I never write anything with the specific intention to offend or unnerve the reader. But when you are committed to candor, it is bound to happen occasionally. The truth is that sometimes when people’s feelings get hurt, their feelings needed to be hurt in order for them to really hear other people. This is probably one of those times.
Breaking down ‘the 5 movies that screwed up white people’s minds’ is aimed at using movies that everybody has seen and that most people love, to illuminate the mind-fuckery implanted into the subconscious of the dominant culture.
Keep in mind that many of you asked for this piece after reading “5 Movies That Screwed Up Black People’s Minds.”
But this piece was a lot harder because there are many more movies directed at general audiences (i.e. mainly white folks) to every one movie directed at Black audiences. And while the flicks deconstructed below may have tampered with Black folks too, they absolutely define mainstream white culture. Even if the movie was good, the influence was a mixed bag at best.
The Godfather
The Godfather, released March 24, 1972
This has to be the most beloved movie in the history of American cinema, so you know there’s got to be some serious cultural issues to unpack. There is a hilarious episode of Seth McFarlane’s long-running animated series The Family Guy, where the entire family is facing imminent death by a rising flood. They begin making confessions to each other since death will shield them from any consequences of their disclosures. The confessions of the wife, daughter, and son are all horrible but are immediately forgiven. Then the father pipes in with “I never cared for The Godfather.” As it turns out, that was the unforgivable sin. Immediately, his wife and kids forget about death by drowning and begin to savagely attack him for not liking the universally recognized greatest movie ever made. In response to the onslaught, the father just stares straight ahead, smugly repeating the phrase, “It insists on itself.” And he was right because it does.
But the self-indulgence of this flick is not what screwed up white people’s minds. I am sure that romanticizing their family origin stories was around long before this movie. But The Godfather was the ultimate force multiplier for that dynamic. White men of means seem compelled to work their family struggles into casual conversations, at least with Black men around. At whatever golf course clubhouse you may be sitting in on any given day, some self-satisfied, cigar-chomping, try-hard, douchebag in the group is bound to get around to his great grandfather who “came here with six cents in his pocket and couldn’t even speak English.” Of course, the unspoken message is ‘And look at how swell we are doing now! If you lazy, shiftless negroes would just work hard like we did, you wouldn’t need to ask the government to do anything for you.’
But that irritant pales in comparison to having to listen to a bunch of jerks going around repeating the asinine phrases listed below over and over again. You’ve heard them all before and, God help you, you will hear them all again:
“This is the business we’ve chosen…”
Evidently, this phrase is supposed to be an expression of toughness related to how the speaker earns his living. (I would normally have said ‘his or her living’ but I have yet to hear a woman saying this goofy mess.) The idea is that quoting this line from organized crime mastermind Hyman Roth will help people tolerate what feels like intolerable bullshit in their professional lives; like losing out on a bonus or having to work late, or show up on holidays. So, yeah, Thurston Howell the Fifth, your project manager gig is quite taxing; just like Michael Corleone trying to find out who shot up his bedroom the night of his son’s confirmation ceremony. It’s just like that. And yes, I know this particular scene is from Godfather II. Kindly leave the picking-nits to me.
“It’s not personal. It’s just business.”
If you identify as anything other than a white man, I strongly suggest that you brace yourself anytime you hear one of them say this to you. They actually believe this foolishness and it means you’re about to get screwed. However, the party responsible for your pain does not want you to retaliate. They’d still like to consider you a friend after they have thoroughly screwed you over, ruined your finances, stolen your wife and then kicked your dog on the way out.
This guy has just taken action that has cost you dearly and disrupted your livelihood, but he somehow expects to get a pass based on some make-believe man-code that says that a guy can do anything at all to you as long as he can call it business. I am calling ‘bullshit’ from the top of the highest building at the top of my lungs. And what group of people on planet earth have pushed this nonsense more than white men in America? They have justified, and continue to justify, all variety of depraved malfeasance (like poisoning drinking water) and egregious nonfeasance (like selling cars that they know explode) with this twisted philosophy.
