So what’s Jesse Kornbluth up to these days? The Vanity Fair contributing editor and former AOL editorial director has a new website called Head Butler that acts as “a plugged-in cultural concierge who will tell you about books, music and movies you might never hear about from anyone else.” And ain’t that the truth: I mean, where else are you going to read about the fundamental racism of Curious George? Well, quite a few places, as it turns out, like the Des Moines Register column of Kyle Munson and the academic research of CWRU prof Marie Lathers…although Lathers seems a bit, shall we say, extreme, as she also believes the Ridley Scott movie Alien is an allegory about black men being killed by white astronauts so they can keep outer space all to themselves. (It’s days like this when I’m ever so glad I was disinvited from graduate school.)
Anyway, Curious George: Through Kornbluth’s eyes, the children’s classic becomes an allegory of the slave trade which then transmogrifies into an allegory of “a minstrel who will always grin and shuffle for his white ‘massuh.'” Apparently the Head Butler readers are nodding their heads in agreement with this interpretation and adding their own sinister subtexts. “The monkey’s ‘benefactor’ is a timorous single white man in very tight pants, sporting symbols of hyper-masculinity (boots, safari hat, pipe) who is holed up with a monkey for a companion,” runs one email commentary Kornbluth passed along, “a monkey who is essentially a mischievous little boy who needs loving and spanking. There are no women in the picture, nothing to spoil the man-boy perfect love. Curious George is a parable every member of NAMBLA can embrace.” O-kay, then.
UPDATE, 12/13/07: Marie Lathers eventually found this item, and emailed to take issue with the characterization of her position. “I never have stated in a lecture or publication that Alien is a film about killing black guys to keep them out of space, as you state on your site. I believe you found this erroneous information on another website,” she writes, which is true—the link’s to that description of her appearance at the 2002 MLA convention is included in the first paragraph. “I don’t think Alien is about this. It’s about other things.” Bearing out that assertion: a CWRU profile which mentions how she uses Alien in a course on representations of “women or femininity in outer space.”