Right now, speaking as a black person in this country, in this time of sorrow and of grief—may Sandra Bland rest in peace.
My biggest concern is not the police who worry BlackLivesMatter and for good reason—for me, it’s mostly about the movies. This worry is not keeping me awake at night but does concern me as much as the actions of the Texas Highway Patrol. The worst the cops can do is kill you but Hollywood can dehumanize you or stereotype you. And then the real cops shoot you because they’ve seen the same movie. That’s what the screenplay calls for and who is a mere cop-on-the-street to question such a well regarded script?
Or the very, very worse, you get a bad actor to portray you or people "like you" or bad actors to portray your tribe, whatever tribe that may be. Mao said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun but it also comes out of a camera lens, a different kind of power certainly but just as un-contestable and final. The issue for me is that the very strength of film, the ability to encapsulate life or something approaching life in a gripping and effortless way, unlike reading where you have to pay attention and turn the page, in a movie theater you can just sit there and have your imagination highjacked. Not to be critical. But that's precisely what makes the medium so dangerous.
If you think this is shaping up as some kind of rant about a particular movie or star, it’s not. There are a few candidates out there, it seems to me, a lot of really bad movies being made, practically anything with Adam Sandler for example, but that’s not why we’re here. It’s more the role of critics to tell you which is a bad film or not. My opinion is offered solely as an average viewer and with a sole caveat, a moviegoer who is African American. Nor is this about what’s going on behind the camera, which is an issue of current concern because of the recent ill-chosen comments of a certain Caucasian male Hollywood A-lister, who seems clueless about racism in his own industry. You may say, well, who is behind the camera is intricately tied to who appears in front of it and that’s true. But as scientists write in learned papers, that is beyond the scope of our work here. Besides that’s something that will have to be explained by someone who knows the industry, someone who knows the ins and outs of filmmaking, how to position the casting couch so to speak, as opposed to who lies down on it which is what concerns us here. Again, my cinematic opinions are expressed purely as an average moviegoer, a consumer of the final cut who is African American, the cinematic version of the “man in the street” who we used to talk about before the man in the street got a blog or social media and started speaking for himself.
Mine is an inexpert opinion coming from someone who doesn’t know film but who knows black people and who has a certain consciousness and is worried by what he sees on the Big Screen. If you’re wondering if this is shaping up as some kind of revolutionary rant, it is.
There have been, it’s my thesis, having seen a lot of movies, old and new, as many of you have too, or more, it's my thesis that there have been only two eras of film for blacks in this country. “Pre-Dooley” and “Post-Dooley,” the former designated “B.D.,” for “Before Dooley” for simplification, because otherwise both will be “P.D.” and confuse the reader. The “D” stands for Dooley Wilson who played Sam the piano player to Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca. Dooley Wilson like everyone else important was actually born in Texas, in some pinewoods pisspot near Tyler, wherever that is, may Allah be pleased never to send me there. It sounds like the kind of place that people are best known for leaving.
Wilson got out as soon as he could, from Tyler and from Texas, as many black people did at that time, and never looked back. It’s worth mentioning the Lone Star State connection only because so often in modern history there is a connection to something that has happened or is happening south of the Red River and north of the Rio Grande. A link that others have commented on at length and that has been the subject of not a few news articles and screenplays, the worrisome “Texas connection.” Anyway, before Dooley, there were three sub-eras for blacks in American film, loosely speaking, represented by three movies or kinds of movies, the first being the blatantly racist Birth of a Nation and any of the blackface films or anything with Stepin Fetchit or a Stepin Fetchit-like character, and the Mammy portrayals like Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, in which a middle-aged black woman utters folksy wisdom while working in a white woman's kitchen. These films or kinds of films were not accurate but were pretty consistent with the status of blacks in America of the time. GWTW might even have been considered progressive in race relations, at that time. McDaniel won a best supporting Oscar after all, basically for rolling her eyes and warning Miss Scarlet not to commit some kind of foolishness, if memory serves, but an Oscar nonetheless and McDaniel became a role model not for her role in the film but for her successful entrée into “the industry,” which was not automobiles or home furnishings or domestic service but making movies. The credit you have to give to Hattie McDaniel is despite her work in the film.
The beautiful thing about films even today and especially for white actors and actresses is that bad movies cannot be held against good performers. It’s the Hollywood corollary of the idea that bad things happen to good people. You can be an actor walking down Sunset Boulevard, minding your own business and humming a Shakespearean soliloquy or just humming because many stars see themselves as singers too, when suddenly you get hit with a bad role. It's like lightning—you’re not to blame. Taking a bad role is usually about working in a very competitive industry where everyone wants to be and most actors usually want the work, even the good ones who may not need it, to hone their craft or keep it sharp, and they usually explain that they want to see what they can do with the role. There’s the paycheck that is often supersize. McDaniel got a paycheck and presumably a big one. Playing a maid in a white woman’s house in a film was certainly more lucrative than being a maid in a white woman’s house, which is the best that many black females had to look forward to, again at the time.
