On Race, Class and the Hollywood ‘Whiteout’

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February 16, 2011 | 7 books mentioned 19 5 min read

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covercoverIn Sunday’s New York Times, inspired, I suspect, by Black History Month, movie critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis had a long piece on the glaring absence of black writers, directors, and actors in this year’s Oscar nominated movies. They refer to this phenomenon as a “whiteout.”  Some might say that Scott answered his own question—why there are no major movies this year by or about black characters (never mind the rest of America’s non-white racial panoply; Scott never mentions them)—with his rather insightful piece of a few weeks back, “Hollywood’s Class Warfare,” which argued that in the wake of the financial crisis, in the midst of mass unemployment, mortgage defaults, and forecloses, many American filmmakers became preoccupied by class, and that some of the best of this year’s movies (The Fighter, Winter’s Bone, The Town) were about working-class and underclass lives, the kinds of lives that the dominant American class mentality—we’re-all-middle-class-here—doesn’t acknowledge or examine all that often.

Yes, I know: there are still a great many statistics that demonstrate that race and poverty’s fault-lines still mirror each other, still have a causal rather than accidental relationship, and thus that class is not the new race: that race is the new race and the old race. But, it’s Hollywood we’re talking about, and we can’t ask them to attend to too many weighty aspects of American life at once.  So, at least for this year in American movies, the answer to the rhetorical question in “Hollywood and the Year of the Whiteout,” “Is class the new race?,” is yes: For Hollywood this year class was the new race.

That doesn’t mean that this year’s “whiteout” isn’t a problem. But neither the problem nor the answer to the problem are quite what the authors here take them to be, though they touch on the real answer fleetingly.

The problems with the argument? First, and most obviously, when there’s a whiteout year in Hollywood, black isn’t the only color that’s missing.  And, second, the solution to the whiteout is not, as is suggested, a new black indie cinema movement—a few new Spike Lee/Lee Daniels-style black moviemakers. Or, at least, that’s not the full answer.

coverMy sense is that the way out of the whiteout requires something more subtle, something unprecedented. The answer isn’t just a new coterie of black directors making movies in the line of Do The Right Thing or Precious. More serious films about black American life in our yearly cinematic output would be great, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something else American cinema needs more now—something we’ve only had accidental and fleeting glimpses of thus far.

What we need are more serious movies with multiracial characters/casts that aren’t SCARE QUOTES MOVIES ABOUT RACE END SCARE QUOTES. We need more movies that simultaneously are and aren’t about race: movies that are dramas and comedies, about love, death, the usual human plots—and also happen to be about race. We don’t need only highly self-conscious, politicized movies about race, but movies that look at race the way Ben Affleck’s The Town look at class: askance—Affleck uses a popular genre, a crime-thriller, to smuggle a story that’s really about class onto the big screen. This is also how Lisa Cholodenko asks us to think about sexual orientation in The Kids Are Alright: The movie’s lesbianism is sort of incidental. The movie is about a marriage undergoing a crisis brought about by a daughter’s departure for college–oh, and the couple happens to be gay.  Cholodenko does not tell us that gay love, marriage, or family exist in a special category of experience unfelt and un-feel-able by heterosexuals: She tells us that the struggles marriage and children involve are a basic human experience, whatever the sexes of those involved.

I’m not saying that we as a nation have arrived at an idyllic, post-racial (or post-sexual orientation, or post-class) age in which we do not need MOVIES ABOUT RACE, but we could also use a less melodramatic, less strident cinema of race in the vein of The Kids Are Alright that’s just about sort of normal human plots inflected by the post-racial-ish reality that has come to define more and more of our lives.  Because in some American communities, in some American homes and workplaces—more and more, I think—a version of the post-racial age has arrived and it’s not because we have a biracial president. We’re married to and related by marriage to and work with and hang out with people of other races and nationalities, and at the end of the day our relationships with these people aren’t really all that different from our relationships with those of our own races. It’s sort of mundane, actually. Bi-racial marriages and friendships are actually pretty much like any other marriages and friendships most of the time.

Are there moments of fracture sometimes—a sense that your partner of another race is experiencing or feeling something you can’t? Yes, certainly. And are there strange moments in bi-racial relationships in which you suddenly feel as if your marriage/friendship is some sort of radical political choice—that you’re poster-children for something (usually caused by other people’s delighting in/awkwardness about your biracial-ness)?  Again, yes. And I hope that this new cinema I imagine would capture and explain such moments with the subtlety they deserve. But most of the time in interracial relationships, it’s all the same laundry-on-the-floor, bills, celebrations, in-laws, dishes, fights, compromises that the same-race couple next door are dealing with.  And I hope my new cinema would capture this too—how normal and humdrum inter-racial relationships can be.

