CRES 280 Map 2: Throughout the years, films depict People of Color (POC) as savage, violent, and/or criminal in order to justify violence and other forms of discrimination enacted on them.

ANIMATION

In children's animated movies, the villainous characters are often working against the common good for their personal gain. There is no nuance to their purpose which is usually power and riches. They are designed to be outwardly scary and their color palettes are chosen to be darker. Their skin tones and hair also resemble the darker skin tones of POC.

TANGLED

THE LION KING

image
In Disney's The Lion King (1994), Scar is the villain character designed to be of a darker palette. Scar lets Mufasa die a tragic death toward the beginning of the movie and wants to be king. At the end, it shows all of his bad actions coming back to haunt him, as hyenas' shadows are shown pouncing on Scar, ultimately killing him.

image http://disneyscreencaps.com In Disney's Tangled (2010), Rapunzel's step-mother - the villain - has fluffy, curly, black hair. Her skin tone is also of a slightly darker undertone than blonde haired, green-eyed Rapunzel. The villain kidnaps Rapunzel from her parents as a baby and raises her for her own gain. The villain is then shown to fall out of the tower's window to her death off-screen.

ACTORS

image
Danny Trejo is a famous Mexican actor that consistently acts in villainous roles. His roles usually are either killed off or somehow has a tragic ending.

Trejo was interviewed in an NPR podcast where he shares how he played unnamed characters often in the role of "The Mean Chicano Dude." Many of his roles are titled "Inmate No. 1" or "Prisoner."


https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=593446805

FILM

Live-action movies provide direct examples of how people of color are cast into roles that support the idea of contemporary savagery, violence, and criminality.

WILD WEST GENRE

The Wild West genre is famous for the "Cowboys vs. Indians" trope where the "Indians" are represented as stereotypical Native Americans who are savage by nature and out for the blood of the white cowboys.


In this Fandango clip of The Searchers (1956), the Native Americans launch their intimidating attack first, and get shot down by six men with guns. The Wild West genre of movies came from a time where a popular trope of "Cowboys vs. Indians" was used to form a narrative for the Natives as uncivilized and violent.

GRAN TORINO

image
Throughout the movie Gran Torino (2008), POC who moved into Walt Kowalski (the main character's) neighborhood were deemed as a nuisance and "other." These POC were widely Asian (Hmong, Latino, and Black) and involved in gang-related crime. After showing that the gang members were willing to violently harm both their cousins, and rape their female cousin, Walt who is their friend provokes the gang members into murdering him, who was unarmed, to put them away in prison for a lengthy amount of time.

image
The synopsis for the movie Cowboys & Indians (2011) is as follows: "With the fate of the frontier hanging in the balance, a former cavalry officer is called back into action to rescue a beautiful maiden from the clutches a band of renegade Black Claw Indians led by a frightening medicine man." The Indians are already pinned as abductors of a white woman, reinforcing the stereotype that Native men are dangerous to the fragile white woman. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1886504/

image
Training Day (2017), features Denzel Washington as a black cop who is corrupt while working as a narcotics officer. He refers back to violence regularly as threats and in the end gets killed after attempting to flee. https://www.thoughtco.com/common-black-stereotypes-in-tv-film-2834653

MUSICALS

image
In the musical West Side Story (1961), the Sharks are a Puerto Rican gang vs. the Jets, and White American gang. During a scene where they are fighting, the leader of the Sharks killed the leader of the Jets first, and then is lead to being killed off by a member of the Jets. It shows that the fight was unfair because the Puerto Rican gang members were unfair and that the White members were only committing murder to retaliate.

The film Blood Diamond (2006), though is set in South Africa, focuses on Leonardo DiCaprio as a white journalist. The film portrays the locals of the community as savage and willing to enslave their own people in order to gain riches. The war within the country is assumed to be from the major political unrest of these "unorganized" people.

COMICS

image
Black Panther's archenemy (1969) is M'Baku, the Man-Ape. Back in the late 60's, these narratives were drawn, reinforcing the idea of the "less evolved" African-American person. He is banished from Wakanda and later killed by a villain of Spider-Man. https://www.theroot.com/the-racist-roots-of-the-black-comic-book-villain-1790875548