Gender and Genre
Among their conventions, genre movies feature standard ways of representing gender, class, race and ethnicity. Into the 1980s, genres and genre movies remained almost exclusively the cultural property of a white male consciousness, the centre from which any difference regarding race, gender and sexuality was defined and marginalised. In all the action genres, it was white men who performed heroic deeds and drove the narrative. Movies such as Westward the Women (1951), in which a wagon train of women successfully makes the cross-country trek to California and the sexist trail boss (Robert Taylor) learns that some women also have what it takes to survive on the frontier, are only rare exceptions that prove the rule. In every type of action film, women and visible minorities assumed subsidiary and stereotyped roles, serving such narrative functions as helper or comic sidekick for the heroic white male.
The hypothetical viewer of Hollywood genre movies was traditionally, like almost all of the filmmakers who made the movies, white, male and heterosexual. This white masculine perspective was an inextricable part of the genre system, which was built upon certain gendered assumptions. Generally, the action genres – adventure, war, gangster, detective, horror, science fiction and, of course, the western – were addressed to a male audience, while musicals and romantic melodramas (also known as ‘weepies’) were marketed as ‘women’s films’. This distinction bespeaks wider patriarchal assumptions about gender difference in the real world. As Molly Haskell rightly points out, ‘What more damning comment on the relations between men and women in America than the very notion of something called the “woman’s film”?’ (1974: 153).
By the 1990s many genre movies attempted to open up genres to more progressive representations of race and gender, often deliberately acknowledging and giving voice to groups previously marginalised by mainstream cinema. In tune with contemporary notions of political correctness, films such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), reconceived in Hollywood as To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995), The Doom Generation (1995) and Bound (1996) pushed the boundaries of traditional generic representations. The film that provided the impetus for this new generic transformation was Thelma & Louise (1991), about two women who, finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, lead the police on a chase through the southwest. A big hit at the box office, Thelma & Louise is a generic hybrid of the western, the buddy film and the road movie – three of those genres traditionally regarded as male – and outlaw couple movies like You Only Live Once, They Live by Night (1949) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Thelma & Louise reversed Hollywood’s conventional definition of woman’s place as the domestic sphere and reimagined the buddy movie as female adventure. In the film’s controversial ending, Thelma and Louise drive over the edge of the Grand Canyon rather than capitulate to the police. The last image is a freeze-frame of the car in mid-air, just beyond the apogee of its arching flight, followed by a fade to white.
This ending is, of course, a direct reference to one of the most famous of buddy movies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and it sparked considerable debate regarding Thelma & Louise’s political value. Did it signify suicidal defeatism or triumphant transcendence? The contentious but popular reception of Thelma & Louise’s ending suggests how novel the film was at the time simply because of its gender substitution, since there had been no similar debate around the mythic ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Regardless of how one reads the ending of Thelma & Louise, the fact that the film was the subject of such controversy suggests the difficulty of finding a place for women in action films and, more broadly, of gendered representations in popular cinema generally. After Thelma & Louise, many genre films seemed content merely to borrow its gender ‘gimmick’, simply plugging women and others into roles traditionally reserved for white men. But in reversing conventional representations, these films are prone to fall into the trap of repeating the same objectionable values. The question of whether female action heroes such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien (1979) and its sequels, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), or the assassins played by Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill films (2003, 2004) and the trio of actresses in the Charlie’s Angels films (2000, 2003) are progressive, empowering representations of women or merely contained within a masculine sensibility has been a matter of considerable debate.
One film that successfully avoids this problem is Maggie Greenwald’s western The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). The film is based on the true story of Josephine Monaghan, a woman who in the 1880s dropped out of New York society when she had a child out of wedlock, went west, and for the rest of her life passed as a man, making a successful career for herself as a sheep rancher in Idaho. Greenwald refuses to allow Little Jo, played by former model Suzy Amis, to become an object of the camera’s traditionally male gaze as theorised by Laura Mulvey (1989). After escaping from her captors, Josephine obtains some men’s clothes at a general store, and then, to the shock of the viewer, slashes her face with a knife from cheek to chin. Her scar becomes a badge of masculinity to the other men in the film, and it prevents the viewer from comfortably regarding her as an object of visual pleasure. As well, the film does not present much action in the form of gunplay – one of the appeals of the traditional western – but rather, emphasises domestic aspects such as homeopathic treatments and cooking.
