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On New Year's Eve, looking for something to pass the time before the ball drop, I rewatched Romancing the Stone, which was a childhood staple. There is still a lot to like about this film, but it is suuuuper racist. This article does a good job of summing up the issues.
If you're unfamiliar, Kathleen Turner plays a romance novelist that has to travel to Colombia to save her sister, who has been kidnapped by people after a treasure map. When she arrives in Colombia, she immediately gets on the wrong bus, leading her deep into the jungle, where she meets Michael Douglas's Jack Colton, a sort of pirate/adventurer. Unlike many movies in this genre, Michael Douglas does not help her break out of her shell--or even rescue her really. He's there to witness her discovery that actually she's a lot more competent than she thought, and she can rescue herself. And lots of wacky hijinks. The problem is that this self-actualization uses Colombia as a heart of darkness backdrop, and it's just yikes. Also--I can't pretend this racism is harmless. For a long time, this was the *only* thing I knew about Colombia. So I'm going to file this movie into problematic faves.
Then I got curious about other films in this genre--cause this very much was a genre in the eighties. The "take a city girl and stick her out in the wilderness with a rugged man" genre. So, I rewatched Crocodile Dundee.
Look, I knew this would be a bad idea. I had no illusions that this would hold up. I saw it several times when it came out (and its sequel), but honestly had not seen it since the eighties.
Apparently two years ago, a reporter in Australia determined that Crocodile Dundee is *still* the highest grossing Australian film of all time, and there are therefore a ton of thinkpieces from Australians going--this? This piece of garbage? Per the wiki, Paul Hogan, who both conceived of it, was one of the scriptwriters, and is the main character, came up with the idea because he wanted to create the mythical Australian figure that everyone knows doesn't actually exist, since "we all live in Sidney." So this was a bald attempt to sell Americans a caricature of Australia. And boy did it succeed at that. I remember this being very big at the time.
Here is the good: The main theme song is a banger. ...that's it.
The bad: Holy shit, this is racist. And sexist. I expected that, but it's also homophobic and transphobic as fuck.
- The racism: There is an indigenous Australian who does have a couple lines. But the entirety of that interaction is the main female character being very racist toward him--including thinking he'd believe that taking his picture would "steal his spirit," and being told that she can't attend a tribal ceremony and sneaking over there and taking pictures anyway. Then, of course, there's Dundee. Cause he was raised by the indigenous people, you see. So he knows their mystic ways and can speak for them. *vomit*
- The sexism: The whole point of putting a city girl in the outback is to point out she can't handle it. And of course all the dialogue is that she can't handle it because she's a *woman*--rather than just being because she's from the city. The main actress is *twenty years* younger than Paul Hogan. And the outfits they put her in--this is what she is hiking through the outback in. With like a full backpack. I was shouting, chafing! So much chafing! Christ, the chafing! Later on, she wears this. It's hard to see, but the cutouts go all the way down the side, meaning she'd have to be totally naked under there. Also, she's an intrepid reporter who is dating her editor and whose father owns the paper. Was all that necessary?
- The transphobia: Did you know there were two (2!) sexual assaults in this film? I sure had forgotten that. I actually fast-forwarded through those scenes, they're so uncomfortable. As soon as he's in a bar with a trans woman, I was like oh nooooooo--I don't want to see where this is going.
Aside from all that, there's also like...no plot in this movie? Like, the reporter is meeting him to find out about him surviving a crocodile attack, but we hear almost nothing about that and get not even a montage about her writing up the stories. Why do they go to New York? Cause she says, hey, do you want to come to New York?
It is essentially a bunch of fish out of water sketches with no connection to each other. The "that's not a knife, this is a knife" scene comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. And the fish out of water-ness is absurd. Dundee's never seen a TV, or a black man, or heard of cocaine, or ever encountered the concept of prostitution. He can't walk down the street because too many people.
So then there's this big romantic closing scene, where the reporter finds out he's leaving and runs to the subway station (as an aside, she's at the Plaza hotel and goes running to the station--there's an entrance literally in the Plaza hotel, where is she running?), and it's too crowded for her to get to where Dundee is, so she shouts down the platform and two New Yorkers relay the love confession. It's very cute. And would be a great payoff if there had been any hint of development of a love story at all.
This is just a bad movie. That somehow was a worldwide blockbuster and has 88% on rottentomatoes. I had a vague thought of revisiting the sequel, but if *this* one has 88%, and the sequel has 11%, yiiiiikes.
I did have the thought that to round out the experience of problematic movies in this genre, I should revisit Gods Must Be Crazy. But you know what? That one's gone. Totally unavailable. Which, fucking good. I remember it as having excellent slapstick, but it was made by apartheid South Africa and narrates the San people like they are the subject of a nature documentary. If you go looking into its history, you'll also find that it treated them like shit, and the Xhosa-speaking star was very much taken advantage of by the film production. So--good that it's gone. Even though there's a part of me that wants to fact check my memory of those movies, they *should* disappear.
