Do movies teach stereotypes?

Wow.

Can't be helped. *shuts book*

Teach stereotypes? No.

Reinforce stereotypes? Most certainly.

This question seems very chicken or egg. I think if someone has their stereotypes reinforced enough they are going to go on to make a movie that uses those stereotypes, but I think a 2 hour movie isn't pervasive enough to teach a stereotype. Systems of power are far more apt at teaching people what they believe.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

The danger of an analogy is that people will read it as a moral equivalence, that they will miss the axis of comparison. The paradox is that the more extreme the example, the more it illustrates the that "something is wrong," but this comes with increasing risk of the moral connotation of the example overtaking the point of the comparison (the defect in the reasoning).

On the other hand, such a comparison can also give one plausible deniability for an unwelcome association.

The best policy I have found is to keep the moral connotation between A and B comparable, but I have a hard time sticking to this policy, because in the moment of writing, the more hyperbolic framing seems to be more effective.

but i think here you are actually making the mistake of using extreme hyperbole to make a point, which is the thing you were criticizing. I'd say if someone is doing what you did, then it's up to you to either address it yourself or just ignore it, both are pretty easy to do here.


There is this really sh*tty forum i know about online where they actually erase your response to the loaded and stupid things that other people say just because the moderator feels like it...which is overall an infuriating and abusive practice. Since I know this, it's then my job to leave the forum together in the dust, and whatever harm i do to myself by failing to heed my own advice in the future is entirely my fault.

I have to admit that I take it for granted that an adult of average intelligence will not read that comparison and believe that I am comparing anyone vis-a-vis to Charles Manson or his beliefs, although I do tend to be optimistic about average adult intellignce in general. It's a little reductio ad absurdist, but the claim that all interpretations which are possible are valid is already absurd, and invites validating the worst in the history of awful interpretions.

There is a core distinction between my use of (humorous) hyperbole and the "ungenerous hyperbolic inferences" I criticized, which is that I was not inferring Agrip's intentions - I'm not claiming that Agrip agrees with Charles Manson or shares his position - whereas Agrip was claiming that I was (however secretly) intending to suggest the hyperbolic reading that he was projecting onto my prior comments.

Not really

Re: this:

(No tagging).

[Wow.

Can't be helped.***shuts book*]

Hmm, yet when I say I can’t be bothered, this is called ‘conceding’. How very interesting.

I think the issue with your approach, having reread all of the above many times in the last few days, is you do not take emotion into account, a problem which applies to this entire thread, by the way. There is the assumption that if you ‘decide’ diversity is good and fair and blah, blah, blah, it will remove the emotion of frustration and hurt on the part of those being policed and somehow make anti-diversity advocates see the error of their ways. Emotionally speaking, the people who are resentful of the suggested ‘reforms’ in the film industry to do with diversity will remain resentful, and no amount of rationalist ‘discourse’ will affect that.

There also seems to be an assumption that using academic (‘fancy’) terminology like ‘discourse’ and reductio ad absurdum (not ‘ad absurdist’, incidentally, as you can’t modify complete Latin phrases) whatnot will disguise the fact that the issue is inherently an emotive one. The difference between the way you and I approach this is that I have already accepted that nothing and no one is objective and impassioned. You still have a way to go.

No matter how many dictionaries and definitions are brought into this, human beings are driven by emotions and all attempts to artificially restrict those impulses are largely futile. This is what I have partly been intending to say, but I never anticipated such a torrent of bizarre literalism in interpreting the guidelines, nor comments about my rational faculties, so got a little derailed in communicating that very fundamental point.

I have used words evoking and referencing emotion very consciously, not because I was, as you say, ‘taking things personally’, but because I was seeking to illustrate that any attempt at objectivity was simply absurd in this context. Hence the humorous hyperboles and suggestions of what can and can’t be inferred are irrelevant outside a philosophy seminar.

