This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
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This is Part 3 of what began as a quick “about me”. Some of it assumes you have at least read Part 2.
PART 1 (The First Post)
The Best Stuff Suits The Hippy In Me: God,: Pranks, Practical Jokes, Schadenfreude; Cultural Identity; Military Forces; Nationalism; Government; Law Enforcement Agencies; Gender; Sex; Sex Generally, Women’s Orgasms in Particular, & Sex Toys;
PART 2 (The Previous Post)
Non or Anti-Racist? About Sets and Systems; What Does SYSTEMIC Mean? (Systemic Racism) Part 1; What Systemic Racism is Made of Part 2; More Ingredients of Systemic Racism Part 3; People Are Motivated by Needs; Needs and Australian History; Other Possible Explanations For Human Behaviour; The Me Too Movement; Trial by Media; Feminism; Intersectionality; Systemic Sexism; White Privilege; Race as a Social Construct;
PART 3 (This Post)
Dramatic Choices & Cultural Consequences: Choices; Compulsory Unit; Censorship and the Single Story; Cultural Appropriation; Blackface; White People With Dreads; Boomerangs, Didgeridoos and Indigenous Australian Art; The W word and the N word; The Hip Hop Lyric Thing; White Saviour Narratives; White Saviour as Inspiring Teacher; White Saviour Adopts Poor Black Kid; White Saviour and the Grateful Slave; White Saviour as Anti-Hero; Fact or Fiction; Crossing the Line; Other-Ness
..--oo0oo--..
Dramatic Choices & Cultural Consequences
ChoicesAll fiction is an abstraction from reality. A smiley face is an example of an abstraction from reality –
it tells you just enough to convey a message “I want you to think of a person smiling.” : )
Another example of an abstraction from reality is a cartoon or a simple drawing. (The 21st century equivalent of a simple cartoon is often a meme).
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| Yep, it's by Leunig |
We try to influence audiences with our choices about what we leave out as much as what we leave in. We choose amongst styles of storytelling, such as documentaries or fiction, film language or sound. And we choose the bits we want an audience to see sitting side by side, for comparison.
We also influence audiences with the bits we aren’t aware we are choosing to leave out.
When we choose what to put into a story, we start with assumptions about what the audience already knows, or takes for granted, or is likely to understand. This is the main reason I ended up writing such a long "about me"- in my reviews I want to be able to assume readers know what I mean by things like "non-racist" as opposed to "anti-racist", or even just whether they might trust I mean well.
Compulsory Unit
I’m going to provide a link at the end of this section to a YouTube clip. I’ve titled this part “Compulsory” because I think watching this clip is the single most important recommendation in this whole post.
The link will take you to a talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled The Danger of a Single Story, but in her talk Chimamanda talks of many things relevant to many things. It would be a mistake to think her talk has only a single point to make.
If you enjoy reading novels and have read none of hers, I would recommend them. I’m not a great fan of novels, but Americanah is especially relevant to any country grappling with issues relating to detention of stateless persons, immigration and so on.
It has something to say on the matter of “place”.
This talk is relevant to many reviews of film … and other things – Chimamanda is a great writer and an intellectual giant. Please watch this clip for yourself – not just because I refer to it constantly.
--oo0oo--
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Or not.
Whatever.
Before you criticise my opinions as racist, you might like to check out the racism scale at
https://racismscale.weebly.com/
Or not.
Whatever.
On the other hand, if you have something constructive to say, I am open to genuine learning experiences. It's because I'm learning all the time that I constantly edit these pages.
Censorship and the Single Story
I’m tired of people jumping up and down and bitching about where other people have failed.
Yes, I’m all for an exchange of ideas, but I’m tired of seeing people taken outside, put up against the wall and shot for not being perfect.
It would be a pity if the boycott campaign’s misguided idea that Guerrilla should be limited to a history of the BBP [British Black Panthers] and nothing more stopped people from watching it – it’s brilliant, necessary, informative, thought provoking and would tell people a lot of truths about the past if it were given a chance.
One good work of fiction is worth a thousand dry documentaries; Working collectively, Black Britons could produce 20 good works of fiction rather than just one and change people’s perception of history forever – but the key here would be working collectively. This does not mean they have to collaborate – it is only through the collective weight of many individuals telling and re-telling their history that the narrative currently owned by the ruling class can be re-written.
Most stories have something positive to offer, and are worth watching for the good bits or at the very least for the discussion they generate. Certainly, unless they are dangerous or damaging, there is no cause for censorship.
