Lecture 9:
Assimilating Blackness Through
Love and Friendship
The Defiant Ones (1958)
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Professor Michael Green
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Previous Lecture
•
The Representation
of Native Americans
in Hollywood Film
•
John Ford and The
Searchers
•
“The Multicultural
Dynamics of John
Ford’s Westerns”
•
Writing About Film
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This Lecture
•
Racial Projects and
Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner
•
Sidney Poitier and
Supertoms
•
Interracial Buddy
Films and The
Defiant Ones
•
Writing About Film
3
Racial Projects and Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Lecture 9: Part I
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Term: Object Relations
Mental templates of our relations with others.
“… the white self exists as an object relation, a
type of relationship, a fictional construction
that once disseminated in the minds of
individuals guarantees that both the white
person and the racial other are perceived
without reference to the true basis of the
relationship between the two. In other
words, their relationship is misrecognized.
– Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project: Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner”
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Term: Sincere Fictions
• A construct held to be natural rather than
ideological.
• “Sincere fictions construct a persistent,
exalted white self-image as powerful, brave,
cordial, kind, firm, and generous, a naturalborn leader worthy to be respected and
followed by those of other races. These
fictions also include debased or fantastic
images of racial others that have become
templates in the mind for people in the
United States and around the world.” 6
Term: Racial Project
A socio-political movement that attempts to
rearticulate the meaning of race.
“Basing their definition of “project” in the work
of existentialist philosopher Jean Paul
Sartre, the authors argue that: “The project
of white racism is to make a non-racist world
impossible in the future; it aims above all to
perpetuate white privilege and its products.”
–Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project: Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner”
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Stanley Kramer
•
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was
directed by Stanley Kramer, a director
famous for making social problem films
(films that contain a social project).
•
His films as a director include The Defiant
Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit
the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg
(1961) and Ship of Fools (1965).
•
He produced Home of the Brave (1949) and
A Child is Waiting (1963), among others.
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The Historical Context of “Guess”
•
•
•
The film came out in 1967, at the height of
the Civil Rights movement (a racial project).
At the time interracial marriage was still
illegal in many states; the first interracial
marriage in film was One Potato, Two
Potato in 1964.
Though the movie is set in San Francisco, a
site of social radicalism in 1967, it avoids
the militant movements, rioting, urban
unrest and momentous change that
characterized America at the time.
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“Guess’s” Surface Project
•
On the surface, the project of the film is antiracist.
Ostensibly, the narrative centers on the
tension between bigotry and racial
tolerance. The movie:
•
–
–
–
Tackles the taboo of interracial romance.
Preaches tolerance, equality and reconciliation
between the races.
Ends with love conquering all.
Watch clip #1 from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
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The Film’s Racial Project
•
•
•
Though the film is nominally about racial
tolerance, many have argued that it’s real
subject is a crisis in white patriarchy.
As the crusading liberal whose tolerance is
tested in his own home, Drayton (Spencer
Tracy) is the target of the film’s comedy.
The movie ends reaffirming white wisdom
and tolerance, with the white patriarch
nobly adapting to changing times.
Watch clip #2 from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
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Generational Reconciliation
•
•
•
The movie uses the “Generation Gap” that
existed in 1960s America to create a theme
of generational reconciliation that is as
central as the message of racial tolerance.
In 1967, the charged issue of interracial
marriage could not be confronted head on
in a Hollywood film.
Miscegenation is displaced in the film onto
generational difference; for example, we
never really see the engaged couple kiss.
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Displacing Racism
• A major device in the film to make the
Draytons appear anti-racist is to displace
the racism onto the black characters.
• These include the Drayton’s maid Tillie and
Dr. Prentice’s father, who subscribes to
what the film considers outdated
segregationist ideas.
• Many critics have referred to the views held
by these characters to be a “gross
distortion of black attitudes.”
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Slow Change
“As James Baldwin says, “In Birth of a
Nation, the loyal nigger maid informs the
nigger congressman that she don’t like
niggers who set themselves up above their
station. When our black wonder doctor hits
San Francisco, some fifty-odd years later,
he encounters exactly the same maid, who
tells him exactly the same thing.”
–Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project: Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner”
Watch clip #3 from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
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Final Point
“If we accept that Mr. Drayton is the true
protagonist of Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner and not Dr. Prentice, and that the
project of the film is to ennoble the
embattled white liberal self, then Dr.
Prentice and all the black characters in the
film are sincere fictions, constructed
according to templates in the white mind.”
–Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project: Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner”
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Sidney Poitier and Supertoms
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Directed by Norman Jewison
Lecture 9: Part II
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Sidney Poitier
•
Poitier was the leading black male actor in
America in the 1960s – and virtually the
only one.
•
He symbolized in Hollywood films of the
1950s and 1960s the rising young
American black man.
