Hollywood Film: Stereotypes Within Hollywood Cinema

Stereotypes within Hollywood Cinema
Over the past 20 years Hollywood cinema have steadily maintained and produced cliché and stereotypical images of African Americans’. These clichés vary from African Americans’ being violent, simple minded, poor, and helpless. Through such films as Boyz in the Hood, A Time to Kill, Django Unchained, and Do the Right Thing accompanied by past discussions about the films. These stereotypes exists and have been maintained to present day.
Boyz in the Hood, filmed in 1991 is an example of how African Americans are portrayed in a cliché fashion in film. Having every aspect shaped by hip hop (Donalson 38). Paula Massood, author of Out of the Ghetto, into the Hood stated that movies revolving around the black urbanscape

Within the film, Blacks are portrayed as the ones who “throw the first punches and a black character throws the firebomb that ends up killing…” (Finley and Finley 231). Within these films it is often times White people that are the heroes and the ones that bring justice to the system (Finley and Finley 233). This is evident within A Time to Kill when the protagonists Jake Brigance (Mathew McConaughey) helps by steping up above everyone else to save a wrongfully acquitted Black man. The film vitalizes the Hollywood cliché of Blacks needing Whites and how White people are always saviors and

But over the years these stereotypes have lessened, not by much, but it has. The belief that Hollywood cinema has maintained their cliché images is true, but what is also true as seen in Django Unchained is that simultaneous to the cliché images, an era of film making has emerged where Blacks can be seen as smart, willing to overcome, and able to step away from racially charged roles and violent