So yeah, white guys, you’re on notice: anything that disrupts my life or livelihood in anyway is personal and I will respond accordingly. Sure, there are some Black and Brown men that have followed your lead down that morality death spiral but I’ll deal with their obsequious asses separately. I cannot think of anything more personal than how I feed myself and provide for my loved ones. If you can, I’ll give you a thousand bucks. So miss me with that ‘business overrides everything’ ethos. And you should miss it, too. It makes you a pariah amongst other members of the human family unnecessarily.
“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
This advice is flawed. But judging by the pervasive conniving in American culture, there are a lot of people who follow it, consciously or unconsciously. And sadly enough, this is the only Godfather take-away that seems to have been adopted primarily by white women rather than men. But I suppose that makes perfect sense when you look at all the White women cheering for Donald Trump to stay in power and grab more pussy.
I confess that I know white men much better than I do White women, but this one is still an easy call. Inside this little nugget of Don Corleone strategery is the seed of what we now know as ‘frenemies.’ Frenemies hang around each other socially, pretend to like each other, and secretly scheme and connive to undermine each other all the while. Of course, there are many sneaky, weak, weaselly-ass men who do this as well, but it seems like White women are given a mandatory master-class seminar on how to be a ‘frenemy’ when they turn 13 years old. Men do not do this nearly as often or nearly as well. But I call bullshit on the whole enterprise. White folks, take it from a brother who would really like to see you do better and be better on a global scale: if you see somebody as your enemy, just stay the hell away from them and leave them the hell alone. I know a lot of Black folks in America and Third World folk across the globe would appreciate it.
In closing the book on how The Godfather screwed up the American mind in general and white folks’ minds in particular, we need only acknowledge that this movie gave birth to the modern era of gangster movies that take themselves quite seriously. And are treated as such by an adoring public and industry insiders ever since. Celebrating criminality is just a bad idea.
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The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments, released October 5, 1956
We are all well aware that Cecil B. DeMille first did this movie in 1923. But that first version was not in color. And my God, is color ever the biggest reason why this movie permanently dumbed down so many white folks in America. This movie is where Hollywood finally said ‘ Fuck it. we are rewriting history and presenting it in Technicolor and Surround Sound. We dare any of you to stop us or even say anything about it. The Bible is the truth, and everybody who mattered in the Bible is white.” So let it be written, so let it be done.
For those who are still non-believers in the gospel according to David Saint Vincent, consider this: If anyone were teaching a course on the accurate history of The Ten Commandments it would almost certainly be labeled as Critical Race Theory and prohibited. ‘Moses was Black?! That’s CRT!’ Right wing nut jobs across America would ban and burn the books in the town square. They’d burn the professor teaching it too if they could get away with it. Because they just couldn’t handle the image of Michael B. Jordan rocking the Moses beard and robe when they grew up seeing Charleton Heston wearing it.
It would be extremely unfair to hang ALL of the racial injustice and insanity infecting the modern world on Western Christianity as presented in this one movie. But, if you are some average white kid and you are watching this dramatic, colorful, exciting, epic film, every Easter for 10 or 15 years, it is going to impact you. In your mind, this movie tells the story of how the religion and culture that defines everything you love came to be; and everybody is white. Could you even conceive of the reality that absolutely NONE of the characters depicted in the drama were really white, and they all were actually Black? Might you get upset or feel threatened by the mere offering of evidence that contradicts what you have come to believe, as brought to you by Paramount Pictures?
All of you historians and genealogists out there, take a breath. Everybody with any exposure at all knows that ‘white’ and ‘Black’ are both American inventions. The designations have no scientific basis but they dictate social identity regardless. According to the ‘one drop rule’ that white folks conjured up to keep Black folks down, there wasn’t a single white person within a thousand miles of the events depicted in that movie. Of course a parade of Ethiopians showed up for five minutes to bend the knee to their white skinned, blue eyed, Egyptian master.
