Jillian Turner Blog # 7: Violence Strikes Again

In both "Who Killed Vincent Chin" and "Amigo," I can't help but say that violence is a dominant trait of American culture. Miscarriage of justice after another and we don't seem to learn from our mistakes... how frustrating!

In "Who Killed Vincent Chin," I was struck by the two foils of women characters. On one hand Mrs. Chin was portrayed as a strong women who fearlessly fought for justice after her son was brutally murdered. On the other, however, I saw in Mrs. Ebens a woman who almost senselessly stood by her husband. Yes, they had been married for years and her loyalty should be honored BUT at some point something inside me snapped. I lost respect for her because she couldn't see that her husband beat a man to death with a baseball bat. I personally thought that the weapon alone should have been enough to convict Roy Ebens. Chin had no weapon and Ebens did. As the film continued, however, and jury members were interviewed, I was irritated by the repeated concept of "beyond a reasonable doubt." This seemingly helpful phrase has debunked slam-dunk court cases since day one. Casey Antony, OJ Simpson, Roy Ebens. All seemingly guilty but, because of a formality, walked free from murder. This simple phrase led to the debauchery that became Chin's case as it was later tried as a civil rights case.

Amigo also raised questions for me regarding Americans and inherent violence. Ever since the days of manifest destiny, Americans have believed it was their right to rule what they believed were inferior races... As it turns out, that mean everyone who wasn't of European decent. We see such motifs in "Amigo." I personally enjoyed this movie very much, never having learned much about the history of the Philippines or the Spanish-American War. I felt that the film portrayed many different angles: Amigo, the insurgents, the Americans, and of course the Priest. I thought it was interesting how, before he was hanged, Amigo admitted to his wife that, regardless of what he could have done, he would have been executed anyways. I still can't decide if this is morbid or brilliantly profound because he was absolutely right. As we discussed in class, I enjoyed watching as over time, the Americans developed ties with the natives and became personally invested. I thought that this gave a different perspective to something that I had previously written off as classic American aggression. Finally, I thought the priest played a key role in the film. Often shady, I honestly couldn't place his angle in the story. What were his motivations? I also found it interesting that, towards the end, the women of the village were seen repeating "mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa" which is a Latin phrase of lament http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/mea-culpa.html . This line is also featured in the Jimmy Buffett song "Fruitcakes" (Funfact!)

In Mark Sawyer's article on Racial Politics in Multiethnic America, he discusses public opinion on race. He admits that much of the research as of today is "focused predominantly on white attitudes about blacks" (Sawyer 529). I thought this was particularly interesting because neither film involved tensions between blacks and whites but rather exposed tensions with people of Asian decent. It was an interesting change in the class, I will admit. Racism against people of Asian decent is something that is often omitted from school curriculums. Who hasn't heard of Rodney King?! But no one at the end of the "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" film had even heard of him before. Here again, we see an American injustice. It was not just African Americans that were oppressed by the Europeans but also Native Americans, Asians, Philippines, and countless other ethnicities. Later in the article, Sawyer states that, today, "Blacks and Latinos share support for affirmative action" (Sawyer 529). Needless to say there seems to be a disconnect here.

Anderson affords yet another prospective. In Chapter 4 on Creole Pioneers, he discusses the affect of newspapers in American development. I interpreted his discussion on newspapers similarly to our class discussion on bias in both the Vincent Chin and Amigo films. According to Anderson, early newspapers contained, along with "news about the metropole,"and "commercial news" (Anderson 89). I could imagine that such a newspaper would produce similar bias to what we saw in the two films. So I must ask, what is the full impact of bias? Media and otherwise...