The Ballad of Little Jo begins by showing a woman, Jo, in eastern dress incongruously walking down a road in the west, rather than the traditional cowboy hero riding into town. Men pass Josephine on horses, and one of them calls her a ‘pretty filly’. A wagon loaded with goods appears in the foreground of the frame, momentarily blocking her from our view – just as men in effect negate her existence through oppression because of her gender. At last she is offered a ride by a passing peddlar, whom we subsequently discover has secretly sold her to some soldiers for their sexual pleasure. The Ballad of Little Jo begins, then, by using the imagery of the western to express the feminist insight that capitalism and patriarchy are intertwined, and that women are positioned as objects of exchange within that economy. Furthermore, by showing that gendered identity can be achieved by role playing and costume, the film foregrounds the postmodern idea of gender as performance rather than as immutable.
Case Study: Die Hard and the Action Film
Action and adventure films offer fast-paced narratives emphasising physical action such as chases, fights, stunts, crashes and explosions, often dominating over dialogue and character development, as in movies like Speed and The Rock (1996). While action in film has been popular ever since the Lumières’ train entered the station in one of the first films ever made (L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, 1895), the action film as a recognisable genre for the definition and display of male power and prowess has its roots in the rousing swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks (The Mark of Zorro, 1920; The Black Pirate, 1922) and Errol Flynn (Captain Blood, 1935; The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1940). Since the blockbuster success of such movies as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its two sequels, the action film has developed into a distinct genre. In the 1970s and 1980s a number of innovative action films by directors such as John Carpenter and Walter Hill followed in the tradition of Howard Hawks, emulating that director’s use of action and gesture as a physical index of professionalism. Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), about a Los Angeles police station besieged by youth gangs, was based on Hawks’ Rio Bravo, while his The Thing (1982) is a remake of the classic science fiction film of the same name produced by Hawks. Hill’s The Driver (1978) and Last Man Standing (1996), a remake of the samurai film Yojimbo (1961), contain minimal dialogue, relying almost entirely on action to convey their narratives.
While earlier action heroes such as Victor Mature and Burt Lancaster were known for their broad, muscular physiques, since Rocky (1976) with Sylvester Stallone the criterion for action stars seems to be more on musculature than Method acting. Hypermasculine stars such as Stallone (First Blood, 1982; Cliffhanger, 1993), Jean-Claude Van Damme (Kickboxer, 1989; Hard Target, 1993), Steven Seagal (Hard to Kill, 1990; Fire Down Below, 1997), Chuck Norris (Missing in Action, 1984; Invasion USA, 1985) and Bruce Willis (the Die Hard series; Last Man Standing; Hostage, 2005), offer their impressive bodies for visual display and as the site of ordeals they must undergo in order to defeat the villains. Several critics have discussed the hyerbolic masculinity in these films as an expression of American ideology regarding politics and gender, reasserting male power and privilege during and after the Reagan administration (see, for instance, Tasker 1993; Jeffords 1994). The perfect embodiment of this excessive physicality is former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, in such films as The Running Man, Predator (1987), Total Recall (1990) and of course, The Terminator (1984), in which he plays an emotionless killer robot. The essence of this new action hero is summed up in the scene in Conan the Barbarian (1982) in which Schwarzenegger, along with two dozen other slaves, is shown turning a giant gristmill; as the years go by the other men gradually disappear, leaving only Conan pushing the millstone himself.
Die Hard (1988) was one of the biggest box office hits of this action cycle, generating two sequels, Die Hard 2 (1990) and Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995). The film’s plot involves a tough New York cop, John McClane (Bruce Willis), who comes to Los Angeles for the first time to visit his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia), in the office building where the company she works for is celebrating its Christmas party. McClane has hopes of convincing Holly to return to New York with him, but before they can fully discuss the matter a group of criminals pretending to be political terrorists take over the building, hold everyone at the party hostage and threaten to kill them in order to get a fortune in bonds stored in the company vault. Slipping away undetected and moving surreptitiously through the building, McClane manages single-handedly to outwit the savvy and ruthless leader, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), and kill all the members of the gang, as both the LAPD and FBI remain outside, unable to take action for fear of endangering the hostages. Once McClane saves the day, Holly reconciles with her husband.
The film shows its hero, like Conan, surviving multiple millstones and ultimately triumphing, but it is also explicit in linking the hero and his heroics to masculinity, patriarchy and their mythic representations. The narrative depicts a tough American male whose sense of masculinity is embattled: a working-class cop, he is uncomfortable in the lavishness of Nakatomi Tower and its white-collar world; more importantly, his wife has left him to pursue her own career and has retaken her maiden name. Ultimately, however, McClane gets to act as a rugged individual hero, and in the process of defeating the villains he reclaims both his masculine potency and his wife.
