Читать книгу America on Film - Sean Griffin - Страница 35

One of the hardest aspects of discussing how white people are represented in American cinema (and in Western culture‐at‐large) is the effort it takes for individuals even to see that racial/ethnic issues are involved with white characters or stories. By and large, the average moviegoer thinks about issues of race only when seeing a movie about a racial or ethnic minority group. For example, most romantic comedies find humor in how male and female characters each try to hold the upper hand in a relationship. Yet Just Wright (2010) starring two African American actors (Queen Latifah and Common), is regarded by some Americans as a “black” romantic comedy, whereas the popular Bridget Jones films (2001, 2004, 2016) starring two white actors (Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth), would tend to be regarded as simply romantic comedies, and not as “white” films. Similarly, it was a cultural event when Black Panther (2018) became one of the first blockbuster films about a “black” superhero, whereas Deadpool (2016) was simply a film about a snarky superhero – period. The fact that Black Panther was not received as just another superhero film tells us that race does still matter to filmgoers (of all races and ethnicities), and that it was a much‐needed corrective to the overall general unremarked‐upon assumption of whiteness within the genre. These examples also underscore the Hollywood assumption that all viewers, whatever their racial identification, should be able to identify with white characters, but that the reverse is seldom true. (Perhaps the tremendous financial success of Black Panther is evidence that contemporary white filmgoers are more able to relate to black characters than in the past.) Still, even today many white viewers choose not to see films starring non‐white actors or films set in minority or ethnic environments, allegedly because they feel they cannot identify with the characters. Because of that fact, Hollywood tends to spend more money on white stars in white movies, and far less money on non‐white actors in overtly racial or ethnic properties. Hollywood is always concerned when a film might be perceived as “too black,” or “too Hispanic,” knowing that such a perception will most likely cost revenue at the box office, should the film fail to crossover to white audiences.

Furthermore, the very structure of classical Hollywood narrative form encourages all spectators, regardless of their actual color, to identify with white protagonists. This may result in highly conflicted viewing positions, as when Native American spectators are encouraged by Hollywood Westerns to root for white cowboys battling evil Indians. This situation was especially prevalent in previous decades, when non‐white actors were rarely permitted to play leading roles in Hollywood films, and when racialized stereotypes in movies were more obvious and prevalent. However, in an acknowledgement of our population’s diversity, over the last several decades an ever‐increasing number of non‐white characters have been appearing in Hollywood movies. More and more films each year now feature non‐white leads, and even more regularly, non‐white actors in supporting roles. Sometimes this practice is referred to as tokenism – the placing of a non‐white character into a film in order to deflate any potential charge of racism. Token characters can often be found in small supporting roles that are peripheral to the white leads and their stories. For example, in science fiction movies featuring mixed‐race battalions fighting aliens, minor black and Hispanic characters frequently get killed off as the film progresses, leaving a white hero to save the day. This is especially egregious in a film like Battle Los Angeles (2011) which begins with a Hispanic Marine (Ramon Rodriguez) leading the attack on aliens, until he suffers a compete nervous breakdown, leaving the world to be saved by his stalwart white replacement (Aaron Eckhart). This phenomenon has become so prevalent that some audience members consider it a racist cliché. For many others, however, the phenomenon goes unnoticed, and the dominance of whiteness remains unquestioned.

Film scholar Richard Dyer’s work on how cinema represents whiteness ties this unthinking (or unremarked‐upon) white centrism to larger ideological issues of race. As pointed out in Chapter 1, a society’s dominant ideology functions optimally when individuals are so imbued with its concepts that they do not realize that a social construct has been formed or is being reinforced. The relative cultural invisibility of whiteness within the United States serves as a perfect example of this idea: the white power base maintains its dominant position precisely by being consistently overlooked, or at least unexamined in most mainstream texts. Unless whiteness is somehow pointed out or overemphasized, its dominance is taken for granted. A rare Hollywood film such as Pleasantville (1998) calls attention to whiteness, even down to its black‐and‐white visual design, in which characters are literally devoid of color. (The film is a satire of 1950s nostalgia as represented by that era’s all‐white television sitcoms.) More regularly, however, Hollywood films continue to use the token approach to casting non‐white actors. Jurassic World (2015) featured a mostly all‐white cast except for Irrfan Khan (as one of the villains who meets his justified end part way through the film), while Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) followed the same formula by casting Justice Smith as a cowardly nerd, whose frightened antics sadly look back to the African American stereotypes of the 1940s. (Both films also feature Asian American actor B.D. Wong in a few scenes, yet as the brainy amoral scientist, how far away from a stereotype is he truly?) Such tokenism, combined with narratives that frame non‐white people as marginal (at best) and villainous (at worst), while maintaining the centrality of white heroics and white romance, work to naturalize whiteness as a universal state of being.

