#710. Thomas Jane

We know what you are asking yourself. Probably, you are having the exact same reaction to this entry as the fine folks over at Arrested Development did when they were confronted with Thomas Jane.

Who or what is a Thomas Jane and why would this warrant an entry in SBPDL? Great question and one that will be answered as you continue to read. Tom Jane is an American actor who has appeared in a number of popular films, including The Punisher, Stander, The Mist, Killshot and most recently the HBO hit “Hung”:

“Hung follows Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane), an unhappy and financially strapped history teacher and basketball coach at a suburban Detroit high school. He's also the father of twin teenagers (Charlie Saxton and Sianoa Smit-McPhee) who are currently living with their remarried mother (Anne Heche).

After a fire destroyed the childhood home Ray still owns and lived in, he was without many options. With the help of a friend, Tanya (Jane Adams), Ray decides to turn his large penis into an opportunity to make money. The episodes center around Ray's attempts to maintain a "normal" life while starting his business as a male prostitute.”

“Hung” is a TV show that allows Tom Jane to flex his acting chops in ways that make Black people uncomfortable, for the character he portrays is well-endowed. Here at SBPDL, we have no problem commenting on what are called stereotypes, for the reality of stereotypes is that most are true, or else they wouldn’t cast in such a stereotyped manner.

Most interestingly, the show pokes fun at Detroit, a city that has no problem seeing raccoon sold in vast quantities, nor attracting 50,000 people to try and get “fake” stimulus checks, as Jane’s character says this about his hometown:

“The opening sequence (which you can watch here) is jam-packed with familiar Motor City signposts, from the first shot of a barge gliding over the Detroit River, to Thomas Jane as Ray Drecker walking through Hart Plaza, below the People Mover and in front of the Joe Louis fist, Lafayette Coney Island and the abandoned Packard plant.

"Everything's falling apart," Thomas-as-Drecker narrates over shots of a crane tearing down Tiger Stadium. "And it all starts right here in Detroit, the headwaters of a river of failure." The camera cuts away to shots of more Detroit ruins, including Michigan Central Station, while Drecker continues. "Good thing my parents aren't around to watch the country go to shit."

Really, the only positive thing about Detroit is the fictitious show “Hung”.

So, Jane has done the horrendous thing by staring in a comedy show on HBO whose central character (besides him) is his private part. Black people don’t like this one bit, for even scientists have published books that argue it is Black people who are really hung. Why have a white boy like Thomas Jane play the part of “Hung”, especially in a city as Black as Detroit?

Worse, Tom Jane took on the role of The Punisher, the Marvel Comics vigilante. The big screen adaptation came out in 2004 and set Jane up as one of the top action stars, but the film showcased a world where all the crime is committed by white people or Hispanics. A casual glance at crime statistics in the United States – courtesy of the FBI – shows us who commits the most crime, so in reality, if a Punisher existed, it wouldn’t be the Italian Mafia he would be going after (Vigilante movies are another SBPDL, for another time).

Black people watch the nightly news casts in the major cities they live in that resemble Blacktopia’s and cover their eyes with their hands like a child watching a horror movie, for the scenes are too graphic. Black on Black or Black on white violence is the normal script for any major city newscast. Moving to a Whitopia won’t change that fact.

Taking on the role of “Hung” is already an unforgivable sign to Black people, so Thomas Jane is a marked man. But it is one role that Thomas Jane took in his career that really gets Black people going as it nearly castrates all Black men in one incredible verbal exchange.

Thursday is that film, and in that movie Thomas Jane plays a character whom exudes Alpha male status. Made in 1998, Thursday follows Jane as Casey Wells:

“A former L.A. drug dealer has moved to Houston to make a new life for himself as a married architect. Everything falls apart when he is suddenly visited by one of his former cohorts who comes carrying heroin. Discovering the dope, the architect flushes it down the drain. This sets up a series of tough customers seeking the dope including a Rasta hit-man, an ex-lover Dallas who ties him up and rapes him, a criminal called Billy with a penchant for torture, and a rogue cop.”

Sounds like a harmless enough plot, right? A former drug dealer deciding to follow the American Dream!

Well, not quite. Roger Ebert, the gatekeeper of passes for theatrical entertainment in America decided to trash the film as one of the more virulently racist films ever made:

"It is unhip to admit to being offended by anything in the new movies, and indeed it's pretty hard to offend me, but a film named Thursday crossed the line....". "Watching it, I felt outrage. I saw a movie so reprehensible I couldn't rationalize it using the standard critical language about style, genre or irony.

The people associated with it should be ashamed of themselves.... There is a "plot", but essentially the film is a series of geek-show sequences in which characters are tortured, raped, murdered and dismembered in between passages of sexist and racist language. This movie goes out of its way to be offensive--to women, Orientals, Pakistanis and especially blacks. Thursday's attitude towards blacks is so obscene, I'm surprised that it was made in this day and age"

To see why Thomas Jane’s film Thursday is deemed to racist to watch, click here to see a seven-minute excerpt from the film that basically shows that Thomas Jane has always been Hung (figuratively) and why this one scene from a movie is perhaps the most horrific sight Black people will ever see.

Thomas Jane is just an actor. He is a good guy at that, who has taken on some risqué roles that have showed his artistic side (Stander) and others that have shown his machismo side (The Punisher). He starred in a movie that Roger Ebert decided was to racist for Americans to endure, even though Thursday enjoys an IMDB.com rating of 7.0.

Thomas Jane also represents something far more sinister. In an age when masculinity is defined by individuals like Justin Timberlake, Jane epitomizes the manly virtues of yesteryear, before women decided to get on birth control and when Hollywood dared to put out manly movies such as The Searchers:

“It ushered in the 1960s sexual revolution and gave women control over their own fertility.

But the Pill may also have changed women's taste in men, according to a study.
Scientists say the hormones in the oral contraceptive suppress a woman's interest in masculine men and make boyish men more attractive.

Although the change occurs for just a few days each month, it may have been highly influential since use of the Pill began more than 40 years ago.If the theory is right, it could partly explain the shifting in tastes from macho 1950s and 1960s stars such as Kirk Douglas and Sean Connery to the more wimpy, androgynous stars of today, such as Johnny Depp and Russell Brand.”

Black people welcomed this change with open arms, as birth control has made white women more interested in androgynous men and thus, decimating the white birth rate. Black people aren’t fans of birth control, as they view it as horrible form of genocide.

Yet, Thomas Jane’s popularity threatens to undue 40 years of scientifically tampering with women’s hormone levels and usher in a new era of white action stars that don’t look like Jack Sparrow.

Jane as an actor is not to be included in SBPDL, but what he represents. He is playing a character in “Hung” that is not Black, but is well-endowed, which Black people hate, because Tom Jane is a white guy. Worse, in Thursday he brought up this urban legend about Black guys and basically castrated them all in one of the more intense scenes ever filmed (Ebert hated it).

Thomas Jane therefore is Stuff Black People Don’t Like, because he is “Hung” in one show and verbally un-hung’s Black people in a movie that most people wish was never made.