Friday the 13th and Roger Rabbit

Friday The 13th (2009)

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No, I couldn't help myself. I had to go and see whether they were going to do anything as riveting as the Kevin Bacon magic trick from the original. There was the one scene at the dock...I won't say, just in case you're as twisted as I am and have to go. But what I can say is that it's fairly effective, but utterly the mixture as before. There is no need to detail characters or plot: you know the drill. Horny, dope-smoking teens fornicate, get high, and die at Camp Crystal Lake, victims of the unkillable mindless murder machine Jason. One or two may live to the closing credits. Oops, that's the whole plot, right there. For fans of slasher films, it probably earns a strong "B" or so. For lovers of good cinema...what in the HELL are you doing even thinking about this mess?

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WARNING: SAMBO ALERT. Hell, maybe a SLANT-EYE alert as well.

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Yes, boys and girls, there is a black character and an Asian character along for the slaughter. They are only interested in dope, while all the white guys have their way with the various women. Oh, there is one white guy who is there to rescue his sister. But one of the women is clearly interested in him, lucky guy.

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The non-whites are mostly interested in pot. But wait, it's worse. The black guy sits back and urges the Asian to go after the white girl ("he can't fight! He can't drive! He's not interested in sex!" Ah..."In Living Color", I miss you.) The girl does flirt with him, a bit. The black guy ends up alone in the living room while the white guy who came to Crystal Lake with ONE girl is humping another one in the back bedroom. He decides to masturbate, and looks for a stroke book. Can't find one, and ends up starting to whack off to an image of a fully-clothed white woman.

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Wow. Let me guess: the entire creative team for this film is white guys, perhaps? I had to shake my head, as it reminded me, quite clearly, why I so dearly loved watching white people get butchered in slasher movies in the 80s. It really was worth every dollar I ever paid. Not so much these days. With Obama in the White House, it almost seems...petty.

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Arrgh. Realized this morning that I was going backwards/upside down in my meditations. I was trying to get enough light to push back the darkness in my head. Just exactly wrong. What I have to do is find whatever light is in my mind, then squeeze my ego down to fit within it. The more I compress it, the brighter the light seems. If I can strip away enough "me" and the light is blinding...no darkness. In other words, the act of looking for the darkness, or resisting it, creates it. Amazing how often I forget this.

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Sitting with Jason this morning, watching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" while I write my morning stuff. Brilliant movie, with some occassionally insensitiv racial subtext (the whole Tunetown thing does the Tune/Human dichotomy exactly as uncounted detective/police films have depicted the 1940's black/white power relationships, complete with a "Cotton Club" sequence. That, of course, puts a different spin on the moment when Eddie Valient calls the club bouncer a "Gorilla"and goes "Ugga-buggah." Considering Disney Animation's rather regrettable racial record, I could do without this.

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On the other hand, it's interesting to note that Disney live-action seems to be quite aware of their 20th Century record. Their recent film "The Express" touched on the sports-race connection as quite a few other Disney movies seem to have done. Like one hand is a little ashamed of what the other hand did. They can't change their past, but they can reflect the awareness of the present, and for that I give them full credit.

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And no, I'm not imagining things about Disney Animation. And no, it isn't a statistical blip. I worked for seven months at Don Bluth Productions when they were doing "The Secret of NIMH," and heard stories about the classic animation department, who they would and wouldn't hire, and the images they wouldn't use, or insisted on using. No accident at all. No accident either, that within a couple years of the last of the "Nine Old Men" retiring, the policy suddenly changed.

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I know of similar crap at other animation studios. There was an animation character over at Hannah-Barbara called "BlackStar" who was originally envisioned as a black character, the first they'd ever had...but turned white when the sponsors got nervous. Let alone the fact that, say, the Flintstone's Bedrock was totally white. Well, that's actually kind of believable, a passing nod to actual anthropology. But what of the Jetson's future? There were, over the course of the television series, the several TV movies, and the theatrical film THOUSANDS of character designs, those with voices, those passing in cars or walking past on streets, or on space stations.

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Every single one of them white. Half of them were women, by the way, and about a third of the animation execs I met in the 80's were as well. Race closes ranks in ways gender never has.

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I remember Tananarive sitting on a plane next to a nice little old white lady, who after listening to T describe her work, said something I've heard innumerable times from white folks: "it sounds so interesting. But why do they have to be black? Why does race have to be described at all?" That all sounds so reasonable until you grasp how poisonous that is. Race doesn't matter...as long as everyone is white. Then you can pretend it's all an accident, or that black people are being racist to point it out (that's my favorite insanity). It matters because unless you actually stop and quantify for a minute, those with an actual negative agenda are concealed among those merely content to let the natural human tendency to surround yourself with "your own", and the status quo continues on for another generation.

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Well, we have a game-changer. The wave begun in the 60's has actually ripened, as as long as you don't let the "Obama's in the white house, Racism is over" blind folks convince you it's racist to notice that only 1% of the Senate is black, we're all right. But the line of the status quo is quite elastic, all that force has stretched it, but man oh man, it wants to snap back to its original position. Listen carefully, and you'll hear the old racial attitudes straining not to call Obama a nigger. You'll watch Fox News accidentally letting out "Obama's Baby Mama" jokes, joking about him being assassinated, the Post joking about the author of the simulus being a chimp shot dead by white cops.

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Humor is a release of tension. We'll see more of this stuff, and every time they'll claim they meant nothing, that Obama is too sensitive, that it is NOTICING this stuff that is "racist" and so forth. No. Fantastic, almost unbelievable progress has been made. But when rape jokes about women are "just humor" I'll believe that anything vaguely resembling the Amadou Diallo shooting is "just humor."

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Sell that crap to someone else. At the least, it was blindness and insensitivity on a grotesque level. I have no memory of a major American news outlet saying ANYTHING that implied violence to Bush. Obama's been in the White House about a month, and there've been about a half-dozen. This is loathesome, and I won't pretend I don't see it.