A half a
century after Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s
Coming To Dinner (1967), the Sidney Poitier - Katherine Hepburn - Spencer
Tracy drama about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé to meet her
parents, Jordan Peele’s Get Out
(2017) is released; a movie about a young white woman who brings her black fiancé
to meet her parents. This time it’s a horror movie, which says a lot about
racism and persistent attitudes towards interracial relationships in America. Looking
back on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,
in its own way it too could be considered a horror movie. The blatant racism of
the Hepburn/Tracy white parents towards the gentle, good looking, intelligent, humanistic,
and all around amazing young doctor that is played by the talented Sidney
Poitier is nothing if not horrific.
 |
| Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in Get Out |
As we
contemplate the great divide in today’s America, without a doubt we find privilege
and oppression at its core and, in particular, racism and sexism. It would
probably take new treaties on social change (or lack thereof) to explain how in
the twenty-first century we are unable to move past these systems of oppression.
But thank heavens there are movies! Movies, like Peele’s Get Out, which use parody and symbolism so wondrously that, well, while
maybe not being able to explain the why, certainly make it easy for those who
have lived oppression to perceive the how.
Jordan Peele said, of his directorial
debut: “"It was very important to me to just get the entire audience in
touch in some way with the fears inherent [in] being black in this country, (…)
part of being black in this country, and I presume being any minority, is
constantly being told that ... we're seeing racism where there just isn't
racism."
 |
| Ruth Nega and Joel Edgerton in Loving |
There have been
a number of movies that have addressed the issue of racism through the lens of interracial
relationships, most recently Jeff Nicol’s Loving
(2016), the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple whose
legal battle against Virginia laws banning interracial marriages led to a Supreme
Court decision; a movie that received various Oscar nominations this Oscar season. Other notables
include Todd Hayne’s Far from Heaven
(2002) about a housewife (Julianne Moore) who falls in love with a black
gardener (Dennis Haysbert) while going through the pain of discovering her
husband (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual. Their interracial love is the
real taboo in this melodrama set in the 1950’s. Marc Forester’s Monster’s Ball (2001), for which Halle
Berry won a Best Actress Oscar, is a dark story about a white racist jail guard
(Billy Bob Thorton) who falls in love with the black woman who is the spouse of
man on death row.
 |
| Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert in Far from Heaven |
Others worth
mentioning include Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale (1993), Richard Benjamin’s Made In America (1993), a comedy with the then real-life interracial couple Whoopi Goldberg
and Ted Danson; or Katherine Bigelow’s Strange
Days (1995), a thriller which is also a sci-fi romance, made great not by
the script as much as by the passion with which the beautiful couple that is
Ralph Fiennes and Angela Basset play out their relationship; this movie is a
particular favorite of mine for just this reason and because the relationship here is never in question for the race of the couple (it takes place,
after all, in the future).
 |
| Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days |
With the
exception of Strange Days, the other
movies were directed by white men. While they are good movies, all worth seeing,
they were made by people who contemplate the system of racial oppression but
have not lived the experience. This marks
a big difference. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote so well many years ago about the
black experience (also applicable to other discriminated groups):
“It is a
peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at
one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
That is why
movies about interracial relationships made by black men or women are so much
more honest, real and strong. In Get Out the black/white relationship is
a metaphor; the movie is about the dangers that black men navigate in a society
that is most definitely not post-racial. Black directors have tended towards comedy
when addressing interracial relationships, maybe to make sure we understand
that it is not the romance that is being examined, but rather the context of
racism. Such is the case of Spike Lee’s Jungle
Fever (1991) about a successful black businessman (Wesley Snipes) who
begins an affair with his white coworker (Annabella Sciorra), or Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s
Guess Who? (2005) in which a young black
woman (Zoe Saldana) brings home her boyfriend (Ashton Kutcher) to meet her
parents; it is Bernie Mac and Kutcher's
relationship and their racial conflict that is under the lens (Bernie Mac is particularly
great in this movie).
Jordan’s Peele Get Out also uses comedy, as could be
expected from one half of the brilliant Key and Peele comedic duo. It is the
strength of the movie that it doesn’t fit into a single genre, and while this
may not be a work of art-house film making, it is most certainly an original,
more so because of the strong social commentary that is presented in such a
creative way.
Movie critics and, most importantly,
the audience, are dissecting the movie, finding all the hidden and
not-so-hidden messages. The movie has exploded on social media. And this is
good. This is what needs to occur. People are talking about this divide, this
open wound in America that will not heal until there is a willingness to
surrender privilege, denounce the barbarism that is racism and sexism, and
recognize and respect everyone’s humanity.
