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

Comments

[professor-booty.livejournal.com]

Er...you mean Chomsky? ;-)

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That's what I wrote. And you can't prove otherwise. :-)

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Have you seen L.I.E.?

I'll have to check out Crash, since I seem to have the same preference for characters who aren't unambiguously good or evil.

[firecat]

"noooooo.... racism is unambiguous. Racists shouldn't have sympathetic parts to their characters."

Uh yeah - as a liberal in an extended blood family of staunch bush-loving conservatives who are otherwise really nice people, I can relate to the squirmishness of this.

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

My favourite decent-human-being movie villain is Lady Eboshi, from Mononoke Hime. Her goals may be at odds with those of our heroes, but her people love her and she takes care of them. I think even the heroes were meant to realise that she's not the sort of bad guy that you want to kill or defeat, because that might actually be a bad thing; you just want to protect certain other parts of the world from her.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

The toxicity of depicting racists as unqualifiedly evil or repellent is that it allows people who don't see themselves as evil or repellent to overlook or deny their own racism. And the power of showing racists as sympathetic and understandable "people like me" is that it can open the door for people like me to recognize our own racism.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent comment. Thanks.