Last week,
eight Native American actors and a cultural adviser threw down their
(metaphorical) tools, and walked away from production on the new Adam Sandler-Netflix
comedy, The Ridiculous Six.
The ostensible
reason for the small-scale rebellion was the film’s shabby treatment of Native
women. For example, leaked pages of the script include a scene in which three
women (with the ever-so-traditional names of Smoking Fox, Never-Wears-Bra
and Beaver Breath) discuss the merits
of using a dead squirrel as toilet paper. The film also allegedly includes instances
where women urinate while smoking the ceremonial Peace Pipe – an act which may be
best akin to using the toilet while praying the Rosary.
When the
actors complained, they were told that the rude scenes would remain. A video
later uploaded to YouTube captures parts of the dispute, including a
confrontation in which a man identified as a producer on the flick tells
participants that if they are going to be “overly sensitive about it,” then
they “shouldn’t be in the movie.” The angry artists took their grievance to Twitter under the hashtag #NotYourHollywoodIndian, and are trying to get Netflix to stop production on the film.
I’m sure
nobody, including the actors, expected to see sparkling social commentary – or even
fair treatment of women – from the man who brought us such gems as Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Adam Sandler has built his career on crass awkward-funny
shock humour, and bouts of racism and sexism are presumably part of the draw of
Sandler’s films. Surely those who had signed up to join this production were
aware of that, and surely they could not have been surprised to see a
less-than-flattering depiction of their ancestors in a film whose title more or
less promises a raucous two hours of potty-based absurdity. So why did the script cut these actors so
deeply?
The answer,
in short, lies in the film’s replaying of a Euro-American media
power differential that is not so far in the past that we can laugh about it. The
film’s ugly depiction of Aboriginal women falls a little too close to longstanding media-fueled views about them and their histories. After all, it was not so
very long ago that Native American children were forcibly removed from their “savage”
families and placed into boarding schools designed to “civilize” them into somewhat
passable, albeit lesser-evolved, Euro-American subjects. And it was narrow and
inaccurate views of Aboriginal women and men, not so far removed from the film’s
depiction, which made it all possible.
For what
it’s worth, I don’t think this script was created with the intention of being as deeply hurtful as it is for these artists and
their communities. I think that Sandler and his creative team just don’t really
get it – and how could they? It is easy, as a powerful public figure with 1.6 million
adoring Twitter followers and enough cash to buy and sell a small country, to
forget that humiliating and belittling words do still have power for some.
Well
actually, Adam Sandler is Jewish. And he makes fun of Jewish people too!
Yes, he is,
and yes, he does. But Sandler’s life is – thankfully – fairly far removed from
history’s most egregious treatment of Jewish peoples. And while many of his
jokes may be in poor taste, Sandler has typically been successful in navigating
his comedy within a certain acceptable parameter of “dirty-shock-humour.”
Perhaps to Sandler, his treatment of Native women seems no different.
Imagine two
children playing at the beach. For argument’s sake, I will call one child
“Adam,” and the other child “Other.” “Other” has spent hours building a
beautiful castle with sand and water, using only his two hands and a small
shovel. Adam, on the other hand, has purchased a small cement mixer and enlisted
a team of architects to assist in building a solid concrete fortress. At the
end of the day, Adam decides to kick each of the sand castles, using the same
amount of force for each. Other’s
castle immediate collapses and is washed back into the sea. After kicking his
own fortress, Adam finds himself with a sore foot.
Now think of
this in terms of the rhetorical punch with which a racist joke hits different
audiences. For those with significant power and resources, “kicking the fortress”
might be considered rude and annoying, but it will not ultimately do much to
injure the fortress’s solid structure. But for highly marginalized and
misunderstood groups, whose reputation in the eyes of the public remains as
fragile as a sand castle, one good blow can begin to unravel decades of work.
While the blow to each structure may be the same, the impact is not.
But why is it different for Aboriginal communities?
When we discuss Native Americans, we are in fact talking
about a large number of unique cultural communities that have lived through –
and survived – nothing less than a cultural genocide. This is a history in
which children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in Indian boarding schools designed to assimilate them into the new Euro-American
culture. They were prohibited from speaking their own language, or practising
their own religion and customs. These schools reached their peak in the 1970s,
and some remained operational in that form until the early-2000s despite
well-documented concerns about the rampant physical, sexual and mental abuse
occurring within them.
And this is only the most recent history. If you look just a
little farther in the past, you will see a history in which Native communities
were slaughtered for target practise, or were intentionally presented
with smallpox-infected blankets in an attempt to weaken and break their
communities. The goal was clear: as a lesser-evolved, sub-human species, Native
Americans had best either assimilate with the burgeoning colonist America, or
die.
