Another Oscar Season, Another White Guy Who Knows a Black Guy

As you may recall, I’m a woman.  If you saw the cover art on the latest Newsweek, you know that this means I’m mainly concerned with boobies and babies and shopping and, occasionally, V.P. and Prez (not Perez, but we girls like him, too!) candidates, so long as they have vaginas.  Amiright, ladies?  (God I wish I had some chocolate right now. For my PMS!!)  But, very occasionally, I also remember that I’m white.  Like when I see previews for surefire Oscar contender The Soloist and am reminded that I’m supposed to need stories of black people to be filtered through the perspective of a white outsider.  Because the alternative just isn’t white enough for me.

This happens in a few ways in movies.  Films like Cry Freedom and The Last King of Scotland are ostensibly about famous black men, yet the protagonists are actually white men who knew them or are created to know them within the film.  Films like Blood Diamond, The Constant Gardener and the abysmal Beyond Borders are all ostensibly about the problems of Africa and Africans, but to greater and lesser extent are really just white love stories set against a black backdrop.  And I’m not even really counting stories like The Green Mile, in which a magical, mystical or otherwise talented black person helps and is marveled at by the whites around them, because those movies deserve their own discussion. And when I googled “movies about magical black people” just now I found out that Spike Lee already started this discussion years ago and I’m way behind the curve in bringing it up now.

Anyway, back to the first two categories, where I have probably read an additional 30-40 scripts that fit the bill of black stories as filtered through white characters or a backdrop for white melodrama. Pretty much every major, non-white leader who is well-known in the United States has a biopic or two floating around. Mandela, Medgar Evers, you name it. And if my experience is at all representative, about 50% of these are told through the eyes of a white dude who knew the person of color, rather than the person him or herself.  Yeah, a lot of these films and scripts are still pretty good.  And yeah, a lot of the real people really did have important relationships with white people –in the case of The Soloist and a few others, that white person wrote the book on which the film is based, making it hard to leave them out.  And yeah, sometimes the outraged perspective of an outsider who has never been the victim of racism or other injustice is a great way to make the struggles of the black character hit home with a white audience.  Yeah. I get it. There are reasons for doing this other than just that the writers want to appeal to me as a (fellow) white person.

What I’m saying is that I don’t care.  No matter how many good reasons there might be for an individual film to be presented through white eyes, it still seems like the proportion of those films to films that are seen primarily through the eyes of the actual black person who is the film’s subject matter (Malcolm X, Ray or Ali, for example) is too high.  It makes me feel like the makers of these films don’t think I will go and see these films if there’s not a white guy up there to translate for me.  It makes me feel like I’m in the jury listening to the last big boy speech Matthew McConaughey ever made in a movie, at the end of A Time To Kill, where he tells me all about the terrible things done to my white daughter and then tells me to imagine that she’s black in order to drive home the point that raping little girls is wrong.  But here’s the problem with that: I’m not a southern, heretofore racist juror,   and while I wanted Samuel L. Jackson to be acquitted enough to believe that desperate times called for desperate, imagine-your-own-daughter-is-black, measures in that movie, outside of that movie, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the local news should only show me stories about black people’s problems if there’s a white person involved to convince me they matter.  Because they do matter. Shove those stories about just black people down my throat, please. If I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to read stories about black people, please don’t pander to me.  Because that just rewards my white narcissism and helps it hang on for another day.

I hear you saying “films are a  business…box office…bringing in big audiences,” but I don’t care.  I am pretty sure Nelson Mandela is of enough interest to all of us for his story to be told from his perspective, not from the perspectives of two separate white dudes who knew him in two separate scripts I have read.  And no matter how friendly Ali got with Howard Cosell, I’m still quite happy that his story wasn’t told by Cosell in the Michael Mann film.  In that movie and in Malcolm X and in Hotel Rwanda, I get to see black characters wake up in their beds, interact with their families and be real people, rather than the distant, different, usually doomed, christlike figures that I already knew them as before coming to the film. Because no matter how amazing someone like Steve Biko is depicted as being in a movie like Cry Freedom, if his amazingness is always held away from me through the white character in a “look how wonderful this white journalist is for actually setting foot in a black household” way, I’m not really watching Steve Biko’s story.  In other words, in these films the beholder is glorified as much as the beheld.

For all these reasons, the trailers for The Soloist make me cringe.  I see Robert Downey Jr. running around telling unbelieving people how he’s actually best friends with Jamie Foxx’s homeless music prodigy character and then going and *gasp* sitting with that character on an actual dirty street and it doesn’t uplift me.  Because I already think Robert Downey Jr. is wonderful.  I don’t need a friendship with a black person to form invisible jazz hands around his angelic face, highlighting this fact for me.

“Look at me looking at this black guy who is extraordinary.  I look at black guys. Honest to God I do. I am the central figure in this story about a black guy who gets looked at.”