How embarassing!

Cafe Society
1

Birth of a Nation revoloutionalized film. Film students can effectively discuss what it brought to the table far more than I can, but it did something truly remarkable films do. Large parts of it became cliche. Watching it you constantly find yourself thinking you’ve seen it before, because it hits every piece of your film vocabulary. But…

It features the Klan as the good guys and an attitude towards race that predates the civil war. It was a technical masterpiece, but the plot is the elephant in the room.

So please, enlighten me to other art that is simultaenously groundbreaking, important, and gawd-awful embarassing.

2

[QUOTE=HeadNinja]
Birth of a Nation revoloutionalized film. Film students can effectively discuss what it brought to the table far more than I can, but it did something truly remarkable films do. Large parts of it became cliche. Watching it you constantly find yourself thinking you’ve seen it before, because it hits every piece of your film vocabulary. But…

It features the Klan as the good guys and an attitude towards race that predates the civil war. It was a technical masterpiece, but the plot is the elephant in the room.

So please, enlighten me to other art that is simultaenously groundbreaking, important, and gawd-awful embarassing.
[/QUOTE]

The racism in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan stories is quite blatant, when looked at with modern eyes it hurts what are otherwise ripping yarns.

3

The works of Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl is doubly notable (in a positive way) for being an absolutely brilliant film pioneer, and one of the few women in the early 20th century to make a career as a film director. Unfortunately, her ground-breaking documentary “Triumph of the Will” is a brazen propaganda piece for Hitler’s then-ascendant Nazi Third Riech.

Riefenstahl lived to be 100 years old (she died in 2003). After WWII ended, she adamantly denied any real ties with the nazi party and insisted that her puff-piece was an utterly objective look at a political rally. To the day she died, she refused to admit she ever was sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Her film-making techniques however are still state of the art.

4

Birth of a Nation is a pretty extreme case; a great artist wh holds a reprehensible moral position celebrates it, rather than obscures it, in a great masterpiece. “Embarrassing” is embarrassingly understated for the racist agenda of Birth of a Nation; the incidental racism of the many Thirties musicals that contain blackface numbers, for example, is pretty innocuous by comparison. I’d sooner say “horrifying” or “shameful” than embarrassing.

On that scale, the only thing to compare to it is the work that Leni Riefenstahl did for the Nazis.

5

Must. Type. Faster.

6

Rudyard Kipling is reviled these days, but his poetry is a magnificent illustration of the height of the British Empire.

7

Well, La Chanson de Roland is an important piece of medieval literature that, at its core, is just a work of anti-Muslim propaganda.

I rather imagine that older religious texts (much of which is written in artistic, literary genres)–such as the Hebrew bible, for example–have sections that some find hard to reconcile with modern sensibilities.

8

HP Lovecraft was a very racist person and his works do nothing to conceal that fact, yet his writings defined the horror genre.

9

Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta - the villain is a rip-roaring, fun-to-hate guy who’d kill his daughter out of spite, because, he’s, well, a Jew.

I used to be embarrassed for Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice before I read the Marlowe version.

10

He is? I’m not familiar with the bulk of his work, but I love the short stories … darn it, my brain is misfiring. You know, like “The Elephant’s Child.” There is a whole series of them and they’re wonderful to read aloud.

I think the work of Andy Warhol fits some of the OP’s critera. It’s groundbreaking and important, but there are many people out there who see it as pure crap, including a camp of art critics.

11

Not by me. The worst of his stuff is, indeed, racist crap, but it sheds a light on the thinking of Victorian England. And the best of his stuff is great by any measure.

12

Oh, well his larger output has been widely reviled in the literature scene in the UK and former colonies over the past couple of decades.

Now you both mention it, though, If won the “best loved poem” on the BBC a few years ago, so I’m probably exaggerating the negativity.

13

[QUOTE=Beadalin]
He is? I’m not familiar with the bulk of his work, but I love the short stories … darn it, my brain is misfiring. You know, like “The Elephant’s Child.” There is a whole series of them and they’re wonderful to read aloud.
[/QUOTE]

Just So Stories.