Whiteness – as a complex and often unconscious structural ideology – can also effect people of color in seemingly contradictory ways. For example, in some communities of color, being born with a lighter shade of skin is itself a form of privilege. This phenomenon of favoring light skin, even within communities of color, is called colorism. It exists in African American cultures, as explored by filmmakers like Spike Lee (in films such as School Daze [1998] and Jungle Fever [1991]) and Chris Rock in his docu‐comedy Good Hair (2009). The title of Rock’s film refers to a black term for having long straight un‐curly hair, and the film shows to what great lengths many African American women (and some men) will go to achieve that goal, including harsh chemical hair relaxers and expensive weaves (somewhat paradoxically coming from dark‐skinned Indian women). Colorism also can be found within the Latinx community and within India and its diasporic population. Colorism is deeply enmeshed in the American fashion and beauty industries, which have traditionally promoted European ideals of feminine beauty (light skin, long straight blond hair, smaller facial features) to people all around the globe. Some people in developing countries spend their earnings on European cosmetics, while Asian women have been known to undergo plastic surgery – all in pursuit of a Western ideal of feminine beauty. Hollywood is no stranger to these ideologies, as it has always tended to cast lighter‐skinned black women in romantic roles, often not even being able to find suitable roles for darker‐skinned actresses (a topic explored at further length in chapter 4). It is only in the last few years that darker‐skinned African American actresses like Lupita Nyong’o and Viola Davis have gained leading roles (and appeared on the covers of beauty magazines).

When it goes unmentioned, whiteness is positioned as a default category, the center or the assumed norm on which everything else is based. Furthermore, aside from white supremacists and neo‐Nazis (who are restaging a comeback in the current political climate), whiteness is most often invisible to the people who consider themselves to be white. Many remain unaware of the subtle ways their whiteness affords them certain privileges. However, many non‐white individuals are often painfully aware of the dominance of whiteness, precisely because they are repeatedly excluded from its privileges. Sometimes racialized stereotypes get inverted to characterize whiteness. Thus, if people of color are stereotyped as physical and passionate, whiteness is sometimes satirized as bland and sterile, represented by processed white bread, mayonnaise, and elevator music. The stereotypes that white people lack rhythm, can’t dance, or can’t play basketball (as the title of the film White Men Can’t Jump [1992] would have it) are simply reversals of racist stereotypes that assert that people of color are “naturally” more in touch with their physicality than are white people. Many of these stereotypes seem to invoke (and probably evolved from) the racist beliefs of earlier eras. One such belief was the assumption that white people were a more evolved type of human being – and thus suited for mental and intellectual tasks – while non‐white people were thought of as being more basely physical and even animalistic.

This process of defining one group against another is sometimes referred to as Othering. More specifically, Othering refers to the way a dominant culture ascribes an undesirable trait (one shared by all humans) onto one specific group of people. Psychologically, Othering depends on the defense mechanism of displacement, in which a person or group sees something about itself that it doesn’t like, and instead of accepting that fault or shortcoming, projects it onto another person or group. For example, white culture (with its Puritan and Protestant taboos against sex) has repeatedly constructed and exploited stereotypes of non‐white people as being overly sexualized. Throughout US history, fear and hysteria about “rampant and animalistic” non‐white sexualities (as opposed to “regulated and healthy” white sexualities) have been used to justify both institutional and individual violence against non‐white people. Other character traits common to all human groups – such as laziness, greed, or criminality – are regularly denied as white traits and projected by dominant white culture onto racial or ethnic Others. In this way, and simultaneously, whiteness represents itself as moral and good, while non‐white groups are frequently characterized as immoral or inferior.

