Posted on 09/18/2006 12:34:43 AM PDT by darkness78
It's an epidemic of caricature and vilification, and the slurs are, for the most part, neither subtle nor gentle. As one French critic noted recently, "Hollywood hasn't engaged in this kind of wholesale nationality-bashing since Pearl Harbor." What's going on?
It's a debatable issue, but it doesn't take a sociology degree to see that it mostly stems from two factors: American anger over the lack of French support for the Iraq invasion, and the absence of politically correct movie villains since the end of the Cold War.
Since 2003, a wave of anti-French sentiment in America has resulted in boycotts of French products and such stridently Francophobic books as Richard Z. Chesnoff's "The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us & Why The Feeling Is Mutual." We laugh about it, but the ACLU is not complaining, and it's had an impact.
At the same time, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa has created a shortage of the kind of instantly recognizable national villains that, along with Nazis, have been the stock movie bad guys of the past half-century.
Francophile director Jim Jarmusch says, "We're at war with Muslim terrorists but we're afraid of caricaturing Muslims in films or even portraying them in a bad light. So what do we do? We take it out on the French. They're a safe target."
Hollywood vs. France, Um, I side with the Unites States (NOT the United States of Hollywood, but the United States of America).
The French are not blameless. They made bestsellers out of the books some barking moonbat wrote about how there was no plane that his the Pentagon on 9/11. He claims it was a missile painted to look like a plane.
That said, there is a genuine villain in the modern world. And to world cinema (including Hollywood), it is is the rich capitalist white guy.
"It's good to hate the French." - Al Bundy
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