Are you thinking of The Twilight Zone? A bigot gets sent back into several pasts where he is the minority that gets persecuted. He finds himself as a black man getting lynched the the KKK, and a Jew getting rounded up[ by the Nazis. He remains white, but other people’[s perceptions of him change.
It was in the original TV show, and remade for the movie. In the movie Vic Morrow was the star of the segment.
Would you really love to see such a movie? This sounds like one of those ideas that might be funny in a brief skit, but I can’t imagine any decent person seriously enjoying a film in which the technologically advanced Westerners righteously subjugate the wicked and backwards non-white indigenous people.
There’s a John Travolta movie called White Man’s Burden that’s about an alternate universe where whites are oppressed by blacks.
That might be it (though I don’t remembr Travolta). It definatly wasn’t the Twilight Zone.
The way I learned it in HS English, most of Shakespeare’s plays are constructed that way, with “rising action” to the third act and “falling action” to the fifth. E.g., the actual climax of Hamlet is not the final sword-duel with Laertes, but Hamlet’s refusal to kill Claudius when he finds him praying.
Something along these lines is Black Robe, where the Indians of New France are portrayed as ignorant savages who torture anyone they capture and completely misinterpret everything they see about the French. Even those friendly to the Jesuit missionary are so frightened of his strange power to put words on paper that they think he is a demon and hire a sorcerer to exorcise him.
See also Out of Africa, where the chief of the Kenyans on Baroness Blixen’s coffee plantation at first tries to block her plan to teach the children to read, because it is unseemly they should know more than their elders.
You could make a good historical case that was true of the Indians, who may have “walked lightly on the land” compared to the Europeans, but still made a great many changes to the landscape over the millennia after they crossed the Bering Strait, and burned forests for their own purposes, and bred barely-edible wild plants into domestic crops such as maize and potatoes, and probably hunted to extinction the Pleistocene mammoths, wild horses, etc. (See American Colonies, by Alan Taylor.)
You need to watch it again. The hero’s death didn’t play out quite like that.
THE CRUSH, with young Alicia Silverstone, comes pretty close.
Thought of another real movie that does invert a familiar trope:
This is more or less what happens in Birthday Girl (2001), starring Nicole Kidman as the wife.Kidman plays a mail-order bride who, with two accomplices, scams one man after another out of large sums of money by playing out a “kidnapping”. Her current husband, the film’s protagonist, is forced to rob his workplace to get the ransom money and is abused by the two “kidnappers”. After he learns Kidman was in on it all along, he beats her up. This character is portrayed sympathetically, and it’s made clear that Kidman’s character was a willing party to these scams.I’m also reminded of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which presents rape (committed by the hero) as a suitable punishment for the female villain. That was over 30 years ago though, I’m not sure any mainstream film would do this today.
Hell, it might or might not have been done, but the simple real life telling of the Wizard of OZ from outside the looking glass would be interesting. Instead of Dorothy’s fevered and hallucinatory story of her Aunts and Uncles and the people in her small Kansas town in the dreamland of Oz, perhaps a simple Winesburg type retelling and short story of small town period dustbowl Kansas with the same plotline.
[quote=“BigT, post:8, topic:532397”]
[li]Either the hero is the one who keeps falling, or the “ethnic” hero and heroine are running away from white “savages.”[/li][/QUOTE]
The latter is pretty much what we see in any portrayal of runaway slaves in the antebellum South.
Here’s something that hasn’t been done yet and probably could be: A movie about the Haitian Revolution of 1791, essentially a successful slave rebellion and one of the few such in history. It would show the astonishingly (even by U.S. standards) cruel and brutal treatment of Haiti’s sugar-plantation slaves under French rule, but also the equally cruel and brutal vengeance they meted out against the whites when they rose up, as well as the complex and multi-sided nature of the conflict between whites, slaves, and free black gens de couleur, the many cynical betrayals of and by both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary leaders, the interplay of it all with the contemporary politics of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and how all of this set the stage for Haiti’s rather dismal political history ever since. No moral message but “Life sucks.”
OK, I take it back: It probably couldn’t be done. Too many minefields. But it should be.
You are correct, sir.
Hell, maybe Dorothy dies in a tornado.
I’m not sure I follow this. In the original novel Dorothy really does unambiguously go to Oz, and no one she meets there is an alternate of people she knows back in Kansas. That conceit is wholly the invention of the movie*. And without the Oz adventure, just what story is there left to tell?
*and IMHO, a stupid invention. Apparently the makers of the film decided that it was necessary to tack on a moral of “no need to wish you lived in a fabulous place of magic and adventure- you can be happy in rural Dustbowl Kansas”.
I thought this thread was about inverting hackneyed TV and Movie screenplays/plots… Yea, the book is a bit different, I’ve read bits and pieces of it…
But the beauty of the whole story in the classic movie version is that Dorothy is constructing a magical archetypical story of her everyday life. I guess what I am leaning towards is a deconstructionist and mundane Peyton Place/The Grapes of Wrath soap Opera type probe of the underlying archetypoes of the “magical adventure”. But Dorothy must die in a tornado
And then everybody blames it on the rich-bitch Almira Gulch and a class war breaks out and Tom Joad leads the nation in revolution . . . 
Don’t knock rural dustbowl Kansas. At least it didn’t have them flying monkeys.
:eek:
Necessarily, my inversion of rural dustbowl Kansas would have flying pigs.
Local Sheriff and crop duster, Simian Huff…