Talking to film students about "Green Book"

I teach two recitation sections for a “Language of Film” class at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and this week the main lecturer was screening Charles Burnett’s landmark 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep, which he was using as an example of personal storytelling. For my 75-minute recitation section I thought I’d extrapolate on another aspect of Burnett’s work by screening sections of his third feature, To Sleep With Anger (just now available in a great Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection), the opening of Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dusk, and the phantasmagoric “praise the griot” motorcade/parade scene from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 Touki Bouki. My class is not about cultural studies or cultural difference per se, but I chose these clips to demonstrate, minimally, a thesis I have concerning modes of cinematic storytelling in what I’ll call “black film.”

This would be taking place less than a week after Green Book had won the Best Picture Oscar, an event I did not actually see take place because my wife and I don’t watch the Oscars. We got into this habit in 2013, when we were vacationing in Iceland as that year’s ceremonies were happening, and we opted not to stay up to watch. We were so spiritually refreshed at not having seen the thing we decided that, barring a genuine rooting interest or something like it, we’d make this a new tradition. Anyway.

Several of my students had previously put forward some opinions and/or speculations about Green Book. It is a film not much liked by the students who’ve seen it, and viewed with suspicion by many who have not. The students in my class are largely white; more than a few are Asian-American, a couple are Asian, and about a half a dozen are African American.

I was walking to class and I was thinking about what to say about the movie if the subject came up. It occurred to me that one of the most objectionable things about it is that it extols the virtues of peace love and understanding from within an exclusively white cultural space. That is, it says “we can and should live together, on my cultural terms.” After winning the Oscar, one of the film’s producers, Jim Burke, vented some frustration to Sharon Waxman of The Wrap: “I can’t change the fact that I was born white.” This remarkable statement raises several fascinating questions, including “Would you, if you could?” But it also lays bare the mode of the film’s construction: if it’s building a bridge, it’s building it on Burke’s terms. “Can white people have or not have a point of view on racial inequality?” Burke then sputtered.

And there you have it. Just as in Joseph Mankiewicz’s remarkable, underrated 1950 film No Way Out, it all boils down to what the born-white person is EXTENDING to the black person. (The picture remains one of the most bullshit-free pictures about race relations made by a white American director.) At the end of Green Book the Don Shirley character enjoys the bounty of a white working class Italian American Christmas by invitation.

Over and over I’ve seen white folks who otherwise hold all sorts of interesting opinions about black folks call Green Book a “feel good” movie. Yes. Sure. You feel good. About yourself. Without having done anything. Without having gained, or try to gain, any knowledge of black culture. Instead, you’ve had an easy laugh at a mouthy mook telling a stuck-up black guy that the black guy doesn’t know enough about HIS OWN culture. Well don’t that just beat all.

I’ve seen some arguments that strongly implied that had the film been more accurate in its depiction of Don Shirley, it could not have made its important brotherhood points as strongly. In which case it’s only fair to ask, “Well, which points are you talking about?”  Because the film depicts Shirley in such a way as to allow the character Tony Lip to lecture the character Don Shirley about not knowing the cultural product of his own people. Whereas the actual, historical Don Shirley, in 1962, made an important recording called Piano Arrangements Of Spirituals and would subsequently record, in 1969, The Gospel According To Don Shirley.

All this came up in my discussions during the two sessions, and something came to my mind as these conversations were going on. Most of my students were maybe in second grade in 2007, when Bill O’Reilly made his visit to Sylvia’s in Harlem, and on his radio show marveled  “There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' […] [I]t was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all." It occurred to me that Green Book is in a sense a milder iteration of O’Reilly’s racialist damage. This analogy, once I explained to the kids who Bill O’Reilly actually was —time really does fly — did not seem particularly outrageous to them.

