Although movies are generally seen as a means of escaping the everyday world to a few hours of fantasy, they can also have a profound impact on how we view the world around us, including our concepts regarding racial issues. It is through the analysis of film that we can understand the values and ideologies emerging from our culture and gain a glimpse into how the powers that be define us, a sort of ‘single voice’ that works to promote the status quo or to effect social change.
However, it is also up to us, as the audience, to determine how we will interpret these messages. There have been several theories proposed regarding how race is represented in the media. To understand the concept fully, it is necessary to understand how media influences society, with examples from the movies Trading Places, Just Cause and Crash used to illustrate these.
The ‘single voice’ typically belongs to those who hold the power and leaves very little room for differences of opinion. “Broadly speaking, the media exist in a very close, sympathetic relationship to power and established values. They favor a consensus view of any problem: they reflect overwhelmingly middle class attitudes and experience. Basically, this unfits them for an authentic portrayal of the black community and its problems” (Hall, 1974).
More than simply speaking of the news or documentary forms of media, Hall’s ideas encompass the world of entertainment media as well. He indicates that even here, where the goal is supposed to be strictly entertainment, the media continues its long-standing tradition of reinforcing middle-class society’s concepts of the world. “Above all, the media are defensive about the sacred institutions of society – whereas black people most encounter problems in these sensitive power-areas: employment, public discrimination, housing, parliamentary legislation, local government, law and order, the police” (Hall, 1974).
In order to appeal to the middle class, many of the films that come out of Hollywood tend to reflect the hopes and dreams of this class of society. This typically involves the concept that the lifestyle of the very wealthy is the only lifestyle worth having. It also reinforces the thought that it is only through hard work and struggle that one can appreciate this good life. The black man, and occasionally a woman, is allowed to enter this world only at the invitation and assistance of a white man while the typical portrayal continues to hold him down at the lower rungs of society. This type of portrayal reinforces the concept that black men are not capable of success and white men are not very capable of failure.
As Hall (1974) makes obvious, even comedies that are merely supposed to entertain, such as Trading Places, can contain several unremarkable messages that serve to maintain and promote the existing power relations within society, representing the black man as a necessary failure.
According to Hall (1974), the way in which race is depicted in the media reinforces a negative concept of race in society without bringing attention to the fact that this is being done. It does this, he says, by the way in which the media focuses reports and relates to the world. “The media tend to favor experts, privileged witnesses, middle men – whereas blacks are predominantly an out-group, outside the consensus.” (Hall, 1974).
Because they are an out-group, they are not permitted to reflect their society in the way it should be reflected, from a true perspective and with a focus on what is really important or representative. Instead, they are required to either conform to the predominantly white male ideology of the Western world by adhering to its precepts or are kept quiet and behind the scenes. This means that the representation of race is not true to life, but is instead a fabrication based on the observations of outsiders or a focus on the eccentricities of a vocal, but not necessarily representative, minority subgroup.
This means that only one aspect of society can be clearly understood while others, perhaps the majority, remain unknown. “The media are sensitive to middle class ways of life – whereas blacks belong to the skilled and semi-skilled working class” (Hall, 1974), making their dreams and aspirations significantly different from those of the solidly middle class, but never alluding to what those dreams might be.
Within the movie Trading Places, this kind of ideology can easily be traced. The entire premise of the film follows the story of a white man who grew up within a privileged environment and a black man who has always lived on the streets, reinforcing the Western idea of the ‘natural’ societal structure. Throughout the movie, the only time black men are seen is when they are downtrodden, struggling to survive and either homeless or just on the verge of being homeless, reinforcing these conceptions within mainstream society. At no point are black men shown to be possibly successful unless they are serving white people or have taken on a white man’s persona.
This point is finally made when the only way Valentine achieves any kind of success is through the hand of a white man, Winthorpe, illustrated by the rapid fire instruction Winthorpe gives Valentine as they walk into the stock exchange.
These racial stereotypes that reinforce the idea of the black man as incapable of blending into the white man’s world are brought into clear and deliberate focus during the scene on the train. This is at a point in the film when Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd’s characters meet to try to steal the orange crop report from Beaks. Valentine gets on the train wearing the very colorful traditional full length robe of Zimbabwe and presents himself as a very loud, very obnoxious and very self-absorbed individual. Winthorpe appears in blackface, another flashback to the old days of blacks in cinema, and joins Valentine in his crazy antics.
This seeming contradictory action of focusing attention on the stereotypes being displayed begins to illustrate the important role being played by the audience itself in interpreting the movie. Although it had been proven by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s that media has demonstrable social effects upon its audience, further investigation into the theory in America illustrated why the idea of the media as an all-powerful straightforward tool for social manipulation was incorrect.
It was determined that the audience itself had a lot to do with how information being presented would be interpreted. “The viewer came to be credited with an active role, so that there was then a question … of looking at what people do with the media, rather than what the media do to them. From this perspective, one can no longer talk about the ‘effects’ of a message on a homogenous mass audience, who are all expected to be affected in the same way” (Morley, 2005).
