As I have stated countless times, the audiovisual world is a reflection of life, touching the same issues that affect us as individuals or as a society, in addition, it seeks to illustrate, excite and appeal to the imagination and fantasy of the viewer. Thus, "minorities" also have their place in this world.
As always, we can find everything from products that deal with social, racial and minority issues very seriously to others that deliver typical clichés and almost end up turning minorities into a joke. We'll focus on those jokes and have a laugh, because it can’t hurt.
Hollywood’s commercial cinema, always trying to be politically correct, has tried to integrate "minorities" in many of its productions. As film is a reflection of life and there are minorities in life, they are represented . I don’t know if there’s a style book, or it is a tradition, or the directors are all of some cultural supremacist association of the Aryan race, despite being, -almost all the producers and those who finance the cinema - Jews. What leaves no room for doubt is that white Caucasians are "the majority" and everyone else, "minorities", that is, Asians, South Americans, Indian Americans, Hindus, Pakistanis, Arabs, who are no longer just a minority, in cinema they are a terrorist minority, which is like a higher category. They have risen in category for the past 20 years or so and have been almost at the level of the Russians, who were the terrorist minority in previous decades ... and left African Americans in last place, which is the politically correct way to call Black people.
African Americans already enjoy a section of cinema where they are the majority and which the majority and minorities enjoy equally, without distinction, from minor to major and starting from the middle. You’re not getting what i’m saying? Well, in short, black people make films produced, directed and starred by other black people, but whites can enjoy it too, since color doesn’t matter, if the product is good, at least for my part I don’t care what skin color its maker has.
Now that we have clear the concepts to which i refer, let’s turn to practical examples .
When minorities are incorporated into films just to fulfill the ethnic quota necessary to open the range of potential spectators to the whole world, they usually fall into the same routines of clichés that are already recognizable and I would say essential, nowadays, to make a nod to the audience in reference to the mentioned clichés. This is best understood with a graphic example that you will surely ring a bell.
Imagine a generic horror movie in which there is a group of people and a murderer will end with them one at a time. The group members are:
The captain of the basketball team, white, tall and handsome.
A blonde with huge breasts, the captain’s brainless girlfriend.
A funny black guy.
A Chinese Internet - or any kind of technology - expert , he carries a Casio calculator on his wrist.
A Hispanic who rivals with the black guy on funniness or to a gang of violent murderers of five and a half meters high.
A white girl, without friends, a school nerd, who always wears black and listens to satanic music in the solitude of her marginalization.
Well, if now I ask you the order of the murderer's executions, how do you think that would play out?
Of course, it is very clear, if we look at the clichés in the manual for minorities of the current Hollywood cinema, the order is ... First the busty blonde dies, the others hide, then the team captain, then the black guy , then the Asian and the Hispanic. These last three can vary their order as they are secondary fillers ... then the emo white girl is saved and ends with the murderer. Before dying, they all make a stop at a supermarket run by an Indian from India, and so all minorities are now covered.
I think this example serves to understand why minorities sometimes protest how they are represented in cinema.
If you're Asian, you have to kick and punch like Bruce Lee or, at the very least, be a half decent hacker. If you are black you have to be violent and criminal or funny, if you are from the Middle East or India you have to be a computer expert or Islamic terrorist, if you are Hispanic American you have to be a criminal or...a criminal, there is not much variety.
I don't want to enter into gender issues or adress the racial slurs that this whole issue carries because, as I said, I want this post to be humorous, yet, it’s important to evidence how dangerous this whole thing seems to me since film has a capacity to influence our perceptions and prejudices greater than many of us are aware of, and it is a very dangerous weapon in the hands of a few producers and creatives.
Although this is the reality of Hollywood cinema, it is not the only one that pulls clichés to refer to minorities or use them to attract the public. If we look at European cinema and especially, in this case, Spanish cinema, minorities are one of the spectrums of population that our most notable directors such as Almodóvar are passionate about ... Drug addicts, whores, transvestites, folklore, bullfighters, etc. Some of Almodóvar's films can be considered minority shows and since he is a very famous director, foreigners believe that we all dance “sevillanas” in the streets while we go to our transvestite brother's house who lives with a drug addict whore and they spend the day watching bulls being killed on TV ... it's not like that !!! It's kinda like that, but we watch more football than bulls!!
Anyway, it is appreciated that the Spanish cinema has changed the perception of foreigners towards the Spanish people, in the 80s they only thought we were small, brown and loud.
As this article is written from the perspective of a Spanish, which is me, and I am very interested in knowing what minorities are and how they are treated in Spanish-American films, I invite you to tell me the clichés of your cinema, the Venezuelan , Argentine, Mexican, Cuban, etc.
For example, in Spain, every time an Argentine appears, he talks a lot and is usually a psychotherapist, if he is Ecuadorian he is small and nice, if he is Venezuelan is because you’re watching a soap opera, etc.
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