Figure 10 Die Hard: mythic male potency in the action film
The film depicts McClane’s rugged individualism and heroic action largely through its generic references. For example, his name recalls Big Jim McLain (1952), starring John Wayne as a tough HUAC communist hunter in Hawaii. Die Hard’s plot overlaps with other action genres such as the heist film and the disaster film, and there are several references to McClane as a western hero. Like Shane, McClane rides into town (in a limousine rather than on a horse) at the beginning and rides out the same way at the end with Holly, like The Ringo Kid and Dallas at the end of Stagecoach. Not knowing McClane’s real identity, Gruber sneeringly calls him ‘Mr Cowboy’. When McClane falls into and then resurfaces from the artificial pond in the lobby of the office building during the climactic battle, he looks for a moment like Stallone as John Rambo in the jungles of Vietnam. (As the FBI approach Nakatomi Tower in a helicopter, one of them shouts: ‘Just like fucking Saigon’.) Such generic references are particularly appropriate in a film like Die Hard, which works to restore the mythic potency to American masculinity.
In an era of Free Trade agreements, the film exploits a fear of foreign others as a threat to the American economy. Nakatomi Tower is a four-storey building that rises above other buildings in the area, a visual index of how the Japanese economic miracle has infiltrated to the point of dominating the American economy. The company president, Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta), is an Asian who has fulfilled the American Dream, rising to the top of a successful business. The leaders of the criminal gang are German and they often speak to each other in Hollywood pseudo-German, a caricature of villainy. The two main enemies of World War Two are like the return of the repressed in the horror film, their post-war economic success coming back to haunt America as the Japanese and the Germans compete to drain the country of its money, its economic potency.
In the scenario of action, Nakatomi Tower functions metaphorically as a big phallus, with muscular men vying for control and power. There are nude women in the nearest building and a pin-up of a female nude at the Tower’s top. The Tower explodes in the film’s climax, its orgiastic release of firepower followed by a coda in which McClane is reinstalled as head of his family, Holly resuming her married name. Appropriately, McClane saves Holly by stripping her of her Rolex, an icon of her success as a businesswoman: when he takes the watch off her wrist, Gruber, who had been clinging to it over the side of the Tower, falls to his death.
The movie is an action fantasy of the reinscription of the white American male as king of the hill. By the end, the evil Germans and industrious Japanese have been killed, and the African-American males seem clearly yet comfortably positioned as helpers: Sgt Al Powell (Reginald Veljohnson) takes his orders on the ground from McClane rather than his superiors, and Argyle (De’voreaux White) is his cheerful chauffeur. Gruber underestimates McClane as ‘just another American who saw too many movies as a child. An orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne, Rambo, Marshall Dillon’, but Die Hard references these and other action icons and films to reassert their masculine potency.
Case Study: Blue Steel
If Die Hard reveals how central masculinity is to the action film, then Kathryn Bigelow’s films constitute a significant site of generic intervention. With The Loveless (co-directed with Monty Montgomery, 1983), Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), Bigelow has established herself as the only female filmmaker thus far specialising in action films who can claim the status of auteur. Her action films employ a variety of stylistic means to question the masculinist values that drive action genres. They provide all the visceral thrills, the eroticised violence and physical action, the kinds of pleasures that viewers expect of action films; yet at the same time they also question the genre’s traditional and shared ideological assumptions about gender, violence and spectatorship (see Jermyn & Redmond 2003; Grant 2004).
The action genre is perfectly suited to Bigelow’s themes. The representation of violence is of course central to the genre, and as Steve Neale notes, the ideology of masculinity in popular cinema centres on ‘notions and attitudes to do with aggression, power and control’ (1993: 11). Bigelow’s films explore the nature of masculinity and its relation to violence, especially within the context of spectatorship, often by playing on the gaze of the camera as conditioned by the generic expectations and conventions of traditional action films. Much as Sirk approached melodrama, providing their pleasures while critiquing the ideology that underpinned them, so Bigelow works within the action film, mobilising a range of the genres traditionally regarded as male precisely to interrogate the politics and pleasures of their gendered representations.
Blue Steel is about a rookie female cop, Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis), whose gender troubles all the men in the film once she dons her uniform. Intervening in a supermarket robbery, Megan shoots and kills the holdup man, while one of the cowering bystanders in the store, Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), secretly pockets the thief’s handgun. As the film progresses, Eugene worms his way into Megan’s life, at first romantically, but he grows increasingly psychotic, obsessed with the image of Megan wielding her weapon and usurping phallic power. Inevitably, there is a final violent confrontation between the two, and Megan manages to kill the seemingly unstoppable Eugene.
The violent struggle between them for control of the gun is not unlike the battle for the building in Die Hard, the gun in Blue Steel serving as the icon of masculine potency around which the action centres. From the opening credit sequence in which the camera magnifies the interior of a Smith and Wesson handgun, Blue Steel explores the action genre’s iconographical fetishisation of the gun. Violence is associated with male animality in Bigelow’s films because it is seen as an inherently masculine quality. Blue Steel demonstrates this idea visually, emphasising the texture and tactile appeal of guns – the way hands caressingly grip them, how they slide across a table or are provocatively unbuttoned from a holster – as well as aurally, with careful Foley work on the soundtrack that magnifies the various sounds guns make.