Right on Mammy’s heels came Dooley Wilson as Rick’s sidekick, the wise world-weary piano-playing black man who loves and is loyal to Rick, which makes Bogie cool, if he wasn’t before, which he was. Because he can hang with Negroes and he’s not racist. That’s kind of my take on the action in Casablanca but it doesn’t really matter because the plot is incidental. Wilson is there as a totem more than an actor, yeah, a totem you could say, and nascent stereotypes are there too but they’re different from what came before, an improvement so to speak. Wilson’s mere appearance on camera in this kind of film was progress. The conceit of Casablanca which has become immortal, both the film and its motif, is the black guy or black girl who kind of has no life of his or her own but whose center of attention is focused on the white lead character and who serves as soulmate for the star, although they’re not fucking. That’s Sam in a nutshell. He has proved to be immortal. We still see him today by other names in other movies.
He’s spiritual too, that’s a big part of the package. Black people are always spiritual and know things that white people don’t and in Casablanca Sam knows that the sudden appearance of Ingrid Bergman is bad news for Rick and that’s what concerns Sam most, what’s good or bad for Rick. When Bogie is getting ready to split for the desert, or whatever, to join the Foreign Legion or whatever, he makes clear to the club’s new owner that Sam gets a piece of the action which is cool too, and new, groundbreaking, revolutionary in fact. Suddenly we’re making money in film and on film, a percentage of the action hitherto reserved for white people, a step up from Ms. McDaniel whose only apparent reward on screen was her love of that scatterbrained scheming white girl Scarlet O’Hara. But fuck that. Sam is not getting any horizontal rewards that we see or at least not any concrete affection from Ingrid Bergman who is Bogie’s love interest—and that’s where the storyline breaks down a little for me because most brothers of my acquaintance, feeling that a fine chick is not right for their best friend, for whatever reason, would make a move on her themselves. Especially anyone as fine as Ingrid Bergman. But this is Hollywood not the real world and Hollywood is a parallel universe to our own, a virtual world where some rules on Earth apply and others do not.
That’s how Dooley Wilson changed our world for the better. He was still a stick figure but one who was making good money and getting significant screen time. He rolled his eyes once or twice but that’s cool too. He got to sing and play the piano on camera which many more liberated Negros even today might like to do. My theory is that we've been living in Dooley’s world ever since, certainly on camera but also to some extent on the streets of the U.S.A. Not because his role is so attractive to us still but because whites like it so much and they’re the ones who usually do the casting. They also write the checks. We’re in a Post-Dooley Era only because he’s dead. At best we’re living in a post-Post Dooley Era that sounds like more radical change than it really has been. Things have changed but haven’t changed much. White people still see us as sidekicks and want us to have suffered so that we can be spiritual for them and they want us to be discriminated against so they can show how open-minded and cool they are by hanging out with us. What Bogie did by instinct, today they do by design. Unless it's supposed to happen on film and we’re getting paid for it, in which case the script is a little old but depending on the paycheck we may still be up for the role. To hone our craft. There was a movie a few years ago where Tom Cruise played a hitman and Jamie Foxx played the taxi driver who chauffeurs him to his victims and it occurred to me how much more compelling Foxx’s role as the fearful taxista was than Cruise’s psychopathic killer. Foxx is from the Lone Star State too, another presumed East Texas shithole, called Terrell, Terrell Texas, God-forbid, and he is a talented actor, also an Academy-Award winner: in a state enamored of Matthew McConaughey, almost to exclusion, it has nothing to do with race, you can be sure. Real reason is that McConaughey hangs out in Texas but Foxx split, like Dooley Wilson.
Mostly as blacks in America and on film we’re still playing Dooley in some shape or form.
Even the great Denzel Washington. Not long ago he was in a spy flick (my genre) with Ryan Reynolds, and Denzel did the buddy-thing or a modified buddy thing because they weren’t real buds or anything but the ending was what you would expect in today's cinema, Denzel died for Ryan, so that Reynolds’ character would live, which is a plot twist that white people like in life and in film. And, you know, it seems to me that Reynolds is an okay actor but hardly in Washington’s league and the only thing that Ryan Reynolds has done of any real note is to marry Scarlet Johansson which does give him points in a guy’s world that his acting may not. There’s a parallel here to our parallel universe, actually. Very often white people somehow expect blacks to take a spear for them, metaphorically speaking, the way Denzel took a bullet for Reynolds, or take a lesser position or less pay because “that’s what it means to be black in this country.” While the white guy or white girl gets the girl or the guy and the big paycheck and gets to feel sympathy at our condition as black people in this country. Which makes your white friend empathetic or cool or whatever, on top of the higher salary. Does that sound familiar? If so, my thesis is that it’s because you’ve seen the movie. Probably multiple times. That movie has been made. Several times. We’re trying some fresh material here. And Caucasians always seem a little hurt because that’s the script they are used to. It’s all coming from the Big Screen, that’s my view.
