Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness

Hernan Vera & Andrew M. Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Rowan & Littlefield, 2003. 203 pages, $75.00. A Huge Subject Bizarre as it may seem, there is not that much difference between a creaky silent film like Birth of a Nation (1915) and a state of the art wonder like Black Hawk Down (2001). Both deal, in essence, with brave, upstanding, loyal white chaps fighting a savage and chaotic horde of people of African descent, and it is abundantly clear which group is the superior. The reason for this continuity is not just the baleful consistency of racism. Rather, it is the need for white maleness to define and assert itself against the idea of the proverbial "other." Nonwhites in films exist only to prop up the unstable identity of the dominant American group, to act as a mirror reflecting back the supremacy of whiteness. This is, in a nutshell, the argument of Hernan Vera's and Andrew M. Gordon's provocative book. Each chapter takes a different aspect of what they term the "sincere fictions" of Caucasian superiority and shows how it operates in various films. Apart from old friends like Griffith's epic and Gone with the Wind, both of which are central to their idea of the "divided white self," the authors examine the film convention whereby non-white races always need to be led to freedom and fulfillment by a Persil-bright messiah (Stargate, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom); they analyze the role of Tahitians in the drama of male authority that exists in different ways in the three versions of Mutiny on the Bounty; they follow the evolution of what might be called the Scarlett and Mammy complex in women's relationships in Imitation of Life (Stahl's and Sirk's) and in more recent productions like Passion Fish. There is plenty more besides. The general message is that, although the archetypes (or stereotypes) may vary according to different historical conditions and cultural pressures, certain concepts remain depressingly constant. Blackness and otherness is passive or savage, comic or servile; the lesser breeds, as Kipling would have put it, are capable only of nurturing whites through their neuroses or of being led by WASPish heroes. Even a righton New Age western like Dances With Wolves turns out to be a story of a white male crisis in which the Native Americans are subsidiary elements in Kevin Costner's psychodrama. It is, in short, a huge subject, but Vera and Gordon (they sound like a bad nightclub act) have not written a huge book. As a result, they suffer from trying to pack too much into the space. Matters are not helped by their use of examples from almost every conceivable non-white image, from African and Native Americans to Vietnamese in The Green Beret, and even the aliens in Men In Black. Because each of these groups raises slightly different contextual questions, the book finds itself skimming over problems or eliding issues that should be separate. For instance, there is a difference between white messiahs operating in their own country (To Kill A Mockingbird) and those spreading their beneficence abroad ( The Man Who Would Be King). …