This American experience has yet to make its way onto the screen, but we catch glimpses of it: A.O. Scott sort of touches on this idea of naturalizing race when he talks about 2009’s The Hurt Locker and its focus on “the volatile friendship between two soldiers, a hot-headed white bomb-disposal specialist played by Jeremy Renner and his cautious black sergeant played by Anthony Mackie.  Race in that movie was not a theme or a problem to be solved, but rather a subtle, complex fact of life.” This is what I’m talking about.  In an ever-increasing number of American lives it’s probably this kind of representation—race as “subtle, complex fact of life”—that feels most resonant. This understated mode (friends and coworkers first; incidentally, black and white) is a norm for more and more Americans and it should become a stronger presence in our movies.  Race, for some of us now, isn’t a be-all-and-end-all melodramatically determinative fact of life, but a fact nonetheless—one that inflects our lives in increasingly subtle, nuanced ways—ways that have only just begun to be reflected in our movies.

What we need now are not white movies with Benetton tokenism (think Harry Potter: Cho Chang and the Patel twins), nor movies that ghettoize racial experience. What we need now, if our movies are to reflect American life as it is lived by more and more of us, is not white or black, but multiracial, biracial—movies whose plots and characters show how people of all races, not just white and black, combine and intersect in more mundane ways (marriage, friendship, work) and how these intersections have their particular, subtle racially-inflected nuances but are also just that—friendships, work, marriages.

is a staff writer for The Millions living in Virginia. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly's Young Reviewers Contest and has a doctorate from Stanford. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Times, In Character, VQR, Arts & Letters Daily, and The Daily Dish.

From the Newsstand

The Art and Science of Collaboration

From the Newsstand
July 8, 2011 | 7 books mentioned 8 6 min read

1.
Collaborating with another writer is something I’ve done only once.  It was for a Washington Post Magazine cover article about the stock car racing legend Richard Petty, who was making his first run for political office in the fall of 1978.  At the time I was working as a newspaper reporter in Greensboro, N.C., and after work I would drive the 22 miles to Petty’s home with one of the paper’s editorial writers, and we would spend the late afternoons talking with Petty as he drove his customized van along the back roads of Randolph County.  Petty was always dressed in his trademark cowboy hat, cowboy boots and wraparound shades as he knocked on doors, flashed his famous thousand-watt smile and urged people to help elect him to the board of county commissioners.  Naturally, Petty lapped the field.

When it came time to write the article, my collaborator gave me his notes and disappeared.  This delighted me.  I was free to sit alone in my room using his notes and my own to write a draft of the article as I thought it should be written.  My collaborator then made suggestions, some of which I heeded, most of which I ignored.  The article appeared under both of our bylines, with mine before his, an arrangement that struck me as more than a little unfair.  We also split the $750 paycheck down the middle, which struck me as enormously unfair.  Afterwards I felt like the character Nelson Head in the Flannery O’Connor short story, “The Artificial Nigger,” a young yokel who survives a harrowing visit to the big city of Atlanta and vows never to return.  To paraphrase Nelson, my feelings about collaborating with another writer were I’m glad I did it once, but I’ll never do it again.

2.
My vow has remained intact for more than 30 years, but I recently learned about a group called NeuWrite that has forced me to reconsider my abiding disdain for the art of collaborative writing.  The group began to take shape back in 2007 because a Columbia University neuroscience grad student named Carl Schoonover had arrived at a blunt realization.  “Lots of interesting neuroscience research gets reported badly,” he says.  “And most scientists can’t write for shit, myself included, because they don’t teach you how to write in science grad school.  The trick was to find writers.”

So after discussing the idea with his colleagues, Schoonover persuaded Stuart Firestein, the chairman of Columbia’s biology deparment, to introduce him to Ben Marcus, who heads the university’s Master of Fine Arts program in non-fiction writing.  Marcus offered the names of half a dozen of his students who might be interested in collaborating with neuroscience grad students, and Schoonover took each of them to The Hungarian Pastry Shop near campus to pitch his idea.  In early 2008, the group came together for the first time at an informal salon in the home of Firestein and his wife Diana Reiss, a psychology professor at Hunter College.

“I think you need to develop trust for it work,” Schoonover says.  “We scientists are accustomed to collaboration.  It’s built into the scientific process.  But the writers were very reticent, especially at first.”

As the members became more familiar and comfortable with each other, scientists started pairing up with writers and working together.  Eventually the salon atmosphere of the meetings gave way to a classic MFA workshop format – members would bring in a piece of their own writing for the group to discuss; established science writers would be invited to speak; the group would read and discuss examples of high quality science writing.

Schoonover wound up pairing with Abigail Rabinowitz, 32, who has since gotten her MFA and gone to India on a Fulbright grant to study surrogate motherhood in Mumbai.  Rabinowitz had wanted to be a scientist when she was growing up, and the announcement that NeuWrite was forming in early 2008 caught her eye.  “I wanted to find my way back to science through writing,” she says, “and I thought this would be a great way to look at writing from a different perspective and possibly find new stories.”

