Pop Culture Rewind
February 17th, 2010 | Published in Other
Black History Month: Not Coming to a Theater Near You
By Brandon Nowalk
We’re in the heart of Black History Month, but you wouldn’t know it from the theater. Denzel Washington and The Rock are the only black faces headlining wide releases this month—though Valentine’s Day somehow found room for both Jamie Foxx and Queen Latifah—and both of their films are currently struggling to recoup their costs. More importantly, neither film has much to do with race, but then, that can be a refreshing change of pace. On the other hand, the Oscars just showered love on a fistful of films explicitly concerned with race relations, not least heavyweight Avatar.
Okay, so James Cameron and company traded actual black faces for artificial blue ones, but the film remains a simple tale with a simple message: Can’t we all just get along? On closer inspection, the film’s apparently racial interests fall apart, as do most of Cameron’s arguable themes, with a lily-white cast of humans leaning on Michelle Rodriguez for proof that they do, in fact, have a minority friend. Meanwhile, hidden beneath piles of shimmering pixels are rising black starlet Zoe Saldana, venerable black thespian CCH Pounder, and other actors of color. Yes, Avatar’s deliberately simplistic, but the fact remains that James Cameron undercuts his message by painting each of his noble savages with the same brush—skin color directly correlates with just about every other attribute—instead of celebrating our differences. He even lets his white human hero live that ultimate fantasy of becoming a black, er, blue person permanently. Maybe Avatar 2: Buyer’s Remorse will have more to do with racial identity than its progenitor.
In another case of white directors addressing race through anthropomorphized animals, a conceit that can be creative or problematic or both (see the comparison between King Kong and slaves in Inglourious Basterds), consider Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, up for Best Animated Feature. Anyone who’s seen the TV spots knows the predominant theme, announced when Meryl Streep’s Mrs. Fox is asked by her son whether he’s different: “We all are. Him especially. But there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?” A little later, Mr. Fox inspires his friends by highlighting their unique attributes and talents in one of the film’s most moving scenes, and, incidentally, George Clooney’s best performance of the year. Far be it for me to encapsulate Black History Month, but equality movements tend to share the idea that we’re all valuable despite (or thanks to, or incidental to) our differences.
Oscar also anointed our first black Disney princess, Tiana from The Princess and the Frog. The Disney princess has a spotty history of antifeminism, but Tiana is a true blue role model. She’s a working class waitress saving up to open her own restaurant, she cherishes her family and community, and she falls in love almost reluctantly, not because she’s been waiting for her man to come and make her life.
Meanwhile, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire explores one branch of the black experience, ferociously digging its Sisyphean heroine, played by the deservedly Oscar-nominated Gabourey Sidibe, deeper and deeper into tragedy including incestual rape that produced a special needs child, physical violence, and, in case you didn’t get it, an HIV diagnosis. In an early fantasy sequence, Precious looks into a mirror and sees a white, blonde woman looking back at her. I’m not convinced the film says anything meaningful about race specifically, just that Precious thinks her life would be better if she were white, but Precious does involve a subplot about embracing diversity, and at least it lends some color to movie screens and Oscar slates.
Everywhere you turn there’s another Oscar-nominated look at race, from the laughably politically correct The Blind Side to the credibly post-racial or perhaps a-racial The Hurt Locker, by which I mean Anthony Mackie’s skin color is of zero importance to the relations among the central trio, presumably thanks to more pressing matters like bombs or reckless endangerment. Meanwhile the one-time nation of apartheid South Africa played home to two Best Picture nominees, Clint Eastwood’s latest racial declarative Invictus and the sci-fi allegory District 9, while Inglourious Basterds makes a sport of satirizing racism and humanizing even Nazis. You may not find much racial interest in theaters this month, but you need only look at the Oscar nominations to see just how interested Hollywood is in race relations.
