“Brothers don’t last long in situations like this.” — Duane Martin as “Joel”, Scream 2, 1997.
In 1997, the illness was still beneath the surface enough for the joke to register. Fourteen years later, in 2011, is the joke still funny? We’re in the future. We have a multi-cultural president. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are basically our royal family. But still too many movies are screwing this up. What the fuck are they thinking?
What follows is a partial list of the movies of 2011 which still dared to kill the black guys first (or only).
Some great movies qualified, unfortunately, but that’s uncommon. Better movies usually know better. Since “killing off the black guy” is more normally the province of uncreative films and filmmakers, and since I tried to stick to the good stuff this year, I’m sure there are plenty of qualifying movies I haven’t seen. Feel free to write in with any additions to the list.
In the meantime, mourn these characters. It should’ve been one of the white guys instead.
SOME SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY.
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- Darwin (Edi Gathegi), X-Men: First Class. This movie was better than could be expected from the director of Kick-Ass, but it still had several problems, such as being way too long for a silly superhero movie, and oh yeah, killing off the only black character. In a film set in the 1960s and pretending to engage in the major social issues of the era, what message is this meant to send?
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- Jameson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), The Thing. Also possibly in The Killer Elite. The “prequel” to John Carpenter’s The Thing is inferior to Carpenter’s classic, and to so many other films, for plenty of reasons (outlined in depth here), but the alien’s racial-profiling is the one I’m focusing on today. This bad new movie lamely imitated so much of what John Carpenter’s movie did, yet somehow the one thing they decided to get original on was to get rid of the awesomeness of Keith David’s character and replace him with one who gets nothing interesting to do.
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- [You tell me who died], Transformers 3. There’s no way I’ll watch the second or third Transformers movie, seeing as how the first one was so ugly. If I’m wrong, I’m sure you’ll tell me. Did they eventually rebuild the black Autobot? Are the human characters still fancy with stereotypically cartoonish behavior? Or did somebody finally convince Michael Bay to rein in his legendary flair for comedy, and stick to blowing shit up with dignity?
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- Dennis (Franz Drameh) and Jerome (Leeon Jones), Attack The Block. As much as I adore this movie, the one thing that troubles me is that the surviving characters, with the exception of main hero Moses, are all white. Did we really need to keep that dopey pothead Brewis around until the end? Or Ron, for that matter, as much as we all dig Nick Frost? I would trade those guys for Dennis and Jerome in an instant. Although maybe that’s the point… (That probably is the point. This movie is too smart to louse this up.)
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- Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo), Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. Every time one of these movies comes out, there’s grumblings about the troubling subtext. Forget the subtext — how about the fact that of the two cheer-worthy deaths in the film, one of them is this dapper gent? I’ll tell you something quite honestly: One of the few cinematic stereotypes I happen to subscribe to is that all evil billionaire businessmen in expensive suits are always white guys.
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- Jason (Brandon Jay McLaren), Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil. This one is pretty mild, since he’s one of about seventeen characters to bite it during the course of this bloody, bloody movie. But it still counts. With this genre, call it the sins of the father.
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- Malik (Sinqua Walls), Shark Night 3D. The one brother in this entire movie didn’t even make it through the trailer.
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- Thundarian (Deobia Oparei), Your Highness. I know this is a comedy. Even still.
- Also probably The Minotaur, Your Highness.
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- Mufasa (James Earl Jones), The Lion King 3D. If they’re gonna re-release it, I’m gonna call them out on it again.
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THE TALLY: 10. More or less.
Comparatively speaking, it was a light year for needlessly offing black characters in movies. However, if you were to expand the field to include other ethnicities, the competition grows more fierce…
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Death Toll, Latin Division
- George (Luis Guzmán), The Caller.
- Zoe Saldana’s entire family, Columbiana.
- Half the cast of Battle: Los Angeles.
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Asian Division
- Amber (Jamie Chung), Sucker Punch. Which is especially egregious considering that all three blond girls make it to the end, and that all three of them put together don’t look this good. Seriously dude, if you’re going to make a shitty exploitation movie, at least know how to favor the hottest chick.
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Native American Division
- Indian genocide, Cowboys & Aliens. There are Indians in this movie, not that you’d know it from the trailers or the posters or the official site or even if you saw the movie (it’s all kind of forgettable.) But in the last third of the movie, our blond, blue-eyed movie star heroes do in fact team up with the red man. An entire tribe of Native braves attacks the alien fortress, getting blasted off like Ewoks during the Battle of Endor. This movie treats them like cannon fodder at best. But at least the unknown enemy brought frontiersmen and savages together just this once, right?
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Special Achievement In [Hopefully] Unintentional Racism
T-Dog and Jacqui, The Walking Dead (Seasons 1-2).
One of the most embarassing things I’ve ever posted on the internet, in retrospect, was this rave review of the pilot episode of The Walking Dead on AMC.
The first episode of the series was promising for many reasons, one of which being the appearance of Morgan (Lennie James), a father trying to protect his son in a zombie-infested wasteland. Morgan also happened to be black, but that was just a detail, not an issue. That’s the good news. The bad news: The show promptly deserted Morgan, and introduced T-Dog.