Figure 11 Blue Steel: Megan usurps masculine power
Some critics have read Blue Steel as empowering for women, with Megan like the hero of a rape-revenge film, changing from being the victim of a stalker to defeating him. In this sense, the casting of Curtis (daughter of Janet Leigh, who played Marion Crane in Psycho) is particularly resonant, since she has been the tough ‘final girl’ (Clover 1992: 35ff) of several horror movies including the prototypical slasher film Halloween (1978), Prom Night (1980) and Terror Train (1980). It is Megan who defeats Eugene in battle, not her superior, the appositely named Detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown). Another convention borrowed from the horror film is the doubling of Megan’s abusive father (Philip Bosco) with Eugene, emphasising a continuity between apparently masculine norms and the horribly psychotic. The film employs other conventions of the horror film as well, particularly the werewolf film: Eugene is hirsute, with a dark beard, and associated with the night. At one point we see him digging for his gun like an animal under the full moon in New York’s Central Park (his surname, tellingly, is ‘Hunt’).
Yet Blue Steel also suggests that the triumph of Megan and the femininity she represents can only be limited because of the entrenched power of patriarchy since the male world of Eugene is shown to be only a monstrous extension of normative masculinity. Eugene is a stockbroker, his position of economic privilege apparently allowing him the power to commit horrible criminal acts, including murder, with impunity. The film links Eugene’s craziness to capitalism, competition, masculine identity and violence. No wonder Eugene hears voices in his head: on two occasions we see him screaming and wildly gesticulating in a sea of commodity traders, all male, on the floor of the stock exchange. It is in this same space that Eugene first fantasises shooting the gun he has picked up at the supermarket. When Mann asks Megan why she became a cop, she ambiguously replies, ‘Him’, which, as Yvonne Tasker notes, may refer to her abusive father specifically or more generally to ‘the man’, to men, to the many potential Eugenes (1993: 161).
This association of masculinity with violence and animality appears throughout Bigelow’s films: the hothead biker Davis (Robert Gordon) in The Loveless literally barks at his friends and yelps wildly as he fires his gun in the film’s violent climax in the bar; in Near Dark, when Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) thinks he has killed the lead vampire by running him over with a semi truck, another icon of phallic power, he similarly howls with satisfaction. Megan’s desire to be a cop thus becomes a desire to enter into the phallic domain, literalised in her struggle with Eugene over possession of the gun. Her uniform is a sign of transgression as Megan encroaches into a traditionally male world, an idea made clear early in the film in the montage of Megan suiting up for graduation. Individual shots fetishise parts of her uniform, reminiscent of the shots of the bikers’ costumes in The Loveless. The character’s gender is initially indeterminate, but then, as she buttons her shirt, we glimpse her lace bra underneath. Viewers are likely to be taken aback for a moment, ‘disarmed’ like the several men in the film when they see her in uniform for the first time or learn what her job is. Megan’s wearing of a traditionally male uniform invokes genre conventions to suggest the extent to which those genres are shaped by the masculine propensity toward violence.
Race and Genre
Race, ethnicity and nationality are commonly stereotyped in genre films, sometimes together. African-Americans, as in Die Hard, have traditionally been cast in supporting roles, stereotyped as toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies and bucks (see Bogle 1973). Racial issues were addressed in a few special social problem films like Home of the Brave (1949), about black soldiers in the army, and Pinky (1949), about a light-skinned black woman passing as white (a theme also explored by Sirk in Imitation of Life). Since the 1990s, generic Arabs have been depicted in action movies as terrorists, as in True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996) and The Siege (1998). By contrast, Russians are friendlier in Hollywood movies following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, as in The Hunt for Red October (1990) and Enemy at the Gates (2001).
Asian-Americans have been largely absent from genre movies, as have Latinos until West Side Story. Outside Hollywood, there were separate but parallel Yiddish and black or ‘race’ cinemas. The ‘golden age’ of Yiddish film was the 1920s to the 1930s, black cinema from the 1930s to the 1940s. Both were institutionalised forms of cinema, with their own stars, directors, exhibition circuits and audiences. Both were organised along generic lines similar to Hollywood. There were, for example, black melodramas and musical westerns featuring African-American stars. Hollywood, too, tried all-black musicals such as Hallelujah (1929), Cabin in the Sky (1943) and Carmen Jones (1954), as well as dramatic films such as Green Pastures (1937) – the practice of segregating casts by race a reflection of the segregationist and discriminatory practices of the era in which they were made. Even in white Hollywood musicals, African-Americans tend to be separate from the narrative, whether it is Louis Armstrong in Young Man with a Horn (1950) and High Society (1956) or Chuck Berry in Go, Johnny, Go (1959) and American Hot Wax (1978). These performers appear as themselves, with a status that is in part ‘outside’ the story.
