Saurian Cinema: Colonialism & The Lost World

this video is sponsored by from.co frome creates beautiful canvas art centerpieces that depict the chromatic chronologies of your favorite films where each color strip represents a corresponding frame within a given film be sure to use the referral link from.co cold crash pictures to get 10 off your order so here's a first for the channel this from doesn't actually depict any film that we're going to be talking about today it's actually a remake of a sequel of a film that belongs in the same subgenre that we'll be talking about but rest assured it still satisfies my two inviable rules of picking froms it's from a film i absolutely adore and it's gorgeous [Music] to know dinosaur cinema is to know lost world fiction stories about brave adventurers risking life and limb to explore uncharted lands fighting off dangerous beasts and documenting strange primitive cultures along the way some of the most famous examples from film and literature include journey to the center of the earth the land that time forgot mysterious island valley of guangzhi the land unknown congo atlantis dinotopia king kong king kong king kong king kong and baby secret of the lost legend but of course the most famous example is the work that gave the genre its name sir arthur cronin doyle's landmark 1912 novel the lost world which didn't invent the genre by itself jules verne had to beat by nearly half a century but it did popularize some of the most common tropes it tells the story of disgraced professor george edward challenger who convinces a group of skeptical colleagues and professional adventurers to accompany him on an expedition deep within the uncharted regions of the amazon rainforest whereupon they discover an isolated plateau populated by living breathing dinosaurs they're then stranded through an act of sabotage and spend the next several weeks fighting to stay alive while simultaneously seeking a way off the plateau so that they can return to england and share their discoveries with the world this story had no small effect on me when i was a kid growing up in south florida my childhood home backed up onto about a dozen acres of undeveloped swamp land i'd hop the fence with my friends and spend whole saturdays pretending we were deep within some unexplored jungle fighting off dinosaurs that had somehow survived into the modern age the first movie pitches i ever wrote were all some variation of a classic lost world narrative but that's not the end of the story as i got older i started reading more about the history of western exploration which is really just the history of western expansion and i soon found out these weren't just inaccurate representations of history nobody really expects them to be historically accurate anyway but that they were completely antithetical contrapositive inversions of the historical truth to the point where they started to feel downright revisionist propaganda even and everywhere i looked i started to see pro-colonial bias the assumption that indigenous cultures represent a primitive form of society rather than their own highly derived way of life the desecration of indigenous land lives and property chronic ethnocentrism fostered dependence as a means of further exploitation naming things that already have names lake gladys future use planning for the next wave of colonizers and in the words of anthropologist linda tuhiwe smith a deep sympathy for indigenous people as an ideal while being hostile towards those natives who fall short of that construct remember her name she's gonna be important later some of you have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes on this colonialism i mean it's stamped across absolutely every aspect of our society our history our language our genetics our traditions our economy epidemiology city planning our justice system technology architecture literature food but i'm not an expert in any of those things i'm an expert in movies dinosaur movies to be exact and if you think that dinosaur movies are some happy exception to the rule that colonialism is stamped across absolutely every aspect of our modern lives well it's amazing how we become part of their mythology we're more than that now we're part of their religion we're gods but i'm not here to ruin your fun that's something i feel compelled to make clear right up front i'm not here to make anyone feel guilty for what they watch i say that because i know somebody's already writing some angry screen in the comments about how white guilt is like the most dangerous threat to society or whatever i don't feel guilty i feel angry angry because someone decided long before i was even born that they were going to feed me a complete crock of [ __ ] about the entire history of the so-called new world and that i was too interested in play-acting dinosaur fantasies in my backyard to ever question it well i did question it not because i hate lost world fiction but because i love it and i found out that there is a lot of work to be done if we're ever going to even attempt to decouple these stories from a bunch of racist propaganda and if you're not interested in even attempting to decolonize these narratives out of some misplaced nostalgia for an imagined history that never actually happened then i wouldn't even count you as a fan in the first place good you caught out in the world the lost world makes for an interesting test case for dinosaur cinema since it's been adapted to film no less than five times first in 1925 as an acclaimed silent film with pioneering visual effects then in 1960 is a campy low budget b movie then in 1992 as two made for tv movies produced back to back then as an ambitious tv pilot in 1999 which ultimately ran for three seasons and finally in 2001 as a two-part made for tv miniseries from the bbc i know there was also a straight to video mockbuster in 1998 but i couldn't find a region 1 dvd for anything less than 50 bucks and since michael cinelnikov plays the same character in both the 98 mockbuster and the 99 tv show i figured if any of them were safe to skip it'd be this one now when i first sat down to make this video i honestly didn't think i'd wind up talking about all five i figured the distinctions would inevitably start to blur and there wouldn't be any new points to make after the third or fourth film but when i sat down and actually watched them all i was honestly kind of floored at how they all managed to distinguish themselves not just in terms of artistic differences which you'd expect to vary widely from film to film anyway but also in how they choose to depict or not depict the indigenous peoples of their so-called lost worlds that's really the thing that distinguishes them more than