A Black-and-White Mess No Matter Who Wins
In high politics, on talk shows, on exercise programs, in infomercials, in college departments, in sports, in couples on the streets, in medicine, in technology, in just about anything one can think of, we see black people so well represented and functioning so often as part of the American scene that all the noise about two black men and one black woman being nominated for best actor and best actress at the same time seems almost insane in 2002. But that is how it is.
As things now stand in the motion picture industry, it is also one of the greatest ironies in the history of show business.
This becomes especially obvious when one considers the indelible impact that black people have had on American culture, and the fact that the presence and that impact of black people on an Anglo-Saxon and Protestant identity was in place before other important show business ethnic groups--Irish, Italians and Jews--began immigrating to this country in increasingly significant numbers from the middle of the 19th century forward. All of those “almost” or “not quite” whites became “true” whites as color came to obviate cultural alienation and took on more importance than religion or national origin.
By the middle 1930s, ethnic particulars were of no importance if one’s color was right. Jewish, Irish and Italian actors and actresses became stars and heartthrobs, and the better ones have continued to enrich our understanding of our “Americanness” when the vehicles and the directors have been right. By the time sound took off, even so-called WASP features became less than significant when a guy like Florenz Ziegfeld, who looked as “Jewish” as Woody Allen, could be seen sitting behind his desk in a film from the early ‘30s talking about those paragons of American beauty, the Ziegfeld Girls.
One could not imagine any black American, no matter how far back in the culture his family line might have gone, being accepted as the man who helped define American beauty, which is to say what were considered good-looking white women in that period.
Today, of course, no one would get all hot and bothered and start stomping on a soapbox if two Jewish or Italian American or Irish American men and one woman were nominated in the same categories as Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Halle Berry. At this juncture, we still hear and read about the same point, which is what any of this means for “the future of Hollywood.” Will more black actors and performers and directors and screenwriters and whoever else be picked for success or parity with other successful ethnic groups? It would be absurd to ask those questions if we were accustomed to anything resembling genuine interest in quality, which is something we don’t see pursued very often.
While it might not be unusual now for a high-quality fairy tale like “The Lord of the Rings” to have an understandably strong chance to win best picture, it would still be something of a surprise if Berry or Washington walked up that aisle. I am not talking about Smith because I do not see him as a serious contender. (He should have been nominated for best supporting actor in the astonishing “Six Degrees of Separation.”)
As for Berry and Washington, we have a human depiction of a black woman that is more than quite rare and, on the other hand, a monster rendered with such nuance in an absurdly simple-minded bad cop movie that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would have to embrace two very different things in order to hand off the statuettes in both cases. It would have to recognize a black woman achieving unexpected human dimensions and an extraordinary performance transcending a frequently ridiculous context.
Some will say that Berry is too good looking to get the Academy Award because that would upset the “whites only” conception of Hollywood beauty. That is followed by those who say that the only reason Whoopi Goldberg got an Oscar or gets so much work is because white actresses feel comfortable opposite her, that she is only an update of the homely black women seen in the old movies, the ones Lena Horne says she could not make because of the restrictions on black female beauty. Yet, as “Soul Food” and anything else with an actual representation of black women prove, we could greatly expand our range of American female beauty if we were to embrace the sweep of skin tones and features and hair textures that black actresses have to offer.
Then there is the other side. One younger black woman told me how much rage she encountered among black Hollywood types when “Monster’s Ball” came up in conversation. Berry was accused of selling out for taking the role and for her willingness to be filmed in such a passionate erotic scene with a white man. This is not surprising since black women from coast to coast went nuts and sometimes began screaming at the screen when “their” Denzel was shown on screen with a white woman in “He Got Game,” another of the films, along with the almost monumentally fresh “Devil in a Blue Dress,” for which he should have been nominated.
So we find ourselves as Americans once more in a great big black-and-white mess. Allowed to pick up a tradition shared by those few black women who have ever been able to play a human being in a Hollywood film, Berry might lose out because of racism or the fear of offending somebody. Or she could lose out because voters don’t want to feel pushed into selecting her even if they know she went far past anything that Sissy Spacek did in the exceedingly absurd “In the Bedroom,” which sinks from a film about grief and injustice into a ridiculous revenge fantasy.
What that film expects us to believe is much further out than the romance between Berry and Billy Bob Thornton, a reinterpretation of the beauty and the beast tale, which also says things beyond what we tend to expect in a film that uses racial antipathy as a central metaphor.
“Monster’s Ball” says that if we come from bigoted backgrounds, we have to cut ourselves loose from those bigots, even if they are family. It says that trauma may help us break free of our emptiness. It says that if we are ever to go beyond our terrible past, we may have to learn to forgive others who have changed just as we have to face our own pain if we are to liberate ourselves from the enslaving weight it can impose upon us. We rarely get such mature and truly human visions from contemporary American film.
As the buzz goes, Washington’s major competition is supposed to be Russell Crowe, who, however fine an actor, has yet to command the American nuances that fellow Australians Anthony LaPaglia, Nicole Kidman and Judy Davis have clearly mastered to a fare-thee-well. Of course, if nuance was ever the issue, no one could have walked past Laurence Fishburne in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” or Angela Bassett in the same film or Washington in “X” and “Devil in a Blue Dress,” where he did so many things we had never seen before. It is Washington’s grasp of nuance at his best that separates him from the pack, his ability to transform his eyes, his lips, his brow and the rest of his face into such an imposing instrument that makes him one of our very best actors. But nuance unrecognized is of no assistance in a profession not always sure of what it should be about.
When we get to black actors, we have another set of problems. Versions of black Americans that we are familiar with on screen have been so often either in the buffoon category or the overacted category that they seem to eliminate all possibilities for subtlety. Those who would make serious American films need, with great haste, to dispense with that endless mountain of corny images that all ethnic groups have had to suffer under. Cartoon stereotypes, whether of the victim or the pious, fail to provide the human depth a film truly needs.
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Stanley Crouch is an editorial columnist for the New York Daily News, an essayist, a playwright, a novelist and a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center.