Get out of La La Land! Naturalizing the Colour Line with “Colour-Blind" Cinema
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Get Out of La La Land! Naturalizing the Colour Line with “Colour-Blind" Cinema by Gavin Ward A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2019 Gavin Ward Abstract This thesis is grounded in semiotics, discourse, and critical race theory to identify and analyze contemporary racial representations in Hollywood cinema during the “post-race” era. “Post- race” has been used sporadically since 1971 when the concept was first published in James Wooton’s New York Times article Compact Set Up for ‘Post-Racial’ South, however I appropriate it here to more accurately reflect the time period from 2008 to 2019. During this time, the United States of America had elected its first African-American president to the White House. For many, this act had symbolically legitimized America as a “post-race” nation in which contemporary racial inequalities could be explained by the principles of universal liberalism and meritocracy, thus “naturalizing” contemporary racial inequalities with nonracial dynamics. This ideology minimizes the impact of historical racisms and uses racial “colour-blindness” to construct a false sense of racial harmony. Antonio Gramsci had proposed that mass media, such as films, have been used to reinforce dominant ideology through cultural hegemony. In the United States, Hollywood has been an important vehicle of discursive formation and narrative control and contributes to the cementing of America’s “post-race” la la land. In this thesis, I conclude that Hollywood films continue to placate concerns of race relations for the dominant ingroup through cinematic escapism, glamour and romance. In refining its art of "naturalizing” an ideological racial status quo, Hollywood has evolved from its blatant racial cinematic representations of the past. Now, mainstream cinema employs racial “colour-blindness” to maintain the colour line, further embedding racism into the fabric of American society. Acknowledgements To Dr. Amina Mire, who has been an inspiration and a mentor since my undergraduate years. I can’t thank her enough for her guidance and for making university fun again. To my parents, who have (somehow) always supported me, no matter the path I choose. To my boys, who have kept me grounded, given me perspective, and who have taught me lessons you won’t find in any texts. To Viki, who consistently believes in my abilities before I do. I am confident that I could not have done this without you. Table of Contents Chapter 1 – Introduction …................................................................................................ pg. 6 Introduction and Statement of Research Problem ...................................................... pg. 6 Methodology …......................................................................................................... pg. 25 Film Selection Process ….......................................................................................... pg. 31 Chapter Breakdown ….............................................................................................. pg. 37 Chapter 2 – Naturalizing Colour-blindness …................................................................. pg. 40 Colour-blind Hollywood, Strategies of Deference …............................................... pg. 53 Chapter 3 – “Post-Race” Plantations and Peculiar Narratives ….................................. pg. 67 Neo-Slavery Tourism and Whitewashing Plantations …..….................................... pg. 67 Controlling the Narrative and Enacting Power ......................................................... pg. 73 Black Panther, Subversion or Submission? ….......................................................... pg. 78 Chapter 4 - Get Out of La La La, A Critical Analysis ….................................................. pg. 85 Colour-blindness and Case Study: Reel Bad Arabs................................................... pg. 85 Get Out ….................................................................................................................. pg. 91 La La Land .............................................................................................................. pg. 109 Chapter 5 – Conclusion …................................................................................................ pg. 118 Summary …............................................................................................................. pg. 118 Areas of Future Study and Limitations ................................................................... pg. 121 References …...................................................................................................................... pg. 124 Fig 1. …............................................................................................................................... pg. 131 “The greatest thing our art does and our industry does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper” - Guillermo Del Toro, 2018 Chapter 1: Introduction Introduction and Statement of Research Problem In a third year Race & Ethnicity course at Carleton University, I began to understand the true value of critical analysis and applying critical theory to the topics that personally interested me, such as Hollywood cinema. It was the first time that I had begun scrutinizing popular films with the theoretical tools and concepts within the discipline of sociology to see past the face-value of what was being shown onscreen compared to what was implicitly meant. Though I had reviewed films, have held opinions about whether or not I enjoyed them or not, and though I would tune in to the Academy Award ceremonies (the Oscars) to see if my favourite films rightfully got the recognition they deserved (I am still amiss about Whiplash not winning for Best Picture in 2014), I never fully went beyond watching films for what they are; “just entertainment”. However, in the final year of my undergraduate degree, I began relentlessly reading texts on critical race theory and the social implications of being raced or ‘othered’. In these readings, the dominant narratives of American (and Canadian) history and triumph typically occluded marginalized voices in favour of the “natural” order of white male supremacy through colonialism and discourse. Richard Dyer makes the argument that “enterprise” was an important attribute of “upper-class white men” during colonialism and that; ‘Enterprise’ is an aspect of both spirit itself – energy, will, ambition, the ability to think and see things through – and of its effect – science, business, wealth creation, the building of nations, the organisation of labour (carried out by racially lesser humans)” (Dyer, 1997. pg.31). Dyer notes that enterprise and “spirit” are central values in ‘Western’ culture and that the most important vehicle for enterprise is through imperialism (1997, pg.31). American history is much the product of enterprise and imperialism, and Dyer asserts that a conflation of race, history, and narrative were part of the US colonialist ideas which are evident in fictional, escapist and entertainment forms today (1997, pg.32). Escapist forms of entertainment allow for the telling and re-telling of the great white narratives of conquest that engender the sense of a “natural order” in racially organized societies. What these narratives have typically left out from the plot are those racialized and gendered accounts of marginalized groups. For example, In Black Feminist Thought (1990), Patricia Hill Collins argues that African-American women intellectuals have remained outsiders to the dominant feminist, social, and political thought because the “assumptions on which full group membership are based – whiteness for feminist thought, maleness for Black social and political thought, and the combination for mainstream scholarship – all negate a Black female reality” (1990, pg.12). Mainstream scholarship and mainstream films share the commonality of being dominated by maleness and by whiteness. The privileging of maleness and whiteness in mainstream American society are the effects of imperialism and narrative construction that insisted that “white people [will] lead humanity forward because of their temperamental qualities of leadership: will power, far- sightedness, [and] energy” (Dyer, 1997, pg.31). Though white women are also marginalized based on their gender, Collins asserts that “denying black women the status as fully human has long been used to justify Black women’s sexual exploitation” (Collins, 1990, pg.70, my emphasis). Thus, black women and black people have struggled in establishing a self-defined standpoint because of their “lack of control over the ideological apparatuses of society” (Collins, 1990, pg.26). Collins argues that “those who control the schools, media, and cultural institutions of society prevail in establishing their viewpoint as superior than others” (1990, pg.26). Thus, with a lack of power and control in self-definition, “when faced with stereotypical, controlling images of black women, [some] women internalize the controlling images and come to believe that they are the stereotypes” (Collins, 1990, pg.23). Because Hollywood maintains control over the ideological apparatus of cinema, race, racism, and representation continue to be hot topics in popular film. In Reel Inequality (2017), Nancy Yuen argues that “through