Mira's Argument

I don't have much time to write an in depth and scholarly blog entry, but I want to say this.  I heard Mira Sorvino on television chastise John Hughes for his movie "Sixteen Candles."  Those of you who don't know, John Hughes authored many of the hit movies released in the 1980's.  Many of them were fantasies.  Are you listening, Mira?  I love your work.  "Mighty Aphrodite" was a delightful film, and perhaps you have a different opinion of it today, playing a whore that is.  Since Harvey W. tainted Hollywood with his foul-smelling semen dripped into a potted plant, things have not been the same.  That does not give anyone the right to project a value judgement out-of-context.  There has been a lot of out-of -context reporting lately.  As a naive, vindictive, selfish American society, no longer do we allow the accused innocence until proven guilty.  We sling mud to our hearts content, until someone responds.  It is not a prudent policy.  Mira's comment was anachronistic.  She was commenting on a fantasy film written for entertainment in an era when it was not politically incorrect.  If you grew up in a different era, you may not know this.  Most millennials have little understanding of American history, especially recent pop culture.  Things were different in the 1980's.  Then president Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War.  Are you listening?  Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War!  Today our President of the United States is resurrecting the Cold War.  Imagine the difference, a time when the threat of global nuclear war was gone?  The economy was solid.  Vehemently many do not agree with trickle down economics and its effects.  I'm not sure if I do, but the 1980's was more pleasant than today.  There was an integrity and solidarity in American society, a substance, which is lacking today.  That sense of well being gave Americans the security to laugh.  We were not fighting for our survival.  We could breathe, relax, and laugh at ourselves.  We could indulge.  We could fantasize.  Indulgent may be the most accurate word to describe the 1980's.  What's the big deal?  Today because millennials are culturally ignorant about American pop history, many things are being taken out-of-context.  For example a black face photograph in a year book may not have been as inciting then as it is today.  Many people do not know that black face was not meant to be insulting to Negros.  It instead was a raciest society trying to portray Negros in the Minstrels, Vaudeville, and Broadway.  Not unlike the limiting of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, Negros were not allowed to participate in musical drama.  Blackface merely was the the attempt of a white actor to portray a black character.  Like any dramatic role the depiction could have been good or evil.  No one seems to understand while stereotypical Negro images appear offensive today, they must be understood in context.  We don't even know what the context was, because American history writers have altered accounts of oppression in text books.  None of us has first hand experience living during slavery.  We can read about and imagine it.  All races can, because of the Nazi holocaust.  Black American slavery was not the only slavery.  It began earlier in many European nations.  Slavery was inherent in newly emerging American society, so society found ways to defuse it.  In entertainment one method of relieving racial tension was parody.  Mick Jagger forged his career in Rock 'n' Roll mimicking the gait of a clucking chicken often parodied by slaves themselves while engaging in the dance the Cakewalk.  These colloquial habits are the sources of many of the stereotypical Negro images which seem so offensive today.  Mammy.  Uncle Tom.  Little Black Sambo.  These not always were offensive.  Contrarily they attempted to provide love in a society charged with racial injustice.   Cartoon images of  stereotypical blacks were meant to provide warmth, familiarity, and escape from the everyday tensions of slave-owning plantation life.  Viewed today they would seem insulting and patronizing, but viewed in the time period in which they were conceived, they had a different intent and therefore meaning.  If Mira chooses to take a 1980's era John Hughes film and decry it, because it casts a woman as a drunken slut, then she is missing the point.  Film not always is art.  Often films are not meant to educate.  Especially they are not meant to be extrapolated into sexist entities, if during their time they functioned differently.  If Mira wants to champion the miscasting of females in Hollywood, then she should ask the actresses who played those roles if they would not have taken them for sexist reasons.  They chose to play those roles just as Playboy playmates chose to accept their images as sex symbols.  They had foresaw no problem with that imagery.  They were not championing civil rights.  Not all women feel the same way.  Not all women are offended by God's designation that women be feminine.  It was not Adam and Adamina in the Garden of Eden.  It was Eve, and some women still are comfortable being Eve-like.  Certainly in my experience many women embody the essence of Eve offering their bite from the forbidden fruit.  She was the temptation, Eve, not Adam.  Many want to change the definition of women, but many are content with it the way it traditionally has been defined.  "Sixteen Candles" was an adolescent sex fantasy never meant to be taken seriously.  Adults can tell the difference.  The financial instrument of taking people's words and actions out-of-context anachronistically to make money should cease.  History when appreciated for what it teaches will be the one thing which allows a plural interpretation of life over time.  The mono-dynamic, fascist, oppressive Trump doctrine which is being implemented today via Washington will be recognized, annihilated, and seen as the Nazi-ism it really is.