anything else even more so than the choice of actors or film stocks or special effects because for all the fanfare that the dinosaurs get they really only appear in a handful of some rather episodic encounters throughout the book most of which don't even push the plot in any particular direction the main conflict throughout the second half comes from a war between a race of primitive ape men and a tribe of indigenous south americans our heroes are first captured by the ape men then fight their way free then join forces with the indigenous south americans to help eradicate the ape men once and for all what's especially wild to me is that for being such a big part of the book each and every one of the five film adaptations presents a wildly different vision of this core conflict and of indigenous peoples in general there's a different lesson to be learned from each one of them and i think those differences are well worth cataloging i also think it's important that i acknowledge at some point that all the historical trauma that i'm talking about today doesn't belong to me my ancestors perpetrated the trauma and the last thing i want to do is tell an indigenous person what they're supposed to think or do or feel about any of this this is also why i think it's important to mention that i will be donating all the proceeds of this video to an indigenous mutual aid organization and i bring it up not as like a clout thing but as more like a precedent thing i'm certainly not the first youtuber to do that sort of thing but i definitely don't want to be the last the lost world 1925 natives what natives the first adaptation of the lost world came in 1925 just 13 years after the publication of the original novel in fact it came so soon after that arthur conan doyle himself appears in the prologue this one is probably best remembered for its pioneering special effects by willis o'brien who'd go on to do the stop-motion animation for king kong 8 years later you see that he put little air bladders in their chest to make them breathe this version keeps the same basic plot of the book but with a couple interesting wrinkles right up front they add a woman to the expedition which is of course the one change from the novel that every subsequent adaptation has always kept gotta have the pretty they're also stranded on the plateau in a different way in the book one of their porters double-crosses them but in this adaptation it's a curious apatosaur who knocks their tree bridge down at the end of the novel the group brings a baby pterosaur back to london as proof of their findings but in the film they upgrade to a fully grown apatosaurus which promptly breaks free and goes on a rampage in the spirited finale but by far the biggest change between the book and the movie is in its depiction of the indigenous peoples of the amazon namely there's not one there are no depictions of indigenous people in this film the filmmakers simply cut them from the story where the book features an all-out war between a bunch of missing link type hominids and a tribe of indigenous south americans the film includes but a single ape-man who periodically chucks stuff at the group but just because there aren't any indigenous peoples in the film doesn't mean there's nothing to talk about by virtue of the fact that the eurasia of indigenous peoples from western authored history has a long sad history within colonialist narratives a patriot's history of the united states is a self-congratulatory white supremacist fantasy fable first published in 2004 which i highly recommend nobody ever reads except maybe as opposition research like i did authors larry schweikert and michael allen and their chapter on the discovery of the new world with a section titled did columbus kill most of the indians in which the authors take a look at almost every pre-colombian population estimate that's ever been published and they decide that since the estimates range from anywhere between 100 million to as little as 800 000 people that nobody has any real clue how many people lived in the americas before columbus and so nobody has the right to claim that columbus killed most of them as if the raw percentage is what people take issue with as if everyone would be a-okay with columbus just so long as his personal kill count never hit 51 percent that's his intentional kill count my dude because schweikert and allen do what a lot of white supremacists do and immediately disqualifies any deaths due to disease which are presumed to be wholesale accidental and thus incidental you know every october people are like we shouldn't be celebrating columbus you know who first pitched that some sjw in 2015 it was columbus's own men his own employers he was stripped of his titles and thrown imprisoned by his own benefactors in 1500 on account of the abuses that the indigenous peoples of the caribbean were suffering in his hands oh you hadn't heard about his arrest that doesn't surprise me that doesn't feed into the narrative that he was just some wily good-willed explorer who helped kickstart the modern age after schweikert and allen declare that nobody knows how many people lived in the americas before columbus they go on to conclude that all the smaller population estimates are probably more accurate even though those estimates are generally older and often based on only indirect evidence such as how much food a given plot of land can grow based on western farming practices but when researchers revisited sites with newer technologies and observed more direct evidence such as the sheer volume of pottery buried in the soil and how indigenous people managed to fertilize it researchers found that all the old estimates were generally too low it's not even like the population estimates have been getting farther and farther apart over time they've been converging at higher and higher estimates as scientists gather more data here's the big revelation of the 20th century soon after columbus made landfall european-born illnesses started decimating indigenous populations before the europeans actually made it further inland as charles c mann puts it in his 2005 book 1491 new revelations of the americas before columbus the first whites to explore many parts of the americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated as a result all colonial population estimates were too low many of them put together just after epidemics would have represented population nadirs not approximations of pre-contact numbers modern researchers didn't start to account for this in their population estimates until the mid-20th century tauen tinsuyu which is what the inca called themselves and so that's how i'll be referring to them throughout this video taiwan tsuyu was hit