The White Savior in the Green Book
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The White Savior in the Green Book: A Postmodernist Project Madeline McBeth In February of 2019, Green Book, directed by Peter Farrelly, took home the Academy Award for Best Picture. As the Oscar winner was announced and nearly three thousand people in the Los Angeles Dolby Theatre came to their feet, one man turned away from the stage. Renowned director Spike Lee, whose movie BlacKkKlansman was also nominated for best picture that evening, became visibly upset when Farelly’s film took the prize. Shortly thereafter, while acceptance speeches were being given, Lee was seen walking out of the theatre. In the press room later that evening, Lee expressed his disappointment in no un- certain terms: “I thought I was courtside at the Garden and the ref made a bad call” (Real). As a contemporary filmmaker famously alive to the possibilities of parody, who has become widely “known for his uncompromising, provocative approach to controversial subject matter” (Britannica), and who has spent most of his career curating a cinematic edge on a shoestring budget, Lee is undeniably invested in his art form on a level that runs much deeper than profit or popularity. Thus, his 2019 loss and subsequent response beg the question of what kind of “call” he believed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was making. Essais vol. 10 no. 2 | Fall 2020 The White Savior in theGreen Book McBeth Whether Lee’s particular brand of film-making was at all influenced by theoretical models, it is difficult to avoid -cer tain eminent poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists when discussing parody and critical approaches to art. One such thinker—Roland Barthes, who, although from an entirely different generation and vocation than Lee—is similarly invested in his own undertaking. To paraphrase, Barthes favors active engagement with literary texts, rather than passive consumption of them. He is concerned with the question of whether art can jar us out of ideological frameworks perpetuated by the repro- duction of dominant interpretations (3, 4, 5). For Barthes, one must always take a critically active position; one must always be re-reading. Close re-readings of both films mentioned above reveal how Lee’s reaction is rooted in something other than spite or the superficiality of an award: the complexities of race and systemic racism in cinema. ThoughGreen Book sparked some controversy and polariza- tion among other movie makers, film critics, and audiences alike, reception was generally positive. Upon its release, many critics praised the movie’s feel-good tone, while some protested its proliferation of the “white savior” trope, referring to a white person who is portrayed as messianic for rescuing a non-white person from their troubles, and who usually learns something about themselves in the process. In Green Book, this messianic figure takes the form of the movie’s central character, Tony Vallelonga. The film chronicles the real-life tale of Dr. Donald W. Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a world-class African American pianist estranged from his family, and Frank “Tony Lip” Val- lelonga (Viggo Mortensen), a tough Italian American bouncer Shirley hires to be his chauffeur on a concert tour of the deep south in the 1960s. The screenplay is written by none other than Nick Vallelonga, the real-life son of Tony Lip. Lee’s BlacKkKlans- man also tells a true story, that of Ron Stallworth, the first African American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department. To make a name for himself in local law enforcement, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) sets out to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan with the help of his Jewish counterpart and 94 Fall 2020 Essais fellow detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). They go un- dercover (on the phone and in person) as potential members of the Klu Klux Klan to investigate and ultimately outsmart the extremist group, as well as humiliate its grand wizard, David Duke (played by Topher Grace). What connects these two films—material centered around racism, Green Book’s contested mode, and Lee’s reaction to its commendation—also raises questions of how exactly these nar- ratives operate. What is Green Book saying and doing, and how? What is BlacKkKlansman doing and how? Why does BlacKkKlansman feel entirely more self-aware and distinctly ironic than Green Book, even though both films contain (or claim) historical truth and anti-racist themes? My argument is this: As a film that claims to confront race in a productive way but nonetheless propagates white saviorism, Green Book further embeds society in the racism it purports to critique, therein representing Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern. Despite whatever supposedly merited its mark of recognition, this makes Green Book a far less critically significant piece thanBlacKkKlansman and a far more dangerous one for being valued above it by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Situated at the intersection of contemporary criticism and the machine of modern-day Hollywood, this thesis uses a postmodernist