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Showing Original Post only (View all)NYT: Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies? [View all]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/arts/green-book-interracial-friendship.htmlHard to excerpt -- lots of good stuff here.
(snip)
Not knowing what these movies were about didnt mean it wasnt clear what they were about. They symbolize a style of American storytelling in which the wheels of interracial friendship are greased by employment, in which prolonged exposure to the black half of the duo enhances the humanity of his white, frequently racist counterpart. All the optimism of racial progress from desegregation to integration to equality to something like true companionship is stipulated by terms of service. Thirty years separate Driving Miss Daisy from these two new films, but how much time has passed, really? The bond in all three is conditionally transactional, possible only if its mediated by money. The Upside has the rich, quadriplegic author Phillip Lacasse (Cranston) hire an ex-con named Dell Scott (Hart) to be his life auxiliary. Green Book reverses the races so that some white muscle (Mortensen) drives the black pianist Don Shirley (Ali) to gigs throughout the Deep South in the 1960s. Its The Upside Down.
Any time a white person comes anywhere close to the rescue of a black person the academy is primed to say, Good for you!, whether its To Kill a Mockingbird, Mississippi Burning, The Blind Side, or The Help. The year Driving Miss Daisy won those Oscars, Morgan Freeman also had a supporting role in a drama (Glory) that placed a white Union colonel at its center and was very much in the mix that night. (Denzel Washington won his first Oscar for playing a slave-turned-Union soldier in that movie.) And Spike Lee lost the original screenplay award for Do the Right Thing, his masterpiece about a boiled-over pot of racial animus in Brooklyn. I was 14 then, and the political incongruity that night was impossible not to feel. Driving Miss Daisy and Glory were set in the past and the people who loved them seemed stuck there. The giddy reception for Miss Daisy seemed earnest. But Lees movie dramatized a starker truth we couldnt all just get along.
(snip)
By this point, you might have heard about the fried chicken scene in Green Book. It comes early in their road trip. Tony is shocked to discover that Don has never had fried chicken. He also appears never to have seen anybody eat fried chicken, either. (What do we do about the bones?) So, with all the greasy alacrity and exuberant crassness that Mortensen can conjure, Tony demonstrates how to eat it while driving. As comedy, its masterful theres tension, irony and, when the car stops and reverses to retrieve some litter, a punch line that brings down the house. But the comedy works only if the black, classical-pop fusion pianist is from outer space (and not in a Sun Ra sort of way). Youre meant to laugh because how could this racist be better at being black than this black man whos supposed to be better than him?
(snip)
Money buys Don a chauffeur and, apparently, an education in black folkways and culture. (Little Richard? Hes never heard him play.) Shirleys real-life family has objected to the portrait. Their complaints include that he was estranged from neither black people nor blackness. Even without that thumbs-down, you can sense what a particularly perverse fantasy this is: that absolution resides in a neutered black man needing a white guy not only to protect and serve him, but to love him, too. Even if that guy and his Italian-American family and mob associates refer to Don and other black people as eggplant and coal. In the movies estimation, their racism is preferable to its nasty, blunter southern cousin because their racism is often spoken in Italian. And, hey, at least Tony never asks Don to eat his fancy dinner in a supply closet.
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NYT: Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies? [View all]
WhiskeyGrinder
Jan 2019
OP
The issue, as I see it, is that when movies like this get acclaim, it takes the issue of unpacking,
WhiskeyGrinder
Jan 2019
#5
Pretty sure no one said you are, and I'm sorry that's what you took from the article.
WhiskeyGrinder
Jan 2019
#6
But those aren't relationships between equals who consider each other equals.
WhiskeyGrinder
Jan 2019
#10
yes... condescendingly implying "if you liked this movie, we're going to show you why you're wrong"
scheming daemons
Jan 2019
#23
Which doesn't take away the point that their relationship is transactional.
WhiskeyGrinder
Jan 2019
#18
Sometimes relationships are transactional... and sometimes those relationships grow
scheming daemons
Jan 2019
#14
Sure, it's just that the issue is that Hollywood loves to address race relations through these
WhiskeyGrinder
Jan 2019
#20
Have you seen The Wire or Treme? Do you think they do a better job of being more realistic?
jalan48
Jan 2019
#9
I was thinking more along the lines of being a more realistic portrayal of the black community
jalan48
Jan 2019
#34