Lucy: Why I'm Tired of Seeing White People on the Big Screen
I'm tired of seeing white people on the silver screen.
First, let me note that I am white. I am a white woman who goes to the theater to see probably a dozen films (if not more) in a given year, a white woman who readily consumes TV shows and series and often blogs/tweets about them. I love film. I love what Hollywood could be, but I must say that I don't love what it is, and that is a machine generating story after story in which the audience is asked to root for a white (usually male) hero over and over and over (and over) again. I'm tired. I'm tired of directors pretending that white actors are the default and that people of color are a distraction when it comes to filmmaking. I'm tired of black women in Hollywood being relegated to roles of slaves and "the help" over and over again. I'm tired of films convincing themselves that they are taking on something fresh and new, the likes of which the world has never seen, but in actuality adhering to tired tropes and stereotypes.
One example that comes to mind is Avatar, a "groundbreaking" film about aliens and humanity, which, underneath it all, is the same old White Savior story. But more recently is Lucy, the film starring Scarlett Johansson in which a woman named Lucy evolves and is able to use 100 percent of her brain's capacity after she unwittingly ingests a massive amount of drugs.
Lucy is about what humankind could be -- it's about possibilities. As Lucy's brainpower grows stronger and the volume of knowledge she is able to access increases, she delivers monologues about how little humans understand about death, existence, and the universe, mediating on time and history. The film likes to think of itself as reimagining everything that we think we know about humanity, and presents to us their vision of what the most evolved woman on earth looks like:
A blonde white woman.
See, I just can't get right with that.
You see, I was an anthropology major ...
"You see, I was an anthropology major ..." Explains a lot. Apparently, even though blacks are always portrayed on the screen as morally superior--the wise mentor, the tough but kindly boss, the self-sacrificing detective partner watching your back, the computer genius in any comedy bank heist, the platonic protector of blond leading ladies–along with the ever escalating anti-White 'affirmative action' dispossession, added to the demographic genocidal policies of open-borders, are not, even when all added together, progressing fast enough for the comically pious pretentious excruciatingly PC-fashionable Ms. Cole. And, oh, how brave of you, Olivia, to write these daring words right in the middle of your Multicultural Marxist Huffington Post terrarium!