Thoughts and Arguments

Thoughts and Arguments Human behavior is nuanced, rules pushed on social media are not. Bill Murray can wrestle a woman in an early-eighties comedy and we know she is not in danger of being raped and the attention is not actually unwanted. If we watch these scenes through reactionary and self-congratulatory eyes of nostril-mining twitter activists, all hijinks are a joyless exercise. Indiana Jones of the Nineteen Eighties killed a lot of people and was the American exploring the world in a way that provokes the term xenophobia but is in fact merely adventure. Indiana Jones of 2008 was relatively safe, still conflating unnamed indigenous figures with magical creatures, but much of the movie takes place in the United States, Indy kills only one person, and instead of being a middle-aged man who can take a punch and look like it hurts he is a senior who can take a much worse beating and shake it off. The era where vegetarian people of India eat chilled monkey brains and the same Thuggee cult we saw in Gunga Din were still operating was frankly a lot more entertaining than the apologetic and tentative offerings of today. Point of view is vital to any story engagement, and the Western Caucasian or North American view is as good a starting point as any - especially since the white guy can be a flawed character and even an idiot without that being taken as a comment on a culture. https://plus.google.com/share?url=https://goo.gl/images/xUGcJD I recall the first article on pop culture that really alarmed me about how film could be hurt. A columnist was overanalyzing a moment from Beverly Hills Cop where Axil Foley passes someone who is wearing a Michael Jackson replica Thriller jacket and laughs to himself. The moment is the sort of thing we are better off taking for granted and going along with, but the columnist feeling like an outsider could not get past the idea that a lead fish-out-of-water is presented as superior to the culture he visits. No mention of Eddie Murphy's two concert films in which he wore leather suits approximately as tacky as the Thriller outfit. Detective Foley is not a millionaire comic and movie star, but is a more grounded everyman who has the right to laugh at whatever he finds frivolous.