Ineffable!

terresdebrume:

I want to watch After Earth again.

Honestly I wouldn’t say it’s the best Sci-Fi movie ever, but I think you should all watch it (and I do mean all) if only for the experience of watching a major movie with only one (very minor) white character.

I mean, I could be mistaken but that’s really the impression the movie left me with, and the realization halfway through that “oh, that’s what’s been bugging me” is both disturbing and important imo

So I thought about Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (which I livewatched a couple days ago) andit reminded me of this post I did about after earth.

And the thing is, there’s no white person in CTHD either (and there I literally do mean zero white person, not just zero speaking white person) and I realized that it didn’t bug me at all.

Maybe it’s because it’s been a year and I’ve progressed, maybe it’s because I’m used to thinking of black people as “more” different from white people than (Han) Chinese people (the fact that I learned Mandarin Chinese for a couple of years also plays a role in that)

But I think what plays a big role too is the storytelling.

After Earth is, very clearly, an USian story. It hits pretty much all the hollywood tropes, complete with the ridiculous “I’ll injure myself further so I can do a military salute” at the end–it’s your basic Hollywood SF flick but with a flipped black actors to white actors ratio, which makes the combination very unexpected and, yes, disturbing (if only on first viewing, tho I guess that varies between viewiers)

However, when you watch CTHD, it’s clearly a Chinese story. I have no doubt that it’s adapted to make it more palatable to western viewers in som way (though I’d be unable to pinpoint to what extent exactly) but the fact remains that CTHD is a Chinese story, and since I don’t expect Chinese stories to have white people in it, watching a Chinese movie with only Chinese (or Chinese-something) actors in it doesn’t cause a dissonance with my expectations the way After Earth did.

The common point, however, is that both are stories I would have dismissed if I hadn’t had a certain background/incentive to go watch them. I watched After Earth because tumblr has taught me to spot racism & racist tropes and I figured ‘eh, might as well put my money where my mouth is’. I thought it was a decent flick but it didn’t get me all that engrossed–would it have succeeded better if it had been filled with white characters? Difficult to say. I hope the answer is ‘no’ but I can’t discount the possibility.

Similarly, the CTHD franchise didn’t interest me in the least before I learned that Harry Shum Jr was in the second movie, and my main incentive to watch CTHD was that I’ve only seen HSJ in shows with terrible scripts so I wanted to know if he’d be better when given better starting ground (he is. A lot.) Before that it was like ‘Eh. Kung Fu movie. Boring.’ And when I watched it, I found it interesting and liked it, but I can’t say it got the same levels of enthusiasm from me as, say, the MCU, LOTR or Battlestar Galactica got from me.

And like, clearly the genre is not the problem here–I like Science Fiction and Fantasy and frankly Kung Fu movies, like any genre, have their good ones and their bad ones. So the obvious conclusion here is that what made me tick about After Earth and not-tick about CTHD are racial expectations–the expectation that US movies will/should be about white people. What part of that is just habit and what part of that is racism, I don’t know yet. It is, however, interesting to think about because it means I can figure out what led to that state of mind and, from there, hopefully work on correcting it, either by consuming more US fiction about black americans (and on that note, remind me to give Luke Cage a go) or by consuming more fiction/material about black people in general or by trying to, idk how to formulate it, rewrite my own programming, so to speak?