The other day I watched How To Train Your Dragon 2. I’d
watched and enjoyed the first one and thought it would be a fun little
diversion for the evening.
It started out promising and fun. But sometime in the
middle, right about when the villain was introduced, I got a little uneasy. He
was your pretty stereotypical villain, nothing much new – he did his thing
through intimidation and an iron fist, he wasn’t all that smart, he couldn’t be
reasoned with. Your basic villain trope, in other words.
But as the movie continued, I got more and more
uncomfortable. The climax of the story made me cringe, even though it was
standard issue – the villain can’t be redeemed, the hero vanquishes him, etc.
By the ending monologue, I was even angry.
Have you figured it out yet?
The villain was the only dark-skinned person in the midst of
fair-skinned vikings. He was dreadlocked and scarred. And he fit, to a T, the
ugliest archetype we have in the West for the “Terrorists.”
When I went to the internet to find out if anyone else had
noticed this, I found some very interesting things. The first was that hardly
any, if any at all, of the critics, mentioned it. Not even the fact that he was
the only dark-skinned person. Crickets. They all loved the movie and its “emotional
resonance” (are you kidding me? A kids’ movie where the father DIES in the
middle of it is great because of its “emotional resonance”???).
All right. Instead I googled “How to train your dragon 2
racist,” and discovered a few fringe tumblr pages. And then I made the mistake
of looking in the comments.
According to most people, Drago Bludvist is eastern
European, and therefore he is Caucasian, and therefore the movie is not racist.
In fact, the entire discussion seemed to be centered around whether or not he
was supposed to be black. Nobody was talking about the terrorist parallel.
I can’t be the only one to see this, or be disturbed by it,
right? The rhetoric isn’t new, by any means – it is, in fact, to cop an
idea from my brilliant sister, straight from the Crusades. The “Other” is
unreasonable and terrible; nothing they do is redeemable. “They” use
intimidation and force, “We” use reason and peace-making tactics. It is only in
defense that we fight, and of course “We” will win.
The ending monologue sums up this archetype in all its
terrifying bigotry: “Those who attacked us, are relentless and crazy, but those
who stopped them, oh, even more so! We may be small in numbers, but we stand
for something bigger than anything the world can pin against us. We are the
voice of peace, and bit by bit, we will change this world.”
Do you see it? It sounds great, doesn’t it? The hero wins,
the villain is gone. We are the peacekeepers, we stand for something bigger (“City
on a hill,” anyone?). It is the Manifest Destiny rhetoric in its very essence. Imperialism is A-OK because we are the ones who stand for something.
Am I overreacting? I don’t know. I doubt the filmmakers did
this on purpose, but what’s really disturbing about it to me is how ingrained
this rhetoric is that it’s turning up so undisguised in a kids’ movie.
More than that, I found that the choice to make Drago
Bludvist whatever he was supposed to be, black, Arab, eastern-European, but in
any case very clearly darker than all the others, and portray him in the way
they did, was far too easy and made the movie seem, to me, like downright
propaganda for justifying the next Crusade.
So I have to ask not, am I overreacting, but do we really
want our kids growing up on this stuff? And does it have to be so ingrained
that hardly anybody bats an eyelash at how blatantly racist it is?
There's got to be another way. I'm convinced of it. Just because this is the way it's always be done doesn't mean it's the way it needs to be.
