Arnold Schwarzenegger’s late-Eighties to early-Nineties comedies have not gone down in history as great triumphs. Films like Junior and Twins – in which he played a pregnant man and Danny DeVito’s unidentical twin respectively – are movies only arch nostalgists could love. But now we learn that Kindergarten Cop, another product of that strange period, is not just a bit crap, but basically white supremacist, too.
This is the news that Northwest Film Center (NWFC) in Portland, Oregon, has pulled the 1990 action comedy from its summer drive-in series after woke complaints. In it, Schwarzenegger plays a cop who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher to apprehend a drug dealer. According to one local intellectual, it is a story infused with racist, pro-police sentiments.
‘National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop’, tweeted Portland author Lois Leveen. ‘There’s nothing entertaining about the presence of police in schools, which feeds the “school-to-prison” pipeline in which African-American, Latinx and other kids of colour are criminalised rather than educated.’
This is nothing to do with the strength of activists, and everything to do with the cowardice of institutions
Speaking to local paper Willamette Week, Leveen elaborated on her thinking.
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