princess and the pauper//portrayal of villains in movies
I watched Princess and the Pauper to satisfy the younger version of me who never did, and the highlight for me was the song in which the villain, Preminger, is introduced. Mainly for its creative⌠camerawork?
It ranks up there for me with Kristoffs cheesy knock off music video song in Frozen 2 (which apparently was covered by Weezer for the credits, and also was made into their own music video. Enjoy.)
But that stuffâ though funâ isnât the point. The point is that I canât help thinking about how villains are modeled.
In order to help them make the audience uncomfortable, they are often marked as Other in some way, and itâs frequently a little fucked up. Just pay attention to this in the next few movies you watch (especially if theyâre animated). Hereâs your checklist:
Is the bad guy
- Queer presenting (effeminate man, uhhh strong powerful sexy lady? Iâm biased)
- disfigured (missing a hand or something, scarred)
- ugly
- abnormally sized
- or, basically, made to look strange and offputting in some way other than their facial expression
If they aren't is it because
- you aren't supposed to know they're bad
- the story is a commentary on beauty standards
what about the good guys?
Preminger? Not only does he have a stupid name, he checks two of these boxes. Effeminate and abnormally sized. Not a real man :(.
These âabnormal qualitiesâ donât mean anything in and of themselves, they only mean something in some sort of cultural context, which brings us to this theory of media that is so basic and fundamental itâs almost boring at this point.
Media uses and (re)produces norms and value systems in society. (blah blah blah)
It uses norms in an attempt to control the emotional reaction the viewer will have to certain symbols.
It reproduces norms by reinforcing cultural associations with symbolic identities and building the lense through which we interperet things.
It produces norms when it challenges pre-existing cultural associations and supplies different meanings and stories for symbols.
We know this. Throughout human history, story and myth have been used to teach people how to live and how to see.
Itâs annoying, disheartening, and cheap when movies mark their villains in such predictable ways, especially because itâs not representative of how things often pan out in the real world. There are so many freaks with amazing hearts (u know who you are, ily).
This begs the questionsâŚ
- What potential world is this media representative of? (âpotential worldâ meaning some alternate world that exists in the abstract realm of ideas and ideals)
- What image of society does this media ask us to buy into?
- How might buying into that image impact how we behave? (our decision making, our perception and treatment of others, our perception and treatment of ourselves)
- Who (if anyone) benefits from this?
- What would it be like if things were different? (and how would the answers to these questions be different)
~
Thatâs all Iâve got. Obviously not all movies and media are like this, and we donât even have to write off the ones that are, itâs just way more interesting to pay attention to these things than to not.