• LordCrom@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    9 days ago

    Blazing Saddles? For the time,it was genius…is the blatant racism still funny… I would say yes because Mel brooks forces you to evaluate it and then laugh or don’t laugh.

    • square@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      9 days ago

      The black sheriff isn’t the butt of the jokes, the dumb fuck racists are. However, there are some gay jokes toward the end, but they aren’t too mean.

      • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        9 days ago

        One of the most legitimate uses of the n-word in media is to make racist idiots look even worse. And the people of the land scene is pure gold.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          9 days ago

          What the movie is REALLY about is, there’s two groups of racists: There’s the elites, the governor and cronies, whose racism is borne mainly from greed and thus insaitable and incurable, and then there’s the townsfolk whose racism is borne of xenophobia and easily cured by understanding. World War 2 veteran Mel Brooks’ intended solution to the problem of racism is to understand that xenophobia is just human nature and that those people are best reached out to with civility and good intentions to get through to them on their level, and the way you deal with the folks who are intentionally enforcing systematic racism is to shoot them in the dick in the real modern-day street because nothing else will ever work.

          “The Right” is content to laugh at the racism because that’s the part they like and they mentally check out somewhere around “throw out your hands, stick out your tush” and “The Left” would try to cancel Mel Brooks because “You can’t have white people in a movie saying the N word. That’s racist.” They’re over here trying to boycott Lucas Pope because a game he made 13 years ago has a “strip search to confirm gender” mechanic. The point Pope is trying to make is that brutal dictatorships sure are dehumanizing, but no, brains turn off at “I think that’s anti-trans.”

          The problem I fear is that the number of people who are willing and able to ask “What’s this movie actually saying, overall?” is dwindling.

          • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            9 days ago

            They’re over here trying to boycott Lucas Pope

            Who is “they” and do you have a source about this?

              • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                edit-2
                8 days ago

                So, when you say “the left” is trying to boycott Lucas Pope over something that happened 13 years ago, what you actually mean is that one Tumblr account, which went inactive 10 years ago, once asked people not to buy his game. When you say that “brains turn off,” you really mean more like one specific brain turned off.

                At some point, we, as a society, need to come to terms with the fact that you can always find some stupid person saying some stupid thing if you look hard enough, and that that isn’t representative of a larger movement.

                • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  ·
                  8 days ago

                  Yeah. People act like this. It’s one example of a broader trend of consuming media at a surface level and immediately discarding anything “problematic” because simply hearing certain words or discussion of certain topics at all makes them uncomfortable. In this very thread you have people calling Idiocracy “pro-eugenics” because it made its point that low-brow culture that actually values stupidity and ignorance seems to be growing at an alarming rate in the context of a family tree. Obviously that means the creator thinks only smart people should be allowed to breed.

                  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    0
                    ·
                    8 days ago

                    I don’t even disagree with you that many people focus too much on the surface level. I do disagree with generalizing this to “the left.” It’s the general trend of society, and leftists are if anything more resistant to it but not immune.

                    The problem is that there’s an image of leftists that exists in people’s heads that doesn’t really bear much relation to reality, because you can just cherry pick bad takes from 10 years ago and a handful of bad takes by a handful of random teenagers live on forever and are used to paint an entire movement.

                    In this very thread you have people calling Idiocracy “pro-eugenics”

                    Yes, how could anyone see themes of eugenics while watching this? So loony!

                    The arguments in the opening are exactly the arguments used historically to justify and promote eugenics. If you don’t want people to see eugenics in your movie you probably shouldn’t start it off by essentially looking directly at the camera and saying, “Social Darwinism is correct.”