Posted on 05/07/2007 1:49:34 PM PDT by Dajjal
Sorry, but I didn’t see Queen Latifah in BDTH as a Magic Negro. Rather her character was more like “Kitten With A Whip” meets “You’ve Got Mail.”
Not to mention Ossie Davis, mentoring Tom Hanks in “Joe and the Volcano.”
Yeah, I always figured him more patterned along the lines of John the Baptist...
And for every "magic negro" example they can come up with, I suspect we could find several counter-examples. George Burns plays God too. Tommy Lee Jones saves Will Smith's backside in MIB....
Mysticism? Nah, how about they are good actors/actresses, the parts suited them, and their agent was able to come to a deal with the producers? Sheesh, lets not read too much into this...
Great site.
On that note, have you seen this?
http://www.fischerfam.net/ftp/bionic/whiteblack.swf
Silly, but fun.
BTW, your “impacted wisdom tooth” characterization of Aaron McGruder is spot-on.
A recent incarnation is Samuel L. Jackson’s Lazarus in “Black Snake Moan,” who straightens out all of the Christina Ricci character’s problems and weaknesses.
You can add Morgan Freeman’s character in the overrated “Shawshank Redemption” to the list of “magic Negroes” in cinema.
The rise of the "magic negro" in film was a sort of pendulum swing -- there were decades of movies in which blacks were pretty uniformly portrayed as lazy, untrustworthy, and intent on nothing more in this world than raping white women.
By the time of Gone With the Wind, even though the civil rights movement was barely in its infancy, filmmakers became more concerned with how they portrayed black characters -- the black characters in GWTW reflected patronizing stereotypes rather than threatening ones, more like children than beasts. Few commentators, and fewer politicians, were arguing then that blacks should have full equality with whites; but at least they had awakened enough to be alarmed by lynchings.
Isacc Hayes killed off Chef, when he quit the show over the Tom Cruise/Scientology spoof. Parker and Stone could have just written out the character, but what kind of satirist lets a story like that go? Especially when you're in the middle of it?
Like the group of "all God's children" who sing with the Marx brothers in "A Day At The Races" of that era.
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