ILX, coach me up: the "White Straight Guy Who Sucks" Narrative and corresponding lack of "... Who Sucks" in anything other than indie snooze

Bizarrely, it took The Good Dinosaur for this incredibly dim 40-watt substitute CFL bulb to go off over my head.
There are countless films/books/whatever, many of them canon (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, for a remarkably bloodless example) where a white straight guy who sucks at everything redeems himself by passing a bill, or killing a couple or a dozen Nazis, or some really mean cattle rustlers, or saving Middle Earth (this happened at least 1.5 times), or killing a White Walker, or being Spider-Man.

There are some attempts to redress the White Straight Guy as Hero All The Time trope - e.g. back to the 80s, since Eddie Murphy kind of paved the way for Will Smith - but the thing I'm trying to get my head around is, where are the Brown / LGBT / Girl Who Sucks stories? Can someone at least point me to the literature on this because I feel REALLY dumb for just figuring this out on my own by accident thanks to a cartoon dinosaur movie.

I think one of the most powerful myths you can put out there is the one about a person who seems to fail at just about everything but succeeds on the only day it matters, or at least that matters for the purposes of a given 3-act structure, and I'm kinda really fucking annoyed that my daughter will never have a Rudy or a Two Towers of her own.

I'm drawing a blank. Non-white guys are pigeonholed into overcoming cultural barriers (instead of just sucking) when they get to be a protagonist at all.

Maybe a movie about a shitty mom who redeems herself with sacrifice?

Huhmmmm. This is super interesting. Am I right that you're not looking for stories where the specific thing they have to overcome is the fact of their oppressed status in a normatively Straight White Guy culture (or family/friends who cleave to the Old Ways)? (e.g. Mulan, Bend It Like Beckham, Whale Rider, etc.) Or things where a straight white woman, made sympathetically bad-at-things at the start, finds success with the help/tutelage of a man (The Terminator, probably a fair number of rom-coms)? Like specifically the klutzy fuckup protagonist who makes good when it counts, teaching the viewer that even if they feel like a fuckup they can still be good? Hrm. I feel like I must be overlooking tons of really obvious examples but maybe it is such a desert if you're a parent trying to pick good stuff.

Or it's that an otherwise-useless LGBTQ protagonist wins by figuring out who they are, I totally get why that's sufficiently heroic to be the culmination of an arc, but am completely ignorant, so again, somebody help me here - is "But I'm A Cheerleader" in this category?

Radio? Maybe thats just a "magic negro" thing (i've never seen it).

Gotta be some eddie murphy films that fit the bill here.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane might be a good start but it's fairly clear she doesn't totally suck at life.

I'm thinking more like [name any hobbit] or [name 50% of the dudes in any Harry Potter] or Rudy, as above, or Logan Lerman's character in Fur, or his prototype played by Jeremy Davies in Saving PRivate Ryan - just useless guys, like amazingly bad at stuff, but they live through it all and somehow are celebrated because THEY WERE THERE and for about five minutes when it REALLY COUNTED they didn't COMPLETELY suck. Everybody else around them had a horrible time but y'know.

oh god horrible typo - Fury, not "Fur"

but the thing I'm trying to get my head around is, where are the Brown / LGBT / Girl Who Sucks stories?

Citizen Ruth?

maybe the will smith movie Hancock? idk.

could this be people who aren't necessarily bad at something but maybe entrenched in a mediocre cushy existence but step up when called upon? in that case maybe hotel rwanda counts? again idk.

also of note re: filmic impetus of this whole train of thought - neither of the lead voice actors, the dinosaur nor the cave boy, are white. Thump.

Private Benjamin is literally the only movie springing to my mind.

I only saw the first 60% or so of "Spy" on the plane but it seemed to put Melissa McCarthy in this exact role.

Mr Mom

Spy is disqualified because the movie repeatedly makes the point that Melissa McCarthy's character is actually a fucking badass and I'm pretty sure they just put her in the basement because she's not traditionally hot. It's the worst part of the movie imho.

Run, Fat Boy, Run

One of my main complaints about Ep 7 was that I felt like they made Rey "too awesome," as though they felt they had to compensate for her being female. Luke really did not kick anywhere near as much ass in ep 4.

Yes! Exactly!

Perhaps Finn is a decent counterpoint, though. He indeed totally sucks.