A refusal to admit that people - I, Hollywood directors, actors, diversity activists and anyone who is human - do and will always bring emotion into their reading of everything, including the diversity guidelines, is simply a dismissal of human nature. Which is the fundamental problem with the whole diversity thing, because no one really cares whether it’s meant to be about behind the camera or in front of the camera or what, the immediate - and natural - knee jerk reaction is that of resentment, and even if we all agree that all the people feeling that misread, misunderstand or misconstrue things, and are generally not very intelligent (the horror!) or whatever ‘inferences’ can come in handy in this instance, the resentment will not go anywhere. It is pure emotion. Like children being told to go to bed. People don’t like being told what to do.

This - ‘it's already been shown to be a misreading of the diversity policy in question’ (no tagging....) - suggests that reading the guidelines literally, paying attention to every word like it’s legalese, removes the implication that they will likely be and are already being used to justify the policing of the creative process. It’s really very peculiar to assume that people will treat them in the same way as you and Takoma seem to, i.e. reiterating again and again that they are very lax and don’t have to apply to non-Best Picture contenders, and so on, ad infinitum. Yes, they are, yes, this is in the text, but no one cares, people only read the headlines of things and feel resentment at once. These people can be called out for misreading all you want. But that won’t change a thing.

I mean, it is extremely likely that plenty of people (especially the majority who can’t be bothered) will read them like I do, or even more dismissively, not bothering to go into the detail and deciding, ‘They are forcing me to hire women, how dare they!’ That doesn’t make anyone thinking the above evil or bigoted. If the guidelines were on only filming people wearing red, they would also provoke resentment. Creativity is incompatible with guidelines on choices that are at their heart emotive, aesthetic and spur-of-the-moment.

And it’s all very well to say that thinking ‘anyone is being forced to do anything’, to misquote Takoma, is a misreading of misunderstand or whatever, but it is not too much of a generalisation to say people skim over things, they speed read, and the natural reaction from anyone with an ounce of libertarian values would be one of resentment. Now, as one of the articles I linked in notes, once the boomers (British term, postwar generation) ‘die off’, these standards are likely to become more widely accepted, unless, by that point, the pendulum has already swung back and we are back to neoliberalism or classical liberalism. Not likely.

There is little tendency among the general population to read the legalese, so the real world external impact of these guidelines is to impede creators, restrict them in what they can do in advance and restrict access to funding and all matter of opportunities even further, or give them the impression that such restrictions are in place, which is equally bad or even worse. No matter in how cautious and caveated a manner I state this, the implication remains the same.

See, I do accept the double standards, and even the fact that no matter how hard I tried to be objective when it comes to hard evidence, I wasn’t. What seems amusing to me in this thread is that everyone is appealing to logic and fallacies and all the rest of the concepts that have no bearing on how the world has functioned since the beginning of time and will likely continue to. In fact, I would argue all these concepts (‘fallacy’ and so on) were devised to create artificial order where there is none, which is exactly the issue with any kind of diversity standards, but especially in the arts.

It appears to make sense to some people that by appealing to fallacies and rules on how discourse and business can be conducted they can affect the way people feel, which is that they are fragile, don’t like to be told what to do and feel resentment towards bossy individuals and standards designed to boss them around. It makes people feel still more fragile and still more resentful and is, therefore, counter-productive.

Yes, I find the murder example ‘irrelevant’, to use your word, or, rather, meaningless in this context. Emotionally speaking, people who want to kill will kill and, more importantly, will continue to want to kill, hence no matter how much directors are policed and restricted in their choices, some of them will secretly (or it) want to make a non-diverse film (and probably find a way around doing so), and it could be argued that the very existence of this persistent desire makes measures like imposing any kinds of diversity standards meaningless, because they will not change people’s minds or make the think differently. They will only aggrieve them.

Now, my point, once again, is not to say that diverse films should not be made or even that they won’t become even more prevalent, but that the whole initiative is not emotionally grounded and, if you like, misunderstands human psychology. What do people do when you’re forced to pay more tax than they want to? They move away to tax havens. When your parents tell you smoking is bad, you do two packs a day even if you hate the taste, just because. With diversity, people will inevitably find ways to evade the standards, which will likely show how odd it was to impose them in the first place.

As a huge generalisation, it’s quite amusing how the progressive society works to restrict all aspects of existence further and further in the name of ‘equality’. People will soon go to make films in Singapore or Russia, just as they go there for illegal commercial surrogacy, because ‘Where there is a will, there is a way.’

