Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Hollywood is more phobic than ever about interracial love, but now it's blacks who are putting on the brakes.
Feb 14, 2000 | "Archie said he never thought he'd see the day when white and colored would be kissin' from coast to coast."
-- Edith Bunker, on "All in the Family," on seeing Sammy Davis Jr. greet Raquel Welch on "The Tonight Show," 1971
"If the only time you show a balanced relationship is in an interracial relationship, whether it's conscious or subconscious, it sends a message I'm not comfortable with."
-- "ER" star Eriq LaSalle on asking the series writers to terminate his character's on-screen romance with a white female doctor played by Alex Kingston, 1999
One of the perennials that always shows up on history-of-TV compilations is the clip from a 1968 musical special in which Petula Clark lightly rested her hand on Harry Belafonte's arm as they sang a duet. That brief touch freaked out Chrysler so badly that it threatened to pull its sponsorship. The clip is always offered in a self-congratulatory "look how far we've come" spirit.
But the secret imperative behind most of Hollywood's black and white star pairings remains: Look but don't touch. We've all been trained by years of moviegoing to know that at some point in thrillers or romantic comedies -- after the growing rapport, the looks that linger just a second longer than necessary -- the male and female leads will get together. Except, that is, when the leading couple is interracial. You can wait until the last credit has rolled in "The Pelican Brief" or "Men in Black" or "Murder at 1600," all movies in which there's a definite chemistry between the black and white leads, and the only physical contact you'll see is -- perhaps -- an affectionate but decidedly nonsexual embrace.
There are no complex sociological reasons for the taboo still attached to interracial romance in movies. It's racism, pure and simple. Perhaps these attitudes are sometimes connected to an executive's fear that audiences will be turned off by the sight of black and white together, but a decision that bows to racism must bear the mark of racism itself.
The difference today is that black actors and audiences may be just as turned off by miscegenation as white ones. We have come from ridiculing Chrysler's horror over a white woman briefly touching a black man to seeing nothing wrong with "ER" star LaSalle's implicit claim that his character's affair with a white woman was an insult to black women. LaSalle, whose character had had unsuccessful relationships with black women in the past, "requested" that the show's writers end the affair because "it sends a message I'm not comfortable with," a message that this relationship could be a happy one. Presumably, LaSalle wouldn't have had any troubles if his character's relationship with Kingston's had been rocky. In other words, it would have been acceptable if it had been depicted as being as doomed as bigots -- the kind who deny being bigots, the "I'm just thinking of the children" variety -- have always said interracial relationships must be.
When it comes to movies, the two films that best highlight the differences between the two eras are Stanley Kramer's 1967 "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and Spike Lee's 1991 "Jungle Fever." Both terrible movies by terrible filmmakers willing to subordinate everything to their "message," the films are nonetheless fairly accurate barometers of each era's acceptable liberal sympathies. In Kramer's film, the good, affluent parents played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy have to confront their own prejudices when their daughter turns up married to Sidney Poitier. In Lee's film, Wesley Snipes is a married black architect who has an affair with his white assistant, played by Annabella Sciorra.
Lee pays lip service to the way each character is rejected by family and friends as a result of the affair, but he can't hide his disgust with the relationship. (Sciorra has spoken in interviews of how she had to fight to give her character dimension.) The first time Snipes and Sciorra have sex is after hours at their office, on top of a drafting table. It's a device that first popped up in '80s movies like "Fatal Attraction": When the filmmakers want to show disapproval of extramarital sex, they shoot it so that it looks physically uncomfortable. (Think of Michael Douglas screwing Glenn Close while she's perched on the kitchen sink.) Lee's message is a blatant version of the thought that hovers in Hepburn's and Tracy's minds in the Kramer film: "Wouldn't you be happier with your own kind?"
We've reached a point where segregation has become an acceptable liberal position. (It isn't conservative critics who praise Spike Lee movies.) But separatism is not the same thing as either self-determination or racial pride. I'd argue that pride finds its strongest expression in the midst of difference.
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