C3PO is probably the Hobbit of Star Wars.

he's more like Will from Inbetweeners

duh, Carrie. total loser until the end when she saves the day.

peggy in mad men kinda sucks but she steps it up that one day with the cosmetics meeting and breaks the glass ceiling

not movies, but all haruki murakami novels feature a sort of milquetoast asian protagonist but they usually do what they need to do in the third act to resolve whatever weird stuff is going on with them

it sucks i can't think of others. the unlikely hero trope is great -- everyone should get a chance to relate to it.

Bilbo and Frodo were neither white nor straight fyi

troop beverly hills

clueless

legally blonde

the babadook

hedwig & the angry inch

pitch perfect

try watching something with a female protagonist

inside out

the dark crystal

oops i meant labyrinth

baby mama

every episode of broad city maybe

lady dynamite

some like it hot

the descent

jupiter ascending (jk she ends up scrubbing toilets voluntarily)

how high (technically)

dear white people (lionel higgins' subplot)

steven universe

Various Whoopi Goldberg roles?

Abbott, while most of those examples are good women-lead movies, I don't think they're what Tombot is looking after... There's a stereotypical movie narrative where the white dude starts out as ineffectual or a loser, but manages to overcome this at the crucial moment, when they're needed the most. The protagonists in, say, Clueless, Labyrinth, or Inside Out are not losers; they're resourceful and even successful, but they also have a crucial flaw that causes the crisis/conflict of the movie, and which they have to overcome to solve the crisis, which is a bit different from the "loser steps up to save the day". Out of your examples (that I've seen), I think only Legally Blonde kinda fits into the loser pattern.

And IMO Tombot is right that in mainstream Western fiction this narrative is most of the time used with white straight guys, because with other groups fiction makers tend to either fall for the tired old negative stereotypes (the non-white/non-straight/non-guy is ineffectual throughout the story and/or has only a supporting role), or for positive stereotypes that can also be problematic (people who are not white straight guys are portrayed as more perfect than they realistically should be, because the writer doesn't want anyone to think he subscribes to those old negative stereotypes).

I think one of the main reasons the first Harold & Kumar movie and Bridesmaids felt so refreshing and became so popular was because they put non-whites/non-guys into those loser roles, and that resonated with a lot of people (because obviously not only straight white guys can relate to these types). Which means there is a mainstream audience for this kind of non-stereotypical characterization, but the examples still remain rare, and seem to be mostly found in comedies.

http://www.womenyoushouldknow.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/MANSPLAIN-Magazine-e1432226049949.jpg

Yeah, I realized that right after I'd hit the "Submit post" button. I'm sorry about it, Abbott.

It depends on how the person sucks and how they stop sucking.

The 'person who seems average-at-best but turns out to be the chosen one/Messiah/DEM' thing should just die immediately regardless of what kind of person is fulfilling the role.

The 'person who is unjustly disadvantaged but demonstrably smart enough to eventually win' trope still has great value particularly if not focussed on SWMs.

Abbott, in which of those movies does the female protagonist actually pretty much suck and then continue to basically be unremarkable except for the one defining moment in the 3rd act?

Appropriate behaviour

Hah Places In The Heart is totally a version of this.

Miss Firecracker is one of my favorite movies about a loser who doesn't win at the end. but who ends up feeling okay anyway. HollyHunter4ever

Re: Adventures in Babysitting: I only remember the bit where she "sings" the "blues" assisted by appropriately sympathetic black musicians, to appropriately wild acclaim. Which totally happens all the time, in the clubs. You know, those blues clubs that I totally go to. All the time.

xp Or Woody Allen. And then he was able to create again!

this is not exactly the same thing, but I realized a couple of years ago that the movie Adventures in Babysitting is a huge apologia for Reaganite politics. There are a bunch of different ways this manifests itself (including "scary" black people on the El and the fact that Elizabeth Shue=good guy because she's a virgin), but the scene that most fully drives it home is when the Elizabeth Shue character is on the phone with her friend, whose rescue is the whole impetus of the film. The friend is at a bus station which is portrayed as the deepest level of hell. The friend has commandeered a phone booth which is usually occupied by a homeless man. While friend is on the phone with ES, homeless man returns and knocks on the door of the phone booth, imploring, "that's my home!" ES's friend, with whom we're meant to sympathize, kicks the homeless man's personal effects out of the booth (I remember slippers) and shouts, "you just moved!" I used to love this movie, but it is some chilling shit to rewatch.
― horsehoe (horseshoe), Sunday, February 12, 2006 4:42 AM (10 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol "chilling" i was such a drama queen in 2006

― horseshoe, Wednesday, July 13, 2016 9:35 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha amazing. I like your close reading, but I also think this was just kind of an 80s movie trope about NYC.

er, about cities, rather. I think it was Chicago.

it was chicago. you're probably right that it was all of those movies, but it feels particularly brazen in Adventures in Babysitting. particularly cold in its calculations about whose safety and well-being viewers are supposed to care about? i don't know. this is really not what this thread's about. good to discover i have had no new thoughts in 10 years.

