Friend or Foe

         Hollywood is made up of stereotypes. They’re the tool that makes it easy for directors to create a quick movie. Need a hero? Let’s have an underdog who comes from nothing. Need a sidekick or two? Let’s have 2 misfits who befriend the hero. Need a villain? Let’s have someone with a thick foreign accent. But why does the villain have to be foreign? I think this idea is a deeply rooted connection to that we see in movies and other media throughout our lives. Many films nowadays utilize foreign characters to play to stereotypes, usually that of a villain or a mysterious character. What’s interesting is that in many instances, these “foreigners” are played by Americans. The actors are forced to don fake accents or even sometimes speak the language of the character’s homeland. However, these characters have also been played by an actor or actress that is of the implied nationality. 

Think about movies such as the James Bond series or the Die Hard series. It was common for the villains in these movies to have accents of some sort. I think this is a tool used by Hollywood to easily represent someone as evil. Although it is an obviously ridiculous accusation to say that all foreigners are evil, it is easy to make them appear that way in cinema because they are foreign in the since that most Americans do not know about the culture of other countries. It is easy to portray evil by using someone who is from a different land because we don’t like to think of fellow Americans as bad people. What we don’t know, what is strange to us, is often viewed as bad. A multitude of countries around the world watch American television and movies, but Americans do not commonly watch foreign films or tv shows. This shows even more that a large number of Americans are uneducated about other cultures. Not all foreigners are portrayed as evil in movies, many times they can be a love interest or an ally to the protagonist. However I think it’d be close to impossible to completely do away with this practice of casting foreigners as the villain because it is so engrained into our mind.