Editor's (that's me!) Note: This article was written for the website HalftimeHennessy.com; you can check it out there as well....
In 1994, the preeminent black filmmaker Spike Lee had a good question for Hollywood. Who does this white guy Quentin Tarantino think he is, using the N-word a half a hundred times in his movies? Tarantino shot back that he was first and foremost a writer before he was a white man and this granted him the right to have his characters speak like real people spoke, period. Looking back, he was probably right, I mean, when is the last time someone saw “Pulp Fiction,” and thought it was racist. But at the time, it was rather new to have the word said at all, and especially to have the phrase "dead n***** storage," said so frequently. It was definitely something that would not have been okay twenty years before that.
Well, have you heard what Tarantino’s next movie is about? It is a “Southern,” starring Jamie Foxx as an ex-slave on a mission to free his slave wife from an evil plantation owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Samuel L. Jackson co-stars as the complicit head house slave. This is kind of revolutionary. Every movie in the past that came even remotely close to American slavery always treated it in this very serious and dramatic way. In contrast, this will be a Tarantino film. That is, it will probably be rather enjoyable to watch. In preparation for some great cocktail party discussions this winter when the movie comes out, here are five films that will make you an expert in race relations, at least where movies are concerned.
1. Birth of a Nation (1915), Director D.W. Griffith
Every discussion about race in movies must start with “Birth of a Nation,” a movie that revolutionized movie storytelling in both technique and technology, broke box office records, and is arguably the most virulently racist movie ever made. The first hour and a half is a civil war movie. The action sequences were great back then but by today’s standards, kind of suck. I suggest skipping ahead to 1 hour twenty minutes when Lincoln is shot in the head. The really astonishing stuff gets into gear right afterwards during Reconstruction, a time in which the North occupied the South with an army and freed blacks gained citizenship and the rights that went with it for a brief period of time.
“Birth of a Nation,” tells an alternate history. One in which The Ku Klux Klan was started as a measure of self-defense when ex-slaves started bullying white people at the voting booth and making unjust rulings against whites via all black juries. The irony is overwhelming and may suspect the viewer to awful pain-inducing laughter. Others play like some sort of bizarre hallucination, like the surreal scene of a session of congress composed of all black senators with their bare feet upon their desks eating chicken and drinking whiskey. My favorite though has to be the hurt look on whitey’s face when a black guy has the audacity to walk past him on a public sidewalk. Oh the injustice!
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this movie is that apparently the makers didn’t think they were being racist. D.W. Griffith actually testified to that belief. But that’s like saying it’s okay to say the sky is green because you really believe that it is green. At some point self-delusion becomes unforgivable. For instance, it is this movie’s argument that the ex-slaves were content with slavery and that they were basically tricked and goaded into wanting rights by northern carpetbaggers. There are even some (loyal) ex-slave characters in this movie that think having these rights is really stupid and a truly unforgettable scene near the end of the movie when they actually fight back against their fellow African Americans on behalf of the really nice white folk.
Now let’s talk about sex. One of the more peculiar things about “Birth of a Nation” is its lack of black actors. Quite a few of the black characters are actually played by white people in blackface. But not just any blackface. It is poor blackface so the audience can easily tell that it is not actually black people playing the black roles. Well, that’s odd? Why would they do that? Well, for one thing, the plot calls for black men making sexual advances on white women (at one point a white woman actually commits suicide by jumping off a cliff to get away from a black pursuer). Apparently it would have been way too outrageous to have an actual black person to leer at a white woman, even if it was only a movie.
Since it is now public domain I am including the movie in its entirety here. I consider it a must-see movie first as a cultural education on insidious effects of racism and second as a baleful of incredulous laughs. It certainly wouldn’t be in good taste, but if you structured a drinking game around taking a shot whenever something astonishingly false or disgustingly offensive happens, you would probably get pretty wasted pretty quick.
2. Gone with the Wind (1939) Directed by Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Sam Wood
In 1939, the epic Civil War blockbuster “Gone With the Wind” became the highest grossing movie ever made, a title it still holds when one accounts for inflation. It also has several things in common with “A Birth of a Nation.”
It should be noted first of all that unlike “A Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind” is still a movie worth seeing simply as a movie. Whereas the action sequences in “Birth” are piss-poor by today’s standards, the set pieces in “Gone With the Wind,” are still effective and at least one, the zoom out of the battlefield wounded, is as masterful as ever. The character development and story arc are helped as well by ditching the ludicrous excesses of historical inaccuracy that plague “Birth.” But in terms of race, one aspect of “Birth” is still very present in “Gone With the Wind,” and that is a complete omission of anything negative about slavery and several black characters that are weirdly loyal to the main characters. This is represented in an idyllic representation of the slave plantation known as Tara. It is an unquestioned good place in the antebellum part of the movie, and when it is destroyed during the war, it is no doubt a very tragic thing. The slaves in this movie just might agree if anyone bothered to ask them or cared what they thought about it.
But even so, for its time, the movie could be considered a step in the right direction. The character of Mammy, at least in the way Hattie McDaniel plays her, is a strong no-nonsense woman and generally speaking the smartest person in the room. None of the other characters seem to notice of course, that is except the societal outcast, Rhett Butler. At first look, the character may seem rather one-dimensional given that she spends the entire movie cranky and cantankerous, but I don’t know, if you were a slave, maybe you’d be pissed off all the time too.