If you're unfamiliar, Kathleen Turner plays a romance novelist that has to travel to Colombia to save her sister, who has been kidnapped by people after a treasure map. When she arrives in Colombia, she immediately gets on the wrong bus, leading her deep into the jungle, where she meets Michael Douglas's Jack Colton, a sort of pirate/adventurer. Unlike many movies in this genre, Michael Douglas does not help her break out of her shell--or even rescue her really. He's there to witness her discovery that actually she's a lot more competent than she thought, and she can rescue herself. And lots of wacky hijinks. The problem is that this self-actualization uses Colombia as a heart of darkness backdrop, and it's just yikes. Also--I can't pretend this racism is harmless. For a long time, this was the *only* thing I knew about Colombia. So I'm going to file this movie into problematic faves.
Then I got curious about other films in this genre--cause this very much was a genre in the eighties. The "take a city girl and stick her out in the wilderness with a rugged man" genre. So, I rewatched Crocodile Dundee.
Look, I knew this would be a bad idea. I had no illusions that this would hold up. I saw it several times when it came out (and its sequel), but honestly had not seen it since the eighties.
Apparently two years ago, a reporter in Australia determined that Crocodile Dundee is *still* the highest grossing Australian film of all time, and there are therefore a ton of thinkpieces from Australians going--this? This piece of garbage? Per the wiki, Paul Hogan, who both conceived of it, was one of the scriptwriters, and is the main character, came up with the idea because he wanted to create the mythical Australian figure that everyone knows doesn't actually exist, since "we all live in Sidney." So this was a bald attempt to sell Americans a caricature of Australia. And boy did it succeed at that. I remember this being very big at the time.
Here is the good: The main theme song is a banger. ...that's it.
The bad: Holy shit, this is racist. And sexist. I expected that, but it's also homophobic and transphobic as fuck.
- The racism: There is an indigenous Australian who does have a couple lines. But the entirety of that interaction is the main female character being very racist toward him--including thinking he'd believe that taking his picture would "steal his spirit," and being told that she can't attend a tribal ceremony and sneaking over there and taking pictures anyway. Then, of course, there's Dundee. Cause he was raised by the indigenous people, you see. So he knows their mystic ways and can speak for them. *vomit*
- The sexism: The whole point of putting a city girl in the outback is to point out she can't handle it. And of course all the dialogue is that she can't handle it because she's a *woman*--rather than just being because she's from the city. The main actress is *twenty years* younger than Paul Hogan. And the outfits they put her in--this is what she is hiking through the outback in. With like a full backpack. I was shouting, chafing! So much chafing! Christ, the chafing! Later on, she wears this. It's hard to see, but the cutouts go all the way down the side, meaning she'd have to be totally naked under there. Also, she's an intrepid reporter who is dating her editor and whose father owns the paper. Was all that necessary?
- The transphobia: Did you know there were two (2!) sexual assaults in this film? I sure had forgotten that. I actually fast-forwarded through those scenes, they're so uncomfortable. As soon as he's in a bar with a trans woman, I was like oh nooooooo--I don't want to see where this is going.
Aside from all that, there's also like...no plot in this movie? Like, the reporter is meeting him to find out about him surviving a crocodile attack, but we hear almost nothing about that and get not even a montage about her writing up the stories. Why do they go to New York? Cause she says, hey, do you want to come to New York?
It is essentially a bunch of fish out of water sketches with no connection to each other. The "that's not a knife, this is a knife" scene comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. And the fish out of water-ness is absurd. Dundee's never seen a TV, or a black man, or heard of cocaine, or ever encountered the concept of prostitution. He can't walk down the street because too many people.
So then there's this big romantic closing scene, where the reporter finds out he's leaving and runs to the subway station (as an aside, she's at the Plaza hotel and goes running to the station--there's an entrance literally in the Plaza hotel, where is she running?), and it's too crowded for her to get to where Dundee is, so she shouts down the platform and two New Yorkers relay the love confession. It's very cute. And would be a great payoff if there had been any hint of development of a love story at all.
This is just a bad movie. That somehow was a worldwide blockbuster and has 88% on rottentomatoes. I had a vague thought of revisiting the sequel, but if *this* one has 88%, and the sequel has 11%, yiiiiikes.
I did have the thought that to round out the experience of problematic movies in this genre, I should revisit Gods Must Be Crazy. But you know what? That one's gone. Totally unavailable. Which, fucking good. I remember it as having excellent slapstick, but it was made by apartheid South Africa and narrates the San people like they are the subject of a nature documentary. If you go looking into its history, you'll also find that it treated them like shit, and the Xhosa-speaking star was very much taken advantage of by the film production. So--good that it's gone. Even though there's a part of me that wants to fact check my memory of those movies, they *should* disappear.