•
Poitier was the key to the commercial
success of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
because he was well recognized and
acceptable to the white audience.
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Career
•
Poitier had a number of prominent roles in
successful films in the 1950 and ‘60s.
•
His films included The Blackboard Jungle
(1955), The Defiant Ones (1958), A Raisin
in the Sun (1961), Lilies of the Field (1963),
To Sir, with Love (1967) and In the Heat of
the Night (1967).
•
He was the first African American to win the
Best Actor Oscar (for Lilies of the Field).
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Donald Bogle
• Important black writer and scholar on African
Americans in film and television.
• He wrote Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,
Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of
Blacks in Films in 1973 that’s become a
standard race and film studies text.
• He updated it in 1989, but didn’t have to
change much, as the stereotypes had not
changed much.
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Uncle Tom
• Bogle identifies
Uncle Tom in Edwin
Porter’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1903) as the
first in a long line of
socially acceptable
“Good Negro”
characters.
The Tom Stereotype
“Always as toms are chased, harassed,
hounded, flogged, enslaved, and insulted,
they keep the faith, n’er turn against their
white massas, and remain hearty,
submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and
oh-so-very kind. Thus they endear
themselves to white audiences and emerge
as heroes of sorts.”
–Donald Bogle, “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An
Interpretive History of Blacks in Films ”
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Poitier as Supertom in “Guess”
“As an object created to satisfy the needs of
the white self, Dr. Prentice must fulfill
contradictory needs: he must be superaccomplished and supremely confident to
enter the white world as an equal, yet
simultaneously humble so as not to offend
that white world. Dr. Prentice is a
reincarnation of a figure who has long
existed in the white imagination: the tom,
here re-imagined as a “supertom.”
–Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project”
A Superhero's Credentials
“The film implies that “a black man has to
have a superhero’s credentials in order to
marry a white woman with no credentials.
Blacks are allowed to bridge the ultimate
social barrier of intermarriage and to be
accepted as equals in the white world as
long as they are superheroes played by
superstars like Sidney Poitier. The film really
emphasizes how narrow the field of
possibility is for black Americans.”
Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project: Guess Who’s
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Coming to Dinner”
Bogle on Sidney Poitier as Tom
“When insulted or badgered, the Poitier
character stood by and took it. He knew the
white world meant him no real harm. He
differed from the old servants only in that he
was governed by a code of decency, duty,
and moral intelligence. There were times in
his films when he screamed out in rage at
the injustices of a racist white society. But
reason always dictated his actions, along
with love for his fellow man.”
Donald Bogle, “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An
Interpretive History of Blacks in Films ”
Black and White Buddy Films and
The Defiant Ones
The Defiant Ones (1958)
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Lecture 9: Part III
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Interracial Buddy Films
• The Interracial Buddy Film
– Classics: The Defiant Ones (1958); In the Heat
of the Night (1967)
– Contemporary: 48 Hours (1982); Lethal
Weapon series (1987-1994); White Men Can’t
Jump (1992); Men in Black (1997); Rush Hour
(1998); The Green Mile (2000), Shanghai Noon
• Thesis: interracial buddy films function
as white male self-definition; white
male is “ideological chaperone.”
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An American Storytelling Tradition
“The story of the white man whose best friend
is a man of another color is . . . a sincere
fiction deeply embedded from the beginning
in the white American imagination . . . The
dream of interracial male comradeship goes
back to nineteenth-century American
literature and the works of James Fennimore
Cooper, Herman Melville and Mark Twain
and continues in 20th century popular culture
duos such as the Lone Ranger and Tonto.”
– Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project”
Feminist Thesis
“Feminist critics argue that this interracial
male bonding excludes women, both
white and black, and represents white
male liberal fantasies. The films express
only ‘the white masculine’s quest for selfdefinition’ because the black male buddy
‘is offered, in the end, no narrative,
theoretical, or social release.’ Such films
‘project the black male masculinity
imagined by white male liberals in search
of perfect partners.”
–
Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project”
The Defiant Ones
•
The movie was directed by Stanley Kramer
(1958) in the historical context of a
burgeoning U.S. Civil Rights Movement,
including the Brown vs. Board of Education
and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.
•
It is a Social Problem film, made palatable
to audience partially because of the stars.
•
Kramer wanted to stress the idea that
humans have basically the same nature.
Pause the lecture and Watch the clip from The Defiant Ones.
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Recurring Image: The Pietà
“In the final scene, Cullen sits on the ground
beneath a tree, holding the wounded Joker in
his arms, in a scene critics have compared to
a pieta. This pieta image is repeated 31
years later, at the end of Lethal Weapon 2
(1980), in which Murtaugh (Danny Glover)
cradles his wounded white partner Riggs
(Mel Gibson) . . . It seems to suggest a
fantasized mutual sacrifice that units the
races: the white Christ figure needs a black
male Virgin Mary to comfort him.”