After a longwinded attempt at breaking Native culture down,
Sandler’s film is one of many instances in which outsiders are now attempting to
build it back up based on an imagine concocted through previous (generally poor)
media treatment and a few twists drawn from their own imaginations. And even as
the dust continues to settle on America’s horrific colonial past, outsiders are
still treating these resilient peoples
as crude and unintelligent.
The fact that it is all supposed to be a joke is lost when
the comic representation is so close to representations that are meant to be
realistic. The Ridiculous Six is not
a biting satire that questions and critiques the challenging life circumstances
and ugly stereotypes surrounding Native communities, or in any way respects
their ongoing process of healing in the wake of centuries of cruelty. It in no
way respects their rights to self-determination. No matter how it is intended, the
effect is one of belittlement and humiliation emanating from those who can
shield their actions in the shimmering armor of stardom. This is a humor that
says, “I am more powerful and I still
have a right to your culture and women.”
In short, this humour re-relegates Aboriginal women to the
role dimwitted sexual plaything and thrusts them backwards into the horror and
humiliation of America’s not-so-distant colonial past. From there, it is no
great leap to render them a sub-human species that deserves all of the abuse that is still levelled against them. It is these attitudes that normalize the poverty, poor health and microaggressions that Aboriginals face every day. It is these attitudes that
propagate my own government’s refusal to properly address the systemic issues behind the epidemic of
sexual violence and murder of Aboriginal women.
Seriously…
it’s just a movie. Why is it such a big deal?
I’m going to
do that obnoxious academic thing, and begin to answer this question with
another question. As a non-Aboriginal American, how many Aboriginal Americans
do you know well?
For the
majority of non-Native Americans, the answer to that question is “none at all.”
The fact is
that less than two percent of the American population identifies as Native
American, and most non-Native Americans have little interaction with
Native peoples. This means that for the most part, Americans’ primary contact
point with Native culture is through television and film. This gives movies
such as The Ridiculous Six a powerful
position in influencing the voting public’s opinion about Native peoples – an
indeed, power in shaping how Native communities understand themselves.
On top of
this, most news and entertainment coverage of Native peoples continues to be narrow
and negative. This is due, in part, to the fact that most journalists are not
Native and do not understand Native culture very well. It is also because of a
strong journalistic tendency to use conflict frames (with “good” and “bad” guys)
to tell news stories. The result is a long journalistic and artistic history of
depicting Native populations as either uncivilized “problem people” or as the
romantic “noble savage” that saves the day through his wilderness wiles. Typically,
very little attention is given to the uglier parts of American colonialism, and
how the ripples of the attempted cultural genocide continue to impact Native
communities. And there is even less everyday coverage of Native communities
being normal people doing their regular day-to-day stuff. Because let’s face
it: that would make pretty boring TV.
Besides
a couple chapters in their high school textbooks, that is how most Americans
learn about Native peoples.
But… they’re trying to prevent freedom of expression!
No, they’re not. As a sidenote, it’s always interesting how
this argument is so frequently made in support of rude and inflammatory
expression, but often misses the fact that those who are critique it are also
exerting their right to free
expression.
As far as I know, nobody is advocating for legal
intervention to prevent the development of this film, or attempting to scare
producers into submission through threats to their physical safety and
wellbeing. Workers are simply exerting their right to refuse a project that
they find objectionable. They are using Twitter to share their concerns and
find their supporters online, and harnessing this support to encourage Netflix
to drop the project. After that, it is up to Netflix and the film’s creative
team to either listen to the concerns, or ignore them and produce the film
anyway.
This is what we call “dialogue,” and it is actually a
market-based approach to the problem. “Censorship” would involve banning the
film’s production outright. Small activist groups rarely have the power to enforce
such a thing.
I’m not suggesting we publicly lambast everyone involved in
this production for being racist asshats. As I mentioned before, I don’t think
they are intending to cause harm; I think they just don’t understand how a
mean, stereotypical depiction of one group can be dismissed as rude and
inappropriate, while an equivalent joke can (and does) cause tangible harm to
another. The real solution for this problem is not to ban distasteful work, but
to attempt, as these workers are, to educate producers and the public about the
consequences of their actions. This is just one of many unfair depictions of
Native peoples, and like a game of whack-a-mole, more will appear when
each is knocked down… until the public no longer finds these depictions as
harmless and funny, and market demand for these products dies.
I applaud these
actors and the cultural adviser in their efforts to create this kind of
awareness. I hope that at least some of it sticks.
