Racism on the Silver Screen

It’s early January, and the Oscar-bait films are just making their way now through the Midwest. Amour and Zero Dark Thirty only opened recently here. The media’s spent a lot of time this Oscar season focusing on the potential controversy behind Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-centered Western Django Unchained, certainly a conversation worth having. But the movie that people really ought to be up in arms about is The Impossible, a movie about a Spanish couple, starring Naomi Watts, surviving the 2004 tsunami in the Indian ocean.

Amidst the wonderful reception of the movie’s acting and directing, critics are overlooking one fundamental thing about the movie: the blatant racism it plays into. The magnitude 9.2 tsunami killed a stunning 280,000 people, many of them residents of Indonesia and other surrounding nations. But for white audiences to appreciate the film, its makers decided, the protagonists would have to be white.

Hollywood has been, for many years, a surprisingly racist organization. Every story must be whitewashed. Addressing racism in The Help? A white protagonist could help audiences relate. Telling a tale of the Meiji restoration in The Last Samurai? Sure, but the protagonist should probably be white.

Even high-profile filmmakers have trouble getting films financed without a white protagonist. George Lucas has attempted for a while to make a film about black airmen during WWII, and has run into this problem explicitly.  Danny Glover’s biopic of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture got shot down on the same grounds.

Are the white people of this country really so shallow that we can’t watch a film from a nonwhite perspective? I understand that you want people that look like you in a film. But when filmmakers are going so far out of their way to find the white angle in Impossible while a brilliant premise about Haiti’s George Washington can’t gain any traction, shouldn’t the moviegoing public open up a bit? Then again, with all of the African-American stars in Hollywood nowadays, perhaps the problem isn’t in the audience, but in the financing minds in Hollywood. 

Eight theaters in the metro will be showing The Impossible today. What a lovely MLK Day celebration.