Name: Enza Rosato Student number: 10588515 Master Thesis Film Studies University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Abe Geil Second reader: Catherine Lord Date: 29 June 2018 Words: 21666 Representing the Civil Rights Movement in Contemporary American Cinema: The Dominant Narrative Abstract In this MA thesis, I explore the dominant narrative of the United States’ civil rights movement in film. This dominant narrative, often represented within the “based on true events” genre, puts Martin Luther King Jr. inevitably in front, implying that the entire movement died with him in 1968. In this narrative, American society is presented as if racism has been overcome. However, a recent wave of protests against racism, and the production and release of the films The Butler (Lee Daniels 2013), Selma (Ava DuVernay 2014), Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi 2016), and Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow 2017), have brought the subject back into focus. I will examine the way in which the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement is represented in these films, by using a textual analysis. This analysis shows that The Butler and Selma contribute to keep the dominant narrative in place, in contrast to Hidden Figures and Detroit which demonstrate stories outside this narrative. However, all films are able to connect the representation of the civil rights movement with the contemporary racial context of the films’ production, especially by combining film and social media. The mediated one-way communication of this historical past has changed into a multi-voiced approach which gives organizations greater opportunity to address present issues. Therefore, the link between the actions of the civil rights movement and the problem of contemporary racism can be made. This link does not only apply for these case studies, and could be developed further on in other research. Keywords: African American, racial politics, civil rights movement, dominant narrative, “based on true events”, discourse analysis Table of Contents Abstract 1 Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Theoretical Framework 5 Framing Racial Inequality Embedded in American Cinema 9 Chapter 1: Representing the Civil Rights Movement 13 1.1 The Dominant Narrative’s Presentation of the Post-Racial Society 13 1.1.2 Documentary: An Addition 20 Chapter 2: Historical Films in Contemporary Hollywood 23 2.1 A White Dominant Perspective 23 2.2 Difficulties of the “Based on True Events” Genre 26 Chapter 3: Contemporary Historical Fictions Revisiting the Civil Rights Movement: 30 The Case Studies 30 3.1 The Butler and Selma 31 3.2 Hidden Figures and Detroit 35 3.3 Cooperation of Cinema and Social Media 37 3.3.1 Application of Social Media: The Case Studies 39 Conclusion 41 Bibliography 45 Filmography 49 Music 50 2 Introduction This year, on 4 April 2018, was the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. In the week surrounding this anniversary, his life and actions as leader of the civil rights movement were remembered, not only in the US, but also in other Western countries such as the Netherlands. The metanarrative of this remembrance presents a dominant narrative that is formed by the media and continuously reproduced, in which King is the one figure representing the entire movement that existed in the fifties and sixties of the last century. The consensus of that dominant narrative is that the movement started in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision regarding the segregation of schools in the South, and that it ended with King’s death in 1968 (Leigh Raiford and Renee Romano xiv; Richard H. King 473). Therefore, most representations of the civil rights movement are set within this period. The amount of representations of the civil rights movement appears to differ per period. For example, more films about the movement were produced in the nineties alone than in the sixties, seventies, and eighties combined (Jennifer Fuller 167). Moreover, the subject seems to have emerged again in the 2010s. Scholar John Robinson explains that when President Barack Obama won the 2008 election, this led to the misconceptions that racial difference had been transcended in American society that there no longer existed a division between African Americans and white Americans, and that the two racial groups had equal opportunities in American society. Most mainstream films produced since the ostensible end of the civil rights movement support the idea that the movement fully accomplished its goals. Hollywood’s popular fictional genre of films “based on true events” is naturally one which deals frequently with the civil rights movement, but is also a complicated genre because of its claim to be connected to reality and the way in which its narratives produce meaning for audiences. Four recently produced “based on true events” Hollywood films about the civil rights movement are The Butler (Lee Daniels 2013), Selma (Ava DuVernay 2014), Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi 2016), and Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow 2018). These four mainstream films, in their own way, help to keep the dominant narrative in place through the means of entertaining, educating, and informing a broad audience about the civil rights movement. I want to indicate here that this is not a historical investigation into whether the films represent the real events accurately. Rather, through textual discourse analysis I explicate the way in which events are represented by the filmmakers, from which point of view, and what meaning these images convey to a mainstream audience that might not consciously grasp its meaning, viewing the genre only as a form of entertainment. The Butler and Selma present a narrative made up of well-known events relating to the movement, events that are often remembered and represented. These films can therefore serve as appropriate examples of the dominant narrative perpetuated by Hollywood representations. On the other hand, Hidden Figures and Detroit complicate the dominant narrative, since the relation of these stories to the civil rights movement is not explicit. These two stories are about events not well-known to 3 the audience, so they provide information about the context of the civil rights movement and complement understanding of race issues in American society. Therefore, these films complicate the ideas presented by the dominant narrative, which represents one clear, linear story with a beginning and an ending and repeatedly re-presents the same general knowledge for Western audiences. Moreover, it is problematic that all four films present racism as a struggle that has been overcome, erasing contemporary race issues. Consequently, these four films are biased in their presentation of the civil rights movement. However, due to developments within the media field and our globalized world, these cinematic representations, through their reception on social media, facilitate a critical discourse around contemporary race issues. Combining the above issues, I will claim the following throughout this thesis: The representation of the civil rights movement in American cinema is a biased one, in which the same story is continuously reproduced. Moreover, this dominant narrative presents contemporary American society as if racism no longer exists. The recent “based on true events” productions The Butler and Selma help to keep this dominant narrative in place. However, two other recent fictional representations Hidden Figures and Detroit complicate this dominant narrative by providing new information not generally known to the public. I argue that the cooperation of cinema and new social media-based forms of communication are able to counter the claim that racism has already been decisively overcome, making it possible to fight contemporary racism. I substantiate this claim across three chapters. In the first chapter, I discuss how the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement appears in American cinematic objects after Martin Luther King’s death in 1968. Especially, cinematic representations produced until our contemporary post-Obama world existed and where more and more information about the civil rights movement became accessible through these representations. This chapter functions as an overview of various examples of cinematic objects representing the civil rights movement discussed according to the narratives presented. During this chapter it will become clear people of African American origin strove to use the media to put the topic of contemporary racial inequality high on the political agenda during the civil rights movement and continued to do so after King’s death. However, as these films are an attempt to put the subject of racism back into focus, the discourse of the cinematic representations presents this subject more as a closed story, instead of provoking the audience to take action to fight contemporary racism. All of the films discussed contribute to keeping the dominant narrative in place by presenting King as the one and only leader, and all films are situated during the period of his leadership, between 1954 and 1968. If more of these mainstream films extended the narrative of the civil rights movement into contemporary Western politics, the link with contemporary racism would be more visible. Therefore, documentaries as non-fictional genre seem to be a valuable contribution to the fiction genre about this subject that are able to broaden the dominant narrative and in this sense explain more of the context of the civil rights movement. 4 The second chapter revolves around the production strategies of Hollywood and how its “based on true events” genre contributes to the dominant narrative. In addition, I examine the complexities of this particular genre in relation to this subject and the aspect of being veracious objective of being truthful. This chapter links the content of the first chapter to contemporary discussions of a divide between African Americans and white Americans within the mainstream American film industry. This discussion intensified after the Academy Awards of 2013, during which the equal representation of African Americans in American cinema was questioned.