Racial Sins

Sources: Taken (dir. Pierre Morel), Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin, The Searchers (dir. John Ford), and many more

I got my wife Taken for Christmas. It was one of those "I'm buying this 'cause you like it but I also like it (maybe more) and so everybody wins" gifts. Not to worry, though, since I also got her an oversized bathrobe and a pearl necklace whose price means it was either stolen or a fake. I have no selfish interest in either of those things.

But back to Taken.

                                                                               photo from here

This movie bothers me, though I seem unable to stop watching it. It's action-packed, and it's fun (?) to watch a father go on a rampage unencumbered by moral compunction. But that's not what troubles me. In fact, the level of violence is comparable to what I would want to be able to inflict on bad guys who were trying to sell my daughter into sex slavery. What does bother me is the casting.


Taken employs a troubling method of casting which I'll call the sin sandwich. On the bottom layer, you have your thugs. On the middle layer (where all the good stuff necessary for a fulfilling bourgeois life is--money, family, glitz, glamor) you have the greedy middle-men who facilitate crime in return for staggering stipends. On the top you have the mega-bosses--animals who cause the criminal world's wheels to turn.

A reasonable cross-section of the underworld, you say? Perhaps. But I can't help but be bothered by the racial make-up of each class. Brown-skinned people (from the "bad parts" of Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa) make up the top and bottom layers (the bread) while Western Europeans and Americans are in the middle. In other words, the Nordic-Teutonic-Anglo peoples are the meat that holds everything together and makes crime so darn tasty.

Now, perhaps this is simply a reflection of true life. Perhaps most greed-induced crime occurs under the pink-skinned guidance of WASP progeny. But I doubt it. More troubling than the unreality of this depiction, though, is what the sin sandwich paradigm says about Hollywood's (and therefore our) continued racialist notions. I don't want to spend too much time talking about the scum and the mega-bosses. I think white folks' projections of evil onto the brown-skinned others of the world is a subject that most people understand, and those who don't understand it at this point likely never will. But the white racial sin of greed, especially in its middle position on the sin sandwich, tells me a lot about how white people still see themselves as behaviorally distinct from others.

The tacit thesis I'm seeing in Taken is that white people have racial predisposition towards greed. Greed is our racial sin. White people love money so much that they will allow the evil brown people to come, take a few of our white virgins (a nod here to Dr. Slotkin), and maintain our way of life from the dirty money we receive in return. If that sounds just as bad as what the violent thugs or the inhuman mega-bosses are doing, think again. Because this racial sin of greed, while still despicable, is a character flaw--something one catches at boarding school because one never gets enough letters from home during the holidays--while the gritty violence of the thugs and the barbarian tastes of the mega-bosses are depicted as cultural, national, or even biological degeneracies. In other words, the audience of Taken is left with the impression that those few white men have done bad things while the Albanians, Arabs, and Africans are bad human beings.

There are many supporting factors that reinforce this message: a French middleman who loves his family, the white protagonist who eschews violence to be closer to his daughter, the white friend who dies from the drugs  before prostitution can ever begin. All these factors reinforce the complexity of the white race while contrasting that complexity with the monolithic badness of gun-toting Muslims.

Now, Taken is not the only film that reinforces such racialist ideas. I've noted The Searchers above in the Sources section, but that's not as clear or recent of an example (though for evidence's sake, here's the schema: Comanche braves as the thugs, greedy would-be assassins/facilitators as the middlemen, tribal chiefs intent on sucking the whiteness out of little girls as the mega-bosses). Numerous films, television shows, and even news reporting participate as well. And I'm not really sure what the next step is here except to say that assigning a sin (or any other characteristic) based on skin color risks reifying the latent racism that we've been working so hard for so long to remove. There's no reason to boycott or not watch a film like Taken, but let's make sure we think while we watch.