with its first smallpox epidemic in 1524 seven years before their first contact with any europeans the epidemic killed as many as half the total population including the ruler his first designated heir his brother his uncle and his sister wife with the line of succession so disrupted civil war quickly followed and the europeans simply took advantage of that chaos when francisco pizarro finally arrived in 1531 he was walking in on an empire in mid-collapse which still rivaled any kingdom he'd ever seen in europe the reason colonialism has such a vested interest in convincing you that an inconsequential number of people lived here before columbus is because they want you to believe that this land was fundamentally unclaimed and therefore up for grabs when europeans arrived they want to combat the narrative the historical truth really that this country's european ancestors were very much thieving ever wonder why so many midwestern cities have the words plane or field in them springfield fairfield greenfield plainville plainview plain city it's because european colonizers typically built their settlements on land that indigenous peoples had already cleared the idea that an inconsequential number of indigenous people were living here before columbus is pure propaganda the real tell for me is when schweikart and allen conclude by saying that native populations were on a downward trajectory long before columbus arrived anyway now even if that's true it's based on one study which i couldn't find based on schweikert and allen citations why bring it up at all the question was did columbus kill most of the indians what does the pre-columbian death rate have to do with how many people columbus killed i have wracked my brain trying to come up with the most charitable interpretation for this scrapyard hot take and the only thing i can think of is that the authors want us to consider the deaths of between 1 and 100 million people write-offs and when you read the rest of the chapter the way they describe europeans as adept disciplined daring and courageous while indigenous mesoamericans are described as brutal murderous who have no concept of individual freedom or civic rights it soon becomes all too clear what these guys are really saying their answer to whether or not columbus killed most of the native americans is just a smug smarmy who gives a [ __ ] to return to the actual film for a sec i'm not saying that excluding indigenous peoples from the film is an explicit act of imperialist repression not necessarily anyway but it does follow a long tradition of imperialist repression and i for one am not prepared to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt the only non-white character in the film is zambo the loyal porter and he's played by a white man in blackface so i'm not exactly itching to see what their idea of good indigenous representation is anyway but for whatever it's worth i prefer lost world films with credible or even thematically relevant reasons for their lack of indigenous peoples i think the sequel to jurassic park makes for a pretty mediocre jurassic park sequel but as a spiritual remake of the lost world i think it's actually pretty interesting it preserves that fun episodic runaway from monsters feel and i mean just look at this shot [Music] plus it has more than a few stated challenges to the western colonialist assumption that scientific inquiry is inherently objective the heisenberg uncertainty principle whatever you study also changed and of course the reason there aren't any indigenous peoples in the film is because it doesn't take place in a true lost world but rather an artificially constructed venture capitalist tourist attraction so you went from capitalist to naturalist in just four years that's that's something the land unknown is another lost world narrative which tends to get a lot of flack even within the dinosaur movie enthusiast community for its cheesy special effects but i think it does some pretty interesting things with its lack of indigenous people too this particular lost world is discovered deep below the surface of antarctica which would explain the lack of any native inhabitants and what's more there's a scene where the one woman on the expedition is kidnapped and when the men find a trail of footprints leading away they assume they were left by some primitive hominid these footprints were made by being physically very much like us but when they finally catch up to her she's actually been abducted by a fellow military man who had been stranded on a previous expedition and has been driven mad by his ordeal move away caveman caveman you won't call me that after you've been here for 10 years they have met the enemy and he is them the land unknown still has literal metric oodles of excruciatingly hokey merry and reproduced messaging who'd stay home with the baby sure who's dale what baby i was silly but that's just the first thing i'd fix in the remake the lost world 1960 honest and uncritical the second adaptation of the lost world came 35 years after the first in 1960 the first with sounded color with none other than claude raines in the lead role george edward challengers lost world you know who claude reigns is he's the louis of louis i think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship director erwin allen apparently wanted to use stop-motion animation for the dinosaurs even going so far as to hire willis o'brien as the film's effects technician but the budget was apparently too small and so they wound up using live reptiles with prosthetics glued to their heads in the final film none of which come close to resembling any actual dinosaurs but that doesn't stop professor challenger from identifying a whole bunch of them tyrannosaurus rex jesus where to get his degree liberty university if for nothing else this version is especially interesting to me because it's the only one set in modern times i say modern as in contemporaneous i know 1960 was already 60 years ago but this is the only adaptation that takes place the same year it came out all the adaptations since then have been set in the early 1900s the setup is still pretty close to the book but they do go ahead and add a woman to the expedition just like in the first film and just like in the first film her purpose and prerogative within the story are justified via her relationship with a man well actually two men she's both the daughter of the newspaper magnate who's financing the expedition and the girlfriend of lord john roxton i guess the writers wanted all the races covered well you know something johnny you could do worse than marry me i think i'm one of the few girls in the world that could put up with you 31. the answer to your question is 31.