Sense8 is an example of a series that is flawed on many levels, but is probably one of the best things ever made (in my lifetime, at least). Nothing in nature is perfect in the way humans have come to expect art to be perfect, and I think we need to re-capture the sense of wonder we once had before over-editing became a technological possibility.
No single movie, no series with several episodes, and not even a series that runs for years can show us every important thing we need to know about a topic. We can be disappointed about the style of show chosen or the premise or the character - we can be disappointed about the creator's priorities or more... but we should not be too quick to stop people from telling stories at all. Yes, we can ask them to do better and to tell more stories, but no single show can be all things to all people.
Cultural Appropriation
“Cultural appropriation is the misuse of a group’s art and culture by someone with the power to redefine that art and, in the process, divorce it from the people who originally created it.”
We could break that down into Necessary and Sufficient conditions, because I think it’s an excellent working definition for anyone who struggles with the concept. One of the key necessary conditions here is
“power to redefine” and another necessary condition is
“divorce it from the people who originally created it.“
Let’s go back to the original article where I found the definition, because Ijeoma Oluo’s example is simple to follow;
“… a shitty black rapper is just a shitty rapper who fades away into obscurity, leaving behind nothing more than a trail of never-played mixtapes dispersed outside of nightclubs. A shitty white rapper wins Grammys and is held up as an example of what good rap is…”
If there are shitty black artists, why can’t white people be shitty artists too? In a fair world, that would be fine. Sadly, the world is not fair. In the real world, the work of the shitty white artist will be valued more than the work of the good black artist… and the work of the shitty white artist becomes the new definition of “good”. This is cultural appropriation in operation. If you have a sense of justice, you will not support it.
(Ijeoma’s full and original article is worth reading - https://medium.com/the-establishment/when-we-talk-about-cultural-appropriation-were-missing-the-point-abe853ff3376 )
Blackface
In the U.S. the birth of and the rise of Blackface and Minstrelsy coincided with the adoption of the 13TH amendment to their constitution. Briefly … (because repeating this is becoming tiring – only an idiot argues with an idiot so why am I still trying?)
If you have a glut of A) black labourers and B) white labourers and you don’t want to pay much to either group, divide them to conquer them. Give the poor white trash permission to treat the poor black trash like shit by dehumanising the poor black trash and use Blackface and Minstrelsy to do this. Then, pay the poor white trash 3/5ths of bugger all, and criminalise the poor black trash, lock them up and use them as unpaid slave labour because criminals are the new slaves as per the clever sneaky loophole in the 13TH amendment that got rid of slavery. Got it?
(Okay, we didn't really want the white trash either, but it would be dangerous to make easy targets of people who look like those of us who matter.)
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND HATE OR ANYTHING TO DO WITH BIZARRE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR, JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY...
There are heaps of sources that equate a black face in one form or another with a face that is not to be treated humanely. The precise form or timing is irrelevant.
Just because blackface was progressively and incrementally sanitised by the U.S. entertainment industry does not alter its history or its inherently offensive nature. Just because its offensive purpose was not widely understood or blackface was naively accepted or used innocently in Australia or just because some of us had golliwogs 50 years ago and did not know better or mean anything evil by it and did not understand the history til recently does not make it okay today.
Fifty years ago poofter bashing, backyard abortions and hiding children with handicaps from the world were also deemed okay.
Just because some Dutch people have a tradition of blackface separate from the U.S. tradition does not make it okay – that also had its origins in bitching about the mooted end of slavery in Europe.
The message coming loud and clear from the Black Pete defender in the video is that
• chimney sweeps always behave badly;
• chimney sweeps can only be corrected with a beating; and
• beating chimney sweeps is innocent fun that benefits everyone including the sweep
Further, rather than accept responsibility for his own beliefs, this person hides behind children who could not, logically, miss wearing blackface if they never did it. Is he incapable of finding any substitute way to give children fun? (Would he correct his own, white children by beating them?)
Blackface is one of those “historical event” things in the grey area of the systemic racism diagram we looked at in Part 2: Blackface is part of Systemic Racism, a craze designed to create and support and sustain and perpetuate negative ideas about POC. It also normalises the past. The only way to eliminate systemic racism is to change the stuff in the grey area.
Yes, eliminating blackface means being “politically correct”. None of my other posts will ever be this long, and I won't make this longer by getting into the topic of Political Correctness, but it's simple, really;
In a fair world, some things are harmless,
but the world is not fair.
but the world is not fair.
