Of the apparent racism in the new Pirates of the Carribean movie, Marc Singer writes1:
Maybe we shouldn’t settle for merely identifying racist stereotypes as if we expect everybody to agree that they persist in our popular culture and that they’re a problem–two assumptions we can’t afford. Maybe we need to explain why they’re a problem: in the case of Pirates because they reduce all nonwhites to mindless savages, backstabbing idiots, or cheerleaders for white people.
Most importantly, maybe we should ask why, in the twenty-first century, we’re still taking such great pleasure from the racist propaganda of the twentieth century, or the nineteenth… or, now that Dead Man’s Chest has bested all competitors, the fifteenth. Maybe we need to mock these caricatures relentlessly wherever we find them.
You know, he’s not wrong. I think the film has a lot of other problems, primarily a thin plot — yet one so thickly applied2) — that assumes you remember and love every character from the original. When, frankly, all that I remember is some lightweight spooky pirating and Johnny Depp’s surprisingly swishy and charming performance.
But Singer’s also right about the film being review-proof. Millions of people just don’t seem to care.
And that’s okay. The film is dumb and overlong and crammed full of uninteresting plot developments clearly designed to set up the next dumb and overlong film in the franchise. But it’s not without its moments of charm, which come mostly from Johnny Depp — who, good or bad, is almost never boring in a role. For all its many faults, it’s the sort of film that’s supposed to do well in the summer blockbuster season, a silly swashbuckler, especially one so starved for a breakout hit as this one.
But, oh, the racism…
It’s a shame that the most blatant example of it — the cannibal island natives — comes in what I think is one of the film’s funnier stretches, and what for me offered the only really laugh-out-loud moment in the entire movie. It’s a shame, too, because it could have been so easily addressed and corrected; there’s no reason for the natives to be disturbing racial caricatures other than lazy writing. There’s no reason for the characters of color to be nothing but “mindless savages, backstabbing idiots, or cheerleaders for white people.” And that they are is really unacceptable.
1 Via Shaken & Stirred. Also in a roundabout way via Nalo Hopkinson
2 As Ask a Ninja points out, everybody gets a plotline: “It’s a neverending story. But with no Luck Dragon.”