Black and white and taboo all over

Black male stars have had an easier time of it, but -- with the exception of Washington -- mostly in action movie roles or playing sidekick roles. That's not to slight the pleasure I've had watching Snipes or Ving Rhames in movies like "Blade" or "Mission: Impossible," but I'd love to see them do other things. I can't be the only moviegoer who loved the teddy-bear slyness Rhames brought to his role in "Out of Sight" and envisioned what he might do in comedy. Perhaps the best male performance of last year was Charles S. Dutton in "Cookie's Fortune," and yet he didn't register in any of the year-end awards. Often, the pleasure of watching black actors is tinged with the realization that it may be a long time before you see that actor in another role as good.

Black and white pairings don't seem to be a big deal in foreign movies, as David Thewlis and Thandie Newton showed in Bernardo Bertolucci's great "Besieged," one of the most potent recent movie love stories, and one of the most potent recent movies, period. Likewise with Beatrice Dalle and Alex Descas in "I Can't Sleep," directed by Claire Denis, whose films have frequently dealt with interracial issues. Perhaps those aren't good examples because the issues of interracial love are part of those films' subtext. The same tends to be true of American movies that feature interracial couples. The most intelligent were both made by Carl Franklin -- "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," the latter featuring Washington's best performance.

The fact that a taboo still exists has led some directors to act as provocateurs. At the beginning of "Freeway," a deliciously twisted B-thriller that constantly challenges the assumptions we make based on appearance, Reese Witherspoon shares a big, wet, lazily hungry kiss with her black boyfriend (Bokeem Woodbine), and as director Matthew Bright focuses on the young lovers, you can feel his glee at potentially making some people uncomfortable. And there's overt provocation in Mike Figgis' presentation of a white Eve dallying with a black Adam in "The Loss of Sexual Innocence." (That provocation temporarily scuttled the movie at one point, when a white South African producer pulled out.)

In an industry in which black-white love is still taboo, we need that sort of effrontery. But even more subversive may be the times when love between blacks and whites is treated as no big deal. Race isn't an issue in Figgis' adultery drama "One Night Stand," in which Snipes has an affair with Nastassja Kinski. Several pictures that were geared more toward the mainstream also take a nonchalant attitude toward race: William H. Macy has a black wife in last year's "Mystery Men," and in "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" Jeff Goldblum (whose character is divorced) has a black daughter (the talented young actress Vanessa Lee Chester).

There's a sort of ball's-in-your-court challenge to the refusal of these movies to treat black-white love as anything out of the ordinary. And inevitably the people who return the serve only prove the point. After "The Lost World" came out, I guested on a radio talk show where the conservative host (also a movie critic) kept harping on the movie as a typical example of Hollywood liberalism. Most people, he insisted, would find it strange that there is no explanation of how a white man has a black daughter (the usual methods, I wanted to say). This man's condescending certainty that the great unwashed would certainly find the idea of black-white marriage strange beyond belief wasn't the only thing he had wrong. A typical piece of Hollywood liberalism would feel obliged to address Goldblum's marriage and the reasons (presumably racial) that it broke up. Steven Spielberg's treatment of it as just the way life is (marriages break up sometimes) is much more sophisticated.

Perhaps no movie has done more to erase the taboo simply by ignoring it than "The Bodyguard." This big, kitschy 1992 star fantasy plays as if someone had gotten the idea of combining Barbra Streisand's remake of "A Star Is Born" with a Steve McQueen movie. (Kevin Costner even adopts McQueen's haircut.) But it's the most glamorous, and therefore the most unapologetic, depiction of interracial romance in the movies. For all the reasons that drive apart Whitney Houston's diva and Costner's hunky human shield, race isn't one of them. It's never even mentioned. They part for the most melodramatic of movie reasons -- he can't protect her if he's distracted by falling in love with her.

"The Bodyguard" is a bad good time, but it's also startling because it places black-white love within the context of the movie traditions that have excluded it. The message is that movie glamour transcends all other concerns, that race should be no obstacle to pleasure. I've heard all sorts of objections raised to the movie, from the ludicrous suggestion that a white man having sex with a black woman recalls master-slave relations (forget that Houston is the aggressor here as well as the one in the position of power) to the outright racist suggestion that Houston is so successful she's an honorary white person. (Success nullifies your race?) But the fact is that movies with big stars tend to be very conservative. Yet Costner, then at the peak of his popularity, and Houston, making her movie debut, risked alienating some of their fans. And the movie was a huge hit.

