John Carter
Mar. 18th, 2012 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ann_leckieWent to see John Carter last night. Which was mostly pretty good fun. I am somewhat puzzled by the folks who can't figure out why they chose the frame they did, with Burroughs as a character. That was, you know, an actual conceit of at least the first volume. And ultimately Chabon and Stanton used it pretty well, I thought.
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glvalentine is right, they did pretty well addressing the creepy sexism of the books. Deja Thoris gets to be pretty kickass. They (mostly, with some reservations, see below) did a good job with Sola.
Butglvalentine is also right about the racism. When I saw that opening clip that was going around the web a while ago, I was a bit puzzled by the cavalry officers turning up and being so determined to make John Carter--former Confederate, clearly antagonistic--sign up. I considered it a bad omen when the guy says "people are being murdered in their homes"--because, yanno, the US was only sending the Apache cupcakes and kittens and suddenly they just snapped and started killing people for no reason, right?--and Carter's response is a weak "You started it" when I'd have hoped for that to maybe be a moment to address some of the ickier things that are going on in A Princess of Mars.
But maybe, I think, we're going to undercut the direct equation of Tharks with Apache by having the US Cavalry chase Carter into the cave. Ooops, no. So why the hell did the writers introduce that extra character?
Well, by the end I realized why, on a mechanical level it made sense. But still we're left with the book's very specific equation of Tharks with Apache. And the first thing we learn about the Tharks is how they raise their kids. Like savages, that's how!
When I first read A Princess of Mars I knew that something felt off about the equation Burroughs was (very deliberately) making, but it was something I couldn't put my finger on. I did see the patronizing attitude Carter takes towards the Green Martians, and I knew that was par for the course at the time, and I figured that was what was making me uneasy. But a few years later, after some conversations and some research for a particular project, I realized that the first thing Carter learns about the Tharks--that they don't really care about their children--was in fact an extremely common racist trope about Native Americans. Possibly still is, since for years I saw examples of it without realizing what it was I was seeing.
I'm going to hope--this is a terrible sort of thing to hope for, but you take what you can get--that Chabon and Stanton were just unaware of that trope, just not aware of the way the depiction of the Tharks is constructed of racist depictions of Native Americans. If they'd seen it, they'd have addressed it. I hope. But I wish they'd have seen it and done something with it.
If you can sit through that kind of thing, which sometimes I can and sometimes I can't, and some people very understandably can't ever, John Carter is a fair amount of fun. The visuals are cool--Paidhi Girl says the airships looked exactly like she'd imagined them, which startled her and kind of minorly creeped her out--and very little of the dialogue sounded utterly improbable. You know the sort of thing, where characters in an emotional situation make speeches that no human being in that situation would actually utter, but are meant to be "moving." The acting was very good, especially on the understanding that a film like this needs some heavy-duty, highly-skilled scenery chewing. On which topic--if James Purefoy had been onscreen thirty seconds longer than he was he'd have stolen the movie and they'd have had to retitle it Kantos Kan of Mars.
Also, a message for Disney executives--people stayed away from Mars Needs Moms in droves because it was clear from the previews that it was tripe. Mars was not the problem there. Truncating the title of John Carter because Mars doesn't sell movies was just...I mean...I don't know, I don't understand people sometimes.
And
glvalentine is right, they did pretty well addressing the creepy sexism of the books. Deja Thoris gets to be pretty kickass. They (mostly, with some reservations, see below) did a good job with Sola.But
glvalentine is also right about the racism. When I saw that opening clip that was going around the web a while ago, I was a bit puzzled by the cavalry officers turning up and being so determined to make John Carter--former Confederate, clearly antagonistic--sign up. I considered it a bad omen when the guy says "people are being murdered in their homes"--because, yanno, the US was only sending the Apache cupcakes and kittens and suddenly they just snapped and started killing people for no reason, right?--and Carter's response is a weak "You started it" when I'd have hoped for that to maybe be a moment to address some of the ickier things that are going on in A Princess of Mars.But maybe, I think, we're going to undercut the direct equation of Tharks with Apache by having the US Cavalry chase Carter into the cave. Ooops, no. So why the hell did the writers introduce that extra character?
Well, by the end I realized why, on a mechanical level it made sense. But still we're left with the book's very specific equation of Tharks with Apache. And the first thing we learn about the Tharks is how they raise their kids. Like savages, that's how!
When I first read A Princess of Mars I knew that something felt off about the equation Burroughs was (very deliberately) making, but it was something I couldn't put my finger on. I did see the patronizing attitude Carter takes towards the Green Martians, and I knew that was par for the course at the time, and I figured that was what was making me uneasy. But a few years later, after some conversations and some research for a particular project, I realized that the first thing Carter learns about the Tharks--that they don't really care about their children--was in fact an extremely common racist trope about Native Americans. Possibly still is, since for years I saw examples of it without realizing what it was I was seeing.
I'm going to hope--this is a terrible sort of thing to hope for, but you take what you can get--that Chabon and Stanton were just unaware of that trope, just not aware of the way the depiction of the Tharks is constructed of racist depictions of Native Americans. If they'd seen it, they'd have addressed it. I hope. But I wish they'd have seen it and done something with it.
If you can sit through that kind of thing, which sometimes I can and sometimes I can't, and some people very understandably can't ever, John Carter is a fair amount of fun. The visuals are cool--Paidhi Girl says the airships looked exactly like she'd imagined them, which startled her and kind of minorly creeped her out--and very little of the dialogue sounded utterly improbable. You know the sort of thing, where characters in an emotional situation make speeches that no human being in that situation would actually utter, but are meant to be "moving." The acting was very good, especially on the understanding that a film like this needs some heavy-duty, highly-skilled scenery chewing. On which topic--if James Purefoy had been onscreen thirty seconds longer than he was he'd have stolen the movie and they'd have had to retitle it Kantos Kan of Mars.
Also, a message for Disney executives--people stayed away from Mars Needs Moms in droves because it was clear from the previews that it was tripe. Mars was not the problem there. Truncating the title of John Carter because Mars doesn't sell movies was just...I mean...I don't know, I don't understand people sometimes.
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Date: 2012-03-18 02:25 pm (UTC)This is appallingly still the case, judging from an NPR story I heard some time ago. This is the outer link, but to get the complete report, you also have to click on the links on the lower left.
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Date: 2012-03-18 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 11:41 pm (UTC)