Boards - GQ

THE CRITIC>
≥here’s a fun way to kill ten minutes: Pretend you’re Jamie
Foxx. Life could be worse, no? That Oscar you copped for Ray
looks pretty shiny on the mantel. The last time you talked to your
grandmother, she was practically nonjudgmental, and better still,
you were able to tell her that you’ve now got options. The next time
someone tries to pitch you Booty Call II: Revenge of the Booty, you
can tell him that he can plant a big wet one on yours, unless the
script was written by Tom Stoppard. That’s a nice feeling. ›››
•
them segregated. But why is interracial sex Hollywood’s last taboo?
By Tom Carson
skin flicks
When it comes to race and sex, the movie studios like to keep
( I l l u s t r a t i o n b y TAV I S C O B U R N )
J U N E . 0 5 . G Q .1 1 9

THE CRITIC>
But if you’re Jamie Foxx, there is one
catch. No matter how proud you’ve made
your grandma, your chances of playing a
sexy romantic lead in a big-studio picture
are somewhere between slim and nil. This is
too bad, since you’d probably be terrific at it.
Whatever else African-American actors
bring to the party, Hollywood usually asks
them to leave their sexual magnetism
at home. Aside from the kind of clowning,
low-rent comedies Foxx has escaped,
where cartoon horniness is the be-all and
end-all—and the Terry McMillan specials
that have become their female equivalent—we’re
about as likely to see black
movie characters acting forthrightly sexual
as gay ones, and the similarity doesn’t end
there. In every other way, America has decided
that black culture and gay sensibility
are where the fun is. But in both cases,
America has one small request to make:
Don’t make us watch you getting it on.
At least that’s the industry’s conventional
wisdom, which goes something
like this: If black performers appear in
monoracial love stories—about people not
named Ray, Ike, or Tina—white moviegoers
won’t show up. So far, this has proven
to be true, even if Taye Diggs’s career
hasn’t su≠ered for it. But the second part
of Hollywood’s conventional wisdom is
that if black actors appear in cross-racial
romances, white audiences will freak and
black ones will stay away. From where I
sit, this is a lot more debatable.
I do realize that by now you may be wondering
what I’m complaining about. It’s
not just that movies aimed at under-25’s—
e.g., Save the Last Dance, with Julia Stiles
falling for hip-hop—have been pushing
this envelope for years. Didn’t I see Hitch,
America’s number one romantic comedy
this winter, with a certifiably appealing
African-American star, Will Smith, in hot
pursuit of Eva Mendes? Well, sure I saw
Hitch; I didn’t think it was much good, but
I’ve had worse times at the movies. I also
came out wondering if Eva Mendes, in her
likable way, is going to make a career out
of playing decoys. When she’s cast as the
love interest of an African-American star,
she’s a stand-in for a Caucasian woman;
opposite white actors, she’s a stand-in for a
black one. It’s Hollywood’s favorite way of
dabbling in cross-racial sexuality without
scaring moviegoers—the Latina Option.
Even at that, you can’t help but be amused
at how Hitch goes out of its way to clarify
that Mendes’s character is no recent immigrant,
which might raise, y’know, issues. In
fact, under its chipper surface, the movie
is a goulash of commercially minded evasions.
Not only is Smith’s role as “the Date
Doctor” an all but openly parodic update
of that movie staple, the Magic Negro—the
benign pixie who solves white folks’ problems—but
his hot pursuit of Mendes is, on
the carnal side, noticeably tepid. They don’t
sleep together, which their counterparts
in an all-vanilla flick definitely would,
and the big barrier they’ve got to overcome
is their emotional guardedness. In
the script’s most preposterous cop-out, said
NO SEX, PLEASE— IT’S RACIAL
Three movies in which the mixed-race couples, conspicuously, never mingle
≥
TO SIR, WITH LOVE
For a while, Hollywood
specialized in movies
that surrounded
Sidney Poitier with
white dames, but in
settings that ensured
romance wouldn’t
be in the cards. In
1 2 0 . G Q . J U N E . 0 5
Lilies of the Field,
his Oscar winner, he
was up against nuns;
in this one, he’s a
dedicated teacher
whose female pupils
include Swinging
London chantoozy Lulu
and ’60s babe Judy
The industry’s conventional wisdom goes something
like this: If black performers appear in mono-
racial love stories—about people not named Ray, Ike,
or Tina—white moviegoers won’t show up.
Geeson, left. Naturally,
Sir’s behavior is
impeccable—but
Lulu’s rendition of the
title song documents
just how seductive
a schoolgirl crush
can be.
THE PELICAN BRIEF
Gee, don’t Denzel and
Julia Roberts make a
nice couple? Too bad
we’ll never know. The
romance between their
characters in John
Grisham’s original
novel has vanished
from the script, leaving
us with the remarkable
sight of two of the
most attractive actors
in movies behaving
as if they’ve never
heard of sex.
HIGH CRIMES Now
that Morgan Freeman
is pushing 70, it may
be time for us to
accept that Driving
Miss Daisy is the
closest he’ll ever come
to getting laid in a
movie. But pairing him
with white southern
gal Ashley Judd was
one of the sexiest
ideas for a whodunit
since Nick shook
Nora’s cocktail in the
Thin Man series—or
would have been,
if the two leads had
been allowed to
do more than swap
deeply amused
looks at Hollywood’s
stupidity in keeping
their relationship
platonic.—T.C.
guardedness is never linked to its most
obvious source—their status as minorities
in a primarily Anglo world—and neither
is their attraction to each other.
From one angle, that doesn’t make Hitch’s
pretense of color blindness any less pleasurable.
But if you want to see its limits, imagine
a switch in the lead’s romantic agendas,
with good-hearted Wasp schlub Kevin
James pining for Mendes while Smith falls
for willowy blond Amber Valletta. Instantly,
the movie becomes more emotionally plausible
and way more interesting. It also becomes
unbankable on the spot. Will Smith
may be the biggest African-American boxoffice
draw in history, but he knows he’d
get a studio to green-light that combo when
pigs fly, and his shrewdness about exactly
what he can and can’t get away with is a
major reason he’s successful.
One proof is that he’s a physically imposing
black guy who devotes a great deal of
ingenuity to making sure the white audience
keeps thinking of him as an innocuous
sweetie pie. This isn’t an option for
Wesley Snipes or Laurence Fishburne, but
it was for Denzel Washington, whose current
career may be the most depressing
example of what being deprived of playing
romantic roles can do to a black actor.
It’s not just that Washington’s so talented;
more to the point, I’ve never known a female
movie fan—black, white, young, or
old—who wouldn’t bail on her own wedding
anniversary to chase his car. With
his gift for wry insinuation and easy rapport
with his costars, he would have been
a natural for romantic comedy. Since his
charisma can switch from ingratiating to
forbidding on a dime, he could even have
been Hollywood’s ultimate male dreamboat—a
guy who could do Humphrey Bogart
and Cary Grant.
You may notice that I’m putting this in
the past tense, and I hope I’m wrong about
that. But I doubt it. Washington has gone
from being boxed in by the audience’s high
expectations to being boxed in by his own
cynical ones. Early on he practically volunteered
himself as the new Sidney Poitier—
although he seemed somewhat less willing
than steely Sidney had been to suppress
any hint of sexual allure or interest. But
with rare exceptions—notably, Mississippi
Masala and Devil in a Blue Dress—Washington
has never had much opportunity to
use his sex appeal on-screen.
It tells you everything about either the biz’s
own hang-ups or its belief in the audience’s
K O B A L C O L L E C T I O N