Except for such subsidiary and subordinate roles as maids, black faces were largely absent from Hollywood movies. Issues of race appeared, like the return of the repressed, safely coded within generic conventions, particularly in the western, which on the surface relegates the topic more safely to the nation’s past rather than present. Since native Americans were victims of a genocidal policy of westward expansion, their image was easily appropriated for mythic use. This explains in part the convention of white men playing Indians in any roles more substantial than extras. The representation of the Indian as sexual threat can be seen in such films as D. W. Griffith’s The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913) and John Ford’s Stagecoach, both of which show well-intentioned men preparing to kill a young white woman to save them from ‘a fate worse than death’ – in other words, rape by the dark Other. The fear of miscegenation in the western is a convention that goes back to seventeenth-century captivity narratives, and conforms also with white fears about black sexuality. The success of Broken Arrow in 1950, with its liberal theme of racial tolerance between native Americans and whites, began a cycle of sympathetic Indian westerns such as The Savage (1952), Seminole (1953), Apache (1954) and The Indian Fighter (1955) that addressed issues of race somewhat more directly before the rise of the Civil Rights movement.
Other films, like The Searchers and The Last Hunt (1956), depict white racism rather than Indian brutality and sexual deprivation. The Searchers presents its protagonist, western icon John Wayne, as an overt racist. At the beginning of the film, Ethan Edwards (Wayne) returns to the Texas home of his brother Aaron several years after the end of the Civil War, having fought for the South and still wearing part of his Confederate uniform. His hatred of Indians is intense, as revealed by his scorn for Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a half-breed, and by his defilement of Indian corpses, scalping them and shooting out the eyes of dead warriors so they cannot go to heaven. Soon after Ethan’s arrival, Comanches lure Ethan away from the ranch and then kill Aaron and his wife Martha but take their two young daughters with them. Soon the younger girl is found dead, but Ethan and Martin spend years tracking down the older daughter, Debbie, although for different reasons: Martin wants to save Debbie not from the Comanche but from Ethan, who intends to kill her because he believes that miscegenation will pollute Debbie beyond redemption. When they find Debbie, they discover that she has become the ‘wife’ of a Comanche chief, Scar (Henry Brandon), and is apparently healthy and well. Ethan does have a change of heart at the last moment, sweeping Debbie into his arms to take her home as he is about to kill her; this ending, necessitated in part by the dictates of the star system and the importance of home and family for the director, hardly negates the virulent racism that characterises this western’s hero throughout the entire film.
Encouraged by the success of Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970, a cop film featuring two black detectives (Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques), a cycle of blaxploitation films followed. The term blaxploitation was coined by the trade paper Variety to describe these films, which appeared from the late 1960s through to the mid-1970s. Blaxploitation films are action films with sensationalist plots featuring stories of crime and violence in the inner city, with black actors in major roles and targeted specifically at black audiences.
As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum and became more militant, many black viewers rejected the more accommodating images of established black stars like Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte and welcomed the newer action movies with more macho black stars, such as ex-football Hall-of-Fame star Jim Brown in films like Black Gunn (1972) and Slaughter (1972). African-Americans responded to the change in representation ‘from sambo to superspade’ (Leab 1976), and Richard Roundtree became famous as the suave black detective John Shaft in Shaft (1971), billed as ‘the new James Bond’, as did Ron O’Neal as Superfly (1972). Pam Grier in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) and Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones (1973) applied the same formula to female characters, creating ‘supermacho females’ (Guerrero 1993: 4).
Although some blaxploitation films were made by black filmmakers, many had white producers and directors and were made to cash in on the trend. Consequently, many of the black characters in these films are also stereotypes. The constraints of blaxploitation characterisation are parodied in Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987), a comedy about an aspiring black actor (played by the director) who goes to a black actors school where white instructors teach him how to talk jive and walk funky, and discovers that in Hollywood the only roles available to blacks are pimps, drug dealers or living-dead zombie pimps.
The formulaic nature of blaxploitation is also parodied in Don’t Be a Menace to South Central and Drink Your Juice in the Hood (1996). The question of the extent to which blaxploitation was politically progressive has been a matter of debate, but the films did pave the way for a cycle of ‘salt-and-pepper’ (interracial) buddy movies beginning with 48 Hrs (1982) and the wider acceptance of black action stars such as Wesley Snipes and Denzel Washington.