you know i wouldn't even mind all this pearl clutching over the fact that there's a woman on the expedition but what really gets me is that after the writers give her so much gumption in the first act the minute they're on the plateau all she can do is scream this adaptation also adds back an important character from the novel who was left out of the previous film the traitorous porter gomez who harbors a grudge against lord roxton ever since he found out that roxton had organized a previous expedition to the plateau that killed his friend santiago his grief is emphasized so heavily throughout the second half that for a minute there i thought we were getting some honest to goddess queer coding and a low budget 1960s sci-fi b movie but no turns out he's just some hot-headed latino with a blood debt i mean santiago my brother what's your plan here you're pointing a six-shooter at eight people oh and if you're worried about hispanic american representation at this point don't worry they come in two varieties there's the blood feuding traitor and the obsequious coward no not me from an entertainment standpoint this film is about as exciting as watching someone else ride a disney ride like they're being chased right now this is a chase scene of course the single biggest change in this adaptation is the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the story and with them come a whole heap of colonialist tropes if i had to generalize i'd say that this version is probably more honest than most adaptations but it's entirely uncritical of what it depicts the first thing professor challenger does when he lands on the plateau is claim it i came the honor to be the first to set foot here unless it's your plateau professor i thank you which certainly reflects the historical record but is presented as like this fun exciting thing for him to do by right not by theft it's not that he doesn't know whether or not there are any people already living on the plateau what matters is that no white people do they spend the first day and night getting acquainted with the local wildlife and then at the 43 minute mark we meet our first native inhabitant and what's challenger's immediate response after him alone ketchup hey she's invaluable i'll get her this is also a pretty accurate representation of history with multiple accounts from both columbus and cortez's expeditions in which they detail compulsory kidnappings of indigenous peoples on site they even lured some of them aboard their ships under false pretenses with the express purpose of enslaving them but again the film isn't concerned about it malone eventually chases down the unnamed indigenous woman and brings her back to camp where her forcible capture barely raises an eyebrow good you caught out in the world the only person who empathizes even a little with her plight is the only other woman on the expedition but then she's less worried about the native woman's freedom than her mere emotional state poor girl she probably thinks we're trying to hurt her ultimately the indigenous woman makes a grand total of one two three then four separate escape attempts before finally getting away whereupon the group is suddenly captured by her fellow tribesmen while awaiting execution challenger suddenly makes a sort of accidental breakthrough call it a faint brush with self-awareness they undoubtedly intend to kill us kill us why not an invasion of privacy gives a man the right to kill we are the invaders this idea could have served as a foundational wellspring of self-reflection yes we are the invaders aren't we but it's basically dropped right then and there in favor of a more survival of the fittest finale when the indigenous woman suddenly reappears and busts them out of prison why you ask no idea there's this impression that she's bonded with this one guy in the group but you'd have to know more about the human condition than me to understand when why or how this bond actually formed this is like their one interaction before everybody's captured you know you're kind of nice have a chair huh i guess that's supposed to prove he's one of the good kidnappers as for the rest of the tribe they're basically treated like every other threat in the movie just another episodic antagonist now it's one thing to simply depict the hostile indigenous tribe that in itself wouldn't necessarily be a problem but the thing that gets me here is that both the white group and the indigenous group commit the same act imprisoning members of the out group on site but where the capture of the indigenous woman is coded as intriguing spirited and ultimately romantic yeah they actually get together in the end the indigenous tribes actions are coded as reactionary barbaric and frankly dim-witted even though they're the ones who actually have a motive now if anyone is blown away by my analysis at this point if you're just like wow i never would have thought of that on my own let me be the first to point out all i'm doing here is asking myself how i would feel if i was in the indigenous people's position which is already more than the filmmakers were willing to ask themselves apparently the lost world 1992 white saviors i mean like good lord white saviors and the water is distributed thusly keeping the soil in optimal growing conditions the lost world adaptation of 1992 presents a great tension between text and subtext on the surface this film desperately wants everyone to just get along but as we'll soon see it does so in a way that perpetuates some of the most patronizing colonialist stereotypes about african or people that still get repeated in mixed company namely the idea that white westerners are the only people equipped to save them that it's up to white people to save the day the same basic plot is still there in fact the first act follows the book closer than perhaps any other adaptation which i quite like but then it moves the action from the amazon rainforest to southern africa according to imdb it was filmed on location in zimbabwe this is useful for our purposes because africa and the americas were exploited in different ways and now we get to talk about them both oh and in case you were wondering there's really not much by way of dinosaurs to discuss with this film this adaptation has the somewhat dubious distinction of featuring the least amount of dinosaur screen time of any adaptation of the lost world and having the most amount of john rice davey's screen time barely makes up for it the first change they make from the book with regard to indigenous peoples is the inclusion of an african bush guide named malu this is her introduction and you sir you speak excellent english i honestly don't know what the filmmakers thought they were doing here malone is coded as a naive but ultimately pure of heart hero throughout most of the film it gets even creepier in the sequel and i honestly don't know if the filmmakers wanted us to think of this as like some rude boyish fixation or if this actually passed for progress in 1992 you know because he's so uh cosmopolitan just admiring the good lord's handiwork we'll make a naturalist out of you yet all i know is that colonial history is absolutely riddled with the presumption that indigenous women's bodies are entirely disposable even or perhaps especially by the men who found them sexually desirable while i was in the boat i captured a very beautiful woman whom the lord admiral columbus gave to me when i had taken her to my cabin she was naked as was their custom i was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire she was unwilling and so treated me with her