I’m sure the man in the video believes he wouldn't be knowingly unkind to a POC if he met one. But being asked to think about the historical and social significance of colour, he might be less likely to UN-knowingly be unkind to a POC, and more likely to contribute to the unravelling of systemic racism. Most importantly, if he stopped dressing in blackface that would be one less visible sign of support for the local neoNazi troop to feel good about.
You might know one or two people of colour who are okay with golliwogs or blackface today but that does not mean it will not offend other people of colour. We don't know anyone else’s story but our own.
If you are tempted to dress up in blackface - please don't. Stop supporting whingers who feel hard done by about stuff that really doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things, get a life, and grow up.
White People With Dreads
Is this a form of cultural appropriation or blackface? When I first saw hip young white dudes with pony tails and matted clumps of what looked like coconut fibre woven into their hair I was really jealous, but mainly because my own hair is shit. I’m genetically tortured with little wisps of downy fluff on my pate instead of a crown of anything impressive – it’s so fine that if a hair falls down to my face when I’m sweating it can take ten minutes of insane washing and wiping to even find it and in the meantime the tickle drives me crazy. So no, I don’t envy the coconut fibre dreads I envy the dudes who have enough tough hair on their scalp to which fake dreads might safely be attached.
My only other response to white dudes with matted fibre dreads is to scratch with an automatic “nit-nest response”. People of colour have been braiding, plaiting, straightening, dying and putting pot plant holders in their hair since time began, but I don’t see why they should have a monopoly on self-decoration. Caucasians have been doing similar shit just as long. If someone cares to explain how Lana Wachowski’s pink mop-top celebrates the dehumanisation of POC I shall re-think my position, but until then I’ll maintain it just shows two things: a) she has the same hair genes as me and b) she has a sense of fun.
Boomerangs, Didgeridoos and Indigenous Australian Art
Indigenous Australians have been and continue to be treated poorly by non-Indgenous Australia. This sucks. I personally want no part of the appropriation or exploitation or abuse of Indigenous culture. I don’t want to participate in any Indigenous cultural practice without the express approval of individual Indigenous Australians affected.
Did you know that not all Indigenous Australian cultures used the didgeridoo, but that amongst the peoples who did traditionally use it, it is a sacred instrument? For this reason, its use by non-Indigenous people could be offensive.
The fact that I have Australian citizenship does not entitle me to align myself with or to make light of any specific cultural or spiritual practice of any other individual Australian, Indigenous or otherwise.
Many Aboriginal artefacts produced for sale to tourists are made by non-Indigenous people (including people overseas), and I find the notion of exploiting someone else’s culture or spiritual beliefs for gain offensive, especially if most of what is produced is, in the long run, only going to contribute to environmental destruction or increase landfill.
A great deal of what is sold as Indigenous Art is fake, and this reduces opportunities for people who are not necessarily fully Westernised but who are often criticised for not being financially self-sufficient. If you are visiting and want to buy Australian Art, please consider buying from a co-op owned and operated by Indigenous Artists or from a reputable gallery.
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| New Day, Sally Morgan 1989 |
If you are considering travelling to Australia in order to climb monoliths like Uluru, please don’t.
Just come to look instead.
I was raised a Catholic and while I don’t believe in God I was disturbed to see the number of people eating and shouting while walking through places like The Vatican – I think people can visit each other’s homes and sites without being disrespectful.
The W word and the N word
In the past, in Australia, the word “Wog” was widely and consistently used as a pejorative and in a hurtful way. One of the greatest cultural revolutions of my lifetime was wrought by three young Australians; Nick Giannopoulos, Simon Palomares, and Maria Portesi who wrote a stage play in 1987 (Wogs Out of Work) and took ownership of the word Wog. They not only took the sting out of the word, it became a word that celebrated a whole range of wholesome values – especially family.
Nonetheless, the best news of all is that because the “Wog” play and TV show franchise became so successful Nick Giannopolous actually Trademarked the word “Wog” and has been able to stop several companies from using it in a negative way to sell products and services (though he lets people use it if they continue to use the word in a positive spirit).
Something similar happened in the U.S.A. when African Americans took ownership of the “N word”, the history of which was a lot more hateful and consequential than the Wog word in Australia.
The W word and the N word are words people within a community are entitled to use when talking to each other. They are not words for outsiders to use.
The Hip Hop Lyric Thing
If you are white and you like to sing along to your favourite songs, do NOT sing the N word. Well, okay, it’s impossible not to try to sing along to good songs. But just because someone has included the N word in the lyrics this is not carte blanche for white people to be rude. Hip Hop did not evolve with white audiences as the primary target demographic – we are not the centre of every universe.
