I’m a little late to the party on this one, but last week, Drafthouse posted an undergraduate thesis on the subject of The FP (a favorite around here), entitled “The FP: A Reflection of Cultural Change and Stereotype Exploitation,” from some intercultural communications students at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Forrest Good, Jacqueline Ramstack and Demar Hall. Suffice to say, I read the entire thing. It’s awesome in the way that quotes from blackout drunks embedded into a dry police report are awesome, that endlessly compelling cocktail of clinical robot prose and vulgar vernacular, like making Stephen Hawking read a Penthouse letter.
I’ve excerpted my favorite quotes below:
The lack of alcoholics has caused the local duck population to flee, seeing as there is no one to feed them. As the character KCDC, played by Art Hsu, framed it, “What’s a f*ckin’ town with no ducks, JTRO? It’s nothin’! It ain’t nothin’! How’s a nigga supposed to sort his shit out without no ducks?” (Trost 2011).
Probably the first time in academic history that a motivational speech about bringing back the town’s supply of booze and ducks has been used in a citation. Hopefully not the last.
The FP takes these concepts to an extreme, because it employs the monomyth, it is put in the same cultural conversation as many legitimately respected writings across the world such as Beowulf or The Lord of the Rings.
“…such as Beowulf or Lord of the Rings.” On one hand, I hope they mean the books, because I don’t like the idea that Beowulf and the Lord of the Rings movies are considered “legitimately respected.” If they mean the books, I like to imagine they pulled them blindly from a dirty pillowcase marked “EXAMPLES.”
In The FP the two rival gangs are themed, both in costume and in character, to reflect the United States and the Confederacy. Even some of the dialogue reflects this, such as BTRO’s expression of “Four score and a couple years ago Ma and Pa fought for some serious shit, ya heard,” (Trost 2011).
(*wipes single tear from eye*)
The use of the N-word within a modern cultural context brings images to one’s mind of lower-socioeconomic youth who have invested themselves within gang culture to the point of a demeaning stereotype, and yet within The FP this stereotype is relished as an inherent actualization.
Mamma mia, that’s-a some-a spicy a-bullshit! (*kisses fingers*)
Blacks finally gained a voice in the industry with the start of the blaxploitation, “blaxploitation” is a combination of the words “black” and “exploitation…”
I like to imagine the professor taking notes at this point. “A combination of ‘black’ and ‘exploitation’ you say? …Slow down, I want to make sure I’m getting all of this.”
Black filmmakers and entertainers must be mindful that the messages of their movies are not lost in these stereotypes. John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood and Eddie Murphy’s Life are both prime examples of movies that depict positive images and role models, as opposed to films that poorly portray blacks such as the Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society.
Uh… wow. I feel like the randomness of the examples cited has become a running joke at this point. Or, in thesisese, the delicious absurdity of this paragraph rivals the absurdity upon which The FP was built, and the further absurdity of the notion of writing a thesis about it, much like those landmarks of absurdist cinema The Jerk, The Life Aquatic, and Along Came Polly.
This next part is the first section of the conclusion:
The adaptation of identity and subcultures within a reflection of cultural change historically and artistically by expanding and exploiting modern stereotypes for satirical purposes are all throughout The FP in multiple forms and facets within many different major cultural analyses.
George Orwell just rose from the grave and shit his pants. This is the kind of sentence that makes a professor say “Ugh, I’m too tired to try to figure out what the hell this means. How does a B sound?”