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.

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Ten Books to Read When Mad Men is Over

Lists Notable Articles Screening Room
June 4, 2012 | 7 books mentioned 20 6 min read

Mad Men is about to disappear from our lives once again, leaving us to grapple alone with our complicated nostalgia for an era when men were men, women were secretaries, and alcoholism was glamorous. These books give a closer look at the era, offering a vision of Midcentury Manhattan that goes beyond Cheever and Yates. (Although Cheever and Yates are a great place to start, if you haven’t already.) Read them to tide you over until the next season or to fine-tune your predictions for this week’s series finale:

1. Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963, by David Rieff and Susan Sontag

If Sontag were alive today, it’s unlikely she would find much to admire about Mad Men, and yet she and Don Draper have a lot in common. Ambitious and seductive, both came to Manhattan to make themselves anew, rejecting their provincial roots. Among the many revelatory moments in Sontag’s diaries, the nakedness of her self-creation is the most startling; there are Gatsby-like resolutions for self-improvement, reading lists, and meticulous records of films, plays, and parties attended. Like Don Draper, she loved to use high-flown language to talk about popular culture, and was happiest when pulling nicotine-fueled all-nighters. She and Don also share a dread of monogamy, while at the same time rushing into ill-advised romances. Here’s Sontag on her early marriage to Philip Rieff: “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.”

2.  Manhattan, When I Was Young, by Mary Cantwell

This sweet, searching memoir about a young woman’s coming of age in Manhattan in the 1950s and early 60s is full of Mad Men-esque images, and narrated with the same rueful, if-we-only-knew-then-what-we-know-now tone. A former magazine writer for Mademoiselle and Vogue, Cantwell’s memory is pleasingly specific as she recalls fashions of the day and the best place to get a sundae in Midtown. The book is also a record of her first marriage to a young, aspiring novelist whose bohemian tastes infected her own. Disdainful of suburban living, Cantwell and her husband chose the West Village instead, where they moved from charming apartment to charming apartment with an ease that seems like utter fantasy today.

3.  The New York Times Cookbook, by Craig Claiborne

Page through this and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the meals that Pete Campbell’s wife, Trudy, has waiting for him when he comes home from work. First published in 1961, it was the book that a generation of young housewives learned to cook from before they graduated to Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

4.  The Early Stories, 1953-1975, by John Updike

Although only a handful of the stories in this collection take place in Manhattan, Updike was born within just a few years of Don Draper, and his stories reflect the peculiar pathologies of their generation, “the Silent Generation.” Raised during the Great Depression, both men grew up in a time of scarcity only to come of age in an era of prosperity. Such extremes of experience were bewildering, creating feelings of both wonder and discontent. As Updike writes in his 2003 foreword to the collection, “We were simple and hopeful enough to launch into idealistic careers and early marriages, and pragmatic enough to adjust, with an American shrug, to the ebb of old certainties. Yet, though spared many of the material deprivations and religious terrors that had dogged our parents, and awash in a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, we continued prey to what Freud called ‘normal human unhappiness.’”

5.  The Grand Surprise, The Journals of Leo Lerman, by Leo Lerman

Leo Lerman, a social butterfly whose name is likely included in any number of books of the period, is briefly mentioned in Manhattan, When I Was Young, in a passage describing the offices at Mademoiselle:
Leo Lerman, the entertainment editor, sat in a sort of railed-off den behind an enormous mahogany desk, taking phone calls from Marlene Dietrich and Truman Capote. A plump, bearded man, he lived in a house so excessively Victorian it defied the century, which was the point, and had a collection of friends so dazzling I am still dazzled by it.
Published posthumously in 2007, Lerman’s diary reveals the full extent of his “dazzling” collection of friends, which included Carson McCullers, Maria Callas, Jackie Onassis, and George Balanchine, among others. In the 1960s, he was installed as features editor of Vogue, and became one of the decade’s tastemakers, introducing readers to writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., August Wilson, and Iris Murdoch. Although Lerman’s version of Manhattan, with its focus on the literary, fashion, and theater worlds, is quite different from the one portrayed on Mad Men, his diaries share the same interest in gesture and language, especially the indirect ways people communicate with another. Attempting to find meaning in his diaries, Lerman wrote: “Personality, that is what I want to pin down, no matter how fleetingly, for the personality of a man is component to personality of his era.”

