I cannot recommend bringing your heritage and culture into how you view media enough.
It is important to consider the culture of the person who created the piece, absolutely; but the different perspectives offered by the viewers is fascinating in and of itself and does not always detract from the message.
As an example, when I was younger, I watched Schindler's List. This movie is famously shot in black and white except for one section, concerning a little girl in a red coat. The camera follows her until her eventual death.
I am Turtle Island Indigenous and I was always taught that the only color spirits could see was red, because it is the color of life and blood.
So the second the girl in the red jacket came on screen, something inside me chilled with fear.
The only color in the movie was that red. At some point, I, the viewer, had died.
I remember sobbing at the sight of the burning human piles that were shown, convinced I was buried in there somewhere. The reason I had only seen red on the girl was that my death was recent. I was the ash in the air mistaken for snow. I had died before her and had followed her, helplessly, until she followed me.
The message I got for that was maybe not what the creator had intended: that there was no "being clever enough" or "good enough" or "kind enough" that would shield or protect you from such a massive tidal wave of evil.
You are not exempt from tragedy, that red jacket whispered. You are not special.
When I told some of my white friends about my experience with viewing Schindler's List, some were shocked and the rest just out-and-out mocked me for my "media illiteracy".
"it was just a filming trick to make you feel something," I remember one saying, which terrified me. How had he not felt anything even before she showed up?
However, when I repeated my viewing to a college class, they were fascinated. The implications of what I had seen and felt made the film all the more terrifying and solemn. It encouraged a lot of people to try to ask themselves what media meant from a cultural perspective, where they hadn't done that before.
jacobvanloon
