What I would like to see is the subjugation of a native people treated as tragic without the natives portrayed as noble savages. No group of people deserves to be conquered just because many of them have character flaws. If that were the case, everyone in the world would deserve to be conquered.
Is a good example.
I don’t know if this is what you mean, but The Notebook would have been a tolerable movie if James Garner had turned out to be not Ryan Gosling, but that other guy that whatshername was engaged to, whom she eventually married and had a happy life with.
I’m pretty sure they rounded up and executed a lot of criminals (along with people who were mentally ill or disabled) before they worked their way up to genocide. I’m sure there were some actual scumbags in there. It doesn’t make for much of a story on its own because you’d have to make the audience care that crimes are being committed against these people.
The Bad News Bears lost fair and square to the jerks who gave them a hard time. Although they did tell them to take their trophy and shove it up their ass. So the scrappy poor kids did at least have the cliche of getting the last word.
Despite it being a Kevin Costner sports movie post-Bull Durham, I still liked TIN CUP for one thing:
The fact that the hero’s stubborn insistence on trying to hit the “perfect shot” instead of taking the easy way out in fact loses him the tournament.
This is a much more worthwhile goal – it isn’t necessary to portray Native Americans as proto-hippies in order to make the characters sympathetic!
The problem with just inverting hackneyed tropes about groups of people is that it usually would not lead to balanced representations of these groups, it would just switch from one extreme to the other.
I’d like to see some of the romantic tropes and obligatory love interest story lines inserted into genre films be gay instead of hetero. The tough guy falls for the guy he’s protecting instead of the girl. A cop comes home to a husband at the end of the day instead of a wife. A woman is really great at her job but isn’t happy because she hasn’t found the right girl. These should not be movies about being gay. I’m saying I would like to see same-sex relationshiops shown as casual and unremarkable to to the plot.
Another one – a girl fights to join a boys’ sports team but ends up totally sucking and not being able to compete with them at all.
There was actually a rather interesting subplot along these lines in the underrated The Mexican.
James Gandofini plays a thug who kidnaps Julia Roberts on behalf of a crime boss. While he has her hostage it’s revealed he is gay and he ends up having a romantic fling with another guy at her instigation.
I don’t they’re talking about a movie where the whites are good and the ethnics are bad. I think the idea is “Everyone’s a selfish b*stard at heart, and good people are good because of who they are, not because their way of life is so superior”.
Or even a plot where the White and Ethnic societies each have their share of good and bad.
…
In the fantasy realm, I’d like to read/watch about a Harry Potter-type school of magic from the teacher’s point of veiw. Extra points if they play up the cliche “rule-breaking kid hero versus oblivious adult” encounters for laughs.
Also, the Foundling With A Destiny. I’d like to have the beginning of the story focasing on the parents and their circumstances, with the kid not being orphaned until at least the middle.
Have you ever seen a Jennifer Aniston movie? Her whole* thing* is subverting rom-com expectations!
I think any “rule breaking kid vs. institution/adult” could be interesting, actually, not just in the fantasy realm.
I’m thinking of the Shining where there’s (in flashback) this minor plot that explains why Jack Torrance lost his teaching position. He talks about how he had this student on the debate team who stuttered and then accused Jack of messing with the timer for the speeches. The kid ended up getting cut from the team and then slashed Jack’s tires–end result is that Jack punched him and then got fired. We see it from Jack’s POV, though (and King’s kind of ambiguous–maybe on some level, Jack was tampering with the timer?) and we see that the kid is sort of pompous and arrogant, so it’s not just “Mean old teacher.” It was fairly well done–one of King’s really awesome moments, IMO.
Actually, now that I remember, doesn’t Jack end up writing his novel about a student/teacher, and initially the student is the hero but as it goes on, he starts to become more sympathetic to the teacher and less sympathetic to the student who’s sort of a smart ass?
I know that. I don’t think it would matter to a lot of viewers, though.
*That’s not what JRDelirious described at all. He didn’t describe a movie where both the white conquerors and the conquered natives have their good and bad points, but a movie in which both cultures are equally evil – with the exception of our hero and heroine, who each renounce their own culture and ride off into the sunset.
There are very good reasons why we aren’t seeing a lot of movies like this in the theaters. Aside from the problem of getting audiences to care about a movie about conflict between two groups where both sides are the bad guys, there’s also the problem of portraying the conquered as being just as bad as the conquerors. Even if the cultures are equally bad in other ways, there’s still a pretty big moral distinction between violently defending your territory from invaders and violently seizing land and resources from someone else. If the movie depicts both groups as being equally bad then that means there’s nothing especially wrong with the bloody conquest of less technologically advanced peoples – it may not be exactly good, but it’s no worse than they deserve because they’re bad guys too and would have done the same if they’d had the chance. So what’s the big deal? We’re not supposed to be rooting for the natives anyway, all we’re supposed to care about is whether the white hero gets to have sex with the hot ethnic woman. :rolleyes:
There are probably filmgoers who enjoy violence for its own sake and don’t care who’s doing what to whom or what their reasons are, but I think most filmgoers would react to such a movie by thinking either “I can’t believe this movie is saying it was okay to brutally conquer indigenous peoples just because they weren’t perfect” or (I hope less frequently) “Yeah, those filthy savages got what they deserved!” It wouldn’t matter much that the white conquerors were also depicted as being violent and cruel, they’re still the “winners”, and the “losers” are depicted as totally unsympathetic.
I’m not sure I follow the whole inversion thing perfectly, but would The Talented Mr. Ripley fall into the category?
Also, in Day of the Jackal we follow an assassin, and by the end I admit I wanted the Jackal to kill deGaulle. Is that an inversion?
I dunno . . . the last lines of Apocalypto, when the two Mayan protagonists see the boats bringing the Spaniards:
Seven: What are they?
Jaguar Paw: They bring men.
Seven: Should we go to them?
Jaguar Paw: We must go to the forest. To seek a new beginning. Come, Turtles Run…
And they (figuratively) go off into the sunset . . . and we’re left with very little sympathy for the soon-to-be-conquered Mayans, having seen up close (in Mel Gibson’s vision) just what their civilization is like.
I would prefer to see something like this more often (one of the reasons I like the movie To Live and Die in LA):
Policeman engages in a high-speed chase or wild shootout with villain, and innocent bystanders die or get severly injured, some being hit by the villains, some by the policemen. Or policeman “breaks the rule” to catch the criminal (e.g. beating up suspects, threatening someone to reveal something confidential) and ends up finding out that they have been harassing innocent people.
A counterexample of a great movie with a triumph of the villain: Robert Towne/Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
I haven’t seen Apocalypto, but it’s my understanding that a lot of people did think the depiction of the Mayan people was offensive and racist. There’s a section about this in the Wikipedia article.
Maybe not, but I’ve read the first three Ripley novels by Patricia Highsmith, and found it quite unsetlling that Ripley keeps on getting away scot-free with his crimes.
What does it invert? The moral that dishonest behavior brings punishment? In the end, if you’ll look closely, it does.
No, it is a perfectly traditional, even hackneyed, thing of its kind. There’s nothing at all unusual about a crime story that has the audience rooting for the criminal. In cinema, that’s almost as old as cinema itself; in literature, it’s at least as old as the Robin Hood ballads (the oldest of which probably did not feature Robin Hood giving his loot to the poor, and certainly did not feature Robin Hood sticking up for the rightful King Richard against the usurping Prince John).