10 Thoughts on "Day The Earth Stood Still"

A recent AP story suggests that Americans are struggling to define race in a way we never have. Good: it was always bullshit anyway. The trigger is the question of Obama's race. Hah! "He's not black..."

As defined by what? White America for most of our history? Black America for the same period? Genetically, he's obviously "mixed" or "biracial." But we're about the same skin color, and trust me, I've been defined as black my whole life. The trick, of course, is that it was always a lie...first, to enable the sale and deprevation of a group of human beings. Then when the "one drop" rule became popular (one drop of black blood makes you black) blacks themselves tried to reframe it. I remember my mother, as light skinned as Catherine Zeta-Jones, talking about how "black blood is the strongest in the world: one drop makes you whole."

Yeah, right. This the same woman who agonized over the fact that she hadn't passed for white and had (in all probability) a much better life, at least materially. She didn't die well, and I think that was a chunk of it.

But Obama is so well liked that everyone wants to claim him for themselves. Making whites ask, for the first real time in our history: "why isn't someone half 'us' one of `us'?"

Well, he is. But there has always been a huge amount of confusion about this. Don't be dishonest enough to imply we started it. Whatever the origins, however, we're going to work this out: I can feel it.

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Part of the problem is the word itself. It just doesn't have a meaning that is really useful about stuff like this. For instance, the word "race" applied to Jews (are Jews a separate race from whites?) is, to me, rather obviously a different word than the word "race" applied to the question of blacks and whites. A Sociological as opposed to anthropological definition, perhaps? I mean, there is greater genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world combined. I'd bet a considerable amount of money that there is a greater genetic difference between pigmies and Zulus than between Jews and Arabs. In terms of sociology, America operates generally as if Jews, Arabs, western and northern Europeans are all "Caucasians" (in some interesting ways), while Latinos are kind of "half-white" depending on their skin color, while Asians are a separate group, and so are sub-Saharan blacks. My reasoning? White film audiences don't react very negatively to images of Jews, Arabs, and Europeans engaged with each other sexually. Most times, you can't even tell the difference between the groups, and unless you hear that Danny Thomas is Armenian or Omar Shariff is Egyptian or Bill Shatner is Jewish...someone may get a slight sense of "Exotic" but there's no objection to having pleasant situation comedies with them married to white women, having them romance Julie Christy, or whatever. Desi Arnaz could be married to Lucille Ball, and while they made jokes about his Cuban heritage, that was about it.

BIG difference once you jump over to Toshiro Mifune, Jackie Chan, Jet Li or whatever. Let alone Sidney Poitier or Will Smith. Nothing scientific about this, just my observation that that's the way we SEEM to react.

Does anyone have a specific comment about the term "race" as it is used with Jews and the way it's used with Asians and Blacks? My sense is that every group sees the minute differences between their own sub-groups, and looms them large. But not within other groups. It's like you know all the names of your own kids, but the kids down the block are just "the Joneses'." Just the way we break reality down.

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I looking forward to seeing Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" this afternoon. About an unrepentant racist forced to reexamine his own feelings when he becomes the neighborhood defender, I suspect it will parallel my own feelings about Eastwood. I love him. I think he is arguably the greatest star in the history of Hollywood. And he is the old guard. I look at "Flags of our Fathers" and he thinks that because he focused on several white guys, that's a justification for the THOUSANDS of extras storming Iwo Jima to have not a single brown face among them. In truth, this is one of the differences I see between Conservatives and Liberals. Conservatives think it will all be all right if we just don't think about race. Liberals think that we have to talk about it and compensate for it.

I won't argue about which is the "best" approach. Ya'll know I'm somewhere in the middle. But one thing I think a lot of Conservatives aren't clear about: if you don't think about it, you will default to your factory setting: Tribal. And for a man of Eastwood's age, that means white. That's why I've said that the racial problems in this country won't finish their major correction until most of the white males born pre-1950 are dead. Sorry. No hard feelings at all.

What do I mean about Eastwood's "problem"? Well...look at the movies he has appeared in and directed. In the entire history of his films, of all the countless hundreds of characters with speaking roles and any characterization, I can remember one...count 'em ONE black character of "breeding" age (and therefore genetic threat) that I would want my son to grow up to be: Mario Van Peeble's dancin', rappin' Marine in "Heartbreak Ridge." Everybody else is old, dead, or criminal. Sorry: no role models there, while his films have provided uncountable decent positive images of strong, decent white men. In order to extract some of the emotional value from his films, I had to forget my skin color, and forget my sense that, to a man like Eastwood, blacks "hadn't quite proven they were up to snuff."

