomous organizations of family groups existing in the margins of colonial hegemony. They are fundamentally reactionary organizations, but they are also contrasted with the odorous machinations of the police force and the elf Inferni clan. (Hmm, Inferni, to what could this possibly be referring?) The 'street gangs' are stereotyped by the 'good guys' as serving the Dark Lord, when the narrative of the film is that it is the cops and elves who behave the most overtly like stereotypical gangs. The orcs are 'un-dignified,' as it were, but they are at least honest. They don't and can't hide behind a cult of hero-worship and nepotism. They (or just some punk street artists) may claim the Dark Lord, but when it comes to actually serving injustice, the footprint left by the cops and elves is far more infernal. Dorghu's attempt to 'make' his son by having him execute Jakoby turns out to be just a pale imitation of what the cops have already tried to get Ward to do. The resolution of the first scenario is that Ward is forced to kill four of his fellow officers to save one. The resolution of the second is that all the orcs live.
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Feb 4, 2018 22:45
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Jukebox Hero posted:He's not saying that and Bright is a dumb movie for trying to have fantasy stuff exist but not think about what it means. It's boring because orcs are just black people with tusks and a stupid Christ allegory myth sewn on. A film does not have any capacity for thought, meaning is something that we as viewers extrapolate through our identification with the symbolic order of the film. Again, the orcs do not represent black people. Poor black folks already exist in the film. The orcs represent orcs, they are a non-exclusive social and cultural group whose experience reflects racism, religious bigotry, anti-immigrant nationalism, etc. The film is not a Christ allegory. There is no Christ figure, no mission of universal emancipation and redemption. Just like RoboCop, the film uses messianic imagery subversively. The protagonists discover the power to transcend death and radically re-shape the world, and then choose to maintain the status quo. The problem, as Sir Kodiak alludes, is that critics who dismiss the film are looking for a convoluted 'subtext' that justifies reading, while treating the straightforward text of the film as inherently insubstantial or irredeemable. It's simply arguing in bad faith, conflating not liking Bright with understanding its 'bad' or 'unthoughtful' or 'lazy' subtext. The subtext is an ideological fantasy, there is only a very textured surface. The film shows you exactly what's going on.
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Mar 14, 2018 14:50
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bushisms.txt posted:The details are that they are visually coded to be a poc amalgam. They wear sports attire, kangol hats and chains, standing outside in unemployed groups blasting rap while drinking 40s. The lynching of Jacoby. Even "blooded" dips it's toes into gang culture. Its disengenous to try to some how elevate the word vomit exposition of neutered dnd rules, when the visuals do more than enough to get the point across. Wrench in the gears: the greatest orc love song is Cannibal Corpse's "Hammer Smashed Face." Coding is not the same as direct characterization. The orcs reflecting the influence of the simultaneously existent poor black and poor Latino communities does not mean they are 'black folks with tusks.' It means that the multiple distinct groups have been in contact long enough through intergenerational poverty to create that cultural overlap. But the orcs are clearly a distinct group in some deadpan humorous ways as with their apparently creating death metal, but also in the manner that, you know, they invoke Satan.
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Mar 19, 2018 22:56
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bushisms.txt posted:That character spouts anti blm rhetoric, is he really the stand in for them? Or, like Jacoby, does the movie not state they're both unique in their stations? Daryl does not represent black people, he is a black man. Nick does not represent orcs, he is an orc. Neither representing 'their people,' they are both nonetheless members of distinct groups; just as Poison is Latino without 'representing' Latinos, and just as Latinos exist as a distinct group within the film that overlaps culturally with other poor and oppressed groups without standing in for or replacing them. The argument has never been that the orcs, narratively, do not signify something apart from a made-up race and social group. The argument is that they are non-exclusively identifiable as subjects of systemic oppression and socioeconomic inequality. The reading that they represent-replace black folks is predicated upon the conspicuous dismissal of any point in the narrative in which black people are portrayed, which includes even the protagonist of the film. But the organization of the film's narrative around Daryl and Nick is a tacit example of the experiences of orcs and black folks in the film occurring parallel to and influenced by one another, without either being conflated with or replacing the other. 'Black folks with tusks' is a derisive minimization of what's actually occurring in the film, which is precisely the repudiation of reading the superficial signification of a distinct race as being the same as representation. There are plenty of black folks both in the destitute suburbs of LA as well as in the ranks of police, but the latter do not 'represent' the former. The antagonism of the film stems from a member of a non-exclusively identifiable, made-up race who joins the police and is treated with hostility because, to a certain extent, he is read as necessarily 'representing his people.' The conclusion of the film is that this culture is both oppressive, but also totally misguided in a black comic sense. Of course Nick doesn't represent his people, anymore than Daryl does. They've joined a new race, the only legitimate gang in the city.
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Mar 20, 2018 14:23
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