I have not forgotten that Esther Brown made a brief appearance as the flirty, sex-kitten, Ethiopian Princess alongside a strong, silent, and stoic Woody Strode, but she was the only one with a speaking part. And she only spoke to announce to the Pharaoh, his Princess, and the entire Egyptian royal court, that Moses could taste that brown sugar anytime he wanted it. Little boys all over America watching that scene had to feel like they were climbing the rope in gym class.
But the sister was just an exotic distraction, not a real character central to the events unfolding. And that, tragically, is still the mindset of far more White folks than any of us care to admit. And that, my friends, is far worse than false. That is very fucked up.
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Wall Street
Wall Street, released December 11, 1987
This movie is set in the 1980s in the heart of New York City and has only one Black character. He is the elevator operator. Blink and you’ll miss him. And it makes all the sense in the world. Wall Street is about those who control markets and wield power in America’s investment finance and commodities trading industries, so it made sense that Black people did not exist. This was the Reagan 80s, and white folks were through even pretending to give a fuck about anything they could not drive, snort, screw, or spend. And they were way past giving a damn about anybody that wasn’t them, or looked like them. More on that in the next section. The subtext of everything coming from the white and powerful was ‘Look, y’all got the Cosby Show, Michael Jackson, and this new guy Michael Jordan. So be happy with that, and get the hell on. The rest of this stuff is ours.’
This is the movie that seared the gross phrase into the minds of every self-important, corporatist, capitalist douchebag in America, “Greed is Good.” It is the ultimate ‘ends justify the means’ argument which always, always, always leads to zero-sum game scenarios where winners don’t just take all. Winners ruin lives, and sometimes losers die.
Greed led Ford Motor Company to sell exploding cars to the American public for years. Greed led the Sackler family to relentlessly pursue the goal of getting the entire country hooked on opioids. Greed led Enron and other companies to fuck over their employees’ pensions while executives pocketed millions. Greed led to private prisons and the entire street drug ecosystem that keeps them full. Greed led to the climate crisis being actively accelerated and denied by oil corporations. Greed led White folks to take this land by force from one group of people and take the labor of another group of people to cultivate it for profit. Greed is leading to the crib death of a democracy barely out of its infancy. And that is where this crazy orgy of greed has led the country.
Wall Street glamorized and romanticized the ruthless capitalist to the point that even when Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gecko went to the can in the end, he was still the star of the show. So much so that when they did a sequel 33 years later, the story revolves around Gecko again. But there is one change: the sole Black character is not an elevator operator. He is a butler.
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Death Wish
Death Wish, released July 24, 1974
This one will not take long. The most deadly and dangerous creature in America is a frightened and angry white man with a gun. And thanks largely to the Death Wish movie franchise, that figure has become mythologized into a hero that far too many white men see in themselves. Death Wish is by no means the only driver of this uniquely American ethos, but there is ample anecdotal evidence that it turbocharged it. Be mindful that for the first time, a non-law-enforcement gun packing avenger became a monster box-office success.
That NRA talking point “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” took root in the mainstream American psyche right here. The average gun-loving White man does not owe that affection to John Wayne nearly as much as he owes it to Charles Bronson.
The key here is that John Wayne played a cowboy, and cowboys always trigger memories of innocent childhood play in the backyard. Charles Bronson played a fake tough guy vigilante, and tough-guy vigilantes trigger imaginary encounters with real people perceived as a threat in the here and now. That is a huge and dangerous difference.
Thanks to Charles Bronson and the Death Wish movie franchise, the world knows that a pissed-off white man with a gun is the almighty force and authority on the streets. Badge or no badge. We can thank Death Wish for aiding and abetting all of the George Zimmermans and Bernard Goetzs of the world, figuratively if not literally. Both of these vigilante assholes shot and killed young Black men, both admitted that they did it, and they both walked free. And there are too many of these cases to treat this as an aberration.