lens (primarily derived from Linda Hutcheon’s “The Politics of Post- modernism: Parody and History”) to explore the examples and effects of white saviorism in Green Book and understand why they are so problematic, i.e, how the appraisal of Green Book over BlacKkKlansman retrenches increasingly stale stereotypes and tropes that paper over the fault lines of race and racism in American culture, denying the national reckoning on race that films like Lee’s demand. Before delving in further, a contextualization in white sav- iorism and a grounding in Linda Hutcheon’s work is crucial, and more specifically, the distinction that she makes between “the postmodern” and “postmodernism.” In “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” Hutecheon sets the parameters of postmodernism as “resolutely contradictory,” 95 The White Savior in theGreen Book McBeth “unavoidably political,” and striving to “de-doxify our cultural representations” (1, 3). Hutcheon actually borrows this term, “de-doxify,” from Roland Barthes, upon whose seminal post- structuralist insights she built her own. The root “doxa” is a Greek word meaning a commonly accepted opinion or belief, so Barthes defines dedoxification as the process that allows us to see the often concealed ideologies which predicate held “no- tions of reality” (16), as Mufti Mudasir explains in “Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama: A Study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard.” Mudasir elucidates: Barthes’ main thrust as a critic was to denaturalize our assumptions of the human self and the “objective” world outside us. Hutcheon sees a similar potential in the postmodern parody as it helps us see the political and ideological nature of all human discourses. (16) Simply put, postmodernism opposes any attempt to think of representations as “natural” (from natural, but cultural/his- torical), instead urging recognition of their ideological underground—their contrived, cultural origins. Hutcheon’s postmodernism is “complicitous with the values it inscribed as well as subverts” (102), or rather, it partakes in and parodies the object of its critique in order to perform that critique. Hence, postmodernism is “self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining . like saying something whilst at the same time putting inverted commas around what is being said”; its effect is to spotlight, and thereby subvert, making its mode “knowing” and therefore “ironic” (1). In a postmodernist work, the contradiction of parody and history creates significant ten- sion, which is what qualifies the work as “unavoidably political.” As Hutcheon reminds us, “Indeed it is their compromised stance which makes those politics recognizable and familiar to us. After all, their mode—that of complicitous critique—is for the most part our own” (2). On the contrary, Hutcheon defines “the postmodern” as lacking critical irony and complicitous critique, with an “unproblematized reliance on realist narrative and transparent representational conventions” (9). In other 96 Fall 2020 Essais words, Hutcheon indicates here that in “the postmodern,” al- though there may seem to be an appearance of critique, it will be void of critical irony and that vital political dimension. As aforementioned, Hutcheon claims that the postmodernist concern is in “de-naturaliz[ing]” the “dominant features” of our lives (1). In “The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption,” Matthew Hughey considers the white savior trope to be one such entity. Any instance in which “a white messianic character saves a lower- or working-class, usually urban or isolated, nonwhite character from a sad fate,” Hughey designates white saviorism (1). According to historian James Axtell, this motif was born out of real events that occurred when the United States was first being formed. Natives would return captured white settlers (most often missionaries, teachers, or soldiers) because they “regarded their white saviors as barbarians and their deliverance as captivity” (62). Hughey emphasizes the deeply-rooted history of the white savior trope and its expansion throughout our entire culture: “This trope is so widespread that varied intercultural and interracial relations are often guided by a logic that racializes and separates people into those who are redeemers (whites) and those who are redeemed or in need of redemption (nonwhites)” (2). The “logic” spoken of here could be interchangeable with “ideology” as it pertains to both Barthes and Hutcheon. The logic of the white savior could be restated as the ideology of the white savior. Though traditionally associated with “right-wing paternalism” (Hughey 2), the white savior trope and its ideology are not exclusive to any one political party or cultural camp. It is both a narrative trait and a narrative itself that can be found in past and present-day film, television, literature, religion, environmentalism, news, on social media, and in other facets of everyday life. Hughey cites as an example Pulitzer Prize-winning liberal journalist Nicholas Kristof, who admitted to using an identifiably American “foreign protagonist” in his writings about Central Africa in order to increase public inter- est and readership (3).