World leaders face off in the 80's.
In the 80's no one feared the US, they looked on them as meddling cowboys that believe their own movies ... nothing changed there but Soviet Russia was feared. Soviets were big and muscular with crew cuts and though they were drunk all the time they were still made of steel. A perfect villain for all the movies. Now the movie bad guy has become Arabs. Scary scary.
Movies and TV shows go to shape the perception of the public. They think one way then when years later someone does a movie with the bad guys as the heroes and someone else does a 10 facts you didn't know article and you realise you've been manipulated into thinking a certain way.
This post looks at the various villains throughout the movies not looking at monsters, sharks or anything weird that Syfi channel can think of. A python genetically mixed with a hippopotamus. Meet the deadly the Pythopotamus! It's fat and it hugs you to death.
Why do you never see a Pythopotamus in a tree? .... because it's sooo good at hiding.
From the very start in 1915 the movie Birth of a Nation had black people and abolitionists as the baddies. Only the KKK could restore order to the south after the civil war. Many of the black people were white actors with blackface acting aggressive, slow minded and wanting to rape all the white women .... ever wonder where whitey got that notion from?
Based on prejudice, white women who had a relationship with a black male obviously must have been raped when a wee brown baby comes along. Black people are often mistrusted and seen as the villain in real life even though it was them who were abducted from their homes and forced into slavery. It's been a difficult reputation to shake thanks to the centuries of disinformation and brainwashing.
Roots was one of the first TV series to show black people as being people rather than caricatures.
Most Americans know fuck all about history so Hollywood has given them their own version. Another popular villain was the dirty red skin. The likes of John Ford fed us shite such as the Indians won't attack at night because if they get killed their souls will be lost in the dark .... um it'll be day in a few hours for fucks sake.
Injuns were heartless brutes that tortured people to death and occasionally raping them or abducting them. In real life the Indians did torture and kill .... but so did the white man.
In 1875 a raiding party of Arrapahoes lost one fighter to 3 white dudes they were stealing horses from. Even though he wouldn't have gotten killed if the Arrapahoes hadn't attacked them they wanted revenge. They talked it out and the man that fired the fatal shot was tortured with knifes and heated up arrow heads before being shot between the eyes and scalped. The other two managed to steal some horses and get away the next day.
This sounds exactly like any modern military unit that lost someone and has captives out in the field. In Saving Private Ryan they had this problem with a captive. I'm amazed it didn't happen all the time with the Injuns. They were going to torture a second whitey just for fun but their chief Lone Wolf (awkward name for today) stopped them.
Indian tribes warred with each other and took slaves. When the truth about that asshole General Custer came out in various movies, also A man called Horse, Little Big Man, The legend of Walks as far woman and when Bury my heart at Wounded Knee was written the US got a conscience. A crying fake Indian in a commercial also helped then everyone claimed to be Cherokee all of a sudden.
Though not enough of a conscience to help the generations of Native Americans living in poverty on reservations. Treaties and rights still get broken and trampled but at least there are no grunting one dimensional Injuns except the ones we are supposed to laugh at like in that terrible Lone Ranger movie.
If you live in the UK then you probably still think WWII is going on because you still see all the war movies. Germans shouting "swinehunt" and "Die Englander pig" and all an American or English soldier has to do is put on a uniform to fool the other Germans.
The Nazis were dicks, that is not in dispute and a million war movies can't be wrong. Then you get cockney Michael Cane or looney Tom Cruise as a German officers showing that some Germans (though fighting for the Nazis) were decent.
The Japanese also became the inhuman foil and if you know about the Bataan Death March you know what evil fanatics they really were. The stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki have tempered our understanding and we do that whole, 'well you can't blame the people' thing but back then Japan was run like a cult, the Emperor being their god .... not one but it took two nukes.
Hippy film makers tried to warn us that if we proceeded the way we are we'd destroy the world. We became the enemy sort of. The Apes were a little too human and did the exact same things as the humans they hated so much. A reminder that we are just animals not really able to achieve much more than our own downfall and destruction.
We are clever enough just to fuck everything up.
