It’s all there in black and white.
Today, U.S. marriages between people of different
races and ethnicities are on the uptick, but that’s rarely reflected on the big
screen.
Will Smith and Margot Robbie are currently
heating up theaters as lovers in the comedy “Focus.” Thankfully the plot
doesn’t dwell on their interracial romance, but it’s hard not to notice the
pairing is scarce in mainstream movies.
“Acting is one of few occupations where you can
legally use race as a criteria for employment,” says Craig Lechner, CEO of
Impossible Casting. “With these big pictures they are marketing to Middle
America. It’s like the old cliché: ‘Will it play in Peoria?’”
Judging by the low number of interracial couples
on the big screen, it seems that most Hollywood executives still think that
Middle America is not ready to accept people of different races in love — and
therefore, won’t play well in Peoria, Illinois, believed to represent
mainstream America.
That’s a shame, especially considering that 10%
of U.S. marriages today are between people of different races and ethnicities.
Even when interracial romances are depicted, they
can too easily become the whole story.
That was the case in “Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner” (1967), in which the entire plot revolves around the fact that a young
white woman’s new fiancé (Sidney Poitier) is black.
A number of more recent movies have featured
variations of this plot, from Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” (1991) to “Save The
Last Dance” (2001) with Julia Stiles.
But these movies point to exactly what some
Hollywood producers are afraid of when they cast an interracial couple.
“People who make movies don’t want to be accused
of making a deliberate statement,” says Paul Levinson, a professor of media
studies at Fordham. “Juts to throw in an interracial couple might distract from
whatever the story is.”
This doesn’t seem to be a problem in “Focus.” The
film stars Smith as an ace con man. Robbie, the blond bombshell from “The Wolf
of Wall Street,” is a less-ace con woman. The two meet up, then hook up.
Neither character ever addresses the fact that one of them is white and the
other is black.
And when the stars of “Focus” lock lips on
screen, it’s hardly the cultural milestone it was in 1968 when Captain Kirk
kissed Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek” — the first time a mixed-race couple got frisky
on national TV.
But the nature of the love affair in “Focus” is still
its own kind of cliché, according to Nadia Ramoutar, a film professor at The
Art Institute of Jacksonville in Florida.
“The black male is usually the model gentlemen
and the white woman is usually extremely naive,” Ramoutar explains. “We have a
hard time breaking out of these stereotypes because they are so entrenched that
they come across an normal.”
Ramoutar should know. She wrote a grad school
dissertation on interracial relationships in films, and is now working on a
book on the subject.
For her dissertation she looked at more than 600
films.
“When the female is Asian, the portrayal is
generally positive,” Ramoutar notes. “But black women don’t come off well. They
are much more likely to get killed.”
Some movies featuring interracial couples are light
and breezy comedies. Smith starred in another interracial relationship a decade
ago in the film “Hitch.” And Halle Berry was a top-notch Bond girl opposite
Pierce Brosnan in “Die Another Day” (2002.) That same year, Berry became the
first black woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress for her work in “Monster’s
Ball,” another movie that had her in an interracial relationship with Billy Bob
Thornton.
But these films, like “Focus,” are all exceptions
in an industry that considers interracial couples to be an unnecessary risk
when casting a movie.
“Those making decisions want to make the easiest,
least controversial choice to increase ticket sales globally,” says
African-American actress Cassandra Freeman (“Inside Man,” “Kinyarwanda”) “If
the creators have no friends of color, or if the creator has never been
attracted to someone outside of their own culture, then their projects will
reflect that reality.”
Indeed, Ramoutar’s research found that a positive
portrayal of an interracial couple generally means that a woman or person of
color is one of the producers.
This is certainly true in screenwriter/producer
Shonda Rhimes’ TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal,” which both feature
interracial love affairs.
But the majority of movie producers are still white
men, and so the prevalence of interracial couples remains low.
“It looked more hopeful in 1967 than it does at
the moment,” says Ramoutar. “Race relations in this country and race portrayal
in films are both in a sad state of affairs.”
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