Besides the abominable name, there isn’t much to T-Dog. It doesn’t help that he’s probably the most ‘limited’ actor on a show that, Michael Rooker aside, isn’t being watched for the acting. There have been no attempts made by the writing staff of this show to broaden T-Dog’s character. I’m pretty sure his biggest moment so far in season 2 was to accidentally slice open his arm on a car door, causing complications for his white friends. Also, may I remind you that, after the abhorrent Season 1 finale, T-Dog is the only black character on the show? (The only character of color, period, besides Glenn.) Should I run through the process that narrowed that number down to one?
Remember that scene in the underground bunker, when both Andrea (blond, conventionally pretty) and Jacqui (black, portrayed as average) decide to stay behind and die, and Dale (old white man, always wears lame hat) returns to save… only one of the two of them? Dale begs and begs Andrea to come with him, to not give up, while Jacqui stands around moping in the background, as indeed she had been for the entire season, completely ignored.
I’m not saying that this was intentionally racist. I don’t actually think it was. But it’s inept and ignorant. And I must assert that any show containing a scene like that one cannot POSSIBLY be as good as way too many otherwise-smart people so badly want to believe that it is. (Looking at you, everyone who’s appeared on “Talking Dead.”) I love the idea of an unrated zombie serial too. But the fact remains: It’s a bad show. Started with a bang, and then it ate dirt.
Anyway, the special effects are awesome. There’s always hope.
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LEGAL DISCLAIMER:
I hope you understand, I didn’t put this list together for hate. The only thing I hate is racism. I undertook this exercise, as I try to do so many things, out of love. I pointed out all these troublesome instances so that people understand how these stereotypes are ingrained in all of us, and how, once we understand that, we can do better. This stuff matters to me. Movies matter to me. Genre movies matter to me. Humanity matters a whole lot to me.
I hope I don’t have to make this list an annual thing. I hope at this time next year, I’ll have to come up with all new conventions to complain about. Help me out with this one, Hollywood.
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For more dancing around the edges of controversy, follow @jonnyabomb on Twitter!
6 comments
I dug the new Xmen but still rolled my eyes when Darwin was killed. You’d think it was in the fine print on the back of sag cards.
It probably is.
I was with you until The Lion King. No. Just no. Fair points on the others but Tucker & Dale doesn’t count just because of the failings of other films.
“and oh yeah, killing off the only black character” [X-Men…]
“…in the last third of the movie, our blond, blue-eyed movie star heroes do in fact team up with the red man” [Cowboys & Aliens]
“Mufasa (James Earl Jones), The Lion King 3D” (Lion King)
Hmmm… it’s almost as if you are suggesting Zoë Kravitz (X-Men…), Niketa Calame, Robert Guillaume, Whoopi Goldberg & Madge Sinclair (Lion King) aren’t African-American and Adam Beach isn’t Native American
If you’re going to call out the racial priveleges in a Hollywood film, at least try not to skip over the major non-white actors as if they don’t exist.
The Lion King bit was an attempt to lighten the mood a little. (The cheap minotaur joke preceding it was a clue.) I didn’t want to bum people out entirely.
Regarding X-Men, sure I contemplated Zoe Kravitz, but her being in the movie sporadically was not enough to lessen my qualms about the prominent and gratuitous death of Darwin. Why him and not Banshee (for example)? You’re free to disagree and I appreciate the dialogue. But while it’s probably tempting (and even justifiable) to pick apart a list like this one, that’s not addressing the main argument I’m making, which is that this problem continues to exist and that it shouldn’t.
Either way, thanks for reminding me about Adam Beach. That character certainly warrants a place on this list.
Ah, maybe I was being oversensitive about The Lion King there. Thing is, people have actually made the argument about Lion King being racially insensitive over the death of Mufasa, so its inclusion here — whether humorously implied or not — is easy to misunderstand.
I don’t disagree at all regarding Darwin’s death — it could have and should have been someone else. I just think that labeling him as “the only black character” is a bit disingenuous . And that was my main point in my original comment: identifying the victims of and the exercise of privilege is a worthy exercise and needs to be done to remind viewers and makers of film alike that it still exists, but it needs to be done carefully. Skipping lightly over exceptions to the foul you cry lessens the impact of that foul.
Darwin’s death in X-Men FC is a great example of just what a fine-line privilege can be. I’m willing to bet that the fact that the character was black had no place in the mind of the filmmakers at all when they decided he should be the one Shaw kills. Instead they probably thought something along the lines of “who’s the nicest, most likeable and almost sweetly innocent of the characters that we could kill (that’s not a current major character in X-Men comics right now, getting us into trouble with fans) and use that death to illustrate Shaw’s power and cruelty? Ahah! Darwin!” The insensitivity of the death arises not “because they killed the black character” but instead that it didn’t even occur to them that killing one of two black characters in a mostly white ensemble was likely to cause offense. They were insensitive to the insensitivity…
Personally, I thought the gender insensitivity to be far more egregious with the reduction of female roles to sex objects for the men. Of four “major” female roles, all four were fetishized at some point: Emma Frost (the character has always been a fetish), Moira (when she infiltrated the Hellfire club as a sex worker), Pixie/ Angel (stripper/ sex worker), and Mystique (the only character to walk around naked). They could have at least bothered to have Beast run around in just shorts as he does in the comics. That MIGHT have made up for Mystique being naked on-film but never in ink.
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