‘The Proposal’: It’s okay! Grandma Annie is part Native American!
Because today’s Valentine’s Day, I decided to do a little writing on the 2009 romantic-comedy: The Proposal. When searching the internet for anything about the film in its relation to Native representation, I came across an interesting conversation in the comment section below the specific scene I’ll be focusing on. It was somewhere between where Mr. Justtestinghere and DistinctLlama were among those talking about how this scene with Sandra Bullock and Betty White ‘chanting’ in the woods is ‘hilarious, I played it over and over when watching the film and couldn’t stop laughing’.
Skinny_Runner5 :
As a Native American I would normally be offended, but this was so funny!
Better4U :
At least you appreciate comedy.
Let me translate Better4U’s reply to Skinny_Runner5’s opinion: “Thank God you aren’t another angry Indian who is trying to suck the fun out of what everyone else finds funny. Please, don’t remind us of our decades of dehumanizing an entire culture of diverse people who we stole land from!”
If you haven’t seen The Proposal, or haven’t revisited the film for the last decade, that’s okay. The scene I am specifically talking about is where Margaret, the main character, happens to hear some chanting in the woods near her fiance’s family home. She follows the sound to find Grandma Annie, who is dressed in unidentified Native American regalia while chanting to Mother Earth. Upon seeing Margaret, Grandma Annie invites her in telling her to chant from the heart! Caught off guard, Margaret begins to chant the lyrics to Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz’s song ‘Get Low’, which includes lyrics about sweat dropping down balls. Yes, those kind of balls.
Though some might see why this might make some viewers uncomfortable, this is the most talked about moment in the film, making it a bit of a metaphor of how little acceptance of Native culture has come through this time of social awareness and growth. While we still have to constantly stand with racist mascots broadcast during the Superbowl (go Chiefs, right?) and presidential candidates that claimed to be one of us for decades, these situations are seen as simple, something we just all need to get over
The film continues by later explaining that Grandma Annie is part Native American, which is why she is allowed to appropriate Native culture into the butt of a joke. In disbelief, I went to the original screenplay and found out the scene is a bit different in the original form as Grandma Annie’s husband, Geoffrey, is just doing what his shaman told him to do when he needed to clear his head. Then, after Margaret starts talking about sweaty balls, it is Grandma Annie that comes and explains that Geoffrey is one-eighth Tlingit and then continues to explain, tongue in cheek, that the chanting helps him stay connected to his people. Obviously, this is not exactly what I find to be comedy.
As if those three minute of pure shenanigans did just ruin every Betty White movie for me, the entire context of the film just put a permanent ‘I just smelled something gross’ look on my face. The whole reason that Margaret is marrying Richard, her employee, is because she is about to be deported.
See, Margaret is a very powerful New York City publisher from Canada that is on the brink of being deported. Instead of taking care of her super easy immigrant paperwork (wink, wink) she decides to just use her power by making her inferior marry her. Yeah! What a great idea!
When I think about the people who are trying to get to this country and do not have a sliver of the money and power that even I, a college student with three jobs, have it shows that this film was definitely created in a time where immigration was not quite the wide-broadcast social issue it is today. Now, I didn’t conduct any research on this but I am willing to bet that the same people that loved The Proposal upon release have some overlap with those who say that any illegal immigrant should ‘go through the process the right way, the legal way’. Do you see the hypocrisy? Oh, and the film was directed by a woman.
So here’s to all the screenwriters, movie-makers, or those who are hoping to dive into the industry as soon as you can: please don’t make Native people, traditions, beliefs, or our cultures into the butt of your jokes ESPECIALLY in an all white movie about a Canadian woman that is getting deported.
Originally published at https://www.sheavassar.com on February 14, 2020.