Schoonover and Rabinowitz’s first collaboration was on an article for Science magazine about a show at the American Museum of Natural History called “Brain: The Inside Story”.  “First, we heard the museum’s directors speak about how they’d planned the show,” Rabinowitz recalls.  “Then Carl and I walked through the show together and shared impressions.  If I wasn’t sure about something, he explained it to me.  Our impressions were very similar, even though we were coming from different backgrounds.  We both felt the show wasn’t organized visually as well as it could have been.”

Next came the hard part.  “So we sat down together with a computer,” Rabinowitz continues.  “We both had a lot of notes, and we outlined the piece together.  I had a vision for the introduction when you walk into a kind of spaghetti forest that represents the brain.  Carl also thought it was a good way into the piece.  Then we moved through the show, and that became the article’s structure.  I typed while we were both speaking – not trying to hone language, just trying to get basic ideas in order.  Then I wrote the first draft until the halfway point and e-mailed the draft to Carl, who then edited what I’d written – not structure, but word choice and one factual error and some added information.  Then he wrote the second half.  He sent it back to me and I edited what he’d written.  We both killed the other’s darlings.”

More and more refined drafts went back and forth a half dozen times.  Changes were tracked on each draft, and the collaborators spoke frequently by phone.  The finished product possesses two things you don’t always find in science writing: accurate, easily comprehensible information related in a style that’s brisk and clear.

The pair’s next collaboration was an article for the New York Times about the emerging field of optogenetics, which uses flashes of light to control electrical activity in specially engineered neurons.  The technique is beginning to yield insight into such human disorders as Parkinson’s disease and anxiety.

Rabinowitz now feels that collaboration, though painful, is worth the trouble.  “Ultimately I think it produced better writing than I could have done myself,” she says.  “Carl knows what he’s talking about.  If he liked something I wrote, I got the joy of recognition.  But it can be frustrating too.  I wouldn’t want to write this way with most people I know, because it’s hard and there has to be a good reason to do it.  If you’re writing with somebody else, you need to communicate very well.”

For Greg Wayne, a grad student in theoretical neuroscience and a member of NeuWrite, this hasn’t been his first exposure to collaborative writing.  Wayne and his brother, a novelist, had worked together on humor sketches, a form that’s “incredibly amenable” to collaboration, he says.  “With humor, there’s a joke every line, and that can be edited immediately.  Is this funny?  Does that work?  But if you have long, discursive writing, sitting at the same keyboard is much more difficult.  I think novel writing would be just about impossible.”

Wayne collaborated with the writer Alex Pasternack on an article for Science magazine about a panel on artificial intelligence at the World Science Festival – replete with robot demonstrations, including Watson, the “Jeopardy!” champion.  The experience left Wayne convinced that there are times when two minds can produce better science writing than one.  “For the article we divided up responsibility based on what we know best,” Wayne says.  “Alex, as a writer, was going to look at social issues, how the public views artificial intelligence, how people think about a Stanley Kubrick sci-fi movie.  As a scientist I would focus on the nuts and bolts of how the robots work.  In the end, neither one of us alone would have been capable of writing what we wrote together.”

3.
Tim Requarth studied Spanish literature as an undergrad and wrote a book about his father’s dementia before entering Columbia’s neuroscience program.  Requarth, who recently wrote a review here at The Millions of the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s best-seller, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, teamed up with Schoonover to help run NeuWrite.  “I was a logical person to step in because I’ve had a foot in both words – science and writing,” says Requarth, who has collaborated on articles for Science and Scientific American with Meehan Crist, who has just finished writing a book called Everything After, about traumatic brain injury.  “One thing we’ve all discovered is that it works better if one person writes the first draft.  Meehan and I discuss the ideas and arrive at a sketch, details to include, how to start.  Then I sit down and write.  Then Meehan does a first-pass edit, and we pass it back and forth until we’re both happy with it.  When someone reads your rough draft, it’s like letting them see you half-dressed.  It’s about arriving at a level of intellectual comfort – or having faith in the process.  In a successful collaboration, both people feel like they did less than half the work.”

Requarth is now working to start a second NeuWrite group that will branch beyond the neuroscience field and beyond the Columbia campus.  He’s recruiting students from other science disciplines at NYU and CUNY, as well as journalists.  Another group is beginning to form in Boston.

Schoonover is optimistic that the group’s tenets will spread.  “We’re trying to make the argument to science editors that the best way to guarantee accuracy and avoid hype is by having a scientist involved in every step of the crafting of articles,” he says.  “Once we show that this collaboration between writers and scientists works with NeuWrite, we’d love to see it become routine.  We’re sowing the seeds for expansion.”

