Two characters in the new Transformers movie, Skids and Mudflap, are getting a lot more attention than the film’s creators probably anticipated. Given their use of slang, their shuckin’ and jivin’ personae, and the fact that they are unremorsefully (unashamedly?) illiterate, particularly vis a vis the behavior of the other Autobots, some people question whether they are stereotypes of Black people. Knowing the historical stereotypes quite well, it’s very easy to see the precedent for this line of concern. One could go back even further, but by looking at the depction of the males in Coal Black and De Seben Dwarves, it’s fairly easy to see a strong continuity from that 1940s cartoon to 2009’s movie. But for me, there are a few questions that expand the discussion beyond the presence of any stereotypical characters.

First, I think it’s important to look at the character in totality. That is, it’s not enough just to note whether he has one or a few stereotypical traits, you’d have to have some understanding of that character overall. I’ll be right up front and say that I did not like Skids and Mudflap because they did not bring anything to the movie. Director Michael Bay claims that they were supposed to be there for comic relief, but I didn’t find them funny. Not in some hypersensitive ‘mad cuz he makin fun of Black folks’ way, they were just generally unfunny. A perfect character to look at to demonstrate this would be Kramer from Seinfeld. For those of us who watched Seinfeld, Kramer was hilarious. But if Kramer had been Black, he might’ve been decried as a stereotype. However, because we have a fairly good understanding of the character, we see that he’s just very quirky — and funny. Well, I would think that Black characters should have the same latitude to be funny, even if the portrayal borders on what would be stereotypical. The limitation with Skids and Mudflap is that they display the stereotypical traits without any counterbalances. They’re not shuckin and jivin and jive-talkin AND smart or particularly brave or anything else. Nope. Just shuckin and jivin and illiterate. With gold teefis. True, one gets eaten by Devastator and doesn’t continues to fight, but that 30 seconds doesn’t really offset anything that’s happpened up to that point. He still shows no particular level of valor.

Another question is this: to what extent should we be concerned about the portrayal of Black folks (or ostensibly Black folks) in the media, in the first place? For instance, I’ve heard the claim that the stereotypes help to perpetuate or justify racism. But do they? I definitely wouldn’t suggest that they do anything to ameliorate racism, but given that racism is itself illogical, I don’t know that anything can be legitimately said to justify it. That is, a racist person is not racist because of anything external, he is racist because of what is inside himself; the racist hates Black people neither because of nor in spite of what we do. He hates irrespectively. So the idea that showing Black folks of noble comport would somehow change his mind really does not follow. Bearing that in mind, does it ultimately matter? The answer I’ve been trained towards is yes, but I think it’s debatable, even if I’m not quite sure what the counterargument would be.

Then, there’s the question of what difference the background of the product’s creator makes. For instance, if you look at the stereotypes of Blacks in the cartoons in the 1940s, you’ll see some of the same actions and activities that are described in Zora Neale Hurston’s works. From my perspective, the obvious difference is that Hurston’s characters were developed and imbued with a full humanity, as opposed to being mere caricatures. However, many of her Black contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance did not see it that way. Hurston faced a good amount of scrutiny because of the stories she told and the characters in them bore some resemblance to the stereotyped characters in the popular (read: white) media at the time. Nowadays, I wonder whether Tyler Perry’s Madea would have anywhere near the traction if she was the creation of a white author. For the people who like TP’s work (cuz there are a lot who don’t), I wonder if they would still be able to relate to the character if everything but the author’s race was the same — or whether the people who protest would be going even harder.

Next question is this: because the characters are literally not human, are we doing too much in projecting humanity onto them based on a couple of characteristics? This one, I’d pretty much give a quick ‘no’ to. With any any anthropomorphic representations, as in animated works, there is a certain ‘type’ of humanity that’s given to the characters. So in the movie Cars, we know that the tow truck (I don’t remember his name) was supposed to be a ‘good ole boy.’ That’s not projecting onto the character, that’s reading it as it’s written. Same thing here. Jokers can try to deny, but in giving the robots human attributes, they also give them some racial elements — the Autobots, that is. The Decepticons, on the other hand, seem to have no distinguishing characteristics other than being Decepticons. There are no Decepticons with British accents, no ‘old man’ Decepticons, none of that. Well…there was one, but he had switched allegiance, so he was, for all practical purposes, and Autobot. But the fact that the Decepticons are all generic robots is proof that the creators know that the individual Transformers are representative of human subgroups, because they know if Megatron spoke with a [insert group] accent, there would be questions whether the portrayal indicated some sort of suggestion that that group was evil.

It’s a tough call. On the one hand, I wouldn’t want to see media that is so scrubbed of any potential offense that the characters essentially became all the same. On the other hand, I would expect somebody with a budget in the hundreds of millions to know how to do better characterization than I saw in this movie. But given the number of wasted characters I saw, maybe that’s expecting too much.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Everwhatever.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.