[Sca-cooks] Re: Hollywood gays (was movie night at therock)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Susan Fox-Davis:
>I was throwing out random minority groups, gay, disabled, green with
>purple polka dots... my point was, all minorities are getting into the
>act these days.  Disabled, etc. people have the equal rights to be
>saints or sinners.  There was a time when every time a minority was
>portrayed in a less than lovely light, they got lots of complaining
>cards and letters.  Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and nobody
>likes that either.  Sigh.  Go please the world.  What's wrong with
>disabled villains anyway?  Villains get the best lines and most powerful
>imagery.  Even the legless, diminutive, or otherwise apparently-impaired
>person can be Powerful, and power is not always used wisely.

I dunno, I think there are quite a few examples of disabled villains,
if perhaps in the lower strata of popular fiction and movies. Let's
see; you got yer Captain Hook, the bizarre Kenneth Branagh character
in "Wild, Wild West" (who wanted to know why Brendan Frasier is
wasted in so many stinkers?), Darth Vader, etc. Unless we're talking
specifically about disabilities involving the legs, in which case of
my examples only Branagh qualifies.

My two favorite comic book characters in childhood were disabled, and
what was interesting about them was the manner in which they overcame
their challenges: Iron Man had an injured heart and could not survive
outside of his suit, and Daredevil was blind. (Both are in
development for movies for which more than 99 cents is being spent,
although the Daredevil project, which looks like the less interesting
of the two, story-wise, has at least been cast and is in
production/shooting. Ben Afleck??!?)

Then again, there's the wonderful portrayal of one of the principle
villains in Joe. R. Lansdale's "Rumble Tumble" (part of a series I
can only describe as two-fisted male-bonding fiction, which has been
described as "gay fiction" since one of the main characters is gay,
but this is pretty silly if you read the books; they're more like
"Pulp Fiction" set among a sort of trailer-park East Texas). But I
digress: one of the villains in this particular entry is a midget
(who is quick to specify that he is neither a dwarf nor a "little
person", but a genuine midget) of a particularly nasty nature, and
over the course of the novel he is repeatedly abused by the other
characters, the "good guys", who pistol-whip him, lock him in a car
trunk, verbally abuse him, duct-tape him to a chair, etc. Whenever he
repeatedly complains that they wouldn't do these things to him if he
were of their own state of physical development, they respond by
saying, "Yes we would. We do these things because you're a dirtbag,
and if you were nine feet tall we would still pistol-whip you."

On the (my perception) flipside, we have the particular insidiousness
of the couple-year-old movie, "Independence Day", which followed the
usual formula of establishing that the bad 'uns are of an ethnic
group that it is "okay" to hate en masse, but supposedly freeing the
audience from any racist guilt by making the baddies
extraterrestrials. Hey, they were aliens and ugly to boot. We need
_somebody_ we can blow up without guilt. I remember being aware, at
the time, of the audience reaction as they fell victim to the
propaganda against a fictional race about which we know absolutely
nothing. I don't know enough about the ethical implications of such a
portrayal, but I remember being kind of disgusted that an entire
theater audience (myself included, to some extent) could fall into so
obvious a trap so easily.

Adamantius