6.  Within The Context of No Context, by George W. S. Trow

Series creator Matthew Weiner has said that at its heart, Mad Men is about the massive cultural shifts that began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the way someone like Don Draper, an archetype of an earlier era, learns to adapt. George Trow’s classic essay, Within the Context of No Context, first published in The New Yorker in 1980, is a retrospective analysis of those cultural shifts, as well as his own anguished response to them. The son of a newspaperman, Trow writes that he grew up expecting to “have a fedora hat of my own by the time I was twelve years old.” Instead, he came of age only to find that his father’s version adulthood could no longer be inherited: “Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned…” Like our nostalgia for the world of Mad Men, Trow’s is undercut by his understanding that it was never very sustainable to begin with.

7.  Talk Stories, by Jamaica Kincaid

After being told that Mademoiselle “would not hire black girls”, Jamaica Kincaid started her writing career at Ingenue magazine, whose offices were in the same building as National Lampoon’s. Recognizing Kincaid’s wit, a writer at National Lampoon introduced her to The New Yorker’s George Trow, who became her mentor. Kincaid’s first assignment for The New Yorker was to accompany Trow to Brooklyn’s West Indian Day parade. Trow transcribed Kincaid’s comments for a “Talk of the Town” column, introducing the world to her joyful, youthful, and subtly ironic point of view. After that, Kincaid wrote her own “Talk” pieces. Talk Stories collects Kincaid’s essays into one volume, covering nearly a decade of New York City life, from 1974-1983. Although the columns don’t — at least not yet — overlap with the time period portrayed in Mad Men, it’s fascinating to see how a young black woman from Antigua managed to subvert the staid “Talk” format, which was at the time an unsigned column written in the first person plural, and free of curse words, sex, gossip, and any subject that might be considered trendy. Despite these strictures — or maybe because of them — the spirit of the era shines through. Kincaid’s spirit also shines, and taken together, these essays form a portrait of a young woman striving to find her place in the world. A must read for anyone with a soft spot for Peggy Olsen.

8.  Just Kids, by Patti Smith

Where Mad Men depicts life on Madison Avenue, with occasional glimpses into the life of New York’s bohemian culture, Smith’s memoir is a portrait of downtown New York with occasional glimpses of Fifth Avenue, where she worked for years as a bookseller at Scribner’s. Smith’s point of view is decidedly romantic as she recalls the years when she and Robert Mapplethorpe were broke nobodies, trying to decide whether to spend her paycheck on art supplies or diner meals. “We hadn’t any money but we were happy…I tacked pictures of Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Lotte Lenya, Piaf, Genet, and John Lennon over a makeshift desk where I arranged my quills, my inkwell, and my notebooks — my monastic mess.” Reading Smith’s girlish memories, you’ll understand why Don sometimes gets a wistful look when talking to Megan.

9.  Jack Holmes & His Friend, by Edmund White

Edmund White’s most recent novel, about the decades-long friendship between a gay man and a straight one, illustrates the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s from a new angle. Like Mad Men, Jack Holmes & His Friend begins in a world that is still dominated by the manners and mores of the 1950s. Jack, who is gay, must hide his sexuality from his straight friend, Will. But as the counter-culture takes hold, the tables turn and it’s Will who struggles with this sexuality, feeling trapped in his marriage while Jack blossoms, embracing a new identity as a “sexual libertine.” Covering a period of over thirty years, this novel includes many evocative descriptions of a Manhattan gone by, as well as a number of blow-out party scenes, resulting in debaucheries worthy of Don Draper.

