Emotionally Potent Oversimplification

[bcholmes]

I have a DVD, Manufacturing Consent -- a documentary about Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has a book by the same name, but the DVD is not a documentary of the book. This particular DVD has spent more time lent out to cow-orkers than actually on my bookshelf.

Anyway, Chomsky uses the phrase "emotionally potent oversimplification", which I'm rather fond of. I especially think about it in the context of Hollywood film. I don't like the phenomenon of making characters in film unambiguously good or evil. I don't like my movie characters oversimplified. I want them to be complicated, fully-developed people.

Except I watched Crash last night. And I've been thinking, today, about how hard it was to watch parts of that movie. The film wouldn't let me unambiguously hate certain characters. And some of the depictions of racism were hard, hard, hard to watch because the characters wouldn't just stay in the "narrow-minded character who's racist" character type.

And a big part of me is screaming, "noooooo.... racism is unambiguous. Racists shouldn't have sympathetic parts to their characters." It's a very difficult film