10 Biggest Movie Tropes Of 2017
5. Cops Were Really Racist
Seen in: Get Out, Detroit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Blade Runner 2049, Bright
Moonlight's Oscar victory at the start of the year wasn't just a victory for queer narratives in cinema, it also represented a response to the previous year's #OscarsSoWhite controversy in which all the major nominees were white. Since then, films that explore racial tensions in past and contemporary America have become more and more prominent. In a climate in which the Black Lives Matter campaign has gained increasing momentum, the stock character of the racist cop has cropped up time and again on screen this year.
In arguably the year's best movie, Get Out, a brief and uncomfortable confrontation with a racist traffic cop is used to indicate that Daniel Kaluuya's Chris is far outside his safe zone when travelling to his girlfriend's countryside estate. It is one of the early moments of racial discomfort in a film that grows into a powerful and timely satire-cum-thriller.
That cop plays a relatively minor role in the story as a whole, however. In other films of 2017, though, the racist cop has been pushed front and centre. Indeed, it may be an unexpected and not wholly positive product of the #OscarSoWhite campaign that we could be about to see awards handed out to white guys for their searing performances as sadistic racists. Certainly Will Poulter in Detroit and Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri stand out as among the year's most memorable roles.
The racist cop trope was not confined to realistic dramas, however, and in 2017 there were plenty of fantastic racists in sci-fi and fantasy police forces too. Officer K's colleagues in Blade Runner 2049 were not exactly keen to be working alongside a replicant (nor were the colleagues of a psychic detective in a decidedly Blade Runner-esque episode of TV anthology Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams). Meanwhile, even Will Smith got to play a racist cop at the end of the year, objecting to being partnered to an orc in David Ayer's urban fantasy Bright.