Case Study: Do the Right Thing
Do the Right Thing (1989), which brought a number of new African-American actors to the screen and started a cycle of black genre films in the 1990s, uses the conventions of many genres without fitting comfortably into any one. African-American filmmaker Spike Lee, director of Do the Right Thing, has tackled a number of genres, reworking them in a way that recalls Robert Altman’s work in the 1970s. School Daze (1988) is a college musical, Malcolm X (1992) a biopic and Get on the Bus (1996) a road movie with a disparate group of black men who find themselves together on a chartered bus from L.A. to Washington to attend the Million Man March. Bamboozled (2000) is about the racist iconography and representation of popular culture. Its story of a new television show featuring deliberately retrograde representations of minstrels that becomes an unexpected hit is a variation of The Producers (1968) and examines the racist iconography of pop culture generally.
The story of Do the Right Thing takes place during one particularly hot summer day in the black neighbourhood of Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York and involves an ensemble of local characters. The action centres around Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, where Mookie (Lee) works as a pizza delivery boy for Sal (Danny Aiello) and his two sons. Tensions begin to mount when Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) ask for the pictures of some black brothers to be placed on the pizzeria’s ‘Wall of Fame’, which is decorated with images of famous Italian-Americans like Frank Sinatra. Eventually tempers, like the temperature, rise to a boil, causing a racially-charged confrontation with police, who kill Radio Raheem and trigger a race riot. The film’s graffiti-like style, with bold colour saturation, suggests the excessive look of melodrama – an appropriate approach given the overheated emotions of the characters.
The importance of such star iconography as displayed on Sal’s ‘Wall of Fame’ informs the strategy of the entire film. As bold as its graffiti-like style, Do the Right Thing is filled with the iconography of black popular culture: Mookie’s Jackie Robinson shirt, gerri curls, Mike Tyson, the casting of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee (stars of the previous phase of integrationist black cinema), the loving litany of black jazz and R&B artists recited by the radio disc jockey Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), and so on. Accompanying the opening credits, the rap group Public Enemy attacks the white iconography of the entertainment industry by focusing on popular music in ‘Fight the Power’, its lyrics boasting that Elvis ‘never meant shit to me’. Raheem and Buggin’ Out’s desire to place African-Americans on the white Wall of Fame is perhaps analogous to the position of Lee, making films with black content for black audiences within a system that is predominately white: wanting to get his films shown in theatres, he appropriates the iconography and conventions of classic Hollywood genre movies just as white popular culture had appropriated black styles in the past. This reappropriation is most explicit in the scene where Raheem repeats with a difference the famous monologue of conman Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) posing as a minister in Night of the Hunter (1955), turning Mitchum’s Southern drawl into urban street talk, and the discourse on love and hate from the metaphysical to the racial.
Figure 12 Do the Right Thing: the importance of iconography
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr (1988) black literature is marked by a revision of, or a ‘signifying’ upon, texts in the Western (white) tradition. It is precisely in this play upon white texts, he argues, that black works articulate their difference. As the ‘Night of the Hunter’ scene makes manifest, Do the Right Thing signifies upon the conventions of dominant white cinema. For example, in the narrative there are no heroes, as in classic Hollywood cinema, only protagonists. All the characters are flawed in one way or another, and the film offers no comfortable site of spectator identification, as most Hollywood films tend to do. All of them talk to the camera, a convention of comedy, but here everyone hurls uncomfortable racial slurs at the viewer. Do the Right Thing also lacks closure, as nothing is resolved after the climactic riot, and none of the characters has an insight or revelation. There is no catharsis or satisfying denouement for viewers, and the film ends ambiguously by offering us two perspectives on the racial violence we have just seen: the peaceful integrationist message of Martin Luther King, and the more militant separatism of Malcolm X.
After Do the Right Thing a number of African-American directors emerged who, following Lee’s lead, sought to penetrate mainstream cinema by signifying upon Hollywood iconography and genres. Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats (1991) is a backstage musical biopic about a fictional soul group, while his The Meteor Man (1993) is a science fiction film about a black man who attains astonishing powers from a meteor that lands in the ’hood. John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991) is a crime film and a teen film, Poetic Justice (1993) a road movie starring Janet Jackson on a journey of self-discovery and Higher Learning (1995) a college movie, like School Daze. Surviving the Game (1994), by director and long-time Lee cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, inflects the classic thriller The Most Dangerous Game (1932) with the politics of race and class, as the human prey hunted for sport in this version are specifically poor urban blacks whom it is believed no one will miss. One distinct cycle that emerged during this period were ’hood films, also inspired by Do the Right Thing, such as Boyz n the Hood, New Jack City (1991), Juice (1992), American Me (1992) and Menace II Society (1993), that sought to capture the harsh realities of inner-city life by updating conventions of the classic gangster and crime film.
