Hotep Movie Moments - Tom Hanks... "Paint it Black"

     Welcome back to Hotep Movie Moments!  This week, we introduce a new concept that we will from henceforth refer to as “Paint it Black,” wherein we lowlight the cancer that is White Privilege by taking something that is patently white and imagining what would be if that very item happened to be black.

     Our subject for this exercise this week will be Mr. Thomas Jeffrey Hanks.  Look, I know that Tom has an EXTENSIVE library of movies to his credit, and we don’t intend to take up all of your week with this post, so we will focus on only three of them.

Without further lining, we will get right into it…

Big:

In this 1988 film we find Tom as 12 year-old Josh Baskin who wishes to be “big” after being sent away from a carnival ride for being too short.

First of all, being “too short” for a carnival ride at 12 is bullshit, as most of them have a lower limit of 4-feet and I was at least that by 12 and I am only 5’8” now as I am closer to 40 than I am to 35.

Sorry for getting off task there.  Anyway, he wishes to be big after not being able to get on the ride and wakes up the next morning still 12 years old, but now in a then-32 year-old man’s body (said to be 30 in the film).  No one believes he is who he is until he finds his best friend to help him.  He secures a job and housing and has Cool White Adventures™ in the old FAO Schwarz toy store and while doing so to be moved up the corporate ladder with alarming speed.  With little difficulty, he finds a woman to throw herself at him and somehow it is never exposed that he is actually still only a 12 year-old boy.

Okay, now let’s Paint it Black…

The movie starts the same.  Josh goes to the carnival and instead of being turned away for being too short, he is turned away for not having the necessary number of tickets to get on due to blowing the money he had saved on getting IN the carnival.  He matriculates to the Zoltar machine and makes a wish to be “big” but not to get on a ride, but to secure employment to able to afford shit.

He seeks his family, but is immediately shunned by his mother who mistakes him for his father who she had locked up on a fake domestic charge years earlier.  And the part about IMMEDIATELY getting a job?  Fuck that!  He goes to the toy store and is followed by security the whole time.  He finally gets a job sweeping floors and wiping the inexplicable shit spray from the walls behind the toilets.  One day on his lunch break, he happens upon the huge piano and plays chopsticks on it, much to the amusement of MANY customers in the store but is damn near immediately fired for playing with the toys as an employee.

Things being as they are, he seeks out his best friend and the friend’s mother calls the cops on “some old motherfucker creeping around my kids’ windows” and he is thrown in jail.

     The movie is over in 12 minutes.

Forrest Gump:

In this eponymously-named 1994 Classic, Tom plays a VERY low-intelligence child in Alabama who sits and recounts his entire (ironically amazing and heroic) life story to some strangers on a bus stop bench.

No need to play with any explanations, we have all seen the movie, some of us laughed and cried to it.

Let’s g’head and paint it black.

     Forrest’s story is told posthumously and explains that his social ineptitude and low intelligence had him qualified as “mentally retarded” (because they could still call children – especially black ones – that in the 40s/50s) and swift boated through a eugenics program to be sure he doesn’t procreate and bring any more ‘tarded babies into the world.  The label sticks with him for the rest of his life and he is in and out of the legal system in the Jim Crow south.  No Jenny, no college football, no Army, no hippies, no Forrest Jr, no Apple Computers (and the instant millionaire status), no Nike, NONE of that shit.  Just a lot of prison time.

     The movie lasts approximately 18 minutes, mostly footage of Forrest getting FUCKED up by prison employees.

Cast Away:

This 2000 Survival epic sees Tom as Chuck Noland, who gets shipwrecked when his plane crashes on the way to Malaysia.  He loses his emergency location beacon thingy and therefore cannot be easily found.  While on the island, he cutely names a volleyball “Wilson” and manages to survive off the uninhabitable land for over 4 years before being randomly discovered trying to save his only “friend,” that volleyball from floating away.

Upon return to civilization, Chuck finds that the world has moved on without him and his woman has married someone else.  Not ONLY someone else, but someone he knows personally.

Now let’s paint it black…

All things being equal, Chuck’s plane crashes and goes off the radar.  It is IMMEDIATELY assumed back home that he is dead and the movie does not bother with delving into what was happening with his life on that island.

Because of that the movie is over in 9 minutes, so let’s focus on what happens off-camera then.

Yes, his woman remarries and has a family.  Instead of with a professional acquaintance, it is with one of his snake-ass homeboys who called himself consoling her at the funeral with the intentions of pressing up as soon after it as possible.  When that cargo ship that discovered a skinny and bearded Chuck over 4 years later, they simply assume him to be an aboriginal inhabitant of the island and decide to be safe in not getting speared to death by the others on the island.

*************

     You know what?  Hollyweird has never been a friend of the Ankh-Right movement.  They love to show us these delightful tales of White People White Peopling, and they ALWAYS end wonderfully and resolve without real major conflict and very little death.
Let one of OUR black asses try that shit and the movie is no longer than a YouTube short and grosses $43.00 at the box office.