This realization led to the development of Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ model of communication at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This model suggested that the same event can be encoded and decoded in more than one way. “Messages propose and ‘prefer’ certain readings over others, but they can never become wholly closed around one reading: they remain polysemic (i.e. capable, in principle, of a variety of interpretations)” (Morley, 2005).
This polysemic principle makes it difficult to correctly understand the message, no matter how transparent it is communicated. The introduction of screen theory brought the text of the media back into the discussion regarding how media affects society by focusing on the idea that the media, particularly the films coming out of Hollywood, worked to ‘position’ their audiences in a way that served to ‘fix’ them into a specific perspective.
The film Just Cause also plays against the audience’s expected interaction with the racial stereotypes displayed in the action. The film depicts the fictional story of a black man placed on death row accused of the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, Joanie Shriver, in a small Florida town. As Paul Armstrong, defending attorney, investigates Bobby Earl Ferguson’s case, he learns that Bobby Earl was arrested on circumstantial evidence and coerced into making a confession through severe beating and racist attitudes, despite the fact that the sheriff, Tanny Brown, is also a black man. As the action progresses, the local police force is demonstrated to be particularly violent.
Other holes in the defense are exposed as well, eventually concluding that another criminal, Blair Sullivan, in the same prison, a known and confessed killer, killed the young girl. As information obtained from Sullivan leads Armstrong and Brown to the murder weapon and a close relationship between the police chief and the dead girl is exposed, it seems clear to the audience that Bobby Earl is innocent and the police chief is corrupt. Based on testimony released in a letter to the parents of the dead girl from Sullivan, Bobby Earl is released from prison.
However, this is not where the movie ends. Sullivan calls Armstrong during the celebration party and points Armstrong to a grisly scene in which Sullivan’s parents have been killed as they sat around the dinner table. Reacting to this in a scene that clearly illustrates the depravity of the criminal, Armstrong gains a recorded confession from Sullivan in which Sullivan confesses to having secured Bobby Earl’s release from jail in exchange for Bobby Earl killing his family.
Thus, it is discovered that Bobby Earl was guilty of his crime all along. His primary goal in involving Armstrong has been to punish Armstrong’s wife, Laurie, who had failed to keep him protected some years earlier resulting not only in the loss of his Cornell scholarship but, in retaliation for him getting off on charges of rape, his final night in prison on this earlier incident was also the night Bobby Earl was castrated by his fellow prisoners.
The film addresses the idea that the justice system seems to be discriminatory, even when those in the justice system are of the minority race. Bobby Earl tells Armstrong that once Tanny Brown takes a disliking to you, nothing good is going to happen. By giving the impression through most of the film that Bobby Earl is innocent, the audience continues to gain a conception that the justice system is somehow broken. However, there continue to be hints throughout the film that there is something missing.
The police who knew him prior to the murder indicate he was always mean while the viewer is never given this opportunity of prior experience. Another inmate, portrayed as absolutely crazy, is a white man who, Armstrong is told, refers to Bobby Earl as his final victim yet this same inmate quickly divulges his crime leading to Bobby Earl’s release. This behavior seems quite contradictory and begins to call into question the concept of whether or not race truly had anything to do with the sentencing. At each level of society, racial balance is kept – the boys washing Bobby Earl’s car are a racial mix, Katie Armstrong’s birthday party is populated with an equal mix of black and white girls, there is a black and a white criminal, a black and a white police force and a black and white truth seeker.
However, the racial sympathies of the audience continue to shift along with the revealed information. In the end, it is difficult to determine whether the film is attempting to reinforce or dispute racial stereotypes as the accused black man is revealed to be a depraved killer yet the brutal black cop is revealed to have ‘known his man’ and acted humanely to protect society.
The interaction of racial stereotypes is obviously explored throughout the film Crash. A good example of this is when Jean Cabot, the character played by Sandra Bullock, automatically grabs her husband’s arm as they are walking down the city street when she sees two black men, Anthony and Peter, walking behind them. She does this because she feels threatened by their mere presence, but they haven’t done anything overtly threatening yet. Her action immediately speaks to Anthony, who is already hurting about his treatment in a nearby restaurant where the waitress offered extra coffee to all the white people but not to him and his black friend.
Although the waitress’s treatment is pointed out by Peter to have been non-discriminatory because they didn’t want or order coffee, the waitress was herself black and they didn’t leave a tip, Anthony chooses not to listen to reason like this. In anger more than anything else, he decides to carjack the white couple because of Jean’s automatic fear. This confirms Jean’s fear at the same time that its reinforces the stereotypes of young black men, but it also presents some of the underlying reasons why young black men fall into this characterization.