(Image: Christmas DNA from pagedooley’s photostream)

From the Newsstand
| 7 books mentioned 8 6 min read
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From the Newsstand

From the Newsstand: E to Z

From the Newsstand
August 4, 2008 | 7 books mentioned 1

Again, the current issue of The New York Review of Books features one splendid fiction writer’s meditations on another brilliant fiction writer Last his time, it was Eisenberg on Nádas; this time it’s Zadie Smith considering the critical legacy of E.M. Forster, who provided the inspiration for On Beauty.As a novelist, Forster has suffered by comparison to his more conspicuously innovative contemporaries (for my money, Howards End is as much a technical achievement as that other Bloomsbury monument, Mrs. Dalloway); Smith suggests that Forster is underrated as a critic, as well.Perhaps his critical medium – BBC radio – made it easy to overlook Forster’s seriousness; perhaps his characteristic modesty did as well. Still, we can learn much from Forster, and from Smith’s appreciation of him:He could sit in his own literary corner without claiming its superiority to any other. Stubbornly he defends Joyce, though he doesn’t much like him, and Woolf, though she bemuses him, and Eliot, though he fears him […] Forster was not Valéry, but he defended Valéry’s right to be Valéry. He understood the beauty of complexity and saluted it where he saw it.

From the Newsstand
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Screening Room

Darren’s Ark: On Noah

Screening Room
April 25, 2014 | 7 books mentioned 4 min read

Last week was a week for festivity and observance.  On the second day, I attended a Seder, with 14 pounds of beef brisket.  On the fifth day, I saw Noah, with Russell Crowe looking like 14 pounds of brisket in a distressed denim bag.   On the sixth day, I wrestled with Robert Alter’s Five Books of Moses and ate mini spanakopitas.  On the seventh day, I rested; while others feasted on paschal ham, I watched Black Swan in bed with the curtains drawn.  And it was good, all of it.

I have been looking forward to Noah.  I love epics, I love Russell Crowe, and I’m willing to admit that my taste in cinema is basically that of an 11-year-old girl (“Harriet thought the movie was a gas. Zeus was very angry all the time and made a lot of temples fall over every time something displeased him”). I also love weird things, and the very fact that Darren Aronofsky was at the helm of a Biblical epic was sufficiently weird to thrill me.  David Denby, patriarch of film critics, called Aronofsky’s Black Swan “a luridly beautiful farrago,” and about Noah, forsaking all synonyms, he spake thus: “an epic farrago.” This was reason enough to spend $30 on movie tickets and Sour S’ghetti — in addition to the above, I also happen to love a good farrago.

Epics can be purveyors of wonder and disappointment in proportion with their outlandish budgets, and there’s a mysterious measure — like something Biblical no longer in use — of magic that makes one epic pleasing while it maketh the other to blow.  This is why I love Gladiator and find Troy, which I managed to see four times in the movie theater, a sandy, sterile flop.  I don’t know what I was expecting of Noah, exactly.  It wasn’t the corny gold font of the credits (“Ten Commandments,” my viewing mates called it) or its robin’s egg sky like unto that of a 1970s nature film.  I didn’t expect the giant rock angels, like Ents created for The Neverending Story, and I expected even less to be finally moved by them, to feel the agony of trapped light in mangled stone bodies.  I didn’t expect Russell Crowe to look so old, nor did I expect to cry at the sight of his leonine grey head lavishing kisses on babies cradled by Hermione Granger.  And yet all of these things came to pass.

Like someone examining the carcass on an abandoned holiday table, Darren Aronofsky is good at finding new meat in seemingly sparse and picked-over stories.  Because here’s the thing about the Real Story of Noah: it’s short, boring, and incomprehensible.  Everyone is hundreds of years old.  Enoch begets Mehujael, who begets Mathusael, who begets Lamech, who begets Jabal and Jubal.  And yet, at the same time in some parallel but separate family tree, a different Enoch begets Methuselah, who begets Lamech, who begets Noah.  Reading even Robert Alter’s wonderful translation, I found these dueling genealogies so maddening that it hardened my heart against Genesis 6:1 to 10:32.

It is ever thus for me and the Testaments, old and new.  I come from the Christian tradition, in my pallid, heterodox little way, but for me the drama of the stories, the occasionally overwhelmingly beautiful language and imagery of the sacred texts always comes up against, not only the begats, but what James Wood calls “the stony reticence” of Biblical style, where, for example, “Joseph’s response to his brothers works by starving us of information.”  I love God’s breath on the surface of the waters, but then there are five different Enochs and so many quotas of bricks, so many bales of straw, and nary a good chunk of fulsome exposition about the things that one feels really matter.  I’m a “In the beginning was the Word” type; I need Robert Alter, or James Wood, to glean for me the surprising charms of Old Testament mode.  And evidently I needed Darren Aronofsky, because, brought up as I was in the Tomie dePaola, cute-animals-on-boats school of Biblical exegesis, I had never really thought about what Noah was asked to do.

