Your Guide to Making a Global-Conscience Film
Check out the cynical cleverness in Steve Rose’s article “Heal the World,” in yesterday’s The Guardian. It’s all about the cliches that go into those Hollywood movies where some conscientious white person confronts “the horror, the horror” of a third-world country with darker-skinned people in humanitarian crisis.
Here’s one of my favorite bits, to give you a flavor of the article: “Wherever you are in the world, especially in the greatest depths of dark-skinned human suffering, you’re sure to find a smokin’ hot white woman. Usually she’ll be struggling to rectify the situation single-handedly on behalf of her uncaring compatriots, carrying the conscience of the western world on her shoulders, and bravely maintaining immaculate skin tone despite the absence of cosmetics.”
The one puzzle is that, as an example of this genre (along with Blood Diamond, Traffic, The Interpreter, The Constant Gardener, and Syriana), Rose includes Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel. This seems odd, because, unlike the directors of the other films, Iñárritu is Mexican and therefore not exactly from the First World. It’d be interesting to explore how and why Babel acquiesces to the Hollywood pattern–if indeed it does. Of course, I have to actually see it first, which won’t be happening until it’s released on DVD next month.
From what I’ve heard, The Last King of Scotland may follow this formula to some degree as well. The one difference is that the white character, a Scottish doctor played by James McAvoy, actually gets drawn into participating in, rather than observing or fighting against, the horrors of Idi Amin’s regime. But several reviews have mentioned that the film’s ending, where McDoctor takes his story back to the white, Western world, implies that justice can only be brought about when the U.S.-European authorities get involved.
4 comments January 28th, 2007