Since movie executives listen to three things in determining what movies get made -- money, money and money -- the success of "The Bodyguard" should have told them that black and white pairings are no impediment at the box office. If they thought they could make money by showing Noam Chomsky reading Hegel for three hours, they would. That makes the cowardice that has characterized other recent movies all the more frustrating.

Reportedly, a love scene between Snipes and Diane Lane (a well-matched pairing of instinctive, quick-witted actors) was filmed and then cut from "Murder at 1600." The plot device that keeps wiping out Linda Fiorentino's memory in "Men in Black" also conveniently keeps the playful flirtation between her and Will Smith from ever reaching fruition. In "The Pelican Brief," Roberts and Washington are thrown together in a danger-fraught fight against an evil conspiracy (a great movie excuse for sex if ever there was one). But when they wind up in a secluded cabin in the middle of the night, you get the sinking feeling that what's coming next is a vigorous game of Scrabble. (The only movie in which the failure of the black and white stars to clinch doesn't seem like a copout is Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," where the movie's melancholy comes from the fact that Pam Grier and Robert Forster can't make their attraction to each other work.)

No other interracial pairing remains as taboo as black-white. The wife Snipes cheats on in "One Night Stand" is an Asian woman (Ming-Na Wen), and in "Rising Sun" he carries on a charming flirtation with Tia Carrere, who plays the daughter of a Japanese woman and a black American. (The flirtation remains unconsummated because she is otherwise involved.) And white-Asian pairings have been a longtime movie favorite for stories of lovers with the odds stacked against them, like Lauren Holly and Jason Scott Lee in the Bruce Lee bio "Dragon" or, currently, Ethan Hawke and Youki Kudoh in "Snow Falling on Cedars." (Considering how Asians were portrayed in American movies during World War II, that has to be counted as some kind of progress.)

Strangely, this separatism seems to me to run against the grain of nearly every other branch of pop culture. Hip-hop and the new-style R&B of artists like D'Angelo and Macy Gray now dominate American pop music. I'd venture that as many white reading groups as black ones choose books by Terry McMillan or Walter Mosley or even a tougher read like Toni Morrison. And despite the divisions that keep black sitcoms like "Moesha" hits among black viewers and virtually unknown among white ones, despite NBC's recent admission that it doesn't feature many black faces, black actors are a strong presence on TV.

Forget the black actors who are regular cast members of hit shows. A few months back on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Giles greeted (and immediately went to bed with) a black girlfriend who came to visit. A recent New York Times piece on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" noted that the practice of showing the contestant's partner in the audience hasn't shied away from either interracial couples or gay ones. A couple of weeks ago in an offhand moment on "The Practice," Michael Badalucco's character admitted that growing up watching "Mannix" he had a crush on Mannix's secretary, Peggy. He didn't mention that she was played by a black actress (Gail Fisher), nor did he need to. You're attracted to whom you're attracted to.

I'm not so naive as to suggest that the popularity of black singers or writers or actors signals the end of racism. The great big-band leader Artie Shaw told a terrible story about touring the Deep South in the '30s with Billie Holiday as the band's featured singer. At one gig, after her scheduled number, the audience went wild, not wanting to let Holiday get away. One guy down front yelled, "Have the nigger wench sing another one!" and simply didn't understand it when Holiday talked back to him.

But the no-longer-token presence of blacks in mainstream pop culture has to count for some progress, though it hasn't yet quelled movie squeamishness at showing black and white people falling in love or into bed. That reluctance refuses to recognize a basic reality of a world where the sight of black and white couples is more prevalent than ever. And it's also blind to the fact that most of us go to the movies for pleasure and don't much care where it comes from. When the pleasure principle is shortchanged, either by not giving good actors the roles they deserve or by keeping apart the ones whose star power draws them together, it doesn't matter how good our seats are. We've all been relegated to the balcony.

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