My kids absolutely loved Jungle Book. When my oldest son was three, he would occassionally pop out form underneath a table and explain that he was the dusty brown snakeling who lies for choice upon the dusty earth. He memorized large parts of the book, from being read to. I did have to do a good deal of ewiting on the fly, though. Any reference to how one race smelled, or how courageous they were, I just skipped over. I could have started a discussion of racial attitutudes in Victorian/Edwardian England and Colonialism, but I was trying to get him to sleep, you know?

14

Breakfast at Tiffany’s explores unconventional roles for both of the main characters (he’s a gigolo and she’s a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-not-quite-prostitute). For the era, it was very daring. But Mickey Rooney’s (supposedly comic) horrible performance as the japanese landlord is cringe-tastic and outright insulting.

15

[QUOTE=BMalion]
The racism in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan stories is quite blatant, when looked at with modern eyes it hurts what are otherwise ripping yarns.
[/QUOTE]
Really? Could you give a cite? I’ve read the first three or four original Tarzan novels and never noticed any particular bias against black Africans, if that’s what you mean. In the second book he saves a tribe from Arab slave raiders (but later portrays other Arabs sympathetically). In the third book he has a tribe take brutal revenge on whites who’ve abused them. The only group of people Burroughs consistantly reviles as the scum of the earth are sailors.

16

There is a lot of overt racism in American films prior to WWII – and a little beyond. Indeed, the stereotypes created in Birth of a Nation still are being used today, albeit in toned-down versions. (ee Charles Bogle’s classic discussion of racism in Hollywood, Toms, Coons, Mammies, Mullatos, and Bucks.

Gone With the Wind, for instance, has some embarassing moments, as does the Warner Brothers cartoon Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs, considered one of the fifty best cartoons of all time.

17

I think there’s been a previous thread on the subject, but for what it’s worth:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has gone from deeply moving:

[QUOTE=The Adventure of the Yellow Face, from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes]
“That is John Hebron, of Atlanta,” said the lady, “and a nobler man never walked the earth. I cut myself off from my race in order to wed him, but never once while he lived did I for an instant regret it. It was our misfortune that our only child took after his people rather than mine. It is often so in such matches, and little Lucy is darker far than ever her father was. But dark or fair, she is my own dear little girlie, and her mother’s pet.” The little creature ran across at the words and nestled up against the lady’s dress.

“When I left her in America,” she continued, "it was only because her health was weak, and the change might have done her harm. She was given to the care of a faithful Scotch woman who had once been our servant. Never for an instant did I dream of disowning her as my child. But when chance threw you in my way, Jack, and I learned to love you, I feared to tell you about my child. God forgive me, I feared that I should lose you, and I had not the courage to tell you. I had to choose between you, and in my weakness I turned away from my own little girl. For three years I have kept her existence a secret from you…

And now to-night you at last know all, and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me?" She clasped her hands and waited for an answer.

It was a long ten minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.

“We can talk it over more comfortably at home,” said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”
[/QUOTE]

to deeply embarrassing:

[QUOTE=The Adventure of the Three Gables, from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes]
“I’ve wanted to meet you for some time,” said Holmes. “I won‘t ask you to sit down, for I don’t like the smell of you, but aren‘t you Steve Dixie, the bruiser?”

“That’s my name, Masser Holmes, and you‘ll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip.”

“It is certainly the last thing you need,” said Holmes, staring at our visitor’s hideous mouth.
[/QUOTE]

18

[QUOTE=Beadalin]
He is? I’m not familiar with the bulk of his work, but I love the short stories … darn it, my brain is misfiring. You know, like “The Elephant’s Child.” There is a whole series of them and they’re wonderful to read aloud.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, he is. Kipling is not only reviled now, he was reviled while he yet lived. And yet, at the same time(s), revered. Read this essay by George Orwell: http://4umi.com/orwell/kipling.htm

19

For really important-yet-embarrassing material, see the “Frank Reade” stories of Luis Senarens – seminal 19th-Century American SF, very influential on later generations of SF writers, yet as crudely racist as anything you ever saw!

http://www.bigredhair.com/frankreade/index.html

For a wonderful parody of the above, see Into the Aether, by Richard Lupoff – http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/l/richard-a-lupoff/into-aether.htm.

20

No hatred for James Thurber? I loved his stories when I read them in my teens, but re-reading them later I was astounded at the undercurrent of misogyny and/or racism in virtually every one.