Case Study: Little Big Man and Posse
Before Little Big Man in 1970, director Arthur Penn had updated the western with a psychological study of Billy the Kid, The Left-Handed Gun (1958). Just as his Bonnie and Clyde offered a revision of the outlaw couple film for the counter-culture, so Little Big Man attempts to rewrite the western from the perspective of the native American. In the film, the Cheyenne refer to themselves as ‘human beings’, decentring the white point of view that dominates the western.
Figure 13 Little Big Man: Custer’s madness is a comment on traditional values
The story involves Jack Crabbe (Dustin Hoffman), a wizened man of almost 121 who claims to have fought with Indians during the Plains Wars and to be the sole survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Montana in 1876, where General George Armstrong Custer (Richard Mulligan) and his battalion of over 200 soldiers from the 7th Cavalry were killed by a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. In the present, Jack tells his story to a historian (William Hickey), who is audio-taping the interview, and Crabbe’s story is told in flashback. According to Crabbe, his family was killed during an attack on their wagon by a band of Cheyenne when he was a boy. Only he and his sister Caroline (Carole Androsky) survive, and she soon escapes, leaving young Jack to grow up as a Cheyenne brave. When he is caught during a skirmish between his Cheyenne band and some soldiers, he is returned to white civilisation, living in town with a stern minister (Thayer David) and his wife (Faye Dunaway). Over the course of the story, the appropriately named Jack Crabbe scuttles back and forth several times between white and Cheyenne society, always returning to the wise counsel of Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), Jack’s ‘grandfather’. Along the way he becomes a gunfighter, earns his place as a Cheyenne brave, befriends Wild Bill Hickok (Jeff Corey) and tries to assassinate Custer.
With its narrative shuttling between white and Cheyenne society, Little Big Man is structured by a series of binary oppositions, points of contrast between the two worlds – not unlike the western itself, according to Jim Kitses. The native characters in the film are as fully developed as the white characters and as important within the narrative. Because Jack comes to one culture having become familiar with the other, we see white society from an Indian point of view and Cheyenne society from a white perspective. In Stagecoach and many traditional westerns, Indians emerge out of the landscape, with no apparent culture or purpose other than to threaten white civilisation. In Red River, when Groot sees the wagon train burning in the distance, he wonders ‘why Indians always wanna be burning up good … wagons for?’ Most westerns avoid answering this question, but Little Big Man reveals the racist assumptions behind it.
Since the comparisons between the two cultures all favour Cheyenne society, the civilisation taken for granted in classic westerns is here consistently questioned. For example, the Cheyenne warrior Younger Bear (Cal Bellini), who hates Little Big Man for humiliating him by saving his life, nevertheless fulfills his duty by rescuing Little Big Man later, whereas a young white man sneaks up on Hickok and shoots him in the back for revenge. Regarding sexuality, Sunshine’s (Amy Eccles) willingness to share her husband with her widowed sisters (in a scene of ‘free love’ with which the contemporary counter-culture audience might easily identify) and the Cheyenne’s acceptance of the obviously gay Little Horse (Robert Little Star), who has chosen to live a domestic life rather than to hunt and fight with the other braves, is obviously preferable to the life of duplicity and repression that characterises Reverend Pendrake and his wife. Mr Merriweather (Martin Balsam), the snake-oil salesman, suggests that the universe is absurd, without meaning, and that as a result he is not any less moral than anyone else for being a charlatan, a confidence man. By contrast, the ‘human beings’, as they say, know where the centre of the earth is, and can accept the wholeness of life even if they cannot understand it (‘sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t’, as Old Lodge Skins observes).
In reversing the depiction of Indians in relation to whites, the film also reverses other conventions and character types. For example, when the Cheyenne chase a stagecoach in Little Big Man, it is nothing more than a bulky conveyance that flops over unceremoniously, unlike Ford’s mythic stagecoach that speeds on undeterred even when the driver is wounded, drops the reins and Ringo has to jump to the lead horses to regain them. Jack’s sister Caroline, imagining herself the heroine of some captivity narrative, expects to be ravished by her Cheyenne captors, but she seems almost disappointed to find that they treat her respectfully. Also in Little Big Man the cavalry does not come to the rescue, as in Stagecoach, but rather brings death. The powerful scene of the Washita massacre, in which the cavalry rides in and lays waste to an Indian village, including women and children, could not help but invoke images of the Vietnam War, and especially the shocking revelations of the Mai Lai Massacre, for contemporary viewers in 1970 (the year of the film’s release). The actress playing Jack’s Cheyenne wife Sunshine looks as much Asian as she does native American. Aided by John Hammond’s blues-tinged guitar and harmonica that provide the film’s musical score, Little Big Man casts the Indians as victims of racial oppression.
