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I don't miss the "Black guy always dies" trope in movies (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was watching Jurassic Park 3 today and I was reminded that all 3 of those movies had the black guy die. Horribly. It can only happen so many times before you start to think something's up. It happened all over, action films, horror, thrillers. The worst is when the black guy goes to get himself killed and then none of the other characters even comments on it after he disappears.

The word "representation" gets a lot of flack, but when I was growing up it was really demoralizing to watch film after film where the black dude was either a clown or was horribly killed a few minutes into the movie. Unless it was a hood movie anyway, but there's an obvious problem there.

Anyway, this isn't one of my more thoughtful rants, but just something I actually do like about modern film.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I really like Night of the Living Dead for avoiding this trope.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

And it us heartbreaking at the end where he gets mistaken for a zombie and is shot... or maybe they knew he wasn't and did it anyway.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You mean "Dawn of the Dead" (1978), cuz the Black-American protagonist dies (at the end of the film you mentioned),

but "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) avoids that horrid trope

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My reading of the trope isn't about the character dying per se, but that they're thrown away for sake of the plot or other characters' development. They're flat and disposable.

Whereas in Night, he outlives the other characters, is central to the plot and thesis of the movie, and his death at the end is meaningful in and of itself (both to the story at face value and symbolic interpretations of the film). But I really like Dawn too.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Huh, ogey