In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to be nominated and win an Oscar, beating out her fellow white cast-mate Olivia De Haviland in the same category. The Academy recognized as the best supporting actress of the year and then made her sit apart from everybody else in the cast and crew at a segregated table.
3. In the Heat of the Night (1967), Directed by Norman Jewison
“In the Heat of the Night,” may not be widely seen today but its influence is still felt in cineplexes every year. Have you ever seen that movie where an odd couple of police officers are assigned to the same case? Maybe at first they do not even like each other, but over time they gain each other’s respect and by the end catch the bad guy on equal terms. Well, “In the Heat of the Night,” was the first of such movies and literally invented the sub-genre. It went over so well, in fact, that it won the Best Picture Oscar in 1968.
Sociologists will confirm that the working together of people on an equal level is what breaks down prejudice, whereas if you had a master-servant or boss-employee relationship, it would only reinforce notions of superiority/inferiority. Here is a very entertaining example of exactly that happening.
The black man is played by none other than Sidney Poiter, who in the sixties basically was at the center of his own subgenre of movies that were expressly aimed at breaking down racial prejudice. Sidney was just the black man to do it. He was handsome, well dressed, well spoken, educated, polite, and had the whitest freaking name in the world. Basically he was everything society said the ideal white man should be except he was black. So either you liked him or you admitted you were a racist. Sidney Poiter starred in several of these kinds of movies, but “In the Heat of the Night,” is the most entertaining of them as it has both sex and violence. If you want to be bored by a movie of great cultural importance, you can watch “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”
4. Do the Right Thing (1989), Directed by Spike Lee
Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” is a landmark for racial-conscious movies not just because it was the first written and directed by a black person, but for also who the primary audience was for it. In other words, the previous movies on this list were all aimed at white people, whether or not it was to reinforce their views or to change them. “In the Heat of the Night,” is about a white racist sheriff. He is the one that changes in that movie. Sidney Poitier is a supporting character in that arc as far as I’m concerned. (I argue that you can say the same thing about the black characters in such recent movies as “The Blind Side” and “The Help.”)
In contrast, “Do the Right Thing,” is not about white people. It is about a black community that is confronted with racism both personally (for example, the N word) and more importantly institutionally (for example there isn’t a single black-owned business in a neighborhood that is 90% black). Racism in “Do the Right Thing,” is a given. The question presented for discussion is what should black people do about it?
Spike Lee makes such a question deliberately hard to answer. The story takes place during the hottest day of the year, encompasses an entire neighborhood’s worth of colorful characters, and draws out a domino chain of cause and effects from little slights (why does a pizza place in a almost entirely black neighborhood have an exclusively Italian hall of fame) to grievous errors (a police officer’s use of a very controversial type of chokehold hold on an arrested subject), that slowly but surely accumulate into a night of racial violence prompted by the action of a character that has good reasons not to do and to do what he eventually does.
One other thing to notice: When white people make race-conscious movies in a non-racist way, it tends to bring out the Sidney Poitier in black people. One example is comeuppance, a sort of comedic affirmative action. It is a technique whereby a racist joke is generally followed by the minority scoring a little victory or the offender looking foolish in some way. Another technique is balancing. Say you were to have a really stupid black character (like say Tracy Jordan on “30 Rock”) In order to not be racist, you can include a really smart black character in the story as well (like say the Harvard man Twofer on “30 Rock”). Or you can have true plausible deniability by being racist to every race in your movie (South Park, Harold and Kumar, the list here is pretty large). Or finally if you were really pathetic and your name was Michael Bay, you would lazily have non-white minorities make stupid racist jokes at each other to create the thin illusion that no white people were actually involved (Bad Boys II).
But since “Do the Right Thing,” is made by a black person it allows the black characters a greater license to be flawed three-dimensional humans. There isn’t any fear that a viewer would mistake the character’s personality to be the black writer’s view of all black people. For example, perhaps a white writer (who isn't Tarantino) would have hesitated before making the character of “Buggin’ Out,” such an asshole.
5. Crash (2005) directed by Paul Haggis
I end this essay with “Crash,” the best picture winner from 2005. Watching this movie alongside the other four I think really demonstrates just racism has changed the last 100 hears. In many ways “Crash” can be seen as sort of a post-racial movie in that every single character in “Crash,” is aware of racism and knows that it is a bad thing. Politicians even wheel and deal with the knowledge that people are judging their actions in terms of race. Weirdly enough this provokes them to make decision explicitly based on race, like for instance giving a police promotion to a black man in order to not look racist when they are arresting a disproportionate amount of black people.
Just for fun, “Crash” expands the race dialogue into a more culturally diverse realm where everybody on earth is involved and it is not merely just a black and white thing. And as a hyperlink movie, we get about 15 main characters which intersect each other’s stories whether by purpose or coincidence or by crashing into each other’s cars. In the meantime they all take turns being racist in that relatively benign way that we are nowadays (and by that, all I mean is that I’ve watched “Birth of a Nation.”)
“Crash” is a special movie for me because it actually changed my thinking about certain things. In particular, there was this one scene where this non-racist character (who I of course identified with the entire movie) makes a snap judgment about another character and ends up shooting him. In that scene, there had been an argument and the non-racist character thought the other person was reaching for a gun, when in reality he had been reaching for something predictably innocent. Thing is, in the moment I was watching the movie, I thought that the other guy was reaching for a gun too. And if I were to be totally honest, I probably would have shot him too. Shows what I know about not being racist.
No comments:
Post a Comment