The film exposes the more common human tendency to fall back on pre-conceived and often not well-considered concepts housed deep in their psyche, as when Jean grabs her husband’s arm, when determining behavior. As Mezirow describes it, the frame of reference is actually composed of two different elements. The first of these is the habits of mind, which are described as “broad, abstract, orienting, habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting influenced by assumptions that constitute a set of codes” which may be “cultural, social, educational, economic, political or psychological” (Mezirow, 1997: 5-6).
Jean’s action is habitual, a culturally ingrained means for a woman to seek protection from a man and a keen awareness of the dangers of living in the city in which young men acting alone or in pairs on dark city streets often do not have good intentions in mind when following behind white women. The point of view is the way in which these habits of mind become evident to both the individual and the people who are witness to its expression.
This is when Anthony recognizes her action for what it is and when Jean herself puts her head down in sheepish shame at having such an automatic and obvious reaction. As we become aware of our point of view through various experiences and events, such as witnessing a film like Crash, the transformative learner will examine their reactions and assumptions, realizing where they erred in judgment and assumptions and attempt to reconcile this new awareness with what has been learned, either for positive or negative effect.
Transformative learning in its most basic sense is the way in which adults more consciously learn to adapt and shape their behavior in given situations. Officially, it is described as “the process of effecting change in a frame of reference” (Mezirow, 1997: 5).
As Mezirow explains, adults tend to behave according to a set series of assumptions that define the world as they know it. These can consist of “associations, concepts, values, feelings, conditioned responses” (Mezirow, 1997: 5), anything that provides the adult with a frame of reference for dealing with the particular situation at hand, whether it be a simple transaction at the grocery store or an unusual encounter with an individual of a different race not typically interacted with. By recognizing these events and the associated behaviors, as well as the reasons behind these behaviors, the transformative learner can grow from the experience and modify fallacious behavior to achieve a more balanced understanding of others.
The movie Crash was released with the tagline, “You think you know who you are. You have no idea.” This suggests the intention of the film was not so much to illustrate and reinforce the various stereotypes people have regarding race and ethnicity, but to force the audience to engage with their own preconceived ideas regarding these issues and perhaps begin to confront the fallacies and realities involved.
The movie demonstrates how personal assumptions can blind us to our own habits of mind and thus bias our own perspective. Jean Cabot is honest enough with herself to realize her action on the street was probably provoking to the two black men, but her anger at being proven right in her fear causes her to act out against Daniel, the Hispanic locksmith, and is then forced to examine her behavior on a more realistic basis. Although she doesn’t necessarily change her assumptions, she is able to think about them, evaluate them and come to a more rational conclusion about why and how she feels the way she does.
In doing so, she demonstrates the transformative learning process for the audience. This is the entire point of the movie, to cause the audience to stop and take a hard look at one’s assumptions, whether they are correct or not, and come to new conclusions regarding their validity. While Anthony judges the waitress at the beginning of the film to have stereotyped against him and his friend as probably not being great on tips, Peter makes it clear that she had little reason to judge against them as she was black and they hadn’t ordered coffee, but that the stereotype of bad tippers did hold true in their case as they didn’t leave a tip at all.
The question becomes should one act out the almost automatic responses we have learned as a result of experience, such as the waitress in the restaurant who already ‘knows’ she will not get a good tip from the only two black men in the place, or should we reconsider our automatic responses and take a closer look at other people, as Jean suggests she should have done on the street when they were being followed by the two black men who carjacked their Navigator?
Each of these three movies was made in a different decade beginning with Trading Places in the 80s, Just Cause in the 90s and finishing with Crash in the first decade of the 21st century. Through this analysis of these films, one can begin to trace a progression of thought that tends toward less stereotyping and greater emphasis placed on audience involvement.
While the earliest film reinforces the concept that the only successful man is a white man or a black man who has adopted white man’s standards and secured the assistance of a white benefactor, the latest film actively challenges the audience’s role in interpreting stereotypical behavior and social placement. Just Cause is demonstrated to fit perfectly in the center of these two approaches.
While it reinforces the stereotypical conception of the black man as criminal and potentially insane, it also forces the audience to think about the assumptions they’ve made, why they’ve made them and what it all means. Crash does this to a much more intense degree in its constant challenging of racial stereotypes and behavioral assumptions. Although Hollywood may play a significant role in how we interpret the actions and probable character of those around us, these films demonstrate that a great deal of responsibility for continued racial stereotyping remains squarely in the heart and mind of the individual.
Works Cited
Crash. Dir. Paul Haggis. Perf. Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon and Jennifer Esposito. (2004).
Hall, Stuart. “Black Men, White Media.” Savacou, Journal of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement. Vol. 9/10, (1974).
Just Cause. (1995). Hollywood, CA: Fountainbridge Films.
Mezirow, Jack. “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. N. 74, (1997).
Morley, David. “Audience Research.” Courtesy of The Museum of Broadcast Communications (2005). Web.
Trading Places. (1983). [DVD]. Hollywood, CA: Paramount.