And it’s not just blacks for whom those same old lines are being written. Michael Pena is a very good young actor but he seems to be dying a lot recently so some white guy with less talent can live on. In Fury and in a cop movie with Jake Gyllenhaal, where Michael took a bullet for Jake. The question in many films is which characters live to see the final credits roll and as in other areas of white privilege those characters tend to be white. This is important because Hispanics run the very real risk of having Hollywood handle their narrative the same way Hollywood handled Native Americans. It’s starting to look that way. American Indians have had a rough time since the Plains Wars because people like John Ford, John Wayne and Gary Cooper took an early interest in “their story,” including depictions of alcohol, savagery and mayhem that was actually visited on them as much as they visited same on whites. Until Hollywood screenwriters stepped in and changed the storyline. If blacks are doing better today it’s only because the very conditions of our arrival in this country made us extremely suspicious of subsequent offers of employment from Caucasians, in Hollywood and elsewhere. You can’t be too trusting whether it’s when the state trooper asks you to step out of your car or a movie producer says he’s going to make a film about your experience. The latter may be more dangerous than the former. You hand your narrative to other people only at great risk, that’s my view too.
A couple of years ago there was the completely forgettable Man on a Ledge with Australian hunk Sam Worthington, the film stands out in my memory only because the very white Kyra Sedwick played TV journalist Suzie Morales. C’mon now, they couldn’t find a Latina to play a Latina?
How is that any different from blackface?
Which raised a question that has been troubling me ever since. If Hollywood already has too many white actors, why are they importing more? This may sound mean-spirited but it’s not. We’re not talking about software engineers or nuclear physicists where there’s genuine scarcity, there’s no shortage of actors in this country. The fact of the matter is that most of the British actors are Caucasian and they are presumably not adding anything to the diversity mix on screen. Especially when they’re being hired to play Americans. Isn’t that like bringing coals to Newcastle? Ditto the new wave of Australian actors who seem to be everywhere at once. Margot Robbie and Sam Worthington are, respectively, a hot blond and a white hunk, which America already produces and who are already over-represented in film.
It’s not all bad news. For black stars specifically there have been a few iterations during the Post-Dooley Era, a Post-Dooley 2.0 and 3.0 and now a Post-Dooley 3.5. Starting in the ‘50s and ‘60s there were “good Negro” roles in which earnest young black actors, after great trials, ended up bonding with skeptical Caucasians on screen. It was supposed to show our common humanity, you know? The actor was usually Sidney Poitier or someone like Sidney Poitier. Of recent black actors, the most significant has been Will Smith, the self-described Mr. Box Office who has made a series of movies in which he portrays a black person.
As a matinee idol, as a black character conceived by whites, Smith was engineered inside out. He has the moves and mannerism, he has the look, he talks the talk—he has been, in some of his work, a white director’s view of what an edgy black person is like. Smith said once in an interview that he could have been elected president of the United States and he was probably right. For me, being African American does not mean seeking ideological purity in a darkened movie theater, exactly, but you don’t want to be embarrassed either. There’s a big ideological component to the arts that you can’t escape. Nor in this country, where minorities are still living something less than the American Dream, do we want to.
My most controversial call as a viewer was deciding whether to see the hitman movie with Tom Cruise, in which Jamie Foxx was chauffeuring Cruise to his victims. The decision was justified only because Foxx killed Cruise’s character in the end. Not having seen The Help or Driving Miss Daisy doesn’t prevent me from criticizing these films. Remember this isn’t film criticism, it’s political criticism. Political protest, you could call it, "talking shit to the white man," others might say, ideally. There’s a reason why Stalin and Mao sent a lot of artists and writers to prison, or worse, for the sake of revolutionary change. When the revolution comes, if the revolution comes, you like to think that anyone involved with Driving Miss Daisy, especially whoever wrote the title, will get a blindfold but no last cigarette.
It’s not that art imitates life or life imitates art. It’s that they are one in the same. Life is art and art is life, especially at the movies. We need to pay as much attention to who Hollywood is casting as who the police are chasing. Too few of one and too many of the other still lead us in the wrong direction as a society. But that’s just my opinion as a moviegoer.
And after all this venting, it’s time to chill: Goina go check out a movie at Redbox, something called Lila & Eve, it’s been described as a kind of Thelma and Louise for colored people, with Jennifer Lopez and Viola Davis, two of my favorite actresses. The ideological police still haven’t cleared the multi-talented Ms. Davis for accepting a role in The Help, a movie which (again, not actually having seen it, only because my high principles won’t allow me to) it’s my belief set back race relations in this country by a century, playing into white women’s wet dreams about their “special" relationships with their maids: the same way Casablanca did for guys, but without the same pretensions to innovative moviemaking. The thing is, Viola Davis’s mom was a maid and Viola was born on a former plantation in South Carolina, which is worse even than Texas, another one of those places black people are known for leaving on the first bus. She’s come a long way, baby, and as an African American you question her street cred only at great risk to your own.
Lila & Eve has a metacritic score of like 12 out of 100 but it’s only $1.62 a viewing. The film may be execrable but the casting is sublime.
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