10.  The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson

This work of narrative non-fiction is an investigation of the migration of African-Americans from the south to northern and western cities, a profound demographic shift that began after World War I and continued through the 1970s. Wilkerson ties her narrative to the lives of three individuals, who each leave the south to settle in three different cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The pathos of Wilkerson’s narrative comes as her subjects realize that escape from Jim Crow laws does not mean an escape from racism. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the roots of the civil rights movement — something that seems, to the characters of Mad Men, to come out of nowhere, but was actually a decades-long process, rooted in the day-to-day struggles of hundreds of thousands of migrant families. As Wilkerson writes of one of her subjects, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, “Few experts trained their sights on the unseen masses of migrants like her, who worked from the moment they arrived, didn’t end up on welfare, stayed married because that’s what God-fearing people of their generation did whether they were happy or not, and managed not to get strung out on drugs or whiskey or a cast of nameless, no-count men.”

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| 7 books mentioned 20 6 min read
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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

Dispatch from Turkey: Plagiarism Charges Levied at Award-Winning Author

From the Newsstand
August 11, 2011 | 7 books mentioned 18 5 min read
Elif Şafak, who writes in both Turkish and English, has enjoyed huge popular success globally for her novels. She was the winner of the Union of Turkish Writers prize for The Gaze, and she is a frequent presence on the Turkish best-seller list. She has appeared on NPR and written for the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. In May, Şafak shared a stage with Jonathan Franzen and Salman Rushdie as a PEN presenter. In short, she's a big deal (and in Turkey, a huge deal).
From the Newsstand
| 7 books mentioned 18 5 min read
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From the Newsstand

Tin House Gets Graphic

From the Newsstand
October 18, 2006 | 7 books mentioned

Remember those kids who obsessively drew their own comics on loose leaf in school? It should come as no surprise that Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem were furiously scribbling away in their notebooks during their pre-teen years. In the latest issue of Tin House – “The Graphic Issue” – the editors have collected boyhood comics from Chabon, Lethem, Dan Chaon, Luc Sante, and Chris Offutt (who also pens an introduction.) The comic juvenalia of these now well-known writers brought me back to my fifth grade class, where comics became a craze, and nearly every kid had created his own – on loose leaf of course – which we traded and read and discussed at length. My favorite amongst those collected here is Lethem’s brief opus “Fig-Leaf Man vs. Hot Dog King.”Unfortunately, none of the comics are available online, but the issue is worth a look as it includes graphic novel excerpts from Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken With Plums and other new works as well as appearances by Lynda Barry, Tom Tomorrow, and Zak Smith introducing his Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated (Read Garth’s recent post about the book). Also in the issue, short pieces by Anthony Swofford, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Stuart Dybek.

From the Newsstand
| 7 books mentioned
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Screening Room

Four-Star Films

Screening Room
January 28, 2007 | 7 books mentioned

Fire up your Netflix queue. The blog Chewing Pixels has compiled a list of all the films ever given four stars by the vaunted Halliwell’s Film Guides. According to Chewing Pixels:By Halliwell’s standard, all films by default receive a zero star rating. Only exceptionally interesting and important films manage to receive a one or two star rating with a tiny handful (just over 1%) of the 23,000-odd films covered receiving the maximum recommendation of Four Stars.Interestingly, as one can see by visiting the Amazon pages for the Guide’s 2006 and 2007 editions, Halliwell’s, once considered the gold standard of film guides, has fallen out of favor with some cinephiles since the death of Leslie Halliwell in 1989. The user reviews on the Amazon pages discuss how, in recent editions, new editor John Walker has “tampered” with Halliwell’s ratings, removing and adding stars in reviews for various films. Meanwhile, the ratings of films since 1989 are objects of scorn. An example: “Virtually every entry is vastly over-rated, with no glimmer of thought behind the utterly one-dimensional wording. Every dumb-ass movie, all those passing fads of the last 15 years has been evaluated & given merit way beyond their value.”Nonetheless, for a lover of lists (or movies), the Halliwell’s four-star films are worth a look.

Screening Room
| 7 books mentioned