Good point. Any discussion of M:I film franchise has to begin by justifying the notion of Jim Phelps not being the protagonist. Since this is, by definition, not possible, there’s no point in considering the films as discussable.
It’s like making a film version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and having the Grinch be the barber who cuts the guy who actually steals Christmas’s hair.
”If they’d just send their money and stay home themselves, they wouldn’t be so bad…”
I was vacationing in a vacationy spot in Maine a few years back. Parked in a driveway was a car with a Maine license plate that read GO HOME. I thought that message was… Rather clear.
I’m glad you mentioned the Japanese. In my opinion their appropriation of European culture for video games exported back to the West was a good thing. The early Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games are some of my favorites, but they certainly don’t realistically represent medieval Europe. None the less, I have no issue with Square and Enix doing what they did. I think it’s likely that video games may have died out in the 1980s had they not been “appropriated” by Nintendo and Sega during that time period. So in my book I have no issue with this sort of thing.
Does it make a difference when the locals are willing participants in the exoticizing? We’re talking about Dubai here and they’ve made a concerted effort to present themselves to the world as a tourist destination with their shopping, recreation, and ostentatious construction projects. The United Arab Emirates actively encourages Hollywood to film movies over there. I don’t see this so much as exploitation as I see it as a cultural exchange. At the very least, I think we can both agree that filming a movie in Dubai is quite a bit different from the slides of misery tourism that was inflicted on you.
And was Dubai exoticized or fetishized in the Mission Impossible movie?
This is an interesting point, because it gets back to what I was saying earlier about how you can’t characterize a whole nation (or city) in this way. Plenty of Dubai locals aren’t willing participants in any economic activity: there’s significant slavery in the city. I have trouble believing that most enslaved folks in Dubai are happy with the city’s tourist-friendly facade; they might prefer that media provide a more accurate view of the human rights violations they face.
But that, of course, wouldn’t provide escapist entertainment. And it wouldn’t line the pockets of Dubai’s elite. So there’s little incentive for that sort of accurate depiction of the city.
I haven’t seen the latest movie and remember pretty much nothing about earlier movies in the franchise, so I’m discussing generalities and not particulars.
You’re right that the UAE treats its foreign workers terribly, and I agree with you in regards to calling it slavery, but I didn’t bring it up because it doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not filming in Dubai is a form of cultural appropriation or exoticizing. (And that’s even before getting into whether or not those slave laborers are locals or not. I lived in Munich for three years but I never considered myself a local.) Even if some people aren’t willing participants, that still doesn’t make filming an action scene on the Burj Khalifa a form of appropriation or exoticization. Especially when the UAE is actively encouraging production crews to film in their country.
It is unfortunate that cultural appropriation is most often thought of in a negative light these days. It can be negative, yes. But very often critics of appropriation view non-western cultures as victims with little to no agency. And for places like the UAE, China, and Japan this just isn’t the case.
It’s set in France. The French don’t complain when people appropriate their culture - they complain when people don’t.
Cultural appropriation would be if the studio doesn’t make a motion picture at all and instead tells their hackneyed story using smoke signals or giant petroglyphs.
It’s relevant because of the counterargument “but the locals WANT it to happen.” It’s always more complicated than that, and that’s not a good counterargument.
I don’t think it’s “cultural appropriation” if all you are doing is filming a gunfight on the outside of the Burj Dubai or jumping a racecar between two skyscrapers.
Video games don’t really represent anything realistically, and cinematic depictions of anything medieval tend not to be realistic.
Anyway, where is the dividing line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange (the latter in the literal and not the euphemistic sense)? For example, Europe had a big thing about chinoiserie in the 18C, and what we see of its nowadays can be rather amusing since we have a far more complete picture of the countries concerned.
Most likely, it is a welcome shot in the arm for the local economy. Often, it showcases areas that would find more tourist trade a very welcome thing.
There have certainly been complaints about the Netflix show “Emily in Paris”.
This kind of anti-tourist stuff really gets my goat. So you live somewhere nice, lucky you. Do you own the place? Do you have to be such an arsehole to visitors? Don’t you ever go on holiday?
I’ve lived in London (tourists get swallowed up by the throng) and worked in Bath (where I habitually felt like the only person there who wasn’t a tourist), and tourists never bugged me. I liked seeing people enjoy themselves in ‘my town’.
To the OP, I don’t like the way everything gets branded as ‘cultural appropriation’ these days. Taken to the enth degree, it means writers can never write about anything outside their immediate environment, and actors can’t take on characters which don’t reflect their own direct experience. It’s the death of artistic experiment. Provided dominant societies treat other cultures with respect, I generally don’t see the issue.
Guess that’s not the car they take on their weekends in Montreal or Boston.
But that’s the current gestalt, isn’t it? All art has to be autobiographical. Look at contemporary popular singers - all they ever sing about is themselves.
I don’t think so either.
as Shatner said, a lot of these ticked off people need to seriously get a life.