Men of Eastwood's generation and temperament can rightly consider themselves Guardians at the Gate. And you know what? There is a cost for being high-Alpha warrior types, and one of them is a tendency to flatten reality out a little so that you can make flash-fast reactions under high stress. Enemy? Friend? You might have a fraction of a second to decide. And to me, this is what explains the horrid stats on police shootings. Physical appearance is simply a determinator of "ours" or "theirs" and has been ever since tribal skirmishes began.

This is just more atavistic programming...but maybe not. It's STILL damned useful under combat stress. The trouble is that if you "just don't think about" race, you will naturally prefer certain roles go to people who look like you: leaders, lovers, fighters, etc.

This is why people like Jesse Owens and Joe Louis were so damned important. They were AMERICA'S champions against Germany, and when we cheered for them, the positive emotions transferred to every other black person in the country. When white audiences laughed at Butterfly McQueen, they opened the door to acknowledging that something she did was brave or smart or at least human. When they admitted Poitier was, but for the single fact of his skin color, a perfectly acceptable mate for a white ingenue in "Guess who's Coming To Dinner" the questions became more urgent. Without a sexless Morgan Freeman playing God and the President, the image systems COULDN'T have changed enough to lay the ground for a Barack Obama.

I'm seeing an overall pattern here, and it's one I just love. God, Jason gets to have a world so much better than the one I grew up in...

But I'll miss Clint Eastwood when he is gone. He ain't PC, but I think he is an authentic, awake, adult male human being, the kind who built quite a bit of this country, and they're in short supply. Might not want him marrying my sister, but I'd be happy to have him live next door.

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Damn! Didn't get to "Gran Torino." Sigh. But did see Jason Statham's "Transporter 3" and found it mostly great fun, with some bad editing of fight scenes (it's harder to pull off the Bourne shakeycam than people think) but a little more heart than the others. A "B" for this tale of an indestructible delivery guy caught up in an environmental scheme.

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"The Day The Earth Stood Still." Well...

1) Keanu Reeves was born to play Klatuu.

2) Jadan Smith has not inherited his father's ability to stare at a blue screen and convince you he's actually looking at something. And his reading of the important final line was shyte. Other than that, cute, talented kid. But he simply screams "watch me act, Dad!" with every move.

3) The use of the actual line "Klatuu Barada Nikto" was superior to the original film. You can barely hear it, mixed into a stream of alien speech. Anyone who really thinks that the words would be pronounced exactly the way Micheal Rennie originally said it isn't paying much attention to transliterations of Chinese or African languages. Sure, I believe he would have TOLD the woman to say those words to the robot, but that would have been an approximation of the actual phrase. When he himself said it to Gort? "Klatuu Barada Nikto" might have been the only way we could write it out, but that sharp pronunciation? I doubt it.

4) G.O.R.T. as an acronym was cute. Maybe too cute.

5) I LOVED the idea that Klatuu was here to save the Earth. From us. Which raises an interesting question: if the intention was to prevent humans from damaging the biosphere, what WOULD the maximum number of us hairless bipeds be?

6) The use of nanotechnology was both fun, and already somewhat cliche.

7) The end of the film was a bit unclear as to what the aftermath of all this was going to be. Clarity would have been nice.

8) Too few people were making too many decisions that affected too many people. Kathy Bates did the best she could with her role, but it really felt like she was just pulling her ideas out of her ass. Where was the intense and universal debate?

9) The containment facility for Gort looked pretty damned convenient. I mean, it didn't look like a re-purposed missile silo or something. It looked as if they knew EXACTLY what was coming. What's up with that?

10) I think the beginning takes place in 1927 Mongolia, where an alien artifact encounters...Keanu Reeves. Wait a minute. The original 1951 classic was WAY ahead of its time in depicting something vaguely like a world-wide and multi-ethnic response. Why the hell couldn't it have encountered a Mongol? Have Chow Yun Fat appear as the alien. Or have the damned sphere appear in Europe. Yeah, I know, "Keanu Reeves is part Hawaiian and Chinese." which is why they're casting him in "47 Ronin" (!!), which is logical in the same way that Fred Armisen, with some small portion of Japanese genetics, is somehow a good choice for Barack Obama on SNL.

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Generally, it's just not a good movie, and is a remake of a classic at a time when Hollywood is plundering its past with disturbing regularity. Yeah, it ain't a lack of creativity, it's a lack of balls--no one wants to green-light a 100-million dollar investment without some kind of safety net: a star, a sequel, a remake, a bestselling original text. I get it.

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But "Earth" is going to take the heat for the righteous disgust. And...I guess that's a good thing. I'd give it a "B-" if it weren't for the original source material. You got responsibilities when you touch something like that. And from that perspective, "Earth" is a "D."