Now let’s discuss great tunes/songs like Breathe and Stop by Q-Tip., or You Can Do It by Ice Cube. It would be an exaggeration to say every second word is the N word, because they also include rude words for body parts. Maybe only every third word is the N word. Songs like these are also available in instrumental form if we don’t like the lyrics. Let’s be honest, the internal rhythm of the words and the voice are an essential part of the total sound, and the instrumental versions are fairly crappy compared to the vocal versions.
Here’s my white person solution (cos I’m an Anglo Australian) – I just replace the N word with the word DIGGER. Similarly, for rude words because I am Australian (old school), I just use rhyming slang.
For example, I absolutely love the four letter word beginning with C, but most people don’t tolerate it well. In rhyming slang this would be “A drop kick and a punt”. On the other hand, a word that other people don’t seem to mind but which grates on me – a word that starts with T – is sometimes referred to in rhyming slang as “Brace and bits” so I just use rhyming slang for that.
This way I can sing along accordingly to any song I jolly well please (if I can keep up – which usually I can’t) without offending anyone. "Don't stop, Digger, hit it (I will) ..."
Word substitution is not a silly idea – Cee Lo Greene’s hit F*** You was released with a clean version “Forget You” and it still works (though since watching The 100 I now sing Float You).
But here's the key part - I don't sing stuff that is not mine in public. No, not just because I was cut to the quick at school 50 years ago when the singing nun told me to sit quietly in the corner and do my homework during singing lessons, but because there's a line I would just feel uncomfortable crossing. When I use words like Digger or rhyming slang to sing along to hip hop (or whatever I'm supposed to call it) it's because that's the absolute worst I'm prepared to get caught doing by accident.
White Saviour Narratives
In economic terms (Remember, it's all about the money) it is fair to say “Empire is theft”. From about 1500 onwards several European nations populated mainly by white people got into the business of sailing the rest of the world looking for “savages” in need of civilising.
Saving/ civilising savages usually involved several steps:
• taking control of their land and resources
• killing, maiming and/or stealing people
• imposing foreign ideas and values
• refusing to go away once the "saving" was finished
• a lot of self-congratulation
Rudyard Kipling took the self-congratulation to lyrical heights in 1899 when he penned an ode to The White Man’s Burden. The title alone sounds like the exhausted sigh of some skinny white pratt wearing a pith helmet while he watches a swarthy native carry a chest laden with jewels down to the pier for a journey back to the old country. “Lucky the natives who get saved by this tosser, eh what?”
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| Animal Crackers |
Western culture has seen this kind of “bullying hero” narrative as normal since the year dot, literally, and anything that challenges it is still so recent it looks odd.
While I grew up watching a steady stream of cowboy movies or TV shows in which white heroes shot “obviously” evil “redskins” – the Indigenous peoples who had the gall to occupy the North American land mass before Hollywood arrived – black cowboys were presumed non existent.
By 2018 we’ve seen a correction of sorts; occasionally we now see Indigenous Americans or Black cowboys on our screens, but for the most part those who screen films seem to have just thrown everything in the bin and made a few “truer” stories to fill the vacuum. But that amounts only to a “correction of sorts”.
World War II marked the beginning of the end of the Age of Empire.
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| The British Empire 1903 (Ironically, the Britbits are marked in red) |
We could separate former colonies into roughly two distinct groups. The first of those would be predominantly white or European controlled settler societies – like Australia. The White Saviour narrative remains a core part of the national “history”; the country has been saved – past tense - no further negotiation or discussion will be tolerated. The second group of former colonies would be those who never had more than a small white presence; their sole purpose was colonial administration and the theft of resources and labour. In modern narratives, countries in this second group are often treated as “still in need of saving”.
Of course, not all stories are about entire countries – most often they are about parts of countries: States, or cities, or towns, or even neighbourhoods. The hero of a story is very often white, by default.
The “White Saviour Narrative” is often an accident because the people most likely to have the money or the connections or the confidence or the audience (i.e. market) to get a story told are most likely to be white and they are sometimes the least likely to question whether the hero of the story ought to be white.
Drama criticism can be a bitchfest that creates animosity and fosters resentment, or it can be an opportunity for a genuine exchange of ideas. I don’t believe it ever needs to be personal. No, the world doesn’t need more stories in which the white person is the only person competent to solve a problem. And no, people of colour are unlikely to be entertained by even more stories suggesting they are useless and can’t do a thing unless some white person comes along and offers a solution.