This thread has definitely gotten off track.

I read quite a bit of the posts, and I don’t see Jinn as personally making any attacks. I do see how some of his posts can be misconstrued as condescending, even if it isn’t necessarily the intention here.

That said, rather then saying “I’m not responsible for how my posts are taken”, maybe take a step back and reconsider that, as you absolutely should always be mindful of that.

As I said before, posts have a way of being taken out of context, and as such the reader should be clear on its meanings as well (god knows I’ve over reacted to well meaning posts) and maybe clarify with the poster his or her meaning before possibly over reacting.

Sorry, but I still don't feel responsible for triggering all of those resentments up there.

Correct: the most extreme way people can get fu*ked over by the internet alone is through repeated bullying/verbal-abuse, this is a lot more serious of an issue than some producer losing their career. People have killed themselves out of getting bullied, when someone's inner space becomes some horrific environment then i can't say i blame them.



Of course, there are a lot of issues with the internet in and of itself when people are using it as a replacement for more old-school types of human interactions.

That’s fine. I can understand your position, even if I don’t completely agree with it.

Alright *rubs lamp* I'm going to attempt a good faith effort here to address the issues laid out, and I promise to leave any snark or sarcasm or 'gotcha'-baiting at the door so that it can be assured that any literal reading will be of a sincere motive on my part. Let's see how this goes.

I'm sentimental by nature, but I do feel that it's necessary, especially when interacting with others of presumably different emotional constitutions, to calibrate one's emotional responses to a degree that allows a common understanding. I believe that your frustration derives from this kind of miscalibration. That is that I can easily take my emotion into account, just as you can easily take your emotion into account. The question in a common discourse is whether either emotional state, necesarily subjective, is being fairly negotiated with someone who isn't required to share it. As the ultimate goal of these kinds of exchanges, from one subjective individual to another, requires a certain understanding of common ground, then it follows that one's emotional understanding needs to be commonly expressed rather than taken for granted. With all due respect, a lot of your frustration seems to be derived from other people not taking your emotional responses as a given. So it isn't so much that anyone isn't taking "emotions into account", but rather that they aren't taking your emotions as a matter of common fact.



One liability of emotional reaction is in how it shortcircuits one's rational faculties. This is known as demagoguery, and it's frowned upon for good reason. A lot of historical atrocities have been commited by those whose emotional reflexes have been manipulated to override their reason. This kind of resentment that you refer to is an excellent example of this, and globably we're seeing people's xenophobic reflexes being manipulated for various means. "Rationalist discourse" is an important defense against irrational emotional impulses. That you feel that rational discourse is incapable of reflecting on these impulses is telling. There's little reason why it shouldn't, unless to suggest that the emotional response cannot withstand rational reflection, which should also be telling.


If you believe that objective understanding of these issues is a forgone fallacy, then I'm not sure why you're attempting to establish such an understanding among those who clearly don't agree with your subjective premise. Your effort to persuade assumes that there's a truth worth being convinced about here.


Denying the utility of "rational faculties", ie saying that pure emotional responses overrule everything else, will likely result in comments about the rational faculties involved.


As Takoma has already mentioned, there is a parallel resentment that you're failing to appreciate here. You demand that we appreciate your resentment against these kinds of diversity corrections. Fine. But have you shown an appreciation for the resentments of those people perpetually excluded fom the very representation that you take for granted? Frankly, I haven't seen evidence of that, and that's a crucial aspect of what this thread is discussing.



But are you a child? No snark - that's simply what this statement begs. Adults do away with childish expectations and learn to negotiate with the society around them.


I treat such documents as legalese because they are legal documents. If one wanted to file a challenge to these policies, they would have to do so in court based on their lack of legal integrity.



I honestly don't see why I should be compelled to respect the position of someone who admittedly didn't bother to understand the issue that they're upset about. "The headline made me mad, but I didn't bother to read the article" is a pathetic excuse for indignation, imo. Sure, I can't force a donkey to drink when they're thirsty. A lot of our recent social problems stem from a kind of willing ignorance - not those who are dumb or dupes but those who are eager to purchase poor information - and, yes, there's nothing I can do about that. If they don't want to listen to reason, it can't be helped. Maybe that's a problem.


