Anyone find this film explicitly racist?
Prim, proper, modern, egalitarian, knowledgable white English woman comes and teaches truth and values to the despotic ruler/spineless subjects, egotistical, misogynist, clueless Southeast Asians?
shareEven tho I really enjoy this movie and its my all time favorite musical to some degree it is explicitly racist because the movie shows foreigners as uncivilized and illiterate people and the majority are not. Almost every movie I've seen the producers and the writers would put foreigners into the negative light or the uncivilized or the ill mannered people in the movie but if the person who is or speaks English or who is "Americanized" ( foreign people who accept the American or Western culture and speaks English well) or who is lighter in skin color they always got to be the hero or heroine of the story or the intellectual individual of the story. Like for example in the movie since the royal family are considered people of color, King Mongkut was this immature barbarian king but the real King Mongkut was well educated and admired ruler of his kingdom. Anna in the movie is the intelligent one and the heroine. In some scenes in the movie Anna treats the King Mongkut like he's the uncivilized being that she assume he is and like he's a man child who don't know any better. The movie is shown by numerous amount of audience and most people are gonna believe what they see whether the facts are true or not true.
share"King Mongkut was this immature barbarian"! Well, Mongkut is not depicted in such a way and it's enough to listen to his soliloquy "A Puzzlement" to realize this beyond doubt. He is simply depicted as an earthy human being, with flaws and qualities, with a charming childlike innocence and a youthful curiosity. We must remember that during the late 19th century most Asian kingdoms were isolated from the rest of the world, and when they suddenly opened their frontiers to western culture they found out that they had to adapt into a new world in order to survive and keep their independence. They were not barbarians, but there were underdeveloped to some degree. Mongkut was an enlightened monarch that wanted to modernize his country. The musical dramatizes his conflict as he can't figure out how far he should proceed in this. He must reconcile the Siamese tradition he has been entrusted with by his ancestors with Western principles like democracy and abolition of slavery.I think Hammerstein himself has described the character of the King as a man who has been raised as a conservative but he longs to be a liberal. Yet this fight inside him tears him apart because democracy can't be reconciled with his traditional absolute autocracy, and to have no harem or no slaves as much as is desirable is a very advanced step and a threat to his power. To say that slavery must be retained because it was a Siamese tradition only because it's Anna that encourages the King to do so, is like saying that China should go on abusing the human rights because it's a centuries-old tradition and that the rest of the world should follow the example!!! In the end, we admire the King more than Anna because there is a huge difference between them: Anna never doubts that she is right, while the King is aware that he is not omniscient as people want to think. This intellectual humility from his part which pushes him to search for knowledge and always doubt is his lesson to Anna.
Mongkut is a rare exception among the Far Eastern kings and autocrats. It's enought to remember that around the same time the Japanese emperor Komei was enraged with the modernization attempts in his country, hated anything non-Japanese and had never met a Westerner. Compare and tell me who is closer to barbarism!
Memento vivere (Remember to live)
In most reviews I've read they depicted King Mongkut in the movie version as a barbaric king if you agree with them or not. On the immature part, I remember Anna said to her son Louis that King Mongkut sometimes acts like a child. I admit that in the movie in some scenes the King acted like a spoiled child in front of Anna. I meant was that the King Mongkut in the movie even tho he was a very likeable character but he had absurd views like for example he almost attempted to kill his new bride Tuptim. I was thinking that there was no connection in their relationship whatsoever but she was forced to marry him and leave her true love Lun Tha so the King has a right to kill her? That is so absurd and somewhat barbaric to see a strong virile man beat a young defendless woman to death. Don't give me wrong I love this movie and the actors but there were some views I did disagree.
shareIt's absurd for us, but it's natural for the King's cultural context. Yes, the King sometimes acts like a child, but he is also unexpectedly wise and shrewd as in "A Puzzlement." I don't think that a man who thinks, dreams, has a vision, and loves knowledge can be called a barbarian. He is not as progressive as to accept to abolish slavery or have no harem-that's why the Westerners describe him as a "barbarian"-but the film depicts him as beginning to think about these issues, however reluctantly, and that's a step forward.
Memento vivere (Remember to live)
I understand and see in A Puzzlement scene the King is trying to adapt to the Western culture. But you don't see that Anna is adapting to the Eastern culture, she finds almost everything absurd with The King and the royal family. In the movie it also shows that Siamese (Thailand) women are naive and like King Mongkut said about his wives and concubines "They have beauty but not a gift for knowledge" so he's actually calling his women "dumb".I've been to Thailand twice and I never hear anyone called me "Sir" and the women in Thailand are very cultured and sophisicated just as much as American women and European women for that matter.
shareDon't judge the film by modern standards. Of course, they are cultured and sophisticated today. But in the 19th century women had no rights and education, and the king's wives and concubines were confined in the harem, which explains their fears and superstitions. The King is definitely influenced by the Siamese tradition which regarded women as little more than objects, he has been raised believing in it. But on the other hand, he is interested in educating his people and modernize his country, and in this process he finds out that he must modernize his mentality, too. Anna encourages this, but the problem is that she doesn't have the patience to help the King do this step by step. She wants to change everything at once without preparation, even things that mustn't change, possibly because they are different from her own culture. But the King resists this, because he wants to be very careful with what he'll change and to which degree, and this is where their arguments come from. Anyway, the character of the King is one of the most complex and multi-sided ever written, and it would require many pages to analyze it. At least, we can agree that the musical is quite accurate in depicting the Siamese beliefs and the country's condition in the 19th century.
Memento vivere (Remember to live)
Here we go again with the race card! The king was not portrayed as moronic at all. He was, however, caught between two cultures -- the royal-centric Thai culture in which the king was treated as a god and the western culture that he, by his own choice, was trying to bring to Siam. The culture of Siam, as in most
Asian cultures of that time, did not treat women very well. Anna tried to show the king that. Is that saying that the West is superior to the East? Well, maybe in that aspect the answer is yes! The people are not stupid,as some posters claim, but are accustomed to cowtowing to the king and not expressing themselves. The king was trying to be more Western, for good or bad, but the dychotomy was tearing him appart and I think the impication of the play/film was that is what killed him. That might not be historical truth, but it is how the film portrays it.