Modhat: You’ve been warned for personal insults before and fairly recently. Your post is probably past borderline but I will just note it. Please be more civil, especially in Café Society.
And who is the official permission giver of a view?
Since there isn’t any I’d say no to the movie being cultural appropriation. I disagree with the concept to begin with so it’d be a hard sell in any case.
Yeah because if I post the link to a 4 hour podcast I really trust the Cafe Society Fact Checkers to be right on it.
And why do you care? People on Cafe Society have said things flagrantly wrong and nobody corrected them. Did you know that Hollywood doesn’t make films about wars where America lost? Apparently Cafe Society thinks so.
Certainly countries have been happy to have The Amazing Race film there. Yes, it’s a reality show, but the show almost always makes you want to bound out the door and head straight to whatever country you just saw.
I’m hesitant to ascribe intention to a whole country like this. My town has a huge tourism industry, and if you look at our TV ads and the front-page articles in our Gannett newspaper and at our government’s Facebook pronouncements, you’d think that we were all desperate for tourists to throng our streets, shops, and restaurants during the holiday season. But if you talk to regular folk–workers, families, not hoteliers and PR flaks–you’ll find that a lot of folks are fucking terrified of a tourist swarm right now and want people to stay home and stay safe. Our wealthy class and our working class aren’t in accord.
Similarly, I suspect a lot of nations have a wealthy class that really wants tourism, whereas a lot of locals are much more skeptical.
Well, yes, right now in the middle of a pandemic people where you live don’t want tourists. But in normal times, I suspect most people where you live want them there.
Any tourist town I’ve been in, people are ambivalent toward tourists. Is that not your experience? It’s exacerbated during the pandemic, but it’s always a tension. It’s not a tension that ever gets reflected in promotional materials, of course.
I don’t know that I’d call it ambivalence exactly - it’s more that some people don’t want tourists and others do. And it’s not always a divide between the wealthy and the workers. I’ve been places where a huge number of businesses close during the off-season - and that means those jobs disappear during the off-season.
While that’s true, I know a lot of people who do feel that ambivalence. They know their jobs depend on tourists, and they hate that, even while they want the tourist money.
More than that, though, I’m talking about the ambivalence within the town: I was responding to the idea that “countries have been happy to have [stuff] film there” and suggesting it’s a little more complicated.
“Well, yes, right now in the middle of a pandemic people where you live don’t want tourists. But in normal times, I suspect most people where you live want them there.”
I used to have relatives in Cambridge (UK) and lived in London for a few years. In both cases there were tourists everywhere, with a respite from about October to March. Cambridge is small and the touristy area is even smaller, so the city center gets overrun. It gets tiresome for the locals.
But it’s not as if tourism is a recent phenomenon in these areas, is it? This sounds like the guy who buys a house next to the airport and then complains about the noise.
As to the OP, cultural appropriation is a somewhat fuzzy concept to me. No, you shouldn’t perform in blackface; yes, white women should be allowed to wear kimonos. There is an infinite grayscale in between. But using a foreign location to film a movie doesn’t even ping as being on that scale. So yeah, it’s a dumb argument IMO.
If filming a movie in another country is appropriation, then where does globalization fit in? Despite many peoples’ objections, we live in a globalized world. Most countries literally cannot survive without the products, services, ideas, knowledge, food, of others. Some of these things are fiercely opposed by locals while others are leapt upon and have become basic parts of a new culture.
Can any lines at all be drawn? If so, who makes those lines? Some cultures/nations/continents/groups have a larger presence than others but those others now have many more opportunities to even out their influence. They can shout just as loudly.
Pedantically, all culture involves appropriation. Even basic tribes/peoples/clans/folk regularly meet with others and swap bits of culture. Numbers and alphabets and farming were invented no more than a handful of times each. Imperialism certainly smashed native cultures and imposed new cultures by force, but no matter how wrong that period was it cannot be erased. Today’s culture is the sum of all influences over history. Nothing and nobody is pure.
Not that it matters down at street level. Individuals will air their grievances and have the right to try to persuade others of their rightness and righteousness. Some won’t be very persuasive at all. I wonder what foods the podcaster eats and how they justify them.
“But it’s not as if tourism is a recent phenomenon in these areas, is it?”
True. But it is still tiresome. It’s far worse for places that change their character.
“As to the OP, cultural appropriation is a somewhat fuzzy concept to me.”
For me too. It’s one thing to have an “exotic” setting. Whatever exotic means. I take it to mean a place that you have not been to. To give an example, some people think Japan is exotic. However, I lived there, and it can be just as workaday as anywhere else in the world.
What irks me is cultural misrepresentation, which is one of Hollywood’s main achievements. To give an example, Disney’s recent attempt at Mulan.
Cultural appropriation is the price you pay for desegregation.
That’s because it is a fuzzy concept. Cultural appropriation, or “borrowing” as we called it when I was a history undergraduate, isn’t inherently good or bad. As you note, all cultures appropriate from others as it’s just a natural consequence of trade and communication. But there are too many people these days who automatically place any appropriation in the category of bad regardless of context.
I think of it as the price you pay for a multi-cultural society.
Thrown at him by who? The Zubrowka Ministry of Foreign Relations?
Well, his recent film Isle of Dogs was set in Japan.
I was trying to think of a film besides The Darjeeling Limited that was set in a real foreign country.
I actually see that he’s got another film coming out soon, adding Timothée Chalamet to his usual cast of characters.
This is glib. We can have desegregation without having people trademark Aloha Poke. We can have a multicultural society without having people dress in blackface as gangsta rappers for Halloween.
There’s a continuum, sure, but continuums exist when something in one one side of it.
And this is maybe not so much about cultural appropriation as it is about exoticizing and fetishizing other folks’ homes.
I once was subjected to a slide show of a couple’s trip to Africa on a “humane safari,” where they just took pictures of wild animals. Scattered amongst the zebras and leopard shots were pictures of Nairobi slums and of orphanages filled with HIV-positive children. It was all just camera-fodder for them, something with which to impress guests.
There are definitely movies that stray into this territory. It’s not helpful to dismiss all complaints glibly.