Gun ownership exploded in the years immediately following the Death Wish revenge fantasy tale of a man whose wife and daughter was victimized by hoodlums in a home-invasion robbery. Notice was served to all street punks across America: you will be dealt with real quick-like if a five-foot-nothing, one-hundred and nothing White dude shows up with a hand cannon and a bad attitude. But there may be some hope on the horizon. The four Bronson wannabe assholes that shot and killed Ahmad Arbury will spend the rest of their days rotting in a maximum-security Georgia state prison.
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Roots
Roots, aired originally from January 23 to January 30, 1977
Roots remains the most viewed television mini-series in American history. I know it is not technically a movie, but it absolutely has to bat clean-up in any line-up of productions responsible for screwing up white people’s minds. And the reason is painfully simple: Roots made the average white person feel bad about the racial history of his beloved country. Probably for the very first time. His sainted nation, as he had learned about it in school, was not nearly as saintly as he thought it was. He saw that there were countless evil and terrifying acts at the roots of the American family tree.
We take it for granted now, but the few movies that hit theaters earlier in the 70s that dealt with the horrors of slavery did not draw significant audiences. Those that got any play at all were highly sexualized and sensationalized in a way that distracted from the history being depicted. It is impossible to conduct a serious examination of America’s uniquely barbaric brand of slavery with Pam Grier’s bodacious bare bosom staring you in the face for two hours.
Roots gave America none of that action. For eight nights in a row, for sixteen hours, America watched as enslaved girls screamed and cried when their enslavers raped them. Enslaved men bled and wailed while being lashed viciously. Enslaved mothers and fathers begged in panicked horror as their beloved children were being sold to another enslaver. Black families were terrorized by the night attacks of the ku klux klan. (I'm not capitalizing that name.) The series was brutal and harrowing. Incredibly well produced and executed, but every bit as painful a watch as it was intended to be.
So how do you process all of this coming through your television screen if you are an average white family? What in the hell do you do with this invasion of your subconscious, this disturbance of your peace? If you are a good person, you feel bad about what you see but you struggle to figure out what that means in your own life. For many good people, it planted a seed of guilt that turned out to be fairly useless beyond distinguishing them from the cretins that felt nothing at all. Planting purpose would have been better, but that would have been a different series. That was for the good people. But for the assholes who tuned in, you learned quickly to lie, deny, justify and perhaps even derive some perverse joy in what you had seen.
But you know what a lot of the good White folks and the assholes agreed on? America was in a downtime and desperately needed to bounce back and love itself again. So how do you do that? You elect a presidential candidate who makes you feel good about yourself and your country. You elect a presidential candidate who promises to ‘make America great again.’ You elect a presidential candidate who made his living pretending to be a cowboy riding a horse on screen because that is what made you feel good.
This is where you get to call me crazy. Yes, I am assigning significant blame for the rise of Ronald Reagan and the lasting perception of Jimmy Carter as a failed president on the fact that three days after Carter took office, America started watching Roots. And when America was confronted with the ugly truths in Roots, the culture started to unravel. It was not his fault and he was powerless to stop it. But there was a seismic shift in the national mood and national conversation for the worse and somebody had to pay for it.
Yes, I know OPEC and the oil crisis was bad. Yes, I know that inflation was bad. Yes, the Iran Hostage crisis was bad. Yes, boycotting the Olympics was bad. And the fact that the U.S. military did not kill a single foreign soldier while Carter was Commander In Chief was really bad. But in the end, it was Roots that did him in before he even got started. Politics is 99% about feelings and 1% about policy, and America just felt bad about itself after Roots. And she never really got over it. Conservatism lives and breathes on making white Americans feel the opposite of what any decent person would feel watching that series. So it was in 1980 when the ‘Reagan Revolution’ began, and so it is to this very day.
So there you have it: the five movies that screwed up white people’s minds. Of course, that is just my list. Attacking organized crime, organized religion, predatory capitalism, gun lust, and conservatism were easy calls for me to make. I have no doubt that each of you could come up with an entirely separate list that could be equally compelling. And I encourage you to do so. Because sometimes profound truths about our country and culture are hiding in plain sight. You may be amazed at what you will uncover if you look at everything with fresh eyes and renewed purpose.