I believe that such a fragility is a lethal liability that's best reconciled by those who harbor it. Going through life with an intellectual chip on the shoulder, lashing out at any rationality and logic that disrupts or contradicts their fragily held beliefs and preconceptions can only make for a more volitile society. This isn't a question of people being emotional. Everyone is emotional to some degree. Most of us learn how to navigate our emotional needs within the expectations of other people's needs. Reason is necessary as a common adhesive of understanding. An appeal to the most emotionally fragile among us is an appeal to immaturity.


For the record, that is a huge generalization.

No one should be expected to respect anything or anyone. For the record, it is not my resentment, but no matter. It’s just blindingly obvious, no matter how you want to frame it rhetorically, that this will achieve the exact opposite of what’s intended, i.e. will annoy the resentful population and likely make them even more closed to the idea of collaborating or having anything to do with ‘the other’.

Nothing wrong with your point that the ‘underrepresented’ population’s resentment is also valid, but the rest of the population just doesn’t care about that. Everyone cares about their own resentment.

Honestly, I do wonder what people were getting at with this thread in the first place, hence why I called it ‘an odd topic’.

—
Outta here as this was emblematic of everything I think is wrong with society - and the film industry.

You did. A day ago.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

You’re @AgrippinaX’s “mate”? I rather doubt this.

@AgrippinaX is female.

So do I...

Duly noted.

Well, I can't be accused of intentional mansplaining.

Did the movie Jaws teach the stereotype of Irish descendants who drink heavy and sing badly? I know a guy like that but he would probably deny he got it from Jaws.

I may be an odd duck in this opinion, but...

I think you're all overanalyzing this debate a bit and giving films way more credit than they actually merit.

Believe it or not, you may all be surprised to know this, but... there's a much larger world outside of the theater, (just beyond the silver screen). As much as I love to viddy a show, fact I've come to learn is... a large portion of the world does not. There's people who listen to music, or read, or have religious practice, or like the outdoors, or play games, or whatever whathaveyou. Simply put. The worlds too big. And the silver screen is just a "small" part of it.

Does it reflect and perpetuate norms, stereotypes, the "in vogue" movements of a time. Sure. No doubt. But whether a movie is more responsible for this or that person holding racial/sexual stereotypes, (my guess, just a hunch), has more to do with what goes on "outside" the four walls of a theater. Not in it. But that's just my guess and hunch, maybe I'm the one overthinking these things and not giving cinema its due credit for all the ills of the modern world. Now forgive me as I watch Psycho dress up like woman and slay some people who I didn't quite see "eye to eye" with. After all, the movie made me do it.

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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

-Stan Brakhage

For the record, (I'm just going to state this upfront so we're clear on some terms).

I'm (mostly) apolitical. I think both the right and the left have become radicalized and there seems to be little, (if any), voice of moderation coming from these groups and there's not really a, "Let's agree to disagree, come to a middle-ground, a 'give'," on and on. etc. etc. whathaveyou. This is not to talk politics on this thread or bring politics into the board... all said however, I do think this debate has a thinly veiled "political"-edge to it. And again, we won't delve too much into these things, but I do feel...

You can't have it both ways...

If you really believe films teach stereotypes, how far are you willing to take this argument? Should we put a ban on such speech or representations? Then if it teaches stereotypes, what also does it teach? Films have a lot of smoking. Lots of smoking. Even in current films. Are film responsible for making people smoke? Should we ban or burn films with smoking? After all, I'd say a film with smoking is worse than a film with stereotypes as stereotypes tends to lead to hurt feelings and smoking leads to death. What of violence? Ill-gotten sexual intercourse? The things church groups and their political affiliates rally against, but there's not so much of a bat of an eye from groups that don't 'agree' with them... films are full of it. Even to the modern day. Should we deprive ourselves, get rid of such things, even burn and ban histories we don't see "eye to eye" with...

Point is,

It's a real slippery slope.

Not only do I think the evidence for these things doesn't hold under a hot light and close scrutiny... but if one side says, "yes such things are true, let's do away with..." well guess what? That mouse is going to want his glass of milk and then none of us are going to have much fun or have anything to talk about anymore.

All said,

Tread with caution.