Australia, the movie

This past weekend I rented the movie Australia from the offices in the basement of our dorm. Starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, all I really knew about the movie was that I remembered liking it after my grandparents took me to see it before Christmas. I was amazed after I read the introductory statements, because this entire movie dealt with issues that pertain not only to the topics of this course, but to my final research project as well.
The movie begins with an introduction into the territory of Australia in 1939, with a mix of the white British and settlers and the Aboriginals who were native to the territory. One product of the mixed cultures in the same area was mixed race children, dubbed 'creamies' by many. This biracial plotline is mixed in with a race to drive cattle across the desert, a war, and a love story, but it is interwoven into all of it. During the war, all of the biracial children that the government could find were sent to Mission Island, the first target of the Japanese upon their invasion, while all of the white children were sent to the safety of southern Australia. Not to mention that the white father of the biracial boy we come to know, called Nullah, tries to kill him several times.
The first time I saw this movie it represented a piece of history to not be proud of, but much more of it hit home now that I have begun my research and participated in this course with readings and discussions. This is a piece of real life and real history for many. I can only imagine the kind of identity issues these children had to deal with, especially if they had murderous fathers and were yanked from their families by the police simply because they were not white. They're parents may or may not have loved each other and tried to help their children to accept who they are (depending on the situation), but no relationships of that nature would have been widely accepted by the culture of cities and towns. Therefore the children had a hard time finding acceptace from most places, sometimes even from within their own families.

Stereotypes in Ballet

I was getting nostalgic this weekend and I started thinking about the 15 years I spent dancing ballet. For nine of those years I performed in our local production of the Nutcracker. As I was remembering all the fun we had backstage listening to the music and trying to sneak upstairs to see the older company members in their costumes and performing, it hit me. I had a TE 448 lightbulb moment. I remembered that in the second half of the ballet dancers that are supposed to represent countries from all over the world come to the court of the Sugar Plum Faerie to dance for Clara who had saved the Nutcracker from the giant king mouse. While some of those dances are more authentic than others (to the best of my knowledge seeing as I am not extremely familiar with all of the cultures represented), some that I can recal are relatively ridiculous.

The one that sticks out the most in my memory is that of the Chinese dance. They are coming and bringing the gift of tea to Clara, and the dance that the company performing these parts of the show had been choreographed around a giant teapot. The dancers entered behind the teapot, wore a costume that many Americans would automatically link with China or Japan (brightly colored, embroidered shirts with tighter black pants, and those hats that look like flattened cones). The part that bothers me the most though is that I remember they had put makeup on their eyes to try and give them a slanted appearance and throughout the dance they squinted their eyes and scrunched up their faces a little bit, to make them 'look more Chinese.' And I remember copying their example starting from when I was about 6 years old. I had no idea that doing that might be wrong, or that some people might be offended (or as I would have thought of it then that some people might not like that I was doing that). I simply wanted to be as good a dancer as those dancers were. And I thought that by mimicking them I was doing something needed to become better.

I did not look at it as making fun of another culture, but it can easily be construed that way. I am not saying that these cultural dances should be cut out of the program, but perhaps the companies should look into a more authentic representation. It is possible to represent other culture's styles of dance without squinting your eyes. And many companies have done this well, because I searched for a youtube.com video that would show you what I'm talking about, and I could not find one that was similar to my memories. The ones I found were, in my opinion, much less offensive. I would be very interested to hear what an insider's perspecitive would be on this issue.

Disability on TV

The other night I was flipping channels before I went to bed, and I stumbled on an episode of House. House was having an argument with a very sick Foreman about a brain biopsy that could leave Foreman permanently disabled. Foreman's argument is that House handles being disabled just fine, but House retorts with something along the lines of, "do I make this look glamorous?"

This got me thinking about the portrayal of disabled people on TV. House becomes addicted to vicoden because of the pain in his leg, Joe from Family Guy functions in his wheel chair, but as soon as he has the chance to walk again he becomes a jerk to all of his friends and only returns to himself after his friends and wife injure him to the extent of lower body paralysis again, and so on. There are not many deptictions of people with disabilities on TV, but those characters are sometimes the only exposure some people have. Talk about stereotypes.

If these are the images that the general public is getting, then the general view of those with disabilities is probably not as positive as is might be otherwise. I guess that this reverts to a question that has come up repeatedly in our discussions. Is it better to expose people/students to a stereotyped version of real life, or to not expose them at all? Should we use these characters as a discussion starting point and try to dispel misconceptions? Or should we avoid potentially creating more misconceptions by not bringing it up, since there are not many good examples? This is one of those questions that I would love an actual answer to, although the chances of getting one when the answers can be so subjective may or may not really help.