"Fish out of water" is a hallowed comedy trope. In 80s movies it (at least sometimes) cut both ways, with the uptight whiteys being redemptively loosened by their surprise interactions with more-diverse influences. Cf. Beverly Hills Cop etc.

if i were going to write a book of cultural criticism about the 80s and reagan's cultural legacy and white flight and representations of blackness and the city, i would devote at least half a chapter to adventures in babysitting

i'd read it

Yeah. Maybe the whole trope is sort of conservative -- barbarians (homeless/"crazy people"/knife-wielding thugs) breaching the gates of the city and such.

i guess i should watch AiB!

i thought he was just a greenhorn who didn't know how to play the game.

This is certainly the contemporary inside-politics def of "loser" -- even a non-neophyte like Bill deBlasio gets tarred with a version of it.

Dr. Morbs, I wish you would! I think it's sort of valuable in its crystal-clear articulation of a really fucked-up ideology. like hitchcock films are for laura mulvey's feminist criticism.

(i understand that hitchock films are better than adventures in babysitting.)

However no Hitchcock film included a cameo from Albert Collins, so therefore your argument is invalid.

prob not Topaz

omg that scene! so cringey. maybe another half-chapter about white people singing the blues in 80s movies. or maybe that's the same half-chapter.

yeah you could definitely get a lot of mileage out of "soul" in 80s movies

"Soul Man" is a chapter in itself.

weird science has a scene like that too
why am i still following this thread

there's one "good" black dude in the scene with the knife-wielding black people on the El. if i remember correctly, he sacrifices his own personal safety to save Shue and the kids she's babysitting.

"Blues Brothers" obv

i promise i will stop posting about this soon, but there's a kind of bipolar philo/phobic interaction with blackness and black culture even within AiB. (i've actually never seen Blues Brothers; maybe its politics are different)

i mean i guess it's philo toward black culture and phobic towards actual black people unless they value white lives over their own.

that makes it seem a lot older than the 80s...

ugh, i'd forgotten all that stuff about Adventures in Babysitting - but horseshoe otm, it is all cringe-inducing.

I feel like this could be its own thread but I don't know exactly how to define the parameters

Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead seems like an (I think?) less problematic film that fits this thread's premise. She is basically the equivalent of the SWD slacker loser who "finds inner strength" when thrust into a situation.

Even White Suburbanites Sing The Blues: Reaganite audience-identification in the "Adventures In Babysitting" narrative and corresponding lack of "a thread about this" in anything other than probably some old threads we can't find now

and racism

lol

i think Aykroyd is on record that he would've liked more than 30 seconds of John Lee Hooker in TBB, but the studio had other ideas (tho i'm sure John Landis wd've been fine with a 4-hour movie). Still that was undoubtedly a gateway for many teens to those artists, an argument could be made.

Swanky Modes 4evs

i will start a thread bc i am responsible for the thread derail. sorry, everyone!

hey here's a good thread connection:

•ILX, coach me up: the "White Straight Guy Who Sucks" Narrative and corresponding lack of "... Who Sucks" in anything other than indie snooze [Started by El Tomboto in July 2016, last updated 1 minute ago by horseshoe on I Love Everything] 142 new answers
•Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy = new Ghostbusters [Started by Ned Raggett in January 2015, last updated 2 minutes ago by j.o. seasoning (how's life) on I Love Everything] 149 new answers

Well if nothing else this thread has given me a lot to chew on in terms of how I unconsciously expect my protagonists to behave and yeah, what they look like.