But not everything that seems to fit into “yet another fail” category is necessarily bad.
White Saviour as Inspiring Teacher
As an example, let me offer the movie Freedom Writers. Teachers who are POC have been helping disadvantaged students for as long as there have been schools. Why is it that stories of inspirational teachers are only worth making a movie of if the teacher is white?
OK, I get it. I understand why people were peeved. It seemed Freedom Writers qualified for dismissal under the White Saviour rule – why couldn’t we have had a POC as the teacher? Just cos the original teacher was white doesn’t mean the story had to be told that way. But here’s the thing – this particular movie was not just about the journey of the students – it was also about the journey of the teacher. I would like to think I have always been something of a SJW but if you read my review of that movie you will see that without it I still would not understand “white privilege”.
Yes, those of us with various types of privilege have a moral obligation to educate ourselves, but it is easier if we actually have opportunities to do that.
White Saviour Adopts Poor Black Kid
The Blindside? Throw it in the bin. Absolute rubbish. Stop taking Black children away from poverty – fix the poverty. Stop creating poverty.
White Saviour and the Grateful Slave
The Help? No, this movie does not fail under this rule, but of course, this is just an opinion. Read my review.
White Saviour as Anti-Hero
Three Billboards. Sorry Frances, that nagging feeling you had that something was wrong was right.
I must confess I love anything with Frances McDormand in it, so when I saw the trailer for Three Billboards I was salivating. Here was a story about a strong woman who hated the establishment as much as I do, she was pissed off and she was ready to fight back. And the people she was going to stick it to were guilty of every ism under the sun. But Sezin Koehler is absolutely right – there is an anti-hero trope in movies where white people are a protected class. No black person in their right mind would even consider half the stuff Mildred Hayes does in Three Billboards – it’s pure fantasy. And the movie is the embodiment of white privilege in action because ultimately it does not challenge racism at all, just accepts it as a "normal" part of the environment.
This article deserves our respectful attention.
https://blackgirlnerds.com/missouri-is-the-new-pop-culture-landscape-for-white-devil-narratives/
Fact or Fiction?
Let me return again to the question I raised earlier about how white people might come to understand their privilege. A willingness to gain insights into the lives of others is necessary, but on its own probably not sufficient. For someone like myself, rarely encountering people of colour, any insight to be had via an emotional experience will usually come through drama.
When I wrote my review of Hidden Figures, I focused on a very real conviction that all of the women in that story were heroes; that by "following their bliss" they created the conditions that forced white people to act – the white people in the story might have formalised change, but without the women change would not have happened at all. Hidden Figures is a universal story because, although it is about race on the surface, it is first and foremost a brilliant story about heroes.
I later found a comment from a woman of colour who was annoyed the subplot about segregated bathrooms deviated from the truth as originally told in the book on which the film was based. In her mind, this was a case of Hollywood once again bleaching a story to make the white manager look like a hero, for de-segregating bathrooms.
This bathroom subplot as shown in the movie did not lead me personally to think of the character of the white manager as a hero ( I just thought he was a dick). One of the benefits of telling the story the way it was told in the movie, for me, was that it led to a discussion with a white friend of mine about the idea of “people who don’t see colour”. Yes, I’ve made it about white people, haven’t I? But my point is that every project starts with a clear idea of its objectives. A producer might want to make something primarily to connect with POC, and that would be fine. Or a producer might want to make something that will somehow connect with whites. Or a producer might want to try and do both, like I believe Hidden Figures has.
Not my dollar, not my decision… I’m just laying out possibilities here.
There is no single, absolute correct point of view in cases like this. My own take is that stories must be told and re-told over and over so that each succeeding generation learns history independently of those who set school curricula. The best way to do this is through film, and the widest audience will be reached through fictionalised truth rather than through documentaries. This will require the sacrifice of some historical detail for dramatic effect, but if the integrity of the piece remains intact, the point of the original story need not be lost. And it's not just about history.
In the end, it won't matter how good a job we do of telling a story, we will never have absolute control over what people make of it.
The Special Case of Africa
(This bit's a work in progress... hopefully life will soon stop interrupting my flow.)
Crossing the Line
There is only one crime on this earth greater than having an obnoxious point of view, and that’s falsely claiming membership of the “I’m allowed to say that because I’m X” club.