–
Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project”
Homoeroticism
“In all the black-white buddy movies under
consideration, the sexual tension is
channeled away from heterosexual
relationships and into the sadomasochistic,
Homosocial relationship between the
buddies.”
–
Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon, “Racism as a Project”
ho·mo·e·rot·ic - Of or concerning homosexual love and desire. Tending to
arouse such desire. .” Dictionary.Com
Male Pastoral
• Buddy films contain the male pastoral,
“…an interracial romance that focuses
almost entirely on the two men.”
• Women often try to get in the way of the
relationship, as is the case in The Defiant
Ones and wives play minor roles.
pas·tor·al - Charmingly simple and serene; idyllic. See Synonyms at rural. Of,
relating to, or being a literary or other artistic work that portrays or evokes rural
life, usually in an idealized way. Dictionary.Com
Male Pastoral (Continued)
• These films emphasize
the “idyllic relationship” of
the men through such
devices as sentimental
music, slow-motion
photography, and endings
that reveal “true”
friendship in a way that
allows the white male to
remain heroic, open, but
vulnerable.
Pause the lecture and
Watch the clips from
Lethal Weapon 2
Buddy Parody: Blazing Saddles
•
Blazing Saddles, is a parody of the
Interracial Buddy Film and the Western that
mocks race and gender conventions in
each genre.
•
The movie is about Jews and blacks
banding together to spoof the white self by
mocking Hollywood westerns and rewriting
Western history.
Pause the lecture and Watch the clip from Blazing Saddles
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Review of Points
•
The Interracial Buddy film starts with The
Defiant Ones (1958) in the context of Civil
Rights demonstrations and protests.
There is a clear template, or pattern, to
these films:
•
–
–
–
The Pietà
Homoeroticism
Male Pastoral
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Writing About Film: Tips and
Suggestions Part II
Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
Directed by Richard Donner
Lecture 9: Part IV
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Summary: Tips and Suggestions I
• Whenever you critically engage specific
topics and terms, you must provide
definition and context
• In critical film writing, understand the
difference between plot and representation.
• Every section in your paper must reiterate
your thesis
• Keep it to one topic per paragraph.
• Stick to the film to be analyzed.
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Plot Summary
• Do not include more than a few lines of
plot summary in your paper.
• While it is necessary to set the context of
the scene or scenes you will be analyzing
– “in the scene in which Murtaugh cradles
Riggs in his arms . . .” – you need no
more than a few sentences to do this.
• If you must summarize the film’s entire
plot, do so briefly high in your paper – just
below the introduction.
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Avoid Opinion
• In a critical paper, don’t include opinionated
language. In other words, keep evaluations
of the movie out of your paper!
• Don’t write, “The Defiant Ones is a fantastic
film, one of the best about racism that there
is, which really made me feel the power of
hate in the world!”
• This is opinion; it does not advance your
argument; nothing concrete backs it up.
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Revision
• The revision process is fundamental to
the writing process.
• No first draft is a good draft! Or at least,
it’s not as good as it could be.
• Revising is more than looking at grammar,
punctuation and formatting errors –
although that is important!
• It is most crucially about streamlining and
enhancing ideas and arguments to make
them strong, clear, organized, convincing.
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Questions to Ask of Your Paper
During the Revision Process
• Read over your essay thoroughly several
times after you’ve written a draft. Does it:
– Follow the assignment guidelines?
– Present a clear argument that is easily located in
the intro. and woven through each section?
– Use sufficient evidence and analysis to
persuasively support your thesis?
– Develop all critical points to their logical
conclusion?
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Copy Editing
• Of course the details matter too: proof
read for correct grammar, spelling,
punctuation and paper formatting.
• Double check all information related to
your films – names of actors and
filmmakers, production information, box
office, year of release etc.
• The titles of movies are always in italics
followed by the year and the director.
– The Godfather (1972), directed by Francis
Ford Coppola
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Get Help!
• For even better results, have someone else
– a friend, a family member, a writing tutor,
a teaching assistant or an instructor – read
over your essay.
• Before turning in your essay, make sure you
have included all required information
including title, author name, due date, page
numbers, correct bibliographic citations and
the bibliography itself.
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A Few Last Points
• Your paper should demonstrate depth, not
breadth. Analyze a few examples in detail.
Especially in a short paper, don’t try to take
on the whole film.
• Always be specific. Stay away from vague
generalizations such as “Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner was a great film that
showed many great things about racism.”
• Write on a topic you care about or have
interest in – it will be a lot more enjoyable!
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End of Lecture 9
Next Lecture: Black “Hero” and “White” Money
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