In 2010, Srđan Spasojević made the graphic horror movie A Serbian Film as a response to American audiences fetishizing a certain type of foreign film. In A Serbian Film, a retired porn star is struggling to make ends meet when he’s approached by an “art film” producer who wishes to make an adult film for foreign markets. The film within the film is a traumatizing violent pornography that exploits women and children at the hands of the lead actor and the foreign producer/distributor. Writer Aleksandar Radivojević said that, due to Western audience’s tastes for third-world suffering and the rise over adversity, “In Eastern Europe, you cannot get your film financed unless you have a barefoot girl who cries on the streets, or some story about war victims in our region.”
The same charges have even been thrown at American cinema. We love seeing the rise of the underdog, and politically correct audiences fetishize suffering and the triumph over adversity. Bret Easton Ellis has defined a group of narrative tropes as being “The Victim Narrative.” His comment is that cinema has become increasingly simplistic, and indie cinema tends to use suffering as an easy conflict generator that also engenders sympathy for the main characters. The protagonist is mostly defined through their victimization, and that “victim” status permits and justifies any and all actions that follow.
The queer community regularly suffers under the victim narrative. In mainstream cinema, movies about queer characters frequently dealt with homophobia, assault, illness and death. Brokeback Mountain had two gay characters struggling against cultural homophobia. Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans character who was beat to a bloody pulp. Monster was about a lesbian prostitute who suffered through sexual violence at the hands of cis-gendered heterosexual males. The Imitation Game had a gay character dealing with cultural homophobia, mental illness, and death.
The other aspect of the victim narrative is the fetishization of cultures not able to progress by themselves. The real-life protagonist of Dallas Buyers Club was a real-life bisexual who smuggled HIV medications into his community and distributed them among the sufferers. In order to deal with the idea of a bisexual male actually doing something for himself and his community, the writer/director not only made the protagonist heterosexual, but gave him homophobia. In order for members of these communities to advance past their situational victimization, they generally need the aid of a heterosexual white person.
Minority communities have also faced the same types of narratives. The Blind Side was based on a true story, and had a black male teenager struggling with his poverty-based situation only to be rescued by a rich white woman and given a second chance to play football. 12 Years A Slave had a black author erroneously enslaved for 12 years, only to be saved with the help of a friendly white Canadian.
This year’s crop of Best Picture nominees features three narratives featuring the black community and one of which also features the gay community. Moonlight, the intersection of black and gay, is an excellent movie about how key events in our past shape who we grow to be as an adult. But, underneath, there is a bit of an inability of the main character to escape his past and the suffering caused by poverty, drugs and homophobia. Fences is about a black family struggling to survive in 1950s Pittsburgh. In Hidden Figures, three women struggling to overcome adversity in 1960s NASA, but each needs to convince some white superior along the way that the system is broken and they need the white person’s help to overcome the systemic issues.
And yet, what has been snubbed? Two years ago, Selma was about Martin Luther King, Jr leading the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, and it earned a nomination for Best Picture and Best Song, being shut out of every other category. This year, The Birth of a Nation was about a slave uprising in the south, where the slaves killed their white masters to earn their freedom, and it was shut out of the Academy Awards completely.
That’s not to say that Hidden Figures, Moonlight, or Fences are bad movies. I am not intending to denigrate their existence nor take away from people’s enjoyments of the movies. Myself, I enjoyed both Hidden Figures and Moonlight (I missed Fences, dammit). Plus, these stories are important, need to be told, and add to the rainbow of our cinematic culture.
Why do we lean toward these narratives? Are the movies about triumphing over adversity symbols of climbing the social ladder? Are they increasingly relevant to our modern society as the income inequality gap grows? Is this just a Western phenomenon, or is this around the world? Is it part of our Judeo-Christian origins, where we worship at the feet of a martyr? Can we escape it?