Black and White Movies ...

Temple Price, Wellesley College, Class of 2013

First thing’s first: my heart and prayers go out to Haiti, and I’m betting yours do too. If you wanna send your dollars as well, be careful—you know there are some evil opportunists who will try to parlay your goodwill into theft or identity fraud. These sites: www.clintonbushhaitifund.org, http://www.redcross.org/, look good, but I honestly can’t tell if these links are legit, and I haven’t entered any card information yet, instead choosing to give cash to a local church.  Check ‘em out!

Switching gears now…

The holidays always make me think of: movies! My family loves to go to the cinema en masse. I got a load of (James Cameron’s) Avatar in December with my mom, my cousin, and a couple of aunts. We all loved it, but Aunt F noted, “Why do they need the White guy to come in and save them?”

Aunt F isn’t the only one that noticed what some call the “white Messiah“paradigm.

http://news.discovery.com/human/avatar-racism-james-cameron.html

The racial themes in Avatar are layered on thick – and I like it that way. From the moment that I noticed that all of the leading blue faces concealed brown faces, the movie’s message became crystal clear, and who can frown at a film with substance?

Another surprisingly controversial movie was The Princess and the Frog. Poor princess Tiana had to endure a firestorm after she finally made it to the big screen (I remember catching whiffs about a Black princess years ago). The film seems to present a different problem to every other person that watches it.

 http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/the-princess-and-the-frog-controversy-or-innocence.php

Like Avatar, the film was concocted by older White gentlemen – Ron Clements and John Musker. With some of the best Black actors in the biz, they struck box office oil.

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=princessandthefrog.htm

My friends and I would have liked to see a Black prince, though.

I suppose race matters don’t always have to be wrested from movie context. If I’ve seen a movie “about” race recently, it would be Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire. I mean, if you’ve seen the movie you know it’s about a whole lot of things besides color, but the theme plays out in more than a few ways in the movie.  Wesley Morris, writing for the Boston Globe, made an interesting observation about light vs. dark-skinned characters in the film.

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/11/20/precious_bluntly_goes_to_a_place_rarely_seen____the_life_of_a_young_black_girl/?page=2

Thinking about Precious brings me to my final thought. I’ve asked myself, with so many ugly things going on in the world, like domestic abuse, earthquakes, and the depletion of natural resources, are the nuances of a movie relevant?

I’d say yeah. Our art and our stories represent ourselves. Movies and the rich reactions to them are a peep into American consciousness about all sorts of subjects.  What we find may not be pretty, but oftentimes, it’s real.