Stereotypes In I Love Lucy

Throughout the course of this semester, we have gone to great lengths in order to shift our perspective of France away from the preconceived notions we may have held when coming into this class. As evidenced by the clips we saw from the old television series, I Love Lucy, someone who reduces France into a set of stereotypes will find themselves hard-pressed to fully acclimate to their surroundings, and blend in with the culture. France is more than just the stereotypes people consolidate it as. And indeed, this is true for most, if not all parts of the world. But what we can also find, as we observe France, its culture, its laws, its art, and most importantly its history—is that it’s no so far removed from the rest of the world as we might …show more content…
There are three central characters in this movie, Le Van Cuong is the main protagonist of the story, and he is joined by a woman named Vo Thanh Thuy, as the film’s deuteragonist. Their named adversary, a man squarely in the pocket of the French regime is Sy, a cruel and sadistic man who serves as a major stopping force for Cuong in the later part of the film, and as his commanding officer earlier on. With the cast laid out, it’s time to bring attention towards the main encompassing message that the film lays forth. The Rebel, presents a side of French history that isn’t often discussed in modern society, and coincides quite handedly with American, and European …show more content…
While the internment workers stop for their meal, the French officer looks on speaking more to himself than to his Vietnamese companion, that the Vietnamese are lazy, and classifies them as “our white man’s burden”. The camp as a whole draws its fair share of parallels to Japanese internment camps, as well as Jewish internment camps (though it’s hard to say to what degree since the scenes are comparatively brief) the ideology brought forth by the French officer is presumably the same ideology and mode of thinking that was held by white slave owners in America prior to the civil-war and one would imagine even after with the continual effort to mar the rights of colored people in the form of segregation, Jim Crowe laws, etc. There’s a sense of irony that can then be gleaned from this scene when it’s taken into a more global context, when you consider the idea that the burden the officer speaks of, is one that is in no small part, a product of his own country’s meddling. This is evidenced by the part where Cuong talks to the boy looking off into the woods. The boy asks him “what about laws on slavery?” and Cuong replies “there’s no such law,” to which the boy then replies a very damning statement against the French officer, “Do you think people volunteered to come here?” This is a statement that