And so what if he was never asked, as in the film, to smite down babies issued from previously barren wombs?  Genesis has miracles!  Genesis has people making unreasonable sacrifices at God’s behest, or his perceived behest (people still argue about this).  Some viewers have been awfully pedantic about the Biblical inaccuracy of Noah, but what’s silly is thinking about Noah all on its own.  You need the context of Genesis proper, which, as Alter points out in his invaluable introduction to his translation, “has set the terms, not scientifically but symbolically, for much of the way we have thought about human nature and culture ever since.”  The context of “ever since” doesn’t hurt either.  For all that you can find Noah‘s outfits or its rock monsters or its Anthony Hopkins ludicrous, there’s really nothing wrong with its message, from my veteran youth grouper perspective — the gnarliness of the Old Testament is blended with the warm fuzzies of the New.  God is unreasonable.  Man is unreasonable.  Bad things are going to happen.  Good things, too.  Love one another, as he purports to love you.  Moreover, the particulars are necessarily informed by the problems of our day, which have to do with our ravaged environment, and which promise to achieve Biblical proportions.

The best stories are ones we’ve heard before, in some form.  I also get bogged down around the last third of Swan Lake, another story with somewhat shrouded (if more recent) origins that has received the Aronofsky treatment.  I love the music and I love ballet, and yet it’s very long.  But where I am lazy, Darren Aronofsky is imaginative; he respects these laconic but meaningful stories enough to think more about them, and he is not deterred by their inconsistencies or their longueurs.  At the same time, he is sacrilegious enough to make weird new things out of them, things that work for some and fail for others. Why should Swan Lake carry within itself the possibility of Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman in flagrante, in a dingy bedroom filled with stuffed animals?  And yet, for me, it worked.  And for me, his take on Noah as a vegan environmentalist, irksome to the most literal- and bloody-minded Christianists, worked.   His goofy effects, irksome to some of the heathen viewers, worked.  Me, I would have welcomed more, more disco Instagram colors, more stop-motion nature footage, more animals. I love a good farrago, and Darren Aronofsky never phones his in.

Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 4 min read
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From the Newsstand

Trillin On Parking

From the Newsstand
January 28, 2007 | 7 books mentioned

Millions contributor Garth pointed me to a funny little piece by Calvin Trillin in the New York Times in which the New Yorker writer is asked to test out the new Lexus “Advanced Parking Guidance System.” Perhaps you’ve heard of this; it supposedly enables the car to park itself. Trillin, as he indicates, believes that he has been asked to try this newfangled technology out because he was the author of Tepper Isn’t Going Out, “which is considered by most scholars to have been the first parking novel” and because in 1964 he was the founding co-editor of Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking, which, Trillin says, “I’ve seen referred to as a one-issue publication even though we prefer to say that the second issue hasn’t come out yet.” Indeed, Trillin views himself as something of a parking expert:If I were asked to name my talent – talent, that is, in the way the Miss America pageant uses the word talent, as in “Miss West Virginia will now do her talent” – I would say “parallel parking.” For the second issue of Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking, I’ve been preparing an article on how I came up with the term “slicing the bread” to describe maneuvering into a spot that leaves only the width of a bread slice between your bumpers and the bumpers of the cars ahead of and behind you. In a later issue, I intend to discuss “breaking the matzo” – getting into a spot so small that a matzo would crack if you tried to place it between the relevant bumpers. Just for the record, the last time I broke a matzo was May 1994, on Riverside Drive, between 83rd and 84th; unfortunately, there were no witnesses.Good stuff.

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19 comments:

  1. I couldn’t agree more (and would add that the “whiteout” extends into the indie scene–seen any Sundance movies lately? No better than Hollywood on this issue). I have some personal knowledge of this issue. I am an African-American writer who has had had two novels optioned for film (by white producers) for many years, both of which fall into the category you describe. Race is part of the story but not the focus of the story. My hard-working producers hang in there–but why is it so hard? I can’t help but think that part of the problem is what you describe above. I hope that renewed attention to the issue will begin, slowly to shift things. Doesn’t have to be my stuff that gets made (though I’d love that!) but there are many, many stories to be told.

  2. There’s also the stellar model of “The Wire”: it’s a show very much about race and poverty and power; but it utterly complicates these things, i.e. the characters of the darker hue play roles all over the power map, as do the white characters. At the same time it never bows to a sloppy notion that race “doesn’t matter anymore.”

  3. Dear Martha,

    A while back, I met a filmmaker on a flight to New Orleans who was working on a movie featuring a biracial relationship (white woman; Asian man) but not explicitly and heavily about biracial relationships. I’ve been on the lookout for it since, but no luck. Which is to say that you’re not alone in having Hollywood and Indieland neglect your work about/not about race. I just don’t think they know how to sell it and don’t realize that there’s an appetite for it.

