Adventures in babysitting

[Crackpot]

Ok it's a not so guilty pleasure of mine to watch "old" well 80's vintage movies movies that I haven't watched since my formative years and to be honest most of them don't stand the test of time. However some movies retain their greatness or even improve (Pee-Wee's Big adventure) some turn out to be great for entirely different reasons (Flash Gordon is so mind boggling bad that it achieves a greatness all it's own). So I was somewhat excited when I saw netflix added Adventures In Babysitting. Two things occurred to me while watching it first with current technology the already far fetched premise would be completely non-sensical Second the screenplay was apparently written by Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling. Seriously I'm only half way through it and the racist stereotypes are mind boggling. I listen to a lot of 50's radio shows so I'm pretty jaded when it comes to blatant racism and sexism but this just rises to a whole new level.

Just needed to share.

[Big RR]

Then again, as I recall, Elizabeth Shue looked pretty cute at that time, so maybe the racism/sexism is atoned for. Kind of like Woody Allen's speech in Manhattan that Mariel Hemingway was "god's excuse to job" ("No matter how bad you think I am, I made her, and that makes up for it--and even job agrees").

[Crackpot]

I hostly wonder if it's just that we've made such strides culturally to note a lot of the stuff as being racist. in fact one of the earliest examples of things out of sync with current norms wasn't all that shocking to come from a movie from this time. which is the fight between the brother and the sister where the brother constantly refers to Thor as a "Homo". but the change in attitudes over that in the past 30 years have been drastic. Was the blatant racism just the same example of the shifting cultural mores? I didn't notice the racism at the time it came out but then again I was one of those suburbanites who made up the protagonists of the film. And what I see as racism now may have merely been a reflection of what i saw as "that's just how things are" at the time. Or in other words a more innocuous version of Cliven Bundys's "let me tell you something about the Negro".

[Big RR]

Is it a lessening racism, etc., or just a new era of political correctness. Calling Thor a "homo" had really nothing to do with being gay, although the word was also an epithet for gay persons, it was more a word used to shock and anger. Somehow I think removing that word from acceptability in polite society did little to change attitudes about gays, it just pushed that attitude underground. And I would think the same is true of a lot of the racial and cultural stereotypes you speak of (although it has been years since I saw the movie so I can't say for sure. I think we now live in a society where we have given up trying to cure the disease and change the ideas, and settle for merely treating the symptoms. So the words may shock, but I'd bet you'd agree that those ideas still exist.

[Crackpot]

Oh it meant Gay that was made clear by the end of the movie.

Personally I feel the "disease" is a completely natural coping mechanism and treating the "symptoms" is the only way to cope.

In my opinion everyone is racist/sexist/etc. to some extent though where that particular line is drawn is set up to the individuals personal experience. Everyone has a line where the other somehow becomes less than "human" most have become vilified in one way or another right now the only acceptable prejudice I can think of is political in nature.

Society has been approaching this problems entirely wrong. We are demonizing a perfectly normal coping mechanism to the point where even acknowledging the "problem" offers no solution other than pariahdom. so instead of addressing the problem and ourselves we ignore it.

You see prejudice in itself isn't the problem. The issue is what are you going to do about it? You see my sheltered suburban upbringing in the Detroit area gave rise to several racial prejudices. Most notably against Blacks, Mexicans and Japanese. Luckily my life has provided me with ample experience that challenged those prejudices. the Japanese prejudice pretty much disappeared when I realized that it was a dislike of a group on the sole basis that "they" are perceived as making a better product than "us". The others aren't that simple. Luckily I met a critical mass of "the other" to realize that the idea that they are "one of the good ones" (I would've never said that or thought of it consciously but the idea was there) just didn't make sense. At that moment I confronted my racism and realized it just didn't make sense I wish I could say that was that but I still struggle with where my mind sometimes immediately goes with confronting a situation. Oh in case you wondering up until the point where I actually address my Racism did I ever think I was racist.