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The Freedom to Make Racial Jokes: Satires on Nationalism and Multicultural Comedies in Dutch Cinema

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Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema

Part of the book series: Palgrave European Film and Media Studies ((PEFMS))

Abstract

In this chapter I aim to examine those attempts that do rework and/or contest the influence of a politics informed by nationalist fervour. These attempts take the form of satires, multicultural comedies, or dramas about the second generation ‘new Dutch’. Analysing a number of strategically ambiguous films, I demonstrate how recent Dutch comedies both affirm and contradict cultural ideas of multiculturalism. These show that if anything can be ridiculed, then there is no way to adopt a truly critical perspective, and, as I claim in evoking the concept of ‘progressive racism,’ this mechanism ultimately privileges the force of whiteness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    De oplossing? was made in 1983, the year of a notorious murder by stabbing of a 15-year-old-black boy by a 16-year-old skinhead. The crime was presented as being racially motivated in the media, but the film Skin (Hanro Smitsman 2008) downplays this motivation twenty-five years later. As the film suggests, the kid became a skinhead only as a reaction to unfortunate personal circumstances: his Jewish father was still marked by Holocaust experiences and his mother had just died from cancer. The stabbing followed obnoxious behaviour, and the victim’s ‘skin’ was irrelevant.

  2. 2.

    The PVV became the second largest party.

  3. 3.

    Don’t let me be misunderstood: some interesting Dutch feature films have been made this century, but they are not related to current political subjects at all: Guernsey, Zwartboek, Nothing Personal, Ober, Borgman, Aanmodderfakker, Gluckauf, Beyond Sleep, to name a few.

  4. 4.

    Essed gives an example of an ‘active tolerance of racism .’ When a waiter refuses to serve the one black person in a restaurant, the white Dutch feel inhibited from confronting the situation: ‘the group failed to take responsibility as Whites to speak out against racism ’ (Essed 1991, p. 278). In this case, the ‘norm of tolerance legitimizes nonaction against racism .’ Due to this ‘it is none of my business’ attitude of the group, the offender is supported in his racist practice (ibid.: 277).

  5. 5.

    Another example which shows that the strategy of dis-identification can work counterproductively: Koot and Bie, two of Holland’s most appreciated satirists in the history of Dutch television, regularly played the extreme right-wing characters Jacobse and Van Es in the early 1980s, but their act with absurdist slogans became so popular that they decided to stage the death of the characters. It troubled them that viewers started to take the silly nonsense seriously.

  6. 6.

    It was Janmaat’s latest public appearance before he died on 9 June 2002, one month after Fortuyn.

  7. 7.

    It was with good reason that Sigmund Freud examined jokes and humour in relation to, respectively, the unconscious and the superego.

  8. 8.

    As regards the predominance of humour in the Netherlands, one can think of Johan Huizinga’s canonical study Homo ludens (1938), of the many film comedies that became huge big box-office hits, such as Fanfare (Bert Haanstra, 1958), Wat zien ik!? (Paul Verhoeven, 1971), Flodder (Dick Maas, 1986), but also of a strong and vivid tradition of cabaret performers (Toon Hermans, Freek de Jonge, Hans Teeuwen, Brigitte Kaandorp, Najib Amhali).

  9. 9.

    Even though Van Gogh’s columns had angered Muslims, the direct cause for the murder by Muhammed B. was the fact that Van Gogh had agreed to direct the anti-Islam short film Submission (2004), scripted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

  10. 10.

    Owing to the success of the film, Shouf shouf! was turned into a television series that ran for three seasons.

  11. 11.

    In 2012 Diederick Koopal’s De marathon received the Audience Award at the Netherlands Film Festival: the Moroccan characters in this comedy are hugely sympathetic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Peter Verstraten

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  1. Peter Verstraten
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Correspondence to Peter Verstraten .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Scholar, London, United Kingdom

    James Harvey

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Verstraten, P. (2018). The Freedom to Make Racial Jokes: Satires on Nationalism and Multicultural Comedies in Dutch Cinema. In: Harvey, J. (eds) Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73667-9_7

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