Are Transformers Twins Racist?
Source: The Associated Press
Posted: 06/24/09 4:11PM
Filed Under: Film
By SANDY COHEN
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen introduces some 40 new mechanized characters of all shapes, sizes and even sexes - but it's a pair of jive-talking 'bots that critics are singling out as more than just harmless comic relief.
Skids and Mudflap, twin robots disguised as compact Chevys, constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang. They're forced to acknowledge that they can't read. One has a gold tooth.
Racially-Contentious Movie Characters
Transformers 2 (2009): Mudflap and Skid
Nearly every review of this movie is referring to these two jive-talkin' robots as the low point of the film. They allegedly swagger and bumble their way through every scene, leading many to believe that they're a black stereotype. Oh, and they can't read. Yikes.
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Tropic Thunder (2008): Kirk Lazarus
In this war satire, Robert Downey Jr. plays a black man sent off to war in Vietnam. The movie was a critical hit and effectively showed the black war experience in a satirical way. A great comedic supporting cast helps the character come across as less offensive.
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The Love Guru (2008): Pitka
Canadian comedian Mike Myers' latest comedic character is Pitka, an American raised outside of his country by a cross-eyed Indian guru Tugginmypuddha. Hindu and East Indian groups have been vocal about this release - namely, how something of this nature could have been released in 2008. Reviews panned it, which isn't surprising.
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Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961): Mr. Yunioshi
Unquestionably Mickey Rooney's most racist role, Mr. Yunioshi is meant to provide comic relief. Instead, we get unbelievable stereotypical depictions of Asians. We challenge you to sit through the scenes without squirming. Obviously, what might have been funny in 1961 has long since lost its humorous edge.
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Sixteen Candles (1984): Long Duk Dong
When this film came out, some Asian-American groups decried Long Duk Dong as stereotypical and racist. They aren't far off. Played by Gedde Watanabe, he's a foreign exchange student from an unidentified Asian country. He speaks broken English (which is obviously intended to be funny) and struggles with a knife and fork. The worst part? His every entrance is accompanied by the sound of a gong.
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Soul Man (1986): Mark Watson
In what seems like an appalling plotline, a pampered teen poses as a young black man to receive a full scholarship to Harvard. The film functions as a anti-racism lesson for white folks; C. Thomas Howell's character is nearly evicted, arrested by the police, and subjected to an endless barrage of "no offense" racist jokes. He soon realizes that life isn't very easy for a black man in an institute of higher learning.
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The Party (1968): Hrundi V. Bakshi
Caucasian Peter Sellers plays an Indian actor who's accidentally invited to a Hollywood party. The movie blatantly mocks the East Indian culture and accent; his stumbling around and overall clumsiness makes East Indians seem a laughing stock - enough to make India ban this movie for several years after its release.
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White Chicks (2004): The Wilson Sisters
The Wayans brothers are no strangers to racism-fuelled comedy, so if anyone's going to do this type of film, it's them. And really, to be frank, it was only a matter of time before the tables were turned on white people. This movie is innocuous and silly; more than race, it shows how tough it is to be women in a guy's world.
AP
As good guys, they fight alongside the Autobots and are intended to provide comic relief. But the traits they're ascribed raise the specter of stereotypes most notably seen when Jar Jar Binks, the clumsy, broken-English speaking alien from Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, was criticized as a racial caricature.
Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern described Binks in 1999 as a "Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit," a reference to a black character from the 1920s and '30s that exploited negative stereotypes for comic effect. Extending that metaphor to the Transformers sequel was AP Movie Critic Christy Lemire, who calls Skids and Mudflap "Jar Jar Binks in car form."
And Manohla Dargis, film critic for The New York Times, takes it a step further, writing that the Transformers characters were given "conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas."
Director Michael Bay insists that the bumbling 'bots are just good clean fun.
"We're just putting more personality in," Bay said. "I don't know if it's stereotypes - they are robots, by the way. These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it."
TV actor Reno Wilson, who is black, voices Mudflap. Tom Kenny, the white actor behind SpongeBob SquarePants, voices Skids. Neither immediately responded to interview requests for this story.
Bay said the twins' parts "were kind of written but not really written, so the voice actors is when we started to really kind of come up with their characters."
"I purely did it for kids," the director said. "Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them."
Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman said they followed Bay's lead in creating the twins. Still, the characters serve no real purpose in the story, and when the action gets serious, they disappear entirely, notes Tasha Robinson, associate entertainment editor at The Onion.
"They don't really have any positive effect on the film," she said. "They only exist to talk in bad ebonics, beat each other up and talk about how stupid each other is."
Hollywood has a track record of using negative stereotypes of black characters for comic relief, said Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, who has not seen the Transformers sequel.
"There's a history of people getting laughs at the expense of African-Americans and African-American culture," Boyd said. "These images are not completely divorced from history even though it's a new movie and even though they're robots and not humans."
Man vs. Machine in the Movies
The Terminator
There's nothing scarier than a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger, that is until you meet a naked Arnie who cannot be killed! James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator introduced the world to a robot with a metallic endoskeleton and a very human looking (and Austrian, apparently) exoskeleton. Machines ruling the world in 2029 created The Terminator for the express purpose of travelling back in time to reshape the future. Feeling no pain, no emotion and programmed to kill (specifically the woman who birthed the man who led the resistance against the machines), The Terminator proved to be an almost impossible foe. Perhaps Christian Bale's fiery tongue will prove to be a worthy adversary, only Terminator: Salvation will tell.
