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01/21/2006:

"'New World' tells the story of Pocahontas in riveting fashion. More important, it boldly explores new cinematic territory."

...In its emotional effect and in the ways it makes its points, this motion picture is much more akin to poetry or music. Malick uses cinema in a way no one else uses it, in a way that no one else has ever used it. Through elliptical and seemingly oblique methods, he forges moments of staggering emotional power.

Ideally, it would be best to pull down a screen and show you the beginning of "The New World," rather than clumsily describe what can't be described. But let's try.

As Wagner's prelude to "Das Rheingold" plays, Malick depicts, in those first minutes, the landing of British colonists on what was soon to be known as Virginia. He intercuts from the people aboard the ships to the Indians watching from the woods, alarmed and curious. Moving almost as if in a ballet, the Indians are seen in silhouette against the blue waters, as the ships, now 50 yards away, pull ever closer. Nothing can stop it now. American history is about to begin.

What can't be conveyed but must be explained is the strong effect of this artful arrangement of images and music. In those first moments, Malick realistically depicts the colonists' arrival and creates a wistful dream of it, a dream in which we know everything that is to come. He shows us a moment of greatness, of incalculable historical importance, and also of tragedy -- for the Indians who stand there in complete innocence.

This is the beginning of everything and the end of everything, and to see it all so distinctly, presented with such a full-hearted understanding of the event in all its meaning, is almost too much to bear. There will be people who will walk into this film cold and within five minutes find themselves sobbing, without quite knowing why.

...As we all know from grammar school, Pocahontas saved Smith from being beaten to death in an Indian ritual, and what follows, in the movie, is an innocent romance. Later, her aid to the British causes her to be ostracized by her own people, and we find her suddenly wearing incongruous, bulky English clothes, looking as if her soul has been smashed. But it hasn't. She regains her spirit and is courted by the kindly John Rolfe (Christian Bale), and when they marry, they devise what has since become a time-honored way for non-Americans of different backgrounds to create future Americans: They have a child on American soil.

A later scene, of Pocahontas playing hide-and-seek with her child in a manicured English garden, completes our sense of her journey with eloquent simplicity. It suggests all the things Malick wants to express about the inspiring resiliency of Pocahontas' personality and also about the character of what was being created in the new world. A powerful concluding image shows the sky as Pocahontas once saw it. An insect zips across the corner of the screen -- that's how fast that life went by, and yet such grandeur in the living of it.
sfgate.com

I guess it would take away from the aura of high romance to really look at the tragedy of Pocahantas. Idealization of what must have been the stark reality of her 22-year life is one of those tricks of imperialist discourse: the viewer can be lulled into feeling great that some level of humanity is being ascribed to her at least. There is no 'grandeur' in choking on the blood from rotted lungs. How ironic that Pocahantas died hideously from TB. She was a great favorite among the British upper classes, and her picture appeared everywhere as an advertisement for Virginia tobacco.

Turning a story of rape and exploitation and death into a beautiful piece of cinema, a soul-stirring entertainment for the masters of the universe--it sure makes me want to sob, but I know why.


'Blonde is beautiful' mystique
Is it politically correct for us to see King Kong?" a friend joked when the latest version of the movie classic opened. A movie clip that shows Kong staring mesmerized at the fair Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts, caused me some uneasiness because it's hard not to see the subliminal racism in a story about a big black beast falling tragically in love with a pale blonde beauty.

But lured by reviews touting the special effects and the dramatic story, I went to see the movie anyway. While it certainly has racial overtones, I was more disturbed by its gender message: that fair-skinned blondeness is the essence of female beauty, so powerful an aphrodisiac that it can tame a savage beast.

King Kong is just the latest ripple in a cultural tidal wave of celebrations of a certain kind of Caucasian beauty. Pick up a newspaper or magazine, or watch the entertainment shows on television, and you're bombarded with a profusion of blondes: Paris, the Nicoles (Ritchie and Kidman), Scarlett, Charlize, Ashlee, Gwyneth, Mary-Kate and Ashley, to name a few. Even the African-American hottie of the moment, Beyonce, has golden skin and flowing blonde hair, while Halle Berry, the African-American actress most celebrated for her beauty, is fair with white features. Even in movies with predominantly black casts, the female objects of desire are consistently fairer than their male counterparts.

A step backward

"We move forward on things, and there are ways we keep stepping back," says Kathe Sandler, an African-American filmmaker whose 1992 documentary, A Question of Color, explored African-Americans' hang-ups about skin color, hair texture and facial features. Lately, she has noticed the extreme sexual objectification of women in popular music videos and the "European premium" placed on the women of color in them. "They've got to have really long hair, and I've never seen so much wig-wearing going on," Sandler says.

Jean Kilbourne, who has studied female images in advertising for 30 years in her film series Killing Us Softly and her book Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, says the emphasis on being pretty and sexy, even for young girls, is worse now, the result of companies' desire to sell products and the media working in the service of the advertisers.

The images are impossible for most females to achieve, but they sell products and make girls feel negatively about their own looks. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that the more adolescent and pre-adolescent girls read fashion magazines, the more likely they were to diet and to feel unhappy about their bodies. Researchers at the University of Michigan and Boston College found that while African-American girls ignored images of skinny white female bodies on television and elsewhere, they were concerned about their inability to match white standards of hair and skin color.

Decades after the women's rights movement expanded the view of a woman's worth beyond her physical appearance, and long after the "black is beautiful" movement asserted that African features were also attractive, we seem to be regressing.

It's politically incorrect to admit it, but to some extent we're still color struck. I think of my former colleague, a white blonde, who talked about feeling "rewarded" for her looks every time she walked into a room. I also think of Indian families who tout their daughters' fair complexions in marriage ads, of southern African women who are ruining their skin with bleaching creams, and of the little white, African-American and Asian girls, who despite their parents' assurances that they are beautiful as they are, long for long blonde tresses.

"Racial overtones"??? How about an island teeming with murderous black savages? How is it possible for the author to de-couple western notions of beauty from racism? This is why a lot of smart people caution us about feminism as it is understood by white women. The first feminists in England were after all unapologetic fans of imperialism, and this attempt to separate the issues of sexism and racism always feed into the dominant discourse.

What do we expect from Peter Jackson? I was a lifelong fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the films forced me to see Tolkein's racism and Jackson's faithful adherence to it. By the time the elephants trotted out in volume III, the inferred racial identity of every orc and goblin and lord of Darkness became clear.