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.’
Speaking to local paper Willamette Week, Leveen elaborated on her thinking.
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