    And Sonya’s right that The Wire is a prime example of a successful and highly lauded TV series that’s story first, character first, but is also attending to the nuances of multiracial relationships/communities. There was a bit of this in Deadwood too with the character of Mr. Woo and his relationship with Al Swerengen. And the all-white Friday Night Lights has also, in the past season, become a multiracial show. So there are little inklings of progress–no major feature films along this line yet, but I think they’re coming. Take heart! And thanks for reading, Emily

  4. Before comments, some examples:
    1. Devil in a Blue Dress–Denzel Washington gets caught up in late 40s racial scandal and LA politics but who is he? A WW2 vet, come to California in the Great Migration from the south, owns his own modest home in a black neighborhood of other modest well-maintained homes, which he will do anything to keep (hence, he gets into big noirish trouble when he loses his job). Race is integral to the backstory and it’s a thriller but it’s so much more than a thriller. A man newly middle-class wants to keep his home–an amazing achievement for a black man in this era. Who of whatever race cannot relate to this?
    2. Before The Wire which I agree is the best best best , there was NYPD Blue (first 4 seasons are on DVD and seasons 2 and 3 are to die for)–Sipowicz, white, racist, alcoholic cop with a conscience that drives him crazy and ultimately for his own salvation he gets a lot of help from those around him including his patience-running-thin black lieutenant boss, and a half-hispanic partner. The help comes unwelcomed most of the time.
    3. I suppose Eastwood’s Gran Torino has to be mentioned altho I didn’t like it.
    4. Mother and Child with Benning, Smits and Samuel Jackson.
    5. Immigrant stories can bridge some gaps–The Visitor, Goodbye Solo, Sorry, Haters with an extraordinary performance by Robin Wright Penn (be prepared for a surprising harrowing ending).
    6. Movies I never want to see: movies about the hood aimed at 20 year olds; feel-good inspirational with a mix of characters. Double yuck.
    7. I love the movies of Rodrigo Garcia. He gets it right. I want complex, I want subtle, I want less-is-more. Hollywood mostly: if more works, then give ’em more, and more or top of more.
    8. Fatih Akin is a director who makes German films about Germans and Turks. Fassbinder RIP made movies in the 70s about racism in Germany. There are a whole slew of North African-French directors who open up the wounds and expose the real life of multi-racial characters straddling worlds–race and class. There are many Israeli and Arab-Palestinian movies that expose what needs to be exposed.
    (Now I will look through my movie list and see a lot which I wish I had included, but this is long enough.)

  5. To the extent that there are fewer prominent black characters, this isn’t something that’s happening in a vacuum. There’s been an ugly change in the economics of film. Multiplex theaters are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and the vagaries of distribution deals encourage expansive marketing campaigns that drive audiences into movies on their opening weekends. Movie attendance is so front-loaded that the second weekend gross is often only half of the opening weekend. DVD releases now follow theatrical release by as little as four months.

    Huge opening-weekend grosses on 4000 screens are driven by enormous marketing campaigns. It’s inefficient to run enormous marketing campaigns for movies that aren’t enormous, so there are fewer non-enormous movies. These enormous movies with their enormous budgets are the tent-pole products that prop up the earnings of major corporate conglomerates, so they’re engineered to be very broad, and to appeal to the tastes of the largest portion of movie viewers. This audience is primarily white and largely under 25 years of age.

    A few very powerful auteurs, like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, can make art in this space. But before “Avatar” and “Inception” were box office successes, they were viewed as unreasonable risks and potential follies by executives who could have played safer by investing in franchises and sequels. The Hollywood norm tends to look more like the output of Michael Bay. There are roles for non-white actors in these movies, but not the kinds of roles that get people nominated for awards.

    In the last couple of years, this new calculus caused the studios to shutter the specialty divisions that blossomed in the earlier part of the decade. With a few exceptions, studios are avoiding smaller and medium-sized comedies and dramas. When Scott and Dargis bring up “The Hurt Locker,” they seem to forget how that film struggled to find distribution and did not get a wide release until after it started getting awards nominations. If there are fewer good roles for black actors, it’s probably a symptom of the fact that there are fewer good movies being made.

  6. I couldn’t agree more: Hip-hop has done little more than turn black men and women under the age of 30 into little more than cliches. The lack of employment opportunities for Hispanics as made Hollywood see them only as part-time workers and immigrants. Movies and TV, more than any other media, can change this: there ARE educated, responsible, gainfully employed non-white citizens out there. If the movies don’t want to recognize this, then non-white citizens will get a raw deal.

  7. I take your point, Daniel, about this being part of larger forces at work in Hollywood and Independent film-making. And I remember reading an excellent piece–think it was in the LA Times–about The Hurt Locker’s slow, uncertain journey toward major distribution–that it was picked up after getting knock-out reviews, Oscar buzz, steady audience numbers in the few theaters that had it initially. So I’d agree that it was a one-off example. Can only hope it’s done a little trail blazing. Though we’re still a long way away from the 90’s indie/Miramax era, when it seemed like anyone could make a movie and everyone was and that those movies quite often made their way to decent distribution (High Art, The Last Days of Disco, The Brothers McMullin, Chasing Amy, Clerks, Swingers, Kids). Of course, all these titles are very white movies. But if another golden age of independent filmmaking were to come about in this decade–and how I hope one does–I think it would be different.

