What makes Vanessa different from someone like Lucy in Dracula or Amy on Fright Night? It's well established trope that vampire thralls turn on their family/lovers etc.

@mechajutaro said:

@CelluloidFan said:

I have always enjoyed this film more than any other installment in the series featuring Wesley Snipes for various reasons...

1. It has a near-perfect blend of the realistic and fantastic, content-wise.
2. The cinematography is beautiful, and so is N'Bushe.
3. Snipes actually seems to be having fun.
4. etc....

The issue with the black women in it is vexing, though. It's mostly the lovely Sanaa Lathan, who plays Blade/Eric's mother Vanessa, who does the job. At some point well into the film, we find out that she survived Blade's birth, and is actually a vampire herself, who's a paramour of villain Deacon Frost. Vanessa betrays Blade in a key scene in the film, setting him up for defeat and acting as black "traitor" on perhaps different levels. That is, Vanessa is both helper for Frost (the bad guy) as well as, if you're into this kind of thinking, a black consort for the evil, white vampire. Of course, the whole film has this nutty theme of "pure bloods" & "turned vampires" that threatens to override any racial text in it -- heck, Blade himself (played by Snipes) is a hybrid -- part-human, part-vampire.

There is also a lovely scene in the film featuring a little black girl who allows herself to be used as bait for Blade in the scene with the vampire books... this little doll causes poor Blade to be caught by the vampires. Blade's mentor, an aged, white man named Abraham Whistler helps him and his helper played by N'Bushe Wright out of the mess and to safety, however.

This will go on being my favorite of the Blade films, at least until the MCU's own offering with Mahershala Ali comes out... its only other glaring flaw is in some CGI that today, sadly looks obsolete. But I felt like touching on this interesting quirk of a favorite film of mine here.

The main chick, the doctor, was also a black woman. She didn't betray Blade

Edit: Right. I know. But a substantial amount of women -- within the film's running time -- who are or appear black act / function as what could be interpreted as racial turncoats. I mean, to get pretty crude, there’s a black woman giving Quinn head in the nightclub within, like the film’s first 10 mins.

Either this, or the "turncoat-ism" on the part of the black female characters just stands out. But I feel you have to have either an oppositional gaze or a critical eye to notice it.

@CelluloidFan said:

The issue with the black women in it is vexing, though. It's mostly the lovely Sanaa Lathan, who plays Blade/Eric's mother Vanessa, who does the job. At some point well into the film, we find out that she survived Blade's birth, and is actually a vampire herself, who's a paramour of villain Deacon Frost. Vanessa betrays Blade in a key scene in the film, setting him up for defeat and acting as black "traitor" on perhaps different levels. That is, Vanessa is both helper for Frost (the bad guy) as well as, if you're into this kind of thinking, a black consort for the evil, white vampire. Of course, the whole film has this nutty theme of "pure bloods" & "turned vampires" that threatens to override any racial text in it -- heck, Blade himself (played by Snipes) is a hybrid -- part-human, part-vampire.

There is also a lovely scene in the film featuring a little black girl who allows herself to be used as bait for Blade in the scene with the vampire books... this little doll causes poor Blade to be caught by the vampires. Blade's mentor, an aged, white man named Abraham Whistler helps him and his helper played by N'Bushe Wright out of the mess and to safety, however.

The film just makes an interesting little statement in this way.

@mechajutaro said:

@CelluloidFan said:

@mechajutaro said:

@CelluloidFan said:

I have always enjoyed this film more than any other installment in the series featuring Wesley Snipes for various reasons...

1. It has a near-perfect blend of the realistic and fantastic, content-wise.
2. The cinematography is beautiful, and so is N'Bushe.
3. Snipes actually seems to be having fun.
4. etc....

The issue with the black women in it is vexing, though. It's mostly the lovely Sanaa Lathan, who plays Blade/Eric's mother Vanessa, who does the job. At some point well into the film, we find out that she survived Blade's birth, and is actually a vampire herself, who's a paramour of villain Deacon Frost. Vanessa betrays Blade in a key scene in the film, setting him up for defeat and acting as black "traitor" on perhaps different levels. That is, Vanessa is both helper for Frost (the bad guy) as well as, if you're into this kind of thinking, a black consort for the evil, white vampire. Of course, the whole film has this nutty theme of "pure bloods" & "turned vampires" that threatens to override any racial text in it -- heck, Blade himself (played by Snipes) is a hybrid -- part-human, part-vampire.

