It never stops, does it? The left always finds something to get angry at, and in this case, it's the new movie "The Northman," a bloody, phantasmagorical retelling of an ancient Viking story that may have been the template for works like Hamlet (the protagonist of "The Northman," played by Peter Skarsgård, is named Amleth—hint-hint). The problem, according to leftists? The film is... too white! Women are shown... at home! Taking care of... the kids and the land! Oh, perish the thought! People in standard gender roles? No one at all of dusky persuasion? Well, we can't have that! And while we're at it, the Black Panther films need more Asians! Didn't you know? Africans actually are East Asian! Let's also remake "The Patriot" with a race-swapped protagonist, say, Danny Glover in the title role! And with battalions of female soldiers because of course such battalions fought during the Revolutionary War!
Anyway, I found a video of a historian who calls bullshit on all the lefty nonsense:
The left likes to project, and the leftie idiots who claim the film rewrites or re-envisions the past are themselves guilty of wanting to distort and even erase the past.
I guess I don't keep up with the leftist commentary, because I've heard nothing but good things about this. I desperately want to see it, but I don't think it is playing in Korea, and I'm guessing it's unlikely to make it over here. Maybe it will pop up on Netflix one day, presuming Netflix survives.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I found this interesting article from The Guardian about how the far-right has rallied behind The Northman. While there is certainly some discussion of how art has tended to reinforce certain stereotypes, it mostly seems to me to be a case of people reading into things what they want to see in them. If you want to see a film as celebrating white supremacy (whether you think that is a good thing or bad thing), then you'll see that film as celebrating white supremacy. If you want to just see it as a kick-ass historical tale (which would seem to be how the director intended it), that's how you'll see it. While I'm all for questioning assumptions and examining tropes, etc., the latter does seem like the less exhausting approach.
Well, the Guardian is firmly on the left, so such an article would naturally find a home on its pages, given that the left seems invested in ginning up paranoia about far-right and white-supremacist groups as part of a larger narrative about the pervasiveness of a certain form of bigotry. Such groups do exist, I grant (I've seen their ilk on Gab and even on Instapundit), but they're not hiding in every shadow and under every rug, and they certainly don't have the massive influence on the culture that more wild-eyed lefties think they do.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have known about this controversy, either, had I not heard about it from certain alt-media commentators. The movie critics I watch on YouTube are—with one major exception—all reliably liberal, and they haven't mentioned this problem at all. But, since you've watched the above video, you know the historian quotes from at least one source that makes the white-supremacy claim, so at the very least, we can deduce that that leftie school of thought is out there.
Oh, yeah, I have no doubt that it's out there. I just sometimes wonder if these extreme opinions (on both sides of the aisle) aren't far less influential than media (social and otherwise) might sometimes make them seem.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I will admit that I have occasional seem some things that have made me stop and say, "Wait... really?" or things that I was absolutely convinced had to be a joke (like new comic book characters unironically named "Safespace" and "Snowflake"). So it's possible that I am just living in a bubble of my own ignorance. If that is the case... well, all I can say is that it's pretty nice in here.