    But you’re right. For right now we’re stuck with a movie making and distribution system that’s profit-driven and very cautious and that this is perhaps the main barrier for the kind of films I imagine.

    And Thomas–thank you for writing. I absolutely agree that the more our culture’s books, movies, media show us non-stereotypical images of ourselves, the weaker those stereotypes become. I had a professor once who said that the tv show 24 had helped make a real black president possible by depicting a fictional one. I don’t know if there’s a way to quantify that kind of effect, but it’s definitely a provocative and inspiring idea.

    And I agree with you absolutely that very few directors can do anything approaching art

  8. Emily,

    The issue you describe is a glaring problem, not only in Hollywood, but in other environments as well. The post-racial age ideal you described does happen, but all too often non-whites are hired, befriended, etc. as if to make some kind of point. “Look, we hired/invited this black/asian/latino person! We’re a company/family/city that values multi-ethnicity! Look at us! Look at us!”.

    Does anyone have any suggestions on how we can make diversity less of an “issue” and more of an accepted reality? It’s 2011, folks. Surely we can come up with something…

  9. What we need now are not white movies with Benetton tokenism (think Harry Potter: Cho Chang and the Patel twins), nor movies that ghettoize racial experience. What we need now, if our movies are to reflect American life as it is lived by more and more of us, is not white or black, but multiracial, biracial—movies whose plots and characters show how people of all races, not just white and black, combine and intersect in more mundane ways (marriage, friendship, work) and how these intersections have their particular, subtle racially-inflected nuances but are also just that—friendships, work, marriages.

    This is exactly how I feel. I have no interest in either Benetton tokenism or ghettoized racial experiences, and that is the huge bulk of films (and books, and television shows) that feature people of color. As a woman of color, this is especially disheartening for me, because this means I have a hard time enjoying most things marketed as “black” works of art or “Asian” works of art or “Hispanic” works of art. Most of them end up being either tokenism or ghettoizing or “privilege porn,” i.e. lurid depictions of how “horrible” life is for the (usually black) people in said film/book/TV show.

    I agree with Sonya re: The Wire. That was one of the finest TV series ever made. It was consistently subtle and complex. It should have had more seasons!

  10. Quick note on a side point: Harry Potter is a British film, I have no idea why you are criticising it for not representing American life.

  11. Another quick side note re. Harry Potter and racial diversity: the books are full of non-white characters who really couldn’t be left out of the movies: e.g. Cho Chang, the Patel twins, Dean Thomas, Angelina Johnson, etc.

  12. Also, it seems odd to take the Harry Potter movies to task, as it is based on a book. It’s like complaining there weren’t enough Asians in Beowulf, or enough Latinos in Gunga Din.

  13. Hey Harry Potter fans–Yes, HP was written by a Brit and all of the film’s actors are British but it was made by a Hollywood studio (Warner Brothers).

    Thanks for reading, Emily

  14. Emily,
    Maybe one reason for the glaring absence of black directors, writers and actors at this year’s Oscars is because the Academy, in its rush to embrace the so-called “underclass,” overlooked a gem called “Night Catches Us.” It was written and directed by a talented black woman (Tanya Hamilton), stars two mesmerizing black actors (Anthony Mackie from “The Hurt Locker” and Kerry Washington), and deals with the racially charged hangover from the Black Panther movement in 1970s Washington, D.C. It may not be the thing that you, and I, are hoping for – namely, plausible dramas and comedies about love and death and family that also happen to be about race – but it is nonetheless and nuanced and unflinching film that deserved a larger audience and more awards attention. Given what we’ve got, I’ll be pulling for “Winter’s Bone” on Oscar night – partly because it’s a great gritty movie, but mainly because it grew out of a novel by the gifted Daniel Woodrell. Thanks for this thoughtful, thought-provoking essay.
    Bill Morris

  15. I didn’t even hear about Night Catches Us, Bill–but will certainly seek it out now that I have.

    And I’m pulling for Winter’s Bone too–am delighted that it didn’t fall under the radar–and surprised since Deborah Granik isn’t, or wasn’t, a member of the directors guild.

    Another thing this year’s critical mass of movies about the underclass and the whiteout have obscured: This year was a pretty good one for female directors with Granik and Lisa Cholodenko’s films both in the running for top prizes. I’m a big fan of Cholodenko, but think her less gritty/more bougie film is less likely to win big–though I think the writing is as good and the performances. Plus, Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank and Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways.

    And thank you for reading, Emily

  18. The cover of Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue once again reflects the film biz: zero Asian-American, zero Latinos. One (token ?) black actor (Anthony Mackie), one black/white actress (Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones). White men and white women dominate the very glam 1930 era shot. (Note: To the far right is a Swede (her father is a Spaniard): Noomi Rapace of “Girl with the Dragon Tatooo”, etc. fame.)

