[M]ost movies about the Civil War and slavery have been appeals to our higher, nobler selves. Theyve been appeals to white audiences by white characters talking to other white characters about the inherent injustice of oppressing black people at any moment in this planets history. This is how we get movies in which white lawyers defend innocent black men (To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill). Its how we get romances — Jezebel, Gone With the Wind, Cold Mountain — that use the antebellum South and Civil War as backdrops but feature either the most entertaining black slaves or almost no slaves at all. Its how you get Mississippi Burning, a thriller about three murdered civil-rights activists in which even the one-dimensional racists have bigger speaking parts than any black person. Its how you get Cry Freedom, a thriller about Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) that mostly locks Biko into flashbacks while a white journalist (Kevin Kline) tries to flee apartheid-era South Africa; a movie about the death of Medgar Evers thats focused on his assassin; Steven Spielberg legislative historical dramas about white men fighting over who owns black people and what it means to do so. Its how you spend 35 minutes hearing Christoph Waltz talk and talk in Django Unchained and get nervous that Quentin Tarantino momentarily forgot what his movie was called. The quality of these films is not the issue. A few of them are great. But after decades and decades and dozens of titles, you get the political point. Movies are the most powerful ways Hollywood has to say its sorry. There is a kind of audacity in something like Lincoln, in which important white men get discursive about the moral quandary in which slavery mires the country. That debate required men to search their souls and vote accordingly. But after enough of these movies, youre just hot with insult. You have to stop accepting apologies, accepting, say, The Help, and start demanding correctives, films that dont glorify whiteness and pity blackness, movies — serious ones — that avoid leading an audience to believe that black stories are nothing without a white voice to tell them that black people cant live without the aid of white ones. McQueen and Ridley turn that dynamic inside out. Their movie presents the privilege of whiteness, the systematic abuse of its powers, and black peoples struggles to get out from beneath it. A different movie might have taken this story and turned it into a battle between Epps and the white men who feel a duty to free Northrup. Thats what were used to... Jonathan Demme tried to alter the imbalance with a film of Morrisons Beloved. Its a frustrating yet deeply moving (and now cautionary) attempt to bring art, history, and politics into the same Hollywood space. Demme damn near burned the house down. There are easier Morrison books to film. But that one might have been the most necessary. For as much as the movies have elided blacks from the center of their narratives, it has also padded a cozy nest for white audiences. Racists have tended to be vanquished by white heroes so that a black audience could feel a kind of gratitude. That was the alternate kick of blaxploitation: It redrew the lines of hero worship. Black audiences could cheer for themselves. The 1970s were a bonanza for predominantly black movies. Playing Harriet Tubman, Jane Pittman, the mother in Sounder, and Binta in Roots made a saint of Cicely Tyson. That era didnt last. In the 1980s, black culture accelerated its permanent crossover into mainstream America, but the movies are still figuring out what, beyond comedies and action movies, that means. When it comes to race, Hollywood tells stories from the past or relies on ancient formulas because the familiar is easier to parse. The future? It tends to look a lot like After Earth. grantland/story/_/id/9870721/the-cultural-crater-12-years-slave
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 22:37:57 +0000
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