Kettle, Pot
Every urban culture has a myth about some primitive people that is essential to their identity. Often of course it is the original people that were displaced, and that's the most natural. The Nordic countries do it in this way. But that slot is filled in strange ways across the world. Brazil fills the spot in several ways, with natives, slaves, and the now relatively backwards Portugal being juggled.
In the US, we do something similar, though we handle our native Americans differently. We handle our guilt by overly romanticizing them, a role they eagerly accept. (Indeed, they have reinvented their history around this notion of nobility.) But we do have what everyone else has in this myth of a simple people. You can see this in movies, naturally, as movies are where we as a society mainly maintain our persistent myths these days.
So we have two types of movies that fit this. Blacks aren't allowed in this category. We handle them differently. Immigrants before the recent Hispanic wave of the 60s are particularly represented. The biggest recent example was "Big Fat Greek Wedding," which follows the rather strict model of embracing a sort of innocent stupidity while laughing at it. Its a sort of being in and being out at the same time.
And we have slight variant on this, something I'll call the hillbilly movie. This usually IS hillbillies, Clampets, or Ma and Pa Kettles. The purest form has them puzzled by shoes or plumbing fixtures. This movie is in that tradition.
Its a strange experience if you know the comic strip. That strip was highly political. It and "Pogo" were often the most intelligent things in US newspapers for decades. Al Capp was in a way the political opposite of Gary Trudeau who today does "Doonesbury," perhaps not as clever in narrative but very influential. The strip inspired the famous Lockheed skunkworks, which made secret spy stuff, the inspiration both in name and attitude.
If you know the history and the strip, you'd come to this expecting a deeply political and introspective thing. Instead, this snaps to the hillbilly model, except the characters have prosthetics and histories that resemble their drawn forms.
You might only want to watch this to see how easily movies embrace some of our cultural legacies and at the same time find it difficult to be insightful in useful ways.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
In the US, we do something similar, though we handle our native Americans differently. We handle our guilt by overly romanticizing them, a role they eagerly accept. (Indeed, they have reinvented their history around this notion of nobility.) But we do have what everyone else has in this myth of a simple people. You can see this in movies, naturally, as movies are where we as a society mainly maintain our persistent myths these days.
So we have two types of movies that fit this. Blacks aren't allowed in this category. We handle them differently. Immigrants before the recent Hispanic wave of the 60s are particularly represented. The biggest recent example was "Big Fat Greek Wedding," which follows the rather strict model of embracing a sort of innocent stupidity while laughing at it. Its a sort of being in and being out at the same time.
And we have slight variant on this, something I'll call the hillbilly movie. This usually IS hillbillies, Clampets, or Ma and Pa Kettles. The purest form has them puzzled by shoes or plumbing fixtures. This movie is in that tradition.
Its a strange experience if you know the comic strip. That strip was highly political. It and "Pogo" were often the most intelligent things in US newspapers for decades. Al Capp was in a way the political opposite of Gary Trudeau who today does "Doonesbury," perhaps not as clever in narrative but very influential. The strip inspired the famous Lockheed skunkworks, which made secret spy stuff, the inspiration both in name and attitude.
If you know the history and the strip, you'd come to this expecting a deeply political and introspective thing. Instead, this snaps to the hillbilly model, except the characters have prosthetics and histories that resemble their drawn forms.
You might only want to watch this to see how easily movies embrace some of our cultural legacies and at the same time find it difficult to be insightful in useful ways.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
- tedg
- Oct 12, 2006