Vikings have been the bad guy. Hats with horns on them, drinking, laughing and eating chunks of meat. The sight of their sails would strike fear into the hearts of a Saxon peasant. They didn't have any personality they were just brash barbarians. Now we know they bathed more than most Europeans, bleached their hair and beards and traded slaves from the Mediterranean sea to the Baltic. They were pretty well traveled for their day.
Shows like Vikings has made them into heroes to be admired even though they are quite savage and brutal. You had to be to live in those times I suppose.
Rex Harrison put on blackface to play sexy rexy Saladin when the Saracens were the enemy. They were shown to be honorable and way smarter than the Crusaders especially when it came to medicine and yet the Crusaders were always the good guys.
The Crusaders were anti-semitic religious fanatics which is what we tend to cast everyone else as being.
Richard the lion heart was a terrible King. He could barely speak English and only wanted war and glory, he left the running of England to his brother John, he never liked the cuntry anyways. The movies all have King John as being a tyrant but in reality he was holding the place together and wouldn't have demanded so much tax if his brother hadn't been waging an expensive war oh and being held prisoner for ransom.
The legend of Robin Hood has hurt King John's image as much as Shakespeare did for Richard III's posture. "A horse a horse ... but one with wheelchair access"
More blackface with the Klingons. They were yer basic bad guy along with the Romulans. What is their motivation? To kill the good guys and take over of course. They looked like Genghis Khan and a Saracen with a touch of Satan thrown in.
I don't know what Roddenberry had against Asians but the Romulans and inscrutable Vulcans were Asian like too.
As Star Trek got popular the Klingons actually became a more fleshed out race of beings with their own language and history .... fuck some nerds are dull.
Reds under the beds made sure that everyone knew we could be destroyed at any time by nukes. Yes those Soviets again. They hate everything soft and Amerikan. Why is it that Americans seem to rub everyone up the wrong way? Probably to do with being a shower of cunts or something.
Americans hate the thought of someone getting something for free so Communism really did scare them. What a crazy idea that everyone is equal and all having the same things .... the same iPhone, the same car, the same flat screen TV .... crazy. We demand the freedom to be permanently in debt!
War Games, The Falcon and the Snowman, Red Dawn had the unflinching commie while Little Nikita had River Phoenix showing you that Russians could be pretty and the good guy. Russia is no longer Communist but since 2008 and Obama they've been the bad guy again.
Again we ourselves became the baddie but with zombies, vampires and werewolves being turned into the good guy as well. Hey I'm a tortured conflicted 300 year-old ex killer that hangs around schools, love me. In the zombie or viral apocalyse it has become clear that humans are the biggest most deadly of threats..... big surprise there.
Bloody terrorists, remember when dog shit and terrorists were white? Ah the good old days, now you have bloody immigrants taking jobs away from good British and Irish terrorists. We want killed and the fuck bombed out of us for a United Ireland, not cos of Allan's will.
Brad Pitt and Richard Gere played IRA
We still get shootings, bombs and riots but call it crime because admitting we had terrorists would suggest the peace process failed.
In Back to the future we had Libyan terrorists now you have shows like Homeland or 24 that have other more generic terrorists. Terrorist has now become synonymous with being a Muslim thanks to American re-branding.
The hero is obviously the white American soldier
It's funny how bad guys are turned into good guys by Hollywood and the effect that Hollywood has on the narrative of public perception. Even evil Terminator cyborgs are made into the good guy if he is popular enough.
Marvel's Winter Soldier was a Soviet killing machine but it's alright cos he was brain washed then and only kills now if you know the code ... like that would fly in court.
People of colour seem to have it worse than most, just ask an ethnic actor what roles they get offered and you'll see quite a lot of stereotyping even now. The villains maybe just there for the hero to kill and to make him (usually him) look good. You aren't supposed to give them a second thought or even wonder how many fathers didn't come home after that Skywalker cunt blew up their base.
Still, the movies do add to the bias of the public. I'm sure 300, Dracula Untold and American Sniper are all on the shelf of most deplorable Trump supporters that for some reason just enjoy seeing foreign raghead types getting killed.
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