Deconstructing Race in 10,000 B.C.

I’m not going to write about what a dumb movie 10,000 B.C. was… Though it was dumb.
I’m not going to spend much time on how silly it was anthropologically, geographically, or logistically. Though it was quite silly on all counts.
I’m not even going to go on about how somebody needs to learn what “story” means.

**Spoler Alert: If you’re foolish enough to waste time and money seeing 10,000 B.C., I will reveal some of the climax below. **
I’m much more focused on the subtext of the movie, what it says with regards to our views of race and ethnic differences.
The movie revolves around a tribe of light skinned (European-looking) Cave people. The mystic/wise-woman/shaman of the tribe speaks a prophecy. The main point of the prophecy is that it’ll take somebody with blue eyes to set everybody free. I think that detail is worth noticing: only the blue-eyed person will set everybody free.
These light skinned cave people go on this journey across their frozen tundra. After days of walking through the snow they suddenly find themselves in a jungle. (I laughed outloud. They walk into this scene with all kinds of ferns and trees and steam in the air and you see the snow ground about a hundred feet behind them.) They find this group of dark skinned (African-looking) cave people. These light skinned folks eventually trip upon some sort of prophecy of the darker-skinned people. The European-looking caveman ended up leading an army of African-looking tribes to recover their family and friends from the evil slave traders who had torn through all the lands and tribes and made slaves of all the other people.
It eventually becomes clear that these slave traders are Egyptians working on the pyramids. Much is made of the idea that the Pharoah is treated like a God. If the protagonists are clearly Europeans, if the army is clearly African, then the Egyptians are clearly middle-eastern.
I recognize that if you look at a map Egypt is in Africa. I realize that by most reasonable descriptions, Egyptians should be considered African. The truth is that most people think of Egypt as being part of the Middle East. I’m resisting the urge to take a tangent of speculation around why this might be the case.

I believe there is a subtext in all this. A ludicrious re-casting of history itself. Europe and Africa should be such good friends and the Middle East is the source of all evil. Of course, none of this is stated out. Christianity and Islam don’t even exist, of course, at the time that the movie is set in. I have no idea if this recasting was intentional or not.

This is not so different from many movies. Consider historical pieces like “Ghandi” or “Cry Freedom” Both invent or distort the importance of European figures, making them seem much more important than they actually were. Take a look at most theatrical tellings of the Jesus story. Though many have done a much better job in the last few years with making the characters look remotely Middle Eastern, almost without exception the character playing Jesus will have the lightest skin. Even kids cartoons: notice who has the foreign accents. Almost always it’ll be the villians or the fools. (A friend of mine, many years ago was finishing up her Master’s Degree in American Studies. She wrote an entire thesis on the ethnic stereotypes embodied in the Go-bots cartoon… And yes, there was a Go-bots cartoon, believe it or not.)
If any of these culture happenings existed in a vaccuum I could write them off as coincidence. If there was a countervaling subtext in other films, I could accept the accusations of a liberal, poltically correct media. Maybe those realities exist on the surface of what’s going on in the media, but there is something pretty ugly underneath.