{"id":5857,"date":"2013-10-15T10:08:14","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T10:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.transversalmedia.eu\/white-house-down-and-a-black-man-worth-dying-for\/"},"modified":"2013-10-15T10:08:14","modified_gmt":"2013-10-15T10:08:14","slug":"white-house-down-and-a-black-man-worth-dying-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theresearchpapers.org\/archive\/white-house-down-and-a-black-man-worth-dying-for\/","title":{"rendered":"White House Down and a Black man worth dying for"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>****SPOILERS ALERT FOR WHITE HOUSE DOWN****<\/strong> (Discussions of characters, plot and subplots).<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been itching to formulate some thoughts about the movie White House Down since Saturday, when I saw it. I am not always up to date with movies, sometimes seeing them weeks or even months after they\u2019ve been released in theaters. This means my commentary about film is generally late, after everyone is done discussing whatever might be worth discussing. But I saw White House Down and I\u2019ve googled for reviews and commentary and everything I came across has been about the jingoism and the blatant \u201cRAH RAH\u201d nature of the film. Which, yeah. White House Down is jingoistic. It is RAH RAH and it is trite in the sense that films depicting the US as a military superpower generally are. The thing is, I am accustomed to Hollywood\u2019s jingoism. It is what it is and even sci-fi or fantasy films tend to be filled with this not so subtle propaganda. When it is not filled with propaganda (i.e. Pacific Rim), the film tends to be relegated to a niche category and described as \u201cgeeky\u201d or \u201cfor nerds\u201d or, gods forbid, \u201cfor women\u201d (in all these cases, the propaganda will be of a different nature, perpetuating gender and\/or racial stereotypes rather than the political superpower, but that\u2019s a topic for another post).<\/p>\n<p>So, underneath the layers of jingoistic plot devices, I was left with something I rarely see in any films at all: a Black man in a position of authority who is worth dying for. Sure, we\u2019ve seen Black people (mostly men, with maybe a couple of notable exceptions that I can think of out of the top of my head in the form of Gina Torres in Firefly and Kerry Washington in Scandal) in positions of authority. Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, even Chris Rock, have portrayed powerful men in film, presidents, generals, heroes, etc. However, in each and everyone of those cases, the men in question were at the service of the dominant culture. When they \u201csave the world\u201d, they are saving \u201cthe world as we know it\u201d (i.e. a white dominated world with racial, gender and socioeconomic hierarchies like the world we live in). What White House Down does, for the first time (at least that I\u2019ve noticed) is turn the tables: the man doing the saving is White and the man being saved is Black. This Black president, who of course I am aware wouldn\u2019t exist if it wasn\u2019t for Obama being in the White House, is not the hero that is about to die to save \u201cthe world as we know it\u201d but he is presented as someone worth dying for, someone worth giving one\u2019s life for, someone worth protecting. This Black man, whose entirely Black family is also shown on screen, is someone that people go out of their way to protect. And it didn\u2019t escape me that the entire plot is based on an alliance between old school conservatives trying to maintain the military industrial complex alive and rabid White Supremacist\/ Neo Nazi types who hate the President because he is Black.<\/p>\n<p>When I searched for reviews of this movie, I was looking for the political commentary rather than a critique of the film\u2019s cinematic qualities (let\u2019s be honest, White House Down is not set to change the history of cinema by presenting us with an entirely new genre; it\u2019s a summer blockbuster, not the next Citizen Kane). What I was interested in was the way people read the film\u2019s overtones, not necessarily what was said but what is shown. In my search I came across <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/176014\/summers-fall-white-house-down\">this review by Joshua Clover in the September edition of The Nation<\/a>. Mr. Clover is a white Professor at University of California. I was surprised that all he could see was the military\/ patriotic jingoism, especially considering the review was posted at The Nation, a magazine that usually goes beneath the surface. I left the topic alone for a couple of days because I tend to self doubt: am I seeing things that are simply not there just because of my capability for wishful thinking? But then, I remembered <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redlightpolitics.info\/post\/61106196186\/world-war-z-left-a-bitter-taste-in-my-mouth\">my visceral reaction to the race fail in World War Z<\/a> and realized that even if this racial subplot wasn\u2019t entirely evident, it IS there.<\/p>\n<p>White House Down is an entirely masculine movie. It does fail in the sense that no Black woman is presented as equally worthy of dying for (sure, tangentially, the President\u2019s wife and daughter are mentioned and shown but they are not central to the plot). However, in a world where anti Black racism is rampant, where mostly Black undocumented immigrants from Africa die by the thousands, where Black bodies are valued as \u201cless than\u201d in a systematic, political, ongoing way for centuries, I\u2019ll take a small victory over no victory at all. If beneath the layers of jingoism and RAH! RAH! anyone walks from this film with, at least, one visual queue that differs from the centuries of White Supremacy, I\u2019d say it\u2019s still better than the majority of what Hollywood produces. Sure, White House Down will not go down in history as a game changer. But honestly, I am tired of seeing films where we all die at the service of \u201cthe world as we know it\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>****SPOILERS ALERT FOR WHITE HOUSE DOWN**** (Discussions of characters, plot and subplots). I\u2019ve been itching to formulate some thoughts about the movie White House Down since Saturday, when I saw it. I am not always up to date with movies, sometimes seeing them weeks or even months after they\u2019ve been released in theaters. This means &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"loftocean_post_format_gallery":"","loftocean_post_format_gallery_ids":"","loftocean_post_format_gallery_urls":"","loftocean_post_format_video_id":0,"loftocean_post_format_video_url":"","loftocean_post_format_video_type":"","loftocean_post_format_video":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_type":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_url":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_id":0,"loftocean_post_format_audio":"","loftocean-featured-post":"","loftocean-like-count":0,"loftocean-view-count":1673,"loftocean_coauthors":"","alpaca_post_content_reading_setting":"","alpaca_reading_speed_per_minute":0,"alpaca_reading_speed_unit":"","alpaca_single_post_template_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[769,1361,40,2238],"class_list":["post-5857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-film","tag-media","tag-racism","tag-white-house-down"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>White House Down and a Black man worth dying for - The Research Papers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/theresearchpapers.org\/archive\/white-house-down-and-a-black-man-worth-dying-for\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"White House Down and a Black man worth dying for - The Research Papers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"****SPOILERS ALERT FOR WHITE HOUSE DOWN**** (Discussions of characters, plot and subplots). 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