Love's Labors Lost: Guilty Pleasure Film: The Golden Child

March 11, 2008

Guilty Pleasure Film: The Golden Child

I have a secret. I love The Golden Child. Say what you want about the acting, the plot, or the production values. It won't change the fact that this movie is a classic. Do you want to know why? Of course you do. You're an intelligent human being, and you want to know why you should care about some movie Eddie Murphy made in the 80s.

Let me get this out of the way: I'm a fantasy movie buff. If there's magic or dragons or elves and that sort of stuff in a movie, I'll watch it at least once even if it's terrible. Maybe twice to make sure I don't like it. I've sometimes paid full price to see horrendous movies (say, Bloodrayne or Dragon Wars) simply because they're in the fantasy genre. I even watch Red Sonja whenever it comes on, and I think I'm one of the few Black people who knew of Brigette Nielson before she met Flava Flav.

I have a soft spot for The Golden Child because it breaks longstanding patterns in fantasy movies. What other Hollywood movie can you name in which the hero is Black, Jesus is Asian, and the Devil is a White man?

Take a few minutes to Google it. Seriously, go ahead and look it up.

Welcome back.

First of all, let's look at the protagonist, Chandler Jarrell. First of all, he's actually the main character. This is rare by itself. Most of the time Black characters are mere functionaries in a White person's story. They're only important insofar as they show off how heroic the White protagonist is or to help said White person find himself. Chandler Jarrell is nobody's Magic Negro. He has no weird powers or special insights. We don't even know if he can dance (though he tries to rap). All he has are guts, smarts, and conscience. But it is his story that is being told, his transformation we are witnessing. To make matters even more interesting, Chandler Jarrell's transformation clearly follows the archetypal heroic journey. It's straight out of Joseph Campbell.

Too bad the trend didn't catch on.

You know what? We should find someone to produce a sequel. Let's call it The Platinum Child. In this movie, D.L. Hughley or Katt Williams will try to save a Native American baby from being sacrificed to summon a demon who looks a lot like our current President.

Then again, that would probably be closer to reality TV, wouldn't it?

3 comments:

Devilvet4/30/2008 12:08 PM
I I I I want the knife
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Anonymous6/28/2010 8:55 PM
CO-SIGN ON ALL OF THIS!!!!

Golden Child is my shit. I can watch that movie a million times and never get tired of it.
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RVCBard8/24/2010 3:43 AM
Give me the kniiiiiiiife. Pleeeeeeease.
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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932