There is also a lovely scene in the film featuring a little black girl who allows herself to be used as bait for Blade in the scene with the vampire books... this little doll causes poor Blade to be caught by the vampires. Blade's mentor, an aged, white man named Abraham Whistler helps him and his helper played by N'Bushe Wright out of the mess and to safety, however.

This will go on being my favorite of the Blade films, at least until the MCU's own offering with Mahershala Ali comes out... its only other glaring flaw is in some CGI that today, sadly looks obsolete. But I felt like touching on this interesting quirk of a favorite film of mine here.

The main chick, the doctor, was also a black woman. She didn't betray Blade

Edit: Right. I know. But a substantial amount of women -- that is, within the film's running time -- who are or appear black act / function as what could be interpreted as racial turncoats. I mean there’s a black woman giving Quinn head in the nightclub within, like the film’s first 10 mins.

Either this, or the "turncoat-ism" on the part of the black female characters just stands out. But I feel you have to have either an oppositional gaze or a critical eye to notice it.

Not having seen this one in awhile, the only black women I remember who had more than cameos in this movie that I recall are the main chick and Sanna Lathan. I really don't recall there being any more than a whopping one black woman who betrays Blade in this, or who serves as a racial turncoat in some way

I already covered this, mechajutaro. If you have a critical eye or an oppositional gaze (look it up online), you'll notice that there are 3 black women or females in the film who do stuff that some black men could see as a sort of "betrayal." One is Blade's mother. The other is the little girl who serves as a kind of bait for Blade and gets him briefly captured. Blade assumes the little girl is innocent and tells her to give him her hand. A moment later, the girl is attacking him and the vampires are coming in to get him. Then, the third one is lol the woman I mentioned in the club. So that's a whopping 3 black females, yes, but all 3 of them stand out in the story in some way or form. The chick in the nightclub scene stands out the least, story-wise. The ratio of black women in the film who come off as "turncoats", the way I see it, to those who actually just help Blade, is like 2:1. It's just something that catches my eye whenever I throw the disc in the player.

Not here to preach, I just felt like analyzing.....

@mechajutaro said:

I have something of an oppositional gaze, 'Loid; I'll train said gaze on the all but forgotten Denzel Washington thriller Out Of Time for a moment, for it seems to have some of the same problems you described in Blade. Of the two non-white primary female characters, one(also played by Lathan)betrays the black leading man outright, while the other(Eva Mendes)proves herself to be hopelessly six steps behind everyone else throughout the movie. In the case of Mendes's character, the opposition is compounded by the director's insistence on leaving the audience(who was almost certainly overwhelmingly male)with a pair of blue b-lls..... He went through all the trouble to set this movie in South Florida, yet didn't exploit the surroundings as a means of having EM hit the pool

I do believe the oppositional gaze is meant to mitigate against a phallocentric gaze, not embody one.

I do believe you're an academic. I'm a guy who reads books by academics. You bore me

@mechajutaro said:

All of this liberal arts based babbling about gazes ignores biological realities . Realities which obliterate into smithereens this absurd notion of phallocentrism

Don't you love these articles that take observations from studies out of context.

Here's one study's observation that heterosexual males might be as attracted to - excited by - naked men as heterosexual females are.

The pupil dilates to images that are arousing.

Both heterosexual men and women showed greater pupil dilation to images of nude men than to nude women.

@mechajutaro said:

@CelluloidFan said:

@mechajutaro said:

I have something of an oppositional gaze, 'Loid; I'll train said gaze on the all but forgotten Denzel Washington thriller Out Of Time for a moment, for it seems to have some of the same problems you described in Blade. Of the two non-white primary female characters, one(also played by Lathan)betrays the black leading man outright, while the other(Eva Mendes)proves herself to be hopelessly six steps behind everyone else throughout the movie. In the case of Mendes's character, the opposition is compounded by the director's insistence on leaving the audience(who was almost certainly overwhelmingly male)with a pair of blue b-lls..... He went through all the trouble to set this movie in South Florida, yet didn't exploit the surroundings as a means of having EM hit the pool

I do believe the oppositional gaze is meant to mitigate against a phallocentric gaze, not embody one.

All of this liberal arts based babbling about gazes ignores biological realities . Realities which obliterate into smithereens this absurd notion of phallocentrism

One point of the opp. gaze is that we, as humans, can adjust the indelicate aspects of our God-given nature and not act like cave people. Did you know it is said the most powerful sex organ in the human body is the brain? The brain, which regulates and changes responses to stimuli.

In the right contexts, I enjoy catching a glimpse of a woman's curvy backside as much as the next guy does. But there's so much more to me than that. I'm not a Neanderthal lol.