You might think, and justifiably so, that the answer to this question is a resounding “Hell, no!” But if you stop and ponder it for a moment, you can see the point the critics are trying to argue, even if you think they are a little off-base. Take a movie like THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, for example. After the monster sees luscious eyecandy Julie Adams—this was back in the day when having a beautiful woman around strictly because she was a beautiful woman, and putting her in jeopardy served as a handy plot device, was perfectly acceptable—it becomes infatuated with her. So what? you may ask. The Creature is a FISH! This is precisely the point the critics seek to make, though. Why would a bipedal FISH have any interest in a woman, even a beautiful one? A beautiful WHITE woman.
They would argue that the monster represents, in essence, a black man. An uncivilized, lower-on-the-evolutionary-scale interloper who primarily wants to take the white man’s woman away from him. I don’t buy it. If there was any racist thinking going on, it was of the subtle, subconscious variety, reflecting the mindset of the time in which the movie was made. Films like CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, GORILLA AT LARGE, even KING KONG all utilize the motif of the monster mackin’ on the white babes. Not because the monsters were racist symbols, but because the writers of the screenplays grew up with a zeitgeist and ortgeist wherein a beautiful white woman was the most valuable of all biological treasures. In a sense, these lovely damsels-in-distress were all macguffins. Racist, no. Sexist? I’m not even gonna get into that one…