If white story tellers have more money or greater access to markets than any other group, there will continue to be more white saviour stories, because white story tellers are going to be too shit scared to cross the “I’m not allowed to say that because I’m not X” line.
Yes, white storytellers could get people of colour, people of different religious, cultural, political, sexual, ideological, artistic or other persuasions to write or portray characters for them, but someone would still be pissed off. I don’t see how anyone is going to be happy anytime soon.
Once again, let me hold up Sense8 as an example of a show that was great on a lot of levels and sought very hard to do the right thing cross-culturally, but still managed to get up a lot of noses. Despite its flaws, the world is a much richer place for its having been made than if it had not been made at all.
Other-Ness
Most of the media content I see in Australia is made for an English speaking market, and comes from the United States. A “normal person” is shown to be a White Male Heterosexual Judeo-Christian (WMHJC) who speaks English as his first language.
Anyone else is “other”, and less valuable than the white male. Women are other. Genetically non-Anglo/European people are other. Non-heterosexuals are other. The list of “not-normal” or “other” people is endless. More people in the West are “other” than “normal”.
Although the norm does not represent the majority of people, thanks to a jumbling of jargon, humans tend to think in simplistic terms of "normal=proper" and "not normal=deviant".
The norm was not democratically chosen, but the fact such an absurd definition of “normal” is the default definition in film and TV simply reflects the influence WMHJCs exert over financial and political decision-making in the West.
Hard to argue this doesn’t define a preferred social class.
Most of us have some notion of what it is like to be "other". For example, just some of the ways I have experienced being an outsider is growing up in relative poverty, grappling with mental illness, and being a female in a sexist world. Just some of the privileges I've had are never experiencing war first hand, being born the dominant colour in a racist country, and having access to reasonably good health care.
Although I cannot know what it is like to be black, I have two eyes, two ears, imagination and a voice.
Depending on the personality we are born with and the circumstances of our birth or early years, we absorb the opinions of our primary carers to a greater or lesser degree. In our formative years we are entrusted to the care of a range of people, including some toxic dickheads. Thus prepped, we head out to take our place in a world run by (mostly) more toxic dickheads.
As we go through life, some of the many messages we receive will be negative. The worst of these tell us that we are, in some way, "other" - that we are defective.
In Episode 05x15 of The Fosters, Stef talks to a therapist about being ostracised by her father when she told him she was gay. The therapist explains:
Unlike guilt which is the feeling of doing something wrong shame is the feeling of being something wrong. And this assault on the self… it can cause deep depression and severe anxiety.
The Fosters was a consistently awesome show on several levels, but this exchange pins down how toxic “otherness” is, in all its forms. It would be pointless and stupid to try and rank advantages or disadvantages or combinations of “otherness factors” – otherness is not a competition, it simply is what it is for each of us. That said, there is no question the "otherness" of racial constructs is a multi-faceted, complex, universal health hazard for People of Colour. How could even the most balanced and well adjusted personality in the world not be affected by such an omnipresent, enduring and adaptable form of toxicity?
"othering" people
is always an act of violence
Most Pride Movements are not about claiming superiority, they are simply about refusing to be shamed.
We must each find what is unique and precious in our selves in order to celebrate our selves - and it IS important that we celebrate our selves. At the same time, we must refuse to be defined by anyone else.
--oo0oo--
The Media Market
I go out of my way to look for stuff that is different, because humans are endlessly fascinating, but it is not always easy to find stuff that is "not average" or made for an audience that is assumed not to exist in Australia. For example, I know "Black-ish" exists and I can buy it through iTunes but it's stuff I have to search for otherwise what I am exposed to is limited. I'll probably never buy any episodes unless the price drops dramatically, because I have no way of knowing whether I will like the show's values.
Even a predominantly white show like Wynonna Earp (from Canada) has a cult following and is available on iTunes in the U.S. but the latest season is (so far) unavailable legally in Australia by any means I can uncover - even though I wrote to SyFy to ask WTF is going on. The rights to sell the show in this region belong to some company that is not interested in using them, but SyFy doesn't seem to have any legal way of buying the rights back (or interest in trying). This, in turn, affects final viewing figures and decisions about whether to renew the show.
Killjoys is another good Canadian series - only the first season is available on Netflix Australia, though 4 have been made altogether. Fortunately, all 4 are available on iTunes Australia.
I found Treme on DVD in a local store, but only because it appears to have been "dumped" here, which in turn made it cheap to try/buy.
Let me leave you with this clip someone has cut together to create a song-length moment: (You can count the continuity glitches in the final edit while you enjoy the music. )
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