Classic Movie Tropes That Are Horrifying Today

As our society evolves, the artifacts of the past become more noticeably dated, reflecting values and standards that are no longer the norm. Movies are a great example — the art form of narrative film is now more than a century old, leaving us with a long history of movies that were completely mainstream in their time but seem weirdly out of place today. As modern audiences continue to have complicated arguments over the kinds of content that we find acceptable in films, it can be instructive to look back at the past and see how many storytelling elements and character archetypes that were once common and viewed as normal have become glaring in contrast to the standards of today. With that spirit of edification in mind, here are some tropes that were quite common in classic films but modern audiences would find horrifying in their backwardness today.

Fights between white 19th century settlers of the American West and the indigenous native populations of the land were a central part of mid-20th century popular culture. Battles between cowboys and Indians weren't just a constant feature of Western movies and TV shows, they became a common source of play among young boys, whether through the use of small plastic figurines or just by chasing each other around with toy guns and bows. The problem with these stories is that the Native American characters are often portrayed as unthinking barbarians, or even an undifferentiated mob. The fact that they're most likely attacking the white people because those people have invaded their land and claimed it for themselves is generally glossed over. Even in a film like The Searchers, which presents the anti-Indian racism of John Wayne's character as a major flaw, the portrayal of the Native Americans in the movie still lacks nuance, and one woman in particular, who marries Jeffrey Hunter's character without him realizing it, is humiliated as nothing but comic relief.

Vincente Minelli's 1958 musical film Gigi begins with a 70ish Maurice Chevalier singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." The song fits, because the entire film is about the special appeal of the title character, a teenage courtesan in training, and how she excites an adult bachelor who's bored with his long string of adult female partners. In the past it was more common for men to have relationships with significantly younger women. Since women weren't commonly regarded as equal partners at any age, there was no expectation of equality. It's not surprising, then, that adult men dating surprisingly young and sometimes even underage women is far more normalized in old movies.

One of the most egregious examples is Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan, in which the 42-year-old character played by Allen is dating a 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway. Although the bulk of the film deals with him leaving her and attempting a relationship with a more age-appropriate woman (never mind that Diane Keaton, who played that part, was still a decade younger than Woody Allen), he ultimately runs back to the teenage girl at the end of the film, telling her how pure and perfect she is. There's simply no way around it — it's creepy.

From Milton Berle to Some Like It Hot to Monty Python, a lot of old comedy is built around the idea that there's nothing funnier than a man in a dress. Films like Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire are all about finding complicated reasons why a man has to pass himself off as a woman, and then embarrassing that man when the truth is revealed. From today's perspective, the problem with stories like these is not just that they can be inadvertently quite insulting to transgender people, it's that the humor to be found in men dressing as women is often dependent on the idea that he's lowering himself to do so, thus implying that women are essentially inferior to men.

There are other films, often by LGBTQ filmmakers, that treat crossdressing and gender-nonconformity with more nuance, such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Unfortunately, even films like these sometimes fall into the same tired old tropes of drag as a source of embarrassment and ridiculousness, but there still tends to be a lot more nuance along the way.

Sometimes, particularly in Westerns, you have to get a posse together. Sometimes law enforcement can't be trusted, or simply doesn't exist if you're too far from civilization, and the people have to rise up to make their own justice. Sometimes there's nothing to do except shoot the bad guy yourself, or hang him in front of the entire town. In old movies this often works just fine. It's obvious who's guilty, and the people can judge for themselves what justice must be handed out. Unfortunately, in real life, an angry mob almost never leads to justice. It usually leads to the persecution, or even death, of someone who's an easy target due to class prejudices or racism. The romanticization of mob justice in Westerns and elsewhere only makes this problem worse, because it leaves people with the impression that the mob knows what it's doing.

A similar problem exists with movies about singular vigilantes, whether it's Death Wish or even some versions of Batman and the like. The portrayal of criminals in vigilante movies often reinforces the prejudices of the day, such as in Peppermint, in which a nice white lady avenges her family and protects the local community by killing evil Mexican criminals.

The heroic colonialist is a part of many cowboy and Indian stories, but it's much bigger than that. There's a long history of the white men who invaded other people's countries being treated as heroic for doing so. Take the 1964 British film Zulu, for example. It's all about the heroism of a small group of British soldiers who must defend themselves against thousands of African Zulu warriors. The Zulu army is treated as an invading force, which becomes a bit bizarre when you realize that the movie takes place in Africa. This is Zulu territory, and the British are only there to take it away from them and claim it for their own.

It's hard not to notice the unifying factor of all of these tropes — it used to be far more acceptable, in movies and elsewhere, to ignore the needs and concerns of whole swaths of humanity. People of color, women, and LGBT people were all portrayed in movies in ways that unconsciously reflected their oppression and prioritized the viewpoints of straight white male protagonists. This is a problem that hasn't entirely been conquered, and in fact continues to be the subject of arguments, but enough progress has occurred that the tropes of decades past have begun to look as ignorant as they really always were.