The process of Othering reveals more about white frames of mind than about the various minority cultures being represented. This was often embodied within classical Hollywood filmmaking, when racial or ethnic minority characters were played by white actors. This common practice allowed white producers to construct images of non‐white people according to how they (the white producers) thought non‐white people acted and spoke. How non‐white Others helped to define whiteness can also be seen in the silent and classical Hollywood film practice of using minority‐group performers to play a variety of racial or ethnic characters. For example, African Americans and Latinos were often hired to play Native American characters, and Hispanic, Italian, and Jewish actors played everything from Eskimos to Swedes. Such casting practices again reinforced the notion that people were either white or non‐white, and Hollywood did not take much care to distinguish among non‐white people, often treating them as interchangeable Others.

In socially constructing this concept of whiteness, Western culture had to define who got to be considered white. Many attempts were made over the past centuries to “measure” a person’s whiteness. In the United States, laws were passed defining who was and who was not to be considered white. People claimed that “one drop of blood” from a non‐white lineage excluded an individual from being “truly” white. Marriages were carefully arranged to keep a family lineage “pure,” and laws prohibiting interracial marriage were common in most states. If there were non‐white relationships within a family tree, they would frequently be hidden or denied. Throughout much of American history, lynching – the illegal mob torture and murder of a suspected individual – was a white community crime commonly spurred by fears over interracial sex. All these measures to “protect” whiteness indicate a serious cultural anxiety about the permeable borders between white and non‐white races. In reality, the sexual commingling of different racial and ethnic groups was common in the United States almost from the moment European settlers landed on the continent. On the Western frontier, white men often took up relations with Native American women. In the Eastern United States, many white slave owners regularly forced sex upon their female slaves. Even President Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemings. A few romanticized and revisionist films about this situation do exist: the independent film Jefferson in Paris (1995) and the TV miniseries Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000). Even today, many Hollywood film and TV producers still consider interracial relationships to be a touchy and “controversial” topic.

Struggles over the definition of whiteness were especially pronounced during the late 1800s and the early 1900s, when film was in its infancy. The idea of the American melting pot arose during this period. The metaphor expressed the way various immigrant cultures and traditions were to be forged or melted together into an overall sense of American identity. Obviously, the American melting pot most readily accepted those groups that could successfully blend into or assimilate into the ideals and assumptions of white patriarchal capitalism. Assimilation was (and is) easier for some groups than for others, and the reason for that was (and is) based on longstanding notions about racial difference. European immigrants, although from different national and ethnic cultures, were more readily assimilated into mainstream white American culture than were people of African, Asian, or Native American backgrounds. Partly this was because European immigrants had a certain amount of cultural, racial, and religious overlap with white Americans; people from other areas of the globe were (and still are) more likely to be considered as racially and culturally Other. Nonetheless, even European immigrants had to struggle for acceptance in the United States, and a history of those struggles can be found in that era’s cinematic record.

Assimilation remains a contested issue to this day. While many people (of all racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds) support the idea that Americans should strive to assimilate into the dominant (white) way of life, others find that proposition disturbing. Many people feel that racial and ethnic cultures should be celebrated and not phased out of existence, arguing that one of the basic strengths of America is its very diversity of cultures, and – hopefully – cinematic representations. Another controversial issue related to assimilation is the phenomenon of passing, wherein some people of color deny their racial or ethnic backgrounds in order to be accepted as white. People who pass are sometimes accused of “selling out” their racial or ethnic heritages. (The flip side of that is the far more rare example of white people passing for non‐white, as when civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal was revealed to be white after posing as an African American; she was subsequently reviled for this act, which many saw as the epitome of white people appropriating blackness for themselves.) However, people of color who can pass for white often choose to do so precisely because whites are still afforded more privilege and power in our national culture, and those who pass often want to share in those opportunities. It is this social reality that led many European immigrants to work toward assimilation and acceptance as being white. That process can be seen occurring in American films made throughout the twentieth century, especially in regard to changing representations of Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans. In film and culture‐at‐large, the shift to whiteness occurred for these groups of people when they were no longer regarded as separate races, but rather as ethnicities or nationalities that could then be assimilated into the American concept of whiteness.