nails that i wished i had never begun i then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears eventually we came to such terms i assure you that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for [ __ ] michelle de cunho second voyage of christopher columbus 1495. i think one example is enough you might also notice that malu who's the only indigenous character with more than five minutes of screen time in the whole film is several shades lighter than any of her african co-stars so there's colorism at play here too perhaps even more significantly this is the first adaptation to preserve the two warring tribe storyline from the book except this production didn't have the budget to realize a group of primitive ape men so they changed it to one good tribe of indigenous africans and one bad tribe whose local shaman has taken to kidnapping members of the other group so that he can sacrifice them to the carnivorous dinosaurs of the plateau the high priest is eventually killed and then professor summerley figures out which plants to feed the carnivores in order to keep them docile whereupon the two warring tribes decide to set aside their differences and reunite the tribe i'm not inclined to beat around the bush here this adaptation is positively steeped in the unspoken subtext that black people's biggest problem is other black people and that only white people can save them from themselves i don't doubt that this message was entirely unintentional but the damage that these patronizing stereotypes about indigenous peoples and indigenous africans in particular is well worth calling out so yeah the text is practically screaming can't we all just get along and you might be wondering what's the harm in that what's the harm in positive messaging for its own sake even if it flies in the face of history well i'll tell you or rather bell hooks will tell you the desire to make contact with those bodies deemed other with no apparent will to dominate assuages the guilt of the past even takes the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection these white savior narratives even unambiguously fictitious narratives which depict only kind-hearted benevolent explorers who want nothing but the best for indigenous peoples it's not just that they're fiction they're lies the simple fact that these narratives are often more well known to western audiences then the history of african exploitation itself causes observable measurable real-world harm as a final parting gift the explorers introduced the indigenous peoples to the wondrous modern technology of irrigation which plays into this pernicious stereotype that the indigenous peoples of africa and the americas weren't as advanced as europe and here's the thing i don't think it's ever a good idea to rank the advanced-ness or primitivity of any given society these things can't ever be ranked objectively but even by western standards the technological capabilities of indigenous peoples all around the world still ran circles around what europeans were capable of the homes of the wampanoag indians were warmer than their english counterparts and their shoes were better waterproofed native americans were generally taller and better fed than europeans spanish conquistadors quickly ditched their steel plate armor when they encountered the woven cotton armor of taunton tsuyu which was lighter cooler more maneuverable and only slightly less durable the maya had a more accurate calendar than the romans and they invented zero long before the europeans ever learned about it from mesopotamia even guns the undisputed poster child for european technological superiority were far less accurate than good old-fashioned bows and slings they also took far longer to reload and were only slightly more powerful at extremely close range a patriots history of the united states makes much ado about the fact that mesoamerica had not yet invented the wheel by the time the spaniards arrived in 1519. but this too is not only an obtuse mischaracterization it's just plain wrong they had the wheel there are thousands of surviving children's toys to prove it what they didn't do though was employ the wheel in any building or transportation efforts but when you don't have any horses or oxen to domesticate the wheel's suddenly a lot less useful and when the terrain is almost exclusively either marshy swampland or rocky savannah turns out just carrying your stuff is a whole lot quicker than carting it anywhere meanwhile tenochtitlan had a population bigger than paris in 1521 with indoor plumbing no food insecurity and streets so clean they could perform surgery in the open air no prizes for guessing africa was little different with major contributions in astronomy philosophy metallurgy agriculture linguistics architecture medicine textiles and mathematics to name only a few african smithies developed the bronze and iron ages simultaneously nubians utilized a home-brewed form of tetracycline as early as 350 a.d the oldest mathematical artifacts come from africa and they predate the domestication of dogs tonal bantu languages could be replicated with drums the list goes on and on you want to hear my favorite joke about european technocentric bias it comes from tumblr guy goes back in time a thousand years to his favorite historical time period the middle ages he steps out of his time machine and is surprised to see an advanced technologically superior civilization populated by people in full command of their environment with a standard of living even better than his own and the guy says whoops forgot to go to europe but what's especially grating to me here is the implication that westerners have ever contributed anything useful to african agriculture when in fact it was european colonizers who were responsible for some of the most disastrous farming practices in the history of the continent how europe underdeveloped africa by walter rodney is one of the greatest introductory texts about african history you'll ever read if you've never read a history book specifically about africa i highly recommend you start here even if you can't snag your own copy there are free pdfs online most african societies raised the cultivation of their own particular food staple to a fine art even the widespread resort to shifting cultivation with burning and light hoeing was not as childish as the first european colonists supposed and when colonialists started upsetting the thin topsoil the results were disastrous and europeans didn't just disrupt native farming practices they often replaced them with export-friendly monocultures that completely obliterated the local food chains monoculture was a colonialist invention in africa this concentration on one or two cash crops for sale abroad had many harmful effects sometimes cash crops were grown to the exclusion of staple foods thus causing famines the misrepresentation of history here is so specifically bad that even the one singular idea that white people gifted advanced irrigation technology to zimbabwe is directly refuted by the historical record zimbabwe was a zone of mixed farming irrigation and terracing reached considerable proportions there was no single dam or aqueduct comparable to those in asia or ancient rome but countless small streams were diverted and made to flow around hills in a manner that indicated an awareness of the scientific principles governing the motion of water in effect the people of zimbabwe had produced hydrologists through their understanding of the material environment this is the stuff you tend to get wrong when you want to pretend like colonialism or capitalism