Word: hollywoodism
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...trope is the suffocating bathing of allegory many of these characters receive. The most recent example of this problematic trend is Dreamworks’ Shark Tale, which has a prominent character so metaphorically drenched in sub-meaning that it pinpoints with accidental exactness what is wrong with the contemporary Hollywood political praxis...
...What Shark Tale ultimately represents, and what makes it so eminently aggravating, is Hollywood’s static view of homosexuality as something that must be hidden from the public. In a political atmosphere in which queers are increasingly gaining agency and winning countless victories in the marriage debate, Hollywood thinks itself sneaky and subversive by throwing a character into a kiddie movie that could be read as (hold your breath!) gay. Memo to Dreamworks: In 2004, your audience gets...
...deeper problem is that Hollywood can’t escape the ages-old right-wing dictum that homosexuality is a perversion. It’s not that the predominantly liberal denizens of the world’s dominating film industry are homophobic. The problem is that by hiding representations of queers, be them human or shark, under a (pathetically transparent) veil of allegory reinforces queer-dom in culture as something that is adult, pornographic and too controversial to address directly. The question is, why can’t Lenny just be gay? Shark Tale’s makers already have...
...answer is, naturally, sex. Hollywood has a long, troublesome history of representing homosexuality as an all-encompassing identity. If you’re a gay character in a television show or a mainstream film, the only thing you’re allowed to discuss on screen in direct relation to your identity is the fact that you have a penchant for naughtiness with those of your own gender. In other words, Hollywood saps queers of any notion of a fluidity of identity—they must be gay every single second. Every motivation or action by a queer character must...
Housewives is already a critics' darling for its mordant humor and terrific cast. But it trades on a dated image of ticky-tacky suburbia that Hollywood has been spoofing for decades. (One character makes a batch of ambrosia, the marshmallow-studded salad that is as au courant in today's upscale 'burbs as a beehive hairdo.) And there's something smug and icky about a bunch of TV professionals essentially implying that if their female suburban viewers only realized how empty their Susie Homemaker existences were, they would blow their brains...