Some of the most controversial movie characters are the ones who didn’t just stay on the screen, they became part of arguments about things in the real world, too.
A smile with extra security
Arthur Fleck, aka the Joker, is probably one of the most famous villains of all time, thanks to that purple suit and big laugh. But in 2019’s Joker, Fleck’s broke, lonely, and mentally unwell, slowly being pushed into becoming the infamous villain, and that’s the problem here.
Families connected to the 2012 Aurora theater shooting actually wrote to Warner Bros. to share their concerns about the film, saying it glamorizes violence, although Warner Bros. denied that. Still, there was clearly a lot of tension around the whole film and the Joker himself.
Some cab rides stay strange
Travis Bickle has a normal enough job in Taxi Driver because he’s, surprise surprise, a taxi driver in New York. He watches people and eventually goes deeper into his own violent ideas in a way that actually made it beyond the screen.
In 1981, John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, and he’d watched a certain film many times before doing so. What film? Yes, you guessed it, Taxi Driver. He became obsessed with Jodie Foster and saw himself in Travis, so it’s no surprise it’s controversial.
A vision many rejected
Jesus Christ. No, we’re not talking here about the real man, we’re talking about the version of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ. You know, the one showing him as someone facing doubt and fear, as well as the temptation of having a normal life with a wife and kids.
That’s the part that really annoyed people. Around 1,200 Christian radio stations in California criticized the movie, and several theater chains refused to show it. There were even 25,000 protesters outside Universal in Los Angeles; hardly a quiet opening week.
A joke with passports attached
The whole character of Borat Sagdiyev in Borat is meant to be a joke, but perhaps actor Sacha Baron Cohen shouldn’t have chosen a real country. Borat’s a fake journalist from Kazakhstan and acts wildly racist, sexist, antisemitic, and clueless.
A lot of Kazakhs hated the character, even Kazakhstan’s government criticized how their country was shown and threatened legal action, it was that bad. Groups like The Anti-Defamation League were worried that some viewers wouldn’t understand it was satire.
A comedy that changed plans
Here’s another real person with a controversial movie version. This time, it’s North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in The Interview, shown to be the target of a CIA plan to assassinate him. That alone is enough to make things a little tense.
North Korean officials put out threats against the theaters planning to show the movie, and then there was the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, so it figures that a lot of chains dropped the movie. All that drama for a fake portrayal of a real person.
A fake movie inside the problem
Tropic Thunder features the character of Simple Jack, and he wasn’t even a real movie character, he was part of a fake film in the film. That’s right, a film inside a film, made by Ben Stiller’s character, Tugg Speedman, but that wasn’t the issue here.
It was how the jokes around Jack were focused on his intellectual disability and included slurs against disabled people, so it’s no surprise disability groups weren’t happy. 22 groups backed a national boycott, and protesters showed up at the premiere. A joke inside a joke is still harmful.
A galaxy with an awkward accent
Let’s get one thing straight, Jar Jar Binks was supposed to be a goofy character, he was there for the kids, after all. He does all sorts of silly, and kind of annoying, things in the first Star Wars prequel film, The Phantom Menace. But some moviegoers noticed something odd.
They said the character felt too close to old racial caricatures of Black people, that he was a modern version of blackface, despite being an alien. Lucasfilm rejected the idea that it was doing anything intentionally racist, of course not, but that didn’t diminish the Jar Jar controversy.
A villain built from old fears
Exotic and dangerous, that’s the problem with Dr. Fu Manchu in the Fu Manchu films, apparently. He’s shown in films like The Mask of Fu Manchu to be a sinister Chinese mastermind, although the actor playing him was a white man in yellowface.
That’s the tip of the iceberg, though, because organizations like Museum of Chinese in America said that Fu Manchu was part of old Western fears about Asian invasion. They argued that he’s a racist movie villain. It’s not hard to see why that’d be controversial.
A first role people still debate
What could be controversial about a child character in a movie? A lot, it seems, just look at 12-year-old Mathilda in Léon: The Professional, as she’s a young girl living with Léon, an adult hitman. He doesn’t seem remotely prepared for normal life.
The movie includes scenes where she says she loves him and copies some of the behaviors of adult movie stars. It doesn’t help that Natalie Portman was actually 12 during filming, too, so the whole thing feels decidedly creepy and not at all appropriate, even Portman said it was ‘cringey.’
A love story history didn’t give
The animated version of Pocahontas sells the real woman’s life as a Disney romance, with songs, soft colors, the whole works, although the real story is nothing like that. Pocahontas was eleven when the English arrived, and her life wasn’t a romantic movie, not in the slightest.
Disney aged her up and built a love story around John Smith, creating a lot of controversy among Native American audiences that disliked how it showed Pocahontas. They also said Disney turned down help with cultural and historical accuracy, just to make things worse.
A mermaid people argued over
The movie hadn’t even been released yet, but the announcement that Black singer Halle Bailey would play Ariel was controversial enough. The 1989 animated version of The Little Mermaid featured Ariel with white skin and red hair, it’s how she came to be known.
But some people weren’t happy about that and argued that Ariel couldn’t be Black, she had to be white, with news sources like Reuters even reporting on the changes. It was that serious.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
Stephen King drops his list of 10 favorite movies ever
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