had any benefits to the people that had exploited and here look i get that i'm coming down pretty hard on a film that's almost cloyingly sincere in its desire for world peace all predicated on microbiologic contagion you're stupid theory is that all you care about professor living creatures are dying and you're hatching a new theory but just when i start to feel like i'm being too hard on it i go and read the very first line of women race in class by angela davis and i'm reminded why this [ __ ] matters when the influential scholar ulrich b phillis declared in 1918 that slavery in the old south had impressed upon african savages and their native-born descendants the glorious stamp of civilization he set the stage for a long and passionate debate this idea that white people somehow gifted civilization to africa is one of the core rationalizations of slavery so don't come at me with this whole primitive native schtick don't tell me it was europe who helped pull africa out of a developmental rut when europe is the one that put it there i promise if you read more than two books about the history of capitalism you'll learn that there's no such thing as an underdeveloped country only an over-exploited one the lost world 1999 so much projection it should work for imax i know it probably feels by now that you get the point already colonialism bad but we're still not out of hyperspecific adaptation unique stereotypes to debunk the lost world was next adapted as a two-part television pilot in 1999 which ultimately ran for three seasons for the purposes of this video we're only going to talk about the two-part pilot since that's really the only material that sticks even close to the original novel very few sentient alien skeletons in the book and no vampires this is like their sixth episode they waited six episodes before they put in vampires indigenous peoples have long served as a sort of stock boogeyman character and many a lost world narrative the 1992 adaptation is notable for having one of the few reconciliations between the explorers and natives at the end of the film but where the two previous adaptations of the lost world saw the indigenous characters threatening the heroes with only a few stock hostile native stereotypes namely human sacrifice no not me please everything that the 1999 adaptation is worried that the indigenous characters will do to the white heroes is in fact precisely what western colonizers did and still do to oppress indigenous peoples our main character's first encounter with indigenous peoples comes at the base of the plateau on the morning of the ascent all the white people are busy prepping a hot air balloon when professor sumley heads off to see why the porters aren't helping he finds him all dead killed in the night by a tribe of indigenous natives who apparently saw fit to spare all the white people until first light they then burst from the trees and try to kill them all and at one point i was like oh hey look one of the porters is going to make it but then i'm also like 99 sure there's a greater than zero chance we're looking at some brown face here this trope the territorial natives who attack without warning sounds at first blush like an unflattering but perfectly reasonable narrative trope for the writers to use after all the white people are clearly trespassing so why wouldn't an indigenous tribe attack without warning well you might be surprised while there are plenty of instances of indigenous peoples attacking europeans without warning in the midst of ongoing conflicts almost all instances of first contact were remarkably peaceful and often even after native tribes have been warned about europeans in advance they literally gave them head starts before they attacked in 1517 a spanish scouting party landed in yucatan and were met by a group of indigenous maya who subsequently brought them to their village in ambivalent conquests anthropologist inga clendenin summarizes what happened next according to an eyewitness account from bernal diaz a group of indian men wearing ragged mantles and carrying loads of reeds advanced piled their reeds before the spaniards and withdrew then ten men came swiftly out of one of the temples their long white mantles fell straight to their feet but it was their hair which caught and held the spaniard's incredulous attention for it hung long and strangely thick impenetrably matted and crusted with dried blood an elegant dumb show they indicated that the strangers were to leave before the piled reeds were destroyed they thrust fire into the heap turned and re-entered the temple the spanish then understandably bit a hasty retreat to their ships that'd be one hell of a scene by the way way more tense than just watching the indigenous people spring from a tree line no points for guessing it was usually the europeans who demonstrated an unnerving tendency to attack without provocation on first contact with perhaps the most infamous instance being when francisco pizarro captured atawalpa at their very first meeting in 1521 after atawalpa dropped a copy of the bible onto the ground and for anybody who wants to debate this that is not a provocation that is a pretext so after surviving their first attack all the white people make it safely up onto the plateau and within minutes they meet their first fellow human who turns out to be another white person sexy jungle girl veronica now this is i feel like i could make a whole video about just veronica the way that she's both the worst of the tarzan trope which was originally written as an explicit parable about the inherent biological superiority of whiteness and the worst of the born sexy yesterday trope in which the resident hottie is too socially naive to know just how stinking hot she is where'd she get hair dye in the middle of the jungle when they all meet for the first time there's this brief moment where you think that maybe the writers are going to offer up a critique on the chronic infantilization of native cultures by western colonists me friend challenger you good lord man this isn't edgar rice burroughs you don't expect it to understand english do you well my french is a little rusty but i'm willing to give it a try but if that was the intent it doesn't work because no one's laughing at professor challenger's assumption that a jungle girl would be primitive here they're laughing at the assumption that a fellow white would be i'll not only leave this for me i've had best experience with under development anyway veronica goes from being the invincible jungle girl to damsel in distress in the space of like one commercial break and then the main source of conflict throughout the second half of the pilot is basically just making sure that her lilly white virtue isn't sullied by the lecherous chief jacoba to whom she is betrothed while unconscious apparently veronica had previously enjoyed a friendly relationship with the tribe but once she's knocked out all bets are off and herein lies the projection if you look at actual history it wasn't the indigenous peoples who were forcing rape and marital slavery upon the europeans how could they white women weren't even on those first expeditionary voyages it was western men who were taking indigenous brides for themselves there is one wrinkle though chief jacoba doesn't decide to forcibly marry veronica all on his own it's one of the expedition members marguerite crew who actually brokers the trade veronica for a cache of accumulated riches but this feels less like an acknowledgment of european complicity and sexual slavery and more of a way for the writers to simply vilify