But still. It’s worth noting that Octavia Spencer is also a producer of the movie. And that the movie has elicited warm, genuine, intelligent praise from some African-Americans. I told one of the classes that Harry Belafonte’s praise for the film threw me for a loop. Particularly because Belafonte is a crucial presence in a sequence in BlacKkKlansman which contrasts an African American cultural space (a consciousness-raising meeting in which Belafonte’s character gives a traumatic accounting of a lynching) and a white cultural space (a Ku Klux Klan initiation).       

At this, one of my students raised her hand and said “Harry Belafonte has been wrong before.”

Comments

[Jesse Crall]

I think a big split in the GREEN BOOK response is generational as opposed to strictly racial (hence Belafonte, John Lewis & Kareem Abdul-Jabbar supporting it while middle-aged and younger critics, black & white, seem to look at it with more skepticism or scorn). Which isn't to be discounted; there's value in black people who lived through that time discussing why it worked on them or why it's important to the discourse and lord knows, younger cultural commentators have been known to ignore history at their own rhetorical peril. But it's just not a very good film on a purely craft level and trying to bring political resonance into it is like searching for meaning in a Thomas Kincaid painting. BLACKKKLANSMAN was just a helluva better as a story, as a work of art and as a commentary on race relations past and present. GREEN BOOK only would have worked if it was 80% smarter or 20% dumber.

And yeah, "Belafonte's been wrong before" can't be ignored. Black people don't think in lockstep. One person's praise or dismissals can't possibly begin to speak for everyone.

[titch]

Well, Rex Reed loved it.

[Andrew Del Monte]

Haven't seen Green Book, it looked like an outdated joke from the first trailer and like everyone I'm surprised/not surprised it won Best Picture. I am glad/disappointed that Mahershala Ali has become only the second black actor after Denzel to win 2 Oscars for acting (and I believe only the fourth black person period to win 2).

There is an aspect about Green Book which I haven't noticed people discuss and which I'd like to mention: Mortensen is 60, the character he plays was 32 at the time of the story. Ali is 45, Don Shirley was 35 in 1962. Whereas in real life Shirley was slightly older and both were young men, in the film Lip is the older man by many years. I think this is significant because casting Lip as the much older man gives the "magical white man" some stature over the black man; Lip's credibility during the scenes where he "teaches" Shirley is increased by the years he has on Shirley. Imagine, if Lip was played by an actor closer to Lip's age and appearance (say, comedian Jon Gabrus), and, importantly, younger than Ali, how much harder it would be to take Lip seriously when he's lecturing Shirley. Could this have been on the filmmaker's minds when they were casting? What were their intentions in changing the ages of the characters so drastically? Anyway, just a thought.

[George]

"Over and over I’ve seen white folks who otherwise hold all sorts of interesting opinions about black folks call Green Book a “feel good” movie. Yes. Sure. You feel good. About yourself."

Bravo.

Why is it that almost every movie about race in America is set in the South during the civil rights era of the '50s and '60s? I guess this is because there were (supposedly) obvious heroes and villains in that time. And because that fight has (supposedly) been won, with the good guys winning.

Of course, this helps white people feel better about themselves. It conveys the impression that racism happened a long time ago, and in only one part of the country. A white person watching these movies thinks, "Hey, I'M nothing like those foaming-at-the-mouth rednecks!"

Movies about race set outside the South, and in more recent times -- like Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" or "Black Klansman" -- tend to make white viewers VERY uncomfortable. Which is intentional. No wonder they don't get Oscars for best picture.

[George]

Maybe I'm touchy about this, having grown up in the South. But I've heard people from the Northeast, the Midwest and California say, with a straight face, that racism does not and never has existed in their states.

Of course, the people who say this are all white.

[Tom B.]

A movie about Chicago's white flight in the 1960s would be instructive. It's one of the places where King didn't have much success. Such a movie probably wouldn't get many Oscar nods.

[George]

From Late Night with Seth Myers: "White Savior: The Movie Trailer"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_RTnuJvg6U

Next year's best picture winner, no doubt!