For one thing I'm now pretty sure I have a soft bigotry of low expectations thing with female characters vis-a-vis resourcefulness (and perhaps women IRL, ugh, OK better to be self-aware). ME Winstead assembling a makeshift hazmat suit MacGyver-style in 10 Cloverfield Lane, and later a molotov cocktail = wow she's a badass, therefore not an example of this trope, but on further examination, isn't that the trope?!? My brain

For another (to ME - this is my attempted exploration of my own bias and not a projection of how things are inside any other head(s)) anywhere outside of fantasy settings (Star Wars counts btw) non-StrWhiDude protagonists are pretty much always going to up against an additional level of adversity above and beyond what a StrWhiDude would be dealing with, so just by virtue of *being* the protagonist in a world where StrWhiDudes are "the norm" they can't really be schmuckatellis in the same way that a hapless StrWhiDude is. I feel like I could really use a whiteboard here to help me nail it down a little more precisely. Put another way - a hapless female or minority hero in a "real world" setting is automatically not sucking as much as a hapless StrWhiDude hero, because in order for the latter to be hapless and sucking in the first place, they have to be sucking pretty hard given that they live in the "real world" where they have maximum default privilege etc.

Finn in Ep 8 is quickly becoming illustrative of how a black character can totally fit this poorly-defined trope I've made up, and I think the fact that he is from far-away long-ago galaxy is the reason why I don't saddle him with my "oh he's also up against racial prejudice therefore doesn't actually suck" bullshit

Most of the hobbits, though, still pretty much guys who suck

Sam is/was a badass though

He took down that spider thing HARDCORE.

non-StrWhiDude protagonists are pretty much always going to up against an additional level of adversity above and beyond what a StrWhiDude would be dealing with, so just by virtue of *being* the protagonist in a world where StrWhiDudes are "the norm" they can't really be schmuckatellis in the same way that a hapless StrWhiDude is.

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, July 13, 2016 8:44 AM (3 minutes ago)

Was thinking about this yesterday, in light of Abbott's megaton tbomb, "if [the accidental hero archetype] only exists w/cis white het men that is probably because they are the only people privilieged enough for that dumbshit magic to happen to."

The "everyman falls into greatness" trope doesn't just reflect str8 white male privilege. It's its mythic foundation, the way the dominant culture tells the story of such privilege to itself. You will get the job just because, as legends have foretold, and once there you will be promoted. It may seem to you that you're aren't really doing all that much, but sometimes just being there and being *you* is enough.

Sam explained potatoes to Gollum, he is a paragon of patience

Smeagol was definitely a dude who sucked

The Lego Movie goes to town on this :)

It would be cool if one day society gets to the point where a remake of Edge of Tomorrow ("Live Die Repeat") could swap or otherwise alter the gender / color / orientation of the lead characters and be not seen as being all about the diminishment of the type of person in the Tom Cruise role. That's part of what I'm doing a terrible job circumscribing here.

What constitutes suckiness isn't clear cut. There are drab failures and glamorous failures, ground-down failures and resilient failures.

this is not exactly the same thing, but I realized a couple of years ago that the movie Adventures in Babysitting is a huge apologia for Reaganite politics. There are a bunch of different ways this manifests itself (including "scary" black people on the El and the fact that Elizabeth Shue=good guy because she's a virgin), but the scene that most fully drives it home is when the Elizabeth Shue character is on the phone with her friend, whose rescue is the whole impetus of the film. The friend is at a bus station which is portrayed as the deepest level of hell. The friend has commandeered a phone booth which is usually occupied by a homeless man. While friend is on the phone with ES, homeless man returns and knocks on the door of the phone booth, imploring, "that's my home!" ES's friend, with whom we're meant to sympathize, kicks the homeless man's personal effects out of the booth (I remember slippers) and shouts, "you just moved!" I used to love this movie, but it is some chilling shit to rewatch.

― horsehoe (horseshoe), Sunday, February 12, 2006 4:42 AM (10 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

love this post. this movie is so fucked up! the blues club too...what was going to happen if they didn't sing the blues? was albert collins going to murder them?? did the villains have to sing the blues??? how much time was left for albert collins to perform if everyone in the venue had to sing at least once????

all the penelope ann miller bus station stuff was rough. in retrospect the best characters were the tow truck driver and the kid sister, probably. but i still like the movie as a sort of perfect melding of ferris bueller and judgement night.

and oh man they left that dude on the facade of the crain communications building at the end of the movie. he was still there after the credits!

The kid sister with the Thor helmet is a horror – my idea of hell is that girl as Satan.

i remember liking her character for whatever reason but i also haven't seen the movie since the '90s

never forget

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9GBuciv20A