Rogues, Race, and hegemony

Adventure films project colonial fantasies and offer models of how to relate to other races, other classes, and the other gender.1 Traditionally set in foreign lands or in the distant past, adventure films are ideally positioned to negotiate contemporary problems in veiled form. In other words, they use the relation of the hero to his many “Others” to speak to the concerns of a multiethnic society fraught with racial and class conflict. As Waller points out, “today, at least one-third of Americans do not trace their origins to Europe… non-white minority groups are projected to surpass whites to become, collectively, the numerical majority of the U.S. population by the middle of the twenty-first century” (7). This situation is even more pronounced in LA, home of the Hollywood dream machine. Here, 100 languages are spoken in the public school system, and the four major racial minorities make up more than 60 percent of the population (Waller 44).