6/19/2023 0 Comments Russian song i am gangster bad guyIn her blog, Nina Khrushcheva, who is clearly no admirer, makes the grand claim that Vladimir Putin has been significantly influenced by Hollywood’s parade of evil Russians. As is the case with Russia they may make politicians angry – they may also possibly provide them with role models. Hollywood’s depictions of villains can have very concrete and tangible consequences. Given that there’s no distribution of Hollywood movies in North Korea the producers knew there could be no loss of box office revenue by alienating that country. It was filmed with Chinese villains, but because of concerns that might jeopardise its entry to the Chinese movie market the villains were transformed into North Koreans in post-production – at considerable expense. This became clear with the remake of the 2012 US war film Red Dawn. But nowadays there’s hardly a trace of a Chinese character with evil intent in any Hollywood film because China has become a vitally important market for the studios. When MGM released The Mask of Fu Manchu 1932 the Chinese embassy in the US delivered a formal complaint because the title character was depicted with such hostility. “Unfortunately, Arab and Muslim villains still appear regularly in film and TV shows,” he states.Ĭhina has contributed its share of movie villains going back to the time when Fu Manchu appeared as a distrustful Chinese character in the early days of talking cinema. Although some films did appear with more rounded portrayals of ordinary Arabs, Dr Jack G Shaheen, author of Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, maintains there hasn’t been enough change. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks there was growing concern among Arab-Americans that they were being typecast as terrorists. In the Arab-American community Hollywood’s depictions over the decades have been seen as suffering from the ‘3B Syndrome’, in which Arabs were shown to be either belly dancers, billionaires or bombers. Even before the days of Rudolph Valentino’s roles in silent films like The Sheik in 1921 the cast was set for depicting Arabs as questionable characters who stole and murdered. One group that’s been demonised for decades with varying degrees of intensity is Arabs – and Muslims. Around the time of World War II, for obvious reasons, Germans appeared as villains in US films – as did the Japanese. The Russians might be the villain of choice right now but over the decades many different races and nationalities have had their moment in the evildoer spotlight. “I think particularly since the reemergence of Putin and a much more hardline regime, with the problems now in the Ukraine, there’s been this sense that Russia remains a geopolitical threat and a hostile power – even if it’s post-communist – and I think that’s really the reason you see this type of villainy,” says Chapman. Scholars see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tough stance as the reason for the increased presence of Russian villains now. “It never really eased up enough for Russia to feel that it is not a constant enemy,” she says. Khrushcheva, who teaches at New York’s New School, follows how Russians are portrayed in American entertainment and in her estimation the prevalence of Russians as villains hasn’t really abated since the days of the Cold War. “You can’t even turn the TV on and go to the movies without reference to Russians as horrible,” says US-based Russian-American professor Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Perhaps for a while their presence eased off but Russians remain the studios’ favoured villains. Surprisingly the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t bring an end to Russian villains onscreen. “But takes on a particular ideological inflection during the Cold War when you get the association not just Russia but also Soviet communism.” “Even before the Cold War, Russia was represented often as a geopolitical threat to the West,” says James Chapman, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. The Russian news agency Interfax reported in August that Batu Khasikov, a member of the culture committee at the upper chamber of the nation’s federal assembly, had stated that “movies where everything related to Russia is overtly demonized or shown in a primitive and silly way should be banned from theatrical distribution.”ĭepicting the Russians as villains has a long history. There has even been the threat of a Russian boycott of Hollywood movies, highlighting the risk studios take when they demonise a nationality. Russian politicians and filmmakers have now made clear their displeasure with the US movie industry’s ongoing depictions of Russian characters as villains. From a sadistic former KGB operative in The Avengers to the Russian evildoers in A Good Day to Die Hard, there’s certainly been no shortage of Russian villains on screen recently.
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