Moviefone
I, Robot
This film takes place in the year 2035 A.D., when robots have become commonplace. Dr. Alfred Lanning is the mastermind behind these creepy-looking machines, which are controlled by the Three Laws of Robotics. Essentially, the Laws state that the robots will never harm a human. When Lanning 'commits suicide', an investigator named Spooner (played by Will Smith) discovers the case is not all that it seems. Predictably, the robots eventually begin to feel emotions and become vindictive, threatening Spooner's life as well as all of humanity.
Moviefone
2001: A Space Odyssey
Bypassing the monkey men beating the ground with bones and that giant black monolith, Stanley Kubrick's time-hopping opus 2001: A Space Odyssey features astronauts who are heading towards Jupiter on a spaceship known as Discovery. The ship is run by a man-made computer named HAL 9000, which malfunctions and attempts to murder the ship's astronauts to camouflage his mistakes. Fortunately, one of the apathetic astronauts hops to work and outsmarts the machinery.
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Artificial Intelligence: AI
In this disturbing and epic film, Steven Spielberg takes Stanley Kubrick's brainchild and explores the frontiers of genetic engineering. AI examines what it would be like if we could actually create our own children. Sure, they're not real, but they have emotions, crafted memories, and the ability to form relationships. When young robot David (played by Haley Joel Osment) is abandoned by his new family, he must find his way in the underworld, where he discovers many others like him who harbour resentment towards 'real' humans.
Moviefone
Blade Runner
Only in an alternate reality could Blade Runner be less successful than The Terminator, but so it was in 1982. This sci-fi noir film, adapted from a novel by Philip K. Dick (with the infintely more poetic title 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'), stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a cop in Los Angeles in 2019 who specializes in assassinating rogue replicants. Giving Terminator a run for his money, replicants are human-like androids with short lives and are used for colonization. When a quartet of replicants starts going ape and killing a bunch of humans, Deckard is sent to unplug them, so to speak. It's a piece of cake until Deckard realizes he may have fallen for a replicant (Sean Young) who is unaware of her true nature. To kill or not to kill your true love? That is the question.
AP
The Stepford Wives
Based on Ira Levin's satirical novel, published in 1972, The Stepford Wives tells the tale of a small suburb where women are beautiful and happy doing everything a 50s housewife would gladly do, but most modern women wouldn't. Obviously, there is something rotten in Connecticut, which a new couple discover when they move into the seemingly perfect enclave. Turns out the village wives have been replaced by robots - apparently the only way to get women in the kitchen in the 1970s.
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Battlestar Galactica
Considered one of the original 'machines turning on their masters' films, BSG focuses on the contentious relationship between humanity and human-made robots called Cylons. On the eve of a peace treaty signing, the Cylons attack the humans, nearly wiping them out. The remaining humans assemble on the ragtag warship Battlestar Galactica to collect their forces and make a plan. They decide to find a new planet to begin their new lives, and kill off the Cylons, who follow in hot pursuit. A disturbing look at artificial intelligence and the potential for total destruction.
AP
Westworld
Before dinosaurs roamed Costa Rica, Michel Crichton's fantasy world was a lot more grounded. Hollywood's late resident science fiction geek wrote Westworld in 1973, which revolves around a high-tech amusement park known as Delos. This park is peculiar for the fact that androids will supposedly accede to a visitor'a every will (including fantasies involving sex, drugs and death). Unfortunately, the visitors didn't figure on a trigger happy Yul Brenner. The actor plays the Gunslinger, a robot programmed to start duels, who starts to use his gun on the visitors.
AP
Transformers
Even though humans didn't create the Transformers (made up of friendly Autobots and evil Decepticons), any Earth-bound citizen still fears the brunt of these gigantic monoliths. Human beings aren't the target of the Decepticons, but they're also not any concern, which means they'll get stomped, crushed, or thrown if they're in the way. The Autobots seek to keep the peace with humanity, but it often doesn't turn out that way.
Moviefone
War of the Worlds
In Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel , a species of mechanical aliens invades Earth (noticing any trend with Spielberg's movies?). They're not robots created by humanity, but they're out to eradicate every last one of us in the name of...well, we're not sure...but in the face of such awesome, insurmountable strength, humans are little more than specks of dust to wipe off the planet. Lesson learned, Spielberg!
AP
American cinema also has a tendency to deal with race indirectly, said Allyson Nadia Field, an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"There's a persistent dehumanization of African-Americans throughout Hollywood that displaces issues of race onto non-human entities," said Field, who also hasn't seen the film. "It's not about skin color or robot color. It's about how their actions and language are coded racially."
If these characters weren't animated and instead played by real black actors, "then you might have to admit that it's racist," Robinson said. "But stick it into a robot's mouth, and it's just a robot, it's OK."
But if they're alien robots, she continued, "why do they talk like bad black stereotypes?"
Bay brushes off any whiff of controversy.
"Listen, you're going to have your naysayers on anything," he said. "It's like is everything going to be melba toast? It takes all forms and shapes and sizes."
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