Movies have always been a great way to escape reality. You can throw your mind into a fantasy world, where you can witness characters and events that mirror reality. You can enjoy antic or cringe at certain situations, but at the end of the day, it is just a movie. Even if the movie is extremely far-fetched, people watch movies to entertain themselves. And, no matter how bizarre a scenario or character, the audience will still embark on that journey.
Movies styles, content, production value, etc. have all changed drastically from the first film. Cinema has come a long way from days of black and white silent movies. Improvements in technology, has aided those changes no doubt. What interests me is the content of movies and how they have changed. Like technology changed the way movies were made, society plays a huge role in what's deemed acceptable and controversial in a movie. How do we go from D.W. Griffith's KKK tribute, "The Birth of a Nation," to White Nationalists complaining about being the victim in almost every modern Hollywood movie? Society dictates what's fair game and what's taboo and it's evident when analyzing cinema's history.
You can't start a history of White Nationalists in cinema without 1915's "The Birth of a Nation."
D. W. Griffith's film was a big success commercially and for movies in general, but it was a bigger win for White Nationalists everywhere. I remember watching this film in my high school's Film Study class a junior. The film takes place during the era of Civil War and Reconstruction (post Civil War). The blacks in the movie, who are actually white actors in black face, are depicted as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women. In one part of the movie, a black person is killed after he aggressively pursued a white woman into the forest, where she essentially jumped to her death, rather than being with a black man. The Ku Klux Klan hunts down the black man and tries him, to only fine the man guilty. In the film, the Ku Klux Klan is formed to retaliate against the Reconstruction laws allowing mixed race marriages and orders to salute black officers. The KKK is depicted as heroic and as crusaders to maintain the white race, while protecting the purity that is white women. The film sparked a second wave of the KKK and was also used as a huge recruiting tool.
A lot of early films depict whites as the superior while every other race is inferior, plays a sidekick or a villain. Dehumanization and holding whites supreme to other races was commonplace until more modern cinema. Many movies depict white nationalists as ignorant, country folk, uneducated, and devoid of civilization. Almost everyone taking this class have been influenced by media to think of white supremacists in that light. When doing the "defining white nationalism" assignment, many people had the same "person" in mind when thinking of White Nationalists.
"American History X" came out in 1998 and was interesting because the main character Derek, played by Edward Norton, is an intelligent student, but gets recruited by the leader of the Neo-Nazi movement after Derek's father is killed by a black drug dealer. The anger at a certain group is used to as a recruiting tool. Derek is a smart person, but certain events stir feelings of anger, and that anger is harnessed as hate. His hate disappears after spending jail time, when he becomes friends with a black inmate. Not every person in the movie is as smart as Derek. A lot of the gang come off as empty-headed, following every order from the leader. The leader uses his minions as his tools for destruction, while keeping his own hands clean.
It's comforting to think of White Nationalists in a way of being unintelligent and ignorant. Almost in a way, it is comforting for whites to think of every other race as below them (but on a way lesser scale). The depiction of White Nationalists or of just white people in general in cinema has angered White Nationalists so much they steer clear from a lot of Hollywood films.
