Watching a good movie allows me to experience the lives of different people first-hand, I can think differently, I can feel the lives of different genders, different races and different classes.
Wen 丨Lsoo
Editor 丨 Zhang Aiqing
Written and directed by Jordan Peele, Escape from Breaking Bad has garnered great attention and praise for its profound allusions to race relations in the United States.
"Escape from Breaking Bad" poster
In this article, I want to focus on the topic of "white fragility" and the bold challenges that movies like Breaking Bad have challenged.
The term "white fragility" is derived from a 2011 academic paper by Robin Di Angelo that exposes the reality that white Americans often deliberately create a living environment that avoids racial pressures.
Original manuscript of Robin Di Angelo's paper
This environment provided great comfort to them, but it also reduced their tolerance for racial pressures, leading to what is now known as "white fragility."
The footnotes here add nuances due to social class, namely that working-class whites are not as inedible as the rich people living in the suburbs, but the general direction of society is still sheltering and segregating whites as a group in various ways, one of which is film.
A recent work that can illustrate the relationship between white fragility and cinema is the documentary I Am Not Your by James Baldwin.
I'm Not Your poster
Like Breaking Bad, I'm Not Your isn't just about the most common forms of racial discrimination, it focuses on how high-class whites make people of color angry.
Let them sink to the "bottom," Jordan Peel explains. The so-called "valley bottom" means that we are marginalized, and no matter how we scream and struggle, we will be completely silenced.
Stills from Breaking Bad
Unlike the usual explicit racism in movies, "white fragility" is a potential problem, because many films often include black actors and reflect racial issues, but they are often distorted and whitewashed to alleviate the racial pressure that white people may feel.
Prison Break
For example, the de-gendering of black people and the emphasis on how white protagonists have a profound impetus to the environment of racial issues, and the main means is to use the scene of reconciliation between the two sides to show the audience that white people really have no shame, "Prison Escape" is a classic example, for which James Baldwin writes:
When Sidney jumped off the train, the white people's hanging hearts let go, but when the black people who were watching saw this scene, they shouted, "Come back to the train, you fool!" The black man jumped off the train to reassure the whites, to reassure them that he did not hate them, and that although they had made mistakes, they were understandable, but they were not so kind to the whites in Breaking Bad.
Even when the end of the film hints at a moment of possible reconciliation, Jordan Peel is still cold to the end, and I think that in terms of his contemptuous attitude toward "white fragility", he actually conveys an important message, that is, the true feelings in the hearts of black Americans who have not been whitewashed at all, and his argument gives a deeper understanding of the racial issue, even if this view is temporarily difficult for the secular to accept.
The film contains real-world influences that help us better understand each other both in front of and behind the scenes, and I conclude with the words of the famous film critic Roger Ebert.
Roger Ebert
Watching a good movie allows me to personally experience the lives of different people, I can think differently, I can feel the lives of different genders, different races and different classes, I can travel through time and space, have different beliefs, it makes me more free, makes my heart broader, allows me to integrate into the big family of all human beings on the earth, it allows me to establish contact with others, no longer limited to myself, living a life that repeats day after day, great film works enrich our spiritual world, give us enlightenment, It also makes us better people.
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