Little Big Man acknowledges its own awareness of generic tradition and its attempt to rewrite it. When Jack enters what he calls his ‘gunfighter phase’, for example, he is dressed in an all-black costume reminiscent of that worn by countless movie cowboys. Generic elements are reversed or subverted in the film because it questions the myth of Manifest Destiny that the genre classically embraces. General Custer, as played by Richard Mulligan, is less the dapper but courageous military man played by the swashbuckling Erroll Flynn in They Died with Their Boots On (1941), made during World War Two, than an egomaniacal racist bordering on the psychotic. The stark difference between these two representations of a controversial military figure during two different war eras indicates the relative cultural consensus in the case of the former as compared to the strong division that characterised American society during the later conflict.
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Although black cowboys did exist on the frontier, their history has been overwritten by the predominately white iconography of the western. One of the most popular genres of race films, as mentioned above, was the western, with the first possibly being The Trooper of Troop K (1917) with black star Noble Johnson. In the late 1930s Herb Jeffries appeared in a series of independently produced all-black musical westerns including The Bronze Buckaroo (1939) and Harlem Rides the Range (1939). In 1960, Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge starred Woody Strode as a cavalry soldier being court-marshalled because of his race. During the blaxploitation era several westerns were made, the most notable being Buck and the Preacher (1972), directed by Sidney Poitier, about white bounty hunters looking to return former slaves to work on southern plantations after the defeat of the South in the Civil War. Starring Harry Belafonte along with Poitier, Buck and the Preacher employed many conventions of the genre while foregrounding issues of race relations. But for the most part blacks had been absent from the Hollywood western – an absence so complete that it can serve as one of the major jokes in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, which stars African-American actor Cleavon Little as a stylish ‘Black Bart’ with his Gucci designer saddlebags.
Figure 14 Posse: a black western
It is precisely this mythic erasure that Mario Van Peebles’ Posse (1993) seeks to challenge. Posse opens with a black man speaking directly to the camera, presenting the entire story in flashback. This framing device refers back to Little Big Man, with its similar intent of revising western myth. Significantly, the interviewed witness in Posse is played by Woody Strode, himself an icon who had appeared in several of Ford’s westerns. In a telling scene in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Pompey (Strode), Tom Doniphon’s hired hand, is sitting with the other students in a class on American history and democracy; when called upon to recite from ‘The Declaration of Independence’, looking downcast in a way that speaks volumes, he ‘forgets’ the part that says all men are created equal, after which he is brusquely ordered back to work by Doniphon. (Later Pompey is refused a drink in the saloon.) In Ford’s films, Strode always embodied a respectful, subordinate presence; but in Posse, Strode expresses a more militant point of view, confronting the camera directly rather than averting his gaze, and criticising white people – that is, ‘us’, the normative spectators of the classic genre film – for having taken the land from native Americans.
As Strode tells the story, Jesse Lee (Van Peebles) and several other black soldiers (along with a ‘token white’, Jimmy Teeters (Stephen Baldwin)), desert from their company fighting in Cuba during the Spanish Civil War when they discover that their racist commander, Colonel Graham (Billy Zane), intends to kill them after they retrieve a fortune in gold that he plans to smuggle out of the country. Jesse Lee and the others manage to escape with the money to New Orleans, where they come into conflict with the law and have to flee west as outlaws. Out west, they go to Freemanville, an idyllic all-black community threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, pursued all the way by the vengeful Colonel Graham and his men. The film builds to a violent climax reminiscent of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch as Jesse Lee encourages the townsfolk to take a stand against the white racists, and he also shoots it out with Graham and his men.
Posse uses many of the western’s conventions and imagery reminiscent of western auteurs, but its most interesting aspect is the intrusion of contemporary elements into the narrative, creating a disjunction between setting and sensibility. This strategy is most apparent in the film’s music, such as when the singer in the New Orleans brothel performs in a modern rhythm-and-blues style. Peckinpah once said that the western was a form with which it was possible to comment on society today, and that is Van Peebles’ goal with the genre in Posse. The gang in Posse are a tight group of brothers who rise to the defence of their community, a message that also comes across in the urban ’hood films.
A title in Posse’s closing credits informs us that in fact one out of every three cowboys were black men, and that, ‘although ignored by Hollywood and most history books, the memory of the more than 8,000 black cowboys that roamed the west lives on’. In Liberty Valance, the newspaper editor speaks for Ford when he says, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ Posse, by contrast, prefers to reclaim fact from the myth, reinserting blacks into western history, from which they have been largely written out in popular film.