Page 84 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• In the film, the rebels declare that Scotland had never been a free
nation. According to Fraser, this is simply not true. 4

Children’s cartoons frequently alter historical events for entertainment
purposes. As an example, The Road to El Dorado (DreamWorks SKG)
is an animated film of two scallywags who discover a map leading to El
Dorado, the fabled city of gold. After an adventure-filled journey, they
finally reach the shores of El Dorado, where they are worshiped as gods
by the natives. Although this cartoon may have been intended as a harm-
less entertainment for children, it sends an erroneous message about the
people and events that are being characterized. In 2000, the Mexika Eagle
Society organized a boycott of the film. The association contended that
the cartoon trivialized the systematic exploitation and extermination of
great numbers of the indigenous Mexican natives. Patricia Gonzalez of
the Mexika Eagle Society explains:

It is a blatantly racist misrepresentation of native culture and history. . . . It
is extremely ignorant for the makers of “El Dorado’’ to use the slaughter
and genocide of a people as the backdrop for a children’s cartoon. . . .
This misrepresentation of history only serves to reinforce and validate the
American public’s total disregard for true native history. To dismiss it as
a mere cartoon suggests that feeding racist lies to unwitting children is
perfectly fine. “The Road to El Dorado” is but a link in a continuous chain
of dehumanizing propaganda unleashed upon our people by American
society as a whole. 5

Historical context is also an approach that can account for the popu-
larity of a genre. For instance, in 2004 Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit
9/11 moved the documentary into the mainstream of popular genres. The
film, a scathing indictment of the George W. Bush administration, was
the top-grossing film in the United States during the first weekend of its
release, outdrawing Shrek 2 and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azka-
ban. Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival
and the People’s Choice Award in the United States.
Largely because of the commercial success of Moore’s documentary,
NBC purchased Deadline, a documentary produced by filmmakers Katy
Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson for an undisclosed price and presented
it on Dateline NBC. Only about ten minutes of the two-hour documen-
tary was cut, mostly to make room for commercials. David Corvo, the
executive director of Dateline NBC, said, “This comes in an era where

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