Talking to film students about "Green Book"

I teach two recit­a­tion sec­tions for a “Language of Film” class at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and this week the main lec­turer was screen­ing Charles Burnett’s land­mark 1977 debut fea­ture Killer of Sheep, which he was using as an example of per­son­al storytelling. For my 75-minute recit­a­tion sec­tion I thought I’d extra­pol­ate on anoth­er aspect of Burnett’s work by screen­ing sec­tions of his third fea­ture, To Sleep With Anger (just now avail­able in a great Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection), the open­ing of Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dusk, and the phant­asmagor­ic “praise the gri­ot” motorcade/parade scene from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 Touki Bouki. My class is not about cul­tur­al stud­ies or cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence per se, but I chose these clips to demon­strate, min­im­ally, a thes­is I have con­cern­ing modes of cine­mat­ic storytelling in what I’ll call “black film.”

This would be tak­ing place less than a week after Green Book had won the Best Picture Oscar, an event I did not actu­ally see take place because my wife and I don’t watch the Oscars. We got into this habit in 2013, when we were vaca­tion­ing in Iceland as that year’s cere­mon­ies were hap­pen­ing, and we opted not to stay up to watch. We were so spir­itu­ally refreshed at not hav­ing seen the thing we decided that, bar­ring a genu­ine root­ing interest or some­thing like it, we’d make this a new tra­di­tion. Anyway.

Several of my stu­dents had pre­vi­ously put for­ward some opin­ions and/or spec­u­la­tions about Green Book. It is a film not much liked by the stu­dents who’ve seen it, and viewed with sus­pi­cion by many who have not. The stu­dents in my class are largely white; more than a few are Asian-American, a couple are Asian, and about a half a dozen are African American.

I was walk­ing to class and I was think­ing about what to say about the movie if the sub­ject came up. It occurred to me that one of the most objec­tion­able things about it is that it extols the vir­tues of peace love and under­stand­ing from with­in an exclus­ively white cul­tur­al space. That is, it says “we can and should live togeth­er, on my cul­tur­al terms.” After win­ning the Oscar, one of the film’s pro­du­cers, Jim Burke, ven­ted some frus­tra­tion to Sharon Waxman of The Wrap: “I can’t change the fact that I was born white.” This remark­able state­ment raises sev­er­al fas­cin­at­ing ques­tions, includ­ing “Would you, if you could?” But it also lays bare the mode of the film’s con­struc­tion: if it’s build­ing a bridge, it’s build­ing it on Burke’s terms. “Can white people have or not have a point of view on racial inequal­ity?” Burke then sputtered.

And there you have it. Just as in Joseph Mankiewicz’s remark­able, under­rated 1950 film No Way Out, it all boils down to what the born-white per­son is EXTENDING to the black per­son. (The pic­ture remains one of the most bullshit-free pic­tures about race rela­tions made by a white American dir­ect­or.) At the end of Green Book the Don Shirley char­ac­ter enjoys the bounty of a white work­ing class Italian American Christmas by invit­a­tion.

Over and over I’ve seen white folks who oth­er­wise hold all sorts of inter­est­ing opin­ions about black folks call Green Book a “feel good” movie. Yes. Sure. You feel good. About your­self. Without hav­ing done any­thing. Without hav­ing gained, or try to gain, any know­ledge of black cul­ture. Instead, you’ve had an easy laugh at a mouthy mook telling a stuck-up black guy that the black guy doesn’t know enough about HIS OWN cul­ture. Well don’t that just beat all.

I’ve seen some argu­ments that strongly implied that had the film been more accur­ate in its depic­tion of Don Shirley, it could not have made its import­ant broth­er­hood points as strongly. In which case it’s only fair to ask, “Well, which points are you talk­ing about?”  Because the film depicts Shirley in such a way as to allow the char­ac­ter Tony Lip to lec­ture the char­ac­ter Don Shirley about not know­ing the cul­tur­al product of his own people. Whereas the actu­al, his­tor­ic­al Don Shirley, in 1962, made an import­ant record­ing called Piano Arrangements Of Spirituals and would sub­sequently record, in 1969, The Gospel According To Don Shirley.

All this came up in my dis­cus­sions dur­ing the two ses­sions, and some­thing came to my mind as these con­ver­sa­tions were going on. Most of my stu­dents were maybe in second grade in 2007, when Bill O’Reilly made his vis­it to Sylvia’s in Harlem, and on his radio show marveled  “There was­n’t one per­son in Sylvia’s who was scream­ing, ‘M‑Fer, I want more iced tea.’ […] [I]t was like going into an Italian res­taur­ant in an all-white sub­urb in the sense of people were sit­ting there, and they were order­ing and hav­ing fun. And there was­n’t any kind of crazi­ness at all.” It occurred to me that Green Book is in a sense a milder iter­a­tion of O’Reilly’s racial­ist dam­age. This ana­logy, once I explained to the kids who Bill O’Reilly actu­ally was —time really does fly — did not seem par­tic­u­larly out­rageous to them.

But still. It’s worth not­ing that Octavia Spencer is also a pro­du­cer of the movie. And that the movie has eli­cited warm, genu­ine, intel­li­gent praise from some African-Americans. I told one of the classes that Harry Belafonte’s praise for the film threw me for a loop. Particularly because Belafonte is a cru­cial pres­ence in a sequence in BlacKkKlansman which con­trasts an African American cul­tur­al space (a consciousness-raising meet­ing in which Belafonte’s char­ac­ter gives a trau­mat­ic account­ing of a lynch­ing) and a white cul­tur­al space (a Ku Klux Klan initiation). 

At this, one of my stu­dents raised her hand and said “Harry Belafonte has been wrong before.”