Frantz Fanon, born on this day in 1925, was a West Indian Pan-Africanist philosopher and Algerian revolutionary most known for his text The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon was born to an affluent family on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony which is still under French control today. As a teenager, he was taught by communist anti-colonial thinker Aimé Césaire (1913 - 2008).
Fanon was exposed to much European racism during World War II. After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, a Nazi government was set up in Martinique by French collaborators, whom he describedas taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists".
Fighting for the Allied forces, Fanon also observed European women liberated by black soldiers preferring to dance with fascist Italian prisoners rather than fraternize with their liberators.
While completing a residency in psychiatry in France completing, Fanon wrote and published his first book, "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952), an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon black people.
Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale, a nationalist Algerian party. Working at a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon became responsible for treating the psychological distress of the French troops who carried out torture to suppress anti-colonial resistance, as well as their Algerian victims.
While organizing for Algerian independence in Ghana, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia that would ultimately kill him. He spent the last year of his life writing his most famous work, "The Wretched of the Earth" (French: Les Damnés de la Terre). The text provides a psychiatric analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization and examines the possibilities of anti-colonial liberation
Following a trip to the Soviet Union to treat his leukemia, Fanon came to the U.S. in 1961 for further treatment in a visit arranged by the CIA. Fanon died in Bethesda, Maryland on December 6th, 1961 under the name of "Ibrahim Fanon", a Libyan nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital after being wounded during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.
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I'd argue the main character was only "portrayed as sympathetic" because they're the main character. I didn't see him as right nor correct, after 10-15 mins in the film I knew he wasn't someone to root for. Neither was the liberal mayor of course. But what makes these characters work is they're complex, minimally correct, and consumed by their individualized reality, which is the average American unfortunately.spoiler
So there can be and are protagonists in films that are portrayed as insufferable, he is not one that evokes that emotion. You can feel detached from him, sure, but he isn't someone you dislike. He is much more sympathetic than any of the "woke" characters, which is very frustrating to me. The portrayal of them is MUCH more ham fisted than any of the chud characters, even when the pigs are framing Michael and Cross assassinated the Mayor and his son, it felt completely emotionless. Throughout the film I felt much more disdain for all of the "woke" characters than I did a single one of the chuds, their insufferability was much more obvious and fleshed out. This is what frustrates me about it all. Perhaps frustrating me was Asters aim (triggered lib!), and I'm not media literate enough to see it for its brilliance but it was just bad IMO. I feel like it COULD have been very good but it was all so shallow for a 2.5 hour long movie. He could have done SO MUCH MORE in that time.Spoiler
I think that's fair criticism, he could have gone harder on chuds but that doesn't mean he should go easy on the performative liberals of 2020. The plot was so lost in 2020 because people were just regurgitating things from their internet feed. That's why nothing material was gained, remember the peaceful protest discourse or the kneeling? And the chuds didn't really get portrayed well either. The movie didn't say mask bad-Joe got covid- or BLM bad. There wasn't direct stance on anything because it's not that movie. I think it's about technology, specifically scrolling, is manipulating us while some random mega corporation pushes forward their agenda in the backgroundspoiler
Yeah, I agree that he should have been critical of performative libs for sure, but there was no other layer or complexity to that, everything just felt very surface level to me. And while he didnt explicitly say "mask bad" or "BLM bad", there were the scenes where the grocery store employee was basically assaulting the poor old man who wouldnt wear his mask because he had asthma or whatever, and then the Antifa super soldiers using a black man as literal bait in order to try to murder Cross. It was the build up of many of these very brief interactions that made me roll my eyes. When I first recognized how frustrated I was with the film I was like "Okay, this is probably a reaction that was meant to be elicited, itll probably get better and the story will develop more" but that just never happened for me. Someone in their Letterboxd review just called it "Edgington" and that hit for me lolI just wish that everything was developed more. I feel like I missed the significance of technological influence because I feel like it's just a given that we all understand how insidious it is. But when you phrase it that way it couldve been very intentional that it was barely touched on at all.
In any case it must be good because I've been thinking about it a lot and trying to figure out if the film just went went totally over my head