Update—a friend just brought to my attention an LA Times article that dealt with many of the same issues that I do in this post, except the author of this article doesn’t go to bed every night huddled in the fetal position wondering if they’ll get hired by a newspaper someday.

It’s late Saturday night and I just went to see The Last King of Scotland a few hours ago, and it got me thinking—why does Hollywood always insist on viewing other cultures through the prism of whiteness? It’s not that I hated the movie—in fact, I quite liked it, especially Forest Whitaker’s dynamic/riveting/electrifying/insert overused adjective performance, one that will almost surely be remembered come Tuesday morning’s Oscar nominations. It occasionally stumbled into melodrama and had a puzzling and wholly underwhelming score, but overall it was a pretty good movie. Aside from, of course, the completely fabricated white Scottish doctor angle, which in the end served as the grotesquely overplayed white man finds redemption in some foreign land story, once again.

Do people not get sick of this? I am able to suspend my sense of disbelief, probably more so than most people, but the contrived plot devices employed to get white people in on the act are just absurd. Sure, it probably makes the whole venture more commercially palatable in the U.S. And yes, it enables the studio to hire a bankable white star to hinge the movie’s box office potential on. But it is at the expense of legitimacy, and comes with a lot of neo-colonial luggage, where somehow colonial guilt is exorcised by a white character helping out the apparently completely helpless “other.”

Director Ed Zwick, a repeat (and far worse) offender, has made it his bread and butter—he has directed Glory, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond, all films based on the condescending premise that the natives, the savage other, need the white man to figure things out for them. Of course the natives end up teaching the white man something about himself (these being noble savages, of course), and in the end everybody is the better for it. I’m personally waiting for his epic on the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, sure to star Jake Gyllenhaal as, you know, the unsung force behind Nelson Mandela—the real reason those Africans were able to shake off apartheid.

The ending of The Last King is particularly jarring in light of this—I think it’s supposed to be jarring, and I won’t ruin anything for those who haven’t seen it (in spite of my problems with the racial dynamics at play, I would still highly recommend the movie, and I would once again like to emphasize that, when compared with Ed Zwick’s canon, the problems here don’t even hold a proverbial candle to his blazing sun of offensiveness), but it involves a very uncomfortable calculation of the worth of one life versus another. In that sense, it reminds me of the execrable Derailed, where the erstwhile hero of the piece makes clear his contempt for the worth of a black person’s life. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. I am going to stop rambling about this now, but I just wanted to throw that out there for discussion—when will Hollywood learn to stop being so goddamned condescending and racist?