Most recent public comments by Jessica DiCristoforo https://nowcomment.com/users/17151 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=410337 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=410337 I’ve never seen the movie Gran Torino, and after reading this article if I ever do it will be with a very skeptical eye. It bothers me that so much (and by so much I mean almost all) mainstream media and film is white-washed to the point where any culture that is not like America is seen as inferior and barbaric. Why must we always cast the white man as the savior? Why does changing a different culture to mimic America’s make that culture better? Bee Vang, one of the Hmong actors in the film puts it best when he explains that Hollywood told him to “mak[e] credible a boy adrift, waiting for a white savior to show him the ways of manhood.” (294) This completely takes away the voice of the Hmong people. In a later part of the article media activist-scholar Louisa Schein speaks of a documentary about Hmong immigrants she created. These subjects in the film were not “stereotypical welfare-dependent, non-English-speaking new arrivals daunted by U.S. residence and burdening the American economy” which caused a lot of the scholars viewing it to question why they chose to showcase successful immigrants. The scholars said the film did not show the Hmong’s struggle to acclimate into American life, and wondered if this was an effective immigrant tale. Schein was floored. She went on to say that had the documentary portrayed the Hmong as “maladjusted” (300) and “destitute” (300), then the Hmong would be “viewed through the hostile filter of American anti-immigrant racism” (300). White America has created this idea that immigrants need to assimilate into American culture in order to be successful here. American has been referred to as a melting pot of a plethora of countries and nationalities. In many cases new immigrants need to melt away any sense of a past cultural identity in order to fit in and assimilate into this “land of the free”. In order for the voices of these immigrants to be heard, and for their stories to effectively be told, we need to be okay with white men not always being cast as the savior. Sat, 14 Nov 2015 15:30:47 -0500 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=407179 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=407179 I believe the main point Viet Thanh Nguyen wants us to take away from his essay is “war stories disturb even more when they are not about soldiers”(145). Oftentimes in American culture, war is glorified into star-spangled blind patriotism with very little insight into how it affects the citizens of the countries we invade. Americans have never experienced life as a war torn country—they are always a movie screen, a newscast, a book away from the action. They do not live in a war torn country, and because of this there is a disconnect and inability to understand the true effects of war on the infrastructure of a culture and country. He argues that Americans realizing that a lot of immigrants in America now living the American dream are the product of “millions” of deaths of people from their homeland is not a good war story to tell because it is coated in the reality of war instead of the movie version of war. Nguyen is attempting to show us that we need to add the human element back into war and realize the impacts of what we’re fighting for instead of glorifying it and coating it with a Hollywood glean. Tue, 10 Nov 2015 06:54:58 -0500