their resident ice queen god i hate this trope too she's a stone cold killer who cares about nothing but money right so of course she's constantly mocked and scorned by resident bad boy john roxton who gets to gawk and manhandle her whenever he wants which you don't have to feel bad about because she's just some greedy [ __ ] remember i guess greed has its own rewards [ __ ] why are you here you just wanted to bag the local wildlife miss crew if i have to ask you one more time i'm going to shoot you and save you the pain of being equalized by that crocodile for your information there are no crocodiles in the amazon it's called caiman and yet that is an alligator anyway the men show up to camp just before chief jacoba says i do and since they saved his daughter's life along the way he decides to call the wedding off interestingly enough this adaptation does include a rival group of primitive ape men but it never pits them against the indigenous tribe they're simply wholesale slaughtered like every other antagonist that pops up in the film which makes perfect sense right i mean what self-respecting adaptation of the lost world would go out of its way to preserve the lives of the ape men the lost world 2001 a faint glimmer of introspection without a shadow of a doubt the fifth and final adaptation of the lost world at the time of this recording was a two-part made-for-tv miniseries from the bbc in 2001 which i didn't even know existed until i started doing research for this video this one stars none other than bob hoskins as professor challenger and the exact same cgi dinosaur models that they used in walking with dinosaurs as the dinosaurs that is the big al right there from a pure film craft perspective we're ending on a high note here much of the conflict in this adaptation comes from the clash of personalities between the characters which i think is a key aspect of the original novel's appeal it's been a long time since you've done any real science and it's also not nearly as hokey as all the others although they clearly tempt it with john williams hmm wherever i heard that before [Music] before i tell you anything else about it i want to cold open with this scene which yeah this is the scene where they first cross over onto the plateau and this is the film's first opportunity to say something unique about colonialism something that hasn't been said in any of the previous adaptations once the group makes it over to the other side it's not an apatosaur or an angry porter who strands them there it's a missionary [Music] reverend care had been discouraging them from looking for the plateau from the very start we should go back while we can but then he was the least bit surprised when they actually found them turns out he's known about the dinosaurs for years but he sabotages every expedition that ever comes close since he doesn't want them drumming up support for that wacky evolution theory he's heard so much about the choice of antagonist here is interesting because it offers at least a tacit acknowledgement of the oppressive role that evangelical christianity has played in the history of colonialism missionaries have historically served as a colonizing force the christian missionaries were as much a part of the colonizing forces as were the explorers traitors and soldiers the church's role was primarily to preserve the social relations of colonialism as an extension of the role it played in preserving the social relations of capitalism in europe therefore the christian church stressed humility docility and acceptance it's not like this adaptation goes into the nitty-gritty it doesn't even depict christianity as a force opposed to indigenous life but rather western scientific advancement which has played its own oppressive role throughout the history of western imperialism to be sure there's a scene before they reach the plateau where reverend care and professor summerley are arguing about fossils and the age of the earth and the script sort of just makes it seem like both men are simply out to prove their own beliefs no matter what it takes and that the scientists just so happen to be right it is no basis for serious science you would replace god with man and you would replace science with twaddle whereas if i were writing it i would have tried to dramatize a more fundamental difference between science and religion namely where religion seeks to prove itself and therefore ignore or suppress any evidence that might contradict it science seeks to disprove itself which generally makes it a much more honest and efficacious line of inquiry anyway the show just sort of frames it all like preacher bad but at this point i'll take whatever introspection i can get and that's sort of how i'd sum up this specific adaptation's vision of colonialism there was an attempt they are doing an introspection here they're asking questions reevaluating the narrative this is actually the first and so far only adaptation of the lost world that actually preserves the war between a group of ape men and a tribe of indigenous peoples from the book every other adaptation has either excluded the war altogether transformed them into two tribes of warring humans or never actually pitted either side against each other soon after arriving on the plateau challenger and summerley are kidnapped by the eight men and after a few indigenous men are killed to prove that the situation is serious roxane and the others show up at the last minute and rescue them along with a tribe of indigenous south americans who've agreed to help out this all follows the book to a t but then something different happens after they're brought back to the indigenous people's camp along with some captive ape men they learn that the apes are to be slaughtered in their honor later that night a prospect that professor challenger promptly forbids no one will be killed no one roxton then chimes in and says it's none of their business how the tribes people conduct their affairs he says they must die letting them live would bring disaster to the village i forbid it i'm not sure we should interfere professor it's none of our business i like this plot point a lot because it's interrogating what is possibly the single most important step in decolonizing western thought preserving the right of indigenous self-determination decolonizing methodologies is something of a landmark text in which indigenous maori researcher linda tuhiwe smith sets down some guiding principles for decolonizing certain ways of thinking and studying indigenous populations the ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples just knowing that someone measured our faculties by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are in a key section of her book smith presents a diagram that represents several processes at work when working to foster indigenous self-determination it's a dynamic process one that has to be constantly reevaluated and renegotiated and in fact she spends much of the rest of her book deconstructing and analyzing it but in one especially concrete example of indigenous self-determination smith highlights the charter of the indigenous tribal peoples of the tropical forests which was signed in da nang in 1993. the declaration calls on government and states to develop policies and practices which recognize indigenous people as the guardians of their customary knowledge and have the right to protect and control dissemination of that knowledge and that indigenous peoples have the right to create new knowledge based on cultural traditions smith then points out that it's often western researchers