    I’m white myself and I went: Ouch!!

    One of my favorite black actresses Angela Bassett: whatever happened to her? Halle Berry (white mother/black father) is talented but gets far too much attention in the media.

  19. Dear Jennifer,

    Just back from inspecting the cover and think I’d agree that Anthony Mackie’s their token non-white. And about that: if you’re putting Mackie in the mix, presumably for Night Catches Us, why would you not put his co-star–the ravishing and uber-talented Kerry Washington–in there too? I mean, if Rashida Jones made the cut with her short career of low comedy and that trustfund babe who used to play a lesbian on the OC–who was in some godawful robot/video game movie this year (Tron?)–why not Kerry Washington?

    But I don’t expect much of Vanity Fair–the shamelessness/thoughtlessness/idiocy quotient is so reliably high! Though they do still manage to out-do themselves, as you’ve noted. Personally, I still haven’t fully recovered from the shamelessness/hookerishness of their World Cup cover with Didier Drogba and Christiano Ronaldo. I guess the disappointment is that they could use their considerable artistic powers for good–and so often they squander them on inanity.

    Thanks for reading, Jennifer.

    Emily

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From the Newsstand

A List With A Twist Revisited

From the Newsstand
December 28, 2008 | 7 books mentioned 2 2 min read

In the spring, we reported on an unusual event unfolding in the Books pages of The Globe and Mail. Each week, through 2008, someone – typically a published author or an academic – would write an essay for the Globe championing a book. Fifty books in total. They were not ranked in any order, and in reality they form a jumping-off point into a world of knowledge and literary imagination.About a third of the books championed were novels, from such usual suspects as War and Peace, Don Quixote, and Middlemarch, through Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.More interesting were the non-novels on the list. There were collected shorts from Borges, Kafka and Chekhov, and collected poems from Eliot and Yeats. There was Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Decameron, and The Mahabharata, a 2000-year-old verse from India. Lady Murasaki’s 1000-year-old The Tale of Genji pops up. Plays by Becket and Goethe were also championed.The King James Bible is there; as is the Koran. Books of philosophy by Plato and political economy by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx made the list.Darwin’s Origin of Species is there; so is Diderot’s Encyclopedia, Herodotus’ Histories, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Rachel Carson’s proto-environmental Silent Spring. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her 300-year-old rebel yell, is there, as are St. Augustine’s Confessions, and de Montaigne’s Essays, his 16th-century invention of a genre.Beside each essay are links to all the essays that came before it. So you should go to the 50th essay, championing Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, to get easy links to the other 49. Thank goodness for that, because there doesn’t seem to be a central web page listing all 50, and I advise against trying to search through the Globe and Mail’s Books section archives unless you want to get a blinding headache.

From the Newsstand
| 7 books mentioned 2 2 min read
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Screening Room

Killer of Sheep, Finally.

Screening Room
April 11, 2007 | 7 books mentioned 1 2 min read

You may have missed it in the New Yorker a few weeks back (if it weren’t for my wife, I would’ve), but tucked away in the Critic’s Notebook section of the magazine was the best piece of cinematic news I’ve heard all year. Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s 1977 film about life in the Watts section of Los Angeles, has finally gotten a theatrical release. Because of issues clearing the rights of the music in the film (the single biggest pain in any independent filmmaker’s neck), it’s been locked away in a vault in the Library of Congress, shown only once every few years at a film festival or museum. I was lucky enough to catch a rare screening when I was in college, and it was unforgettable.The story, in so far as there is one, is simple. Stan, an employee of a South Central slaughterhouse (hence the title of the film), is depressed and retreating from his wife. Interspersed with scenes of Stan at home and at work (the footage of the sheep is both fascinating in its gore and haunting, like watching a lake before a storm) are snippets of kids playing, women gossiping, and men scheming to make a few dollars more. What makes Killer of Sheep so memorable is the depth and reality of the characters and the incredibly complex humor the film employs. Indeed, for a movie that says so much about poverty, it’s surprisingly funny. And the new print – beautifully restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive – is a luscious 35mm blow-up of the original 16mm negative. I saw the film again last night, and it looked crisp and clean.In certain film-buff circles, Killer of Sheep has long been a trump card, an instant badge of street cred that could top anything. Oh, you saw a five hour performance of Gances’ Napoleon with the London Philharmonic? Well, I saw Killer of Sheep a few weeks ago at Doc Films. Since it’s never even been released on video, it has become legendary, a sort of a cinematic equivalent to J.D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1920.” But to leave it at this is to cheapen a tremendous film, and to discount the effect it’s had on cinema since. David Gordon Green, Spike Lee, and the people who make “The Wire” all owe a debt to Mr. Burnett. As much as I loved being the only person in on the joke, I’d love even more if everybody went out and saw this film. Luckily, it might be coming to a theater near you.

Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned 1 2 min read
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