who were the very first to violate these rights belief in the ideal that benefiting mankind is indeed a primary outcome of scientific research is as much a reflection of ideology as it is of academic research it becomes so taken for granted that many researchers simply assume that they as individuals embody this ideal and are natural representatives of it when they work with other communities undeterred challenger basically pressures the chief into issuing a temporary stay of execution which the ape men take full advantage of the big set piece of part two is when the ape men call a pair of allosaurus to the camp which wreak a bunch of havoc before they're finally brought down there's this interesting moment in the middle of the scene where the ape men take pity on ed malone and cover up his scent so that he isn't eaten and at first i thought the movie was mixing its metaphors here i was like well are we supposed to want the ape men dead or not but in hindsight i think it's okay if the movie's answer is well it's complicated there are still plenty of aspects to this film that still cling to the old colonial comforts rather than giving us an actual indigenous character to relate to we get agnes the daughter of rev care who's lived her whole life in the jungle and therefore knows very little about proper civilized ladyship ness hood but it is obvious that socially she's a little well backward as evidenced by uh she likes to swim um what what are you doing i'm going for a swim in your fiancee's lake god what a savage am i right anyway ed malone's whole arc is deciding whether or not he's going to care about agnes's lack of social refinement and once he gets stumped by his old fiance back in london his decision to marry her couldn't be easier i hope you don't think i'm uncivilized for kissing you first mr malone lord roxton meanwhile takes a shine to the chief's daughter and winds up staying on the plateau with her we even get this little montage of lord roxton conforming to the tribe's way of life it's very simple i think i get what the writers are trying to say here i think they're trying to say there's no such thing as primitive it's just different people living life the way that they see fit that everyone's way of life is in fact just as highly derived as anybody else's that's the most charitable interpretation i can think of anyway they might even be intentionally referencing the historical precedent of westerners leaving their society and joining indigenous cultures when given half the chance in the end i just wish they hadn't facilitated this particular message through roxton's dick there's one last thing i want to mention something big and unexpected possibly the biggest surprise that this adaptation has to offer when the group finally makes it back to london they do the thing they do in every adaptation they bring a dinosaur back with them well a pterosaur not a dinosaur but you know what i mean it promptly escapes but their reputations are secured that's usually where the story ends but this time something else happens even as the baby pterosaur tries to escape reporters are already asking questions about the possible mineral resources on the plateau did you find any gold on the plateau realizing that the lost world is about to become europe's next strip mine malone pulls challenger aside and tells him to convince the crowd that it was all a hoax this is what you call progress remember what happened when we interfered before roxton knew we had no right and we should have listened to him which he does ladies and gentlemen dinosaurs you didn't honestly believe me did you this point dramatizes one of the most fundamental questions of western indigenous contact do westerners even have a right to it moreover it is also important to question that most fundamental belief of all that individual researchers have an inherent right to knowledge and truth regardless of your own personal opinion history has shown us that even mere contact with indigenous tribes has done more damage than any military campaign ever could so the idea that non-contact isn't even a possibility is pure self-interested spinelessness if you ask me nobody wants your chick tracts john and i honestly never thought in a million years i'd see it in an adaptation of the lost world it's certainly not a deep dive it's a little more than an acknowledgement one which still manages to frame the explorers as the heroes but it's proof that these stories can question or even subvert even the most fundamental colonialist assumptions about indigenous peoples they don't have to go out of their way to reinforce violent colonialist stereotypes in the name of some [ __ ] literary tradition on the contrary with enough effort and education and patience and time and effort they too can be decolonized and then after dinosaur films let's do the economy [Music] this video is 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it came time to pick a from for this video i wanted a film that represented one of the more recent attempts by a certain sci-fi loving filmmaker to try and decolonize the typical lost world narrative and so i went with shape of water when i first saw this from i was like i remember there being a bunch of green in that movie but surely it wasn't every single scene was it well it was this teal here is the cadillac scene and this grey bit is the black and white dance sequence at the end and this strip of jaundice looking yellow here that's when we visit strickland's home it's not a lost world film in the traditional sense but rather a natural evolution of the genre a film that asks what happens after the explorers come home more of that please i could do with more not for nothing but i'd also like to thank from as a sponsor at some point because they agreed to sponsor a video about colonialism sight unseen and didn't exert any editorial control over this video they recently introduced the ability to search their inventory by color and they've also added a new films buff bundle which gives your phone an artist quality gloss finish doubles the depth from the wall and prints the name of the film on the side of the canvas they also update their catalog all the time based on user suggestions so if you're in the market for an expertly stylized canvas art centerpiece that reveals as much about a given film as it does your taste in movies head on over to from.co where you can get ten percent off your order by using the referral link from dot co slash cold crash pictures that's foam dot co slash cold crash pictures also a special shout out to the etsy store cultured kinfolk which made this shirt when i set out to pick a shirt for this video i wanted it to do three things it had to be from a company that supported decolonization i wanted a shirt that was maybe clever enough to make you smirk without minimizing the seriousness of today's subject matter and i also wanted a shirt that was appropriate for a white boy to wear and anyway this was the shirt that fit all three criteria i suppose they're not technically a sponsor of this video they're not paying me anything but i do recommend everybody go over and check out their store now everybody go donate to an indigenous mutual aid organization some of you really have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes on then some of you really some of you have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes up goes on this some of you have no idea how deep the rabbit hole rabbit hole goes rabbit hole goes rabbit hole goes rabbit hole goes

2021-01-06 06:25

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