THE CRITIC>
hang-ups that in one of the few movies
where Washington got to be bantering
and tantalizingly seductive with a white
actress—The Bone Collector, opposite Angelina
Jolie—he was a bedridden quadriplegic.
Short of making the detective
he played a corpse and Jolie’s character a
medium, the moviemakers couldn’t have
gone farther in ensuring that their mutual
attraction stayed all smoke and no fire.
On this front, Washington’s real predecessor
isn’t Poitier but Billy Dee Williams—a
born lover-man who’d have spent
his career playing roguish seducers if he
hadn’t been African-American. Instead, after
making a sizzling breakthrough in Lady
Sings the Blues, he ended up as a footnote
in the Star Wars saga and a regular in action
schlock. Since his Oscar for Training
Day, Washington has been following
suit; he’s practically become the high-end
Wesley Snipes. Meanwhile, Don Cheadle
is starting to get the ambitious parts that
Washington used to be the first choice for,
and odds are that Cheadle will soon be facing
the same bind.
Of course, I’m only guessing. Washington
may be less stymied by Hollywood’s
blinders than held in check by his own
reluctance to gamble on alienating the
big audience, which so far seems perfectly
content to line up to see him in
meaningless thrillers. Perhaps that’s a
dull choice on his part, but it’s not an unreasonable
one. In these dim-witted days
of chick flicks and guy flicks, you’ve got
to pick your category, and Denzel clearly
has. While we like to think attitudes have
changed, the stereotype of black sexuality
as inherently menacing dies hard—and
shows up in the damnedest places, too.
For every teen flick in which Julia Stiles
learns to boogie, there’s a piece of arty
pandering like Thirteen—a.k.a. Reefer
Madness Part Deux—in which hooking
up with black guys is clearly supposed
to mark a new stage in the pubescent
heroine’s degradation, to the audience’s
combined horror and titillation. (This
sort of thing takes you back to Mae Marsh
hurling herself over a cli≠ rather than
submit to rape by an ex-slave in The Birth
of a Nation; apparently, the threat hasn’t
changed, but you just can’t trust today’s
white girls to be as virtuous. It must be
the drugs.)
What makes all this even more lunatic
is that Hollywood, having it both ways as
usual, keeps inviting audiences to respond
to African-American actors’ masculinity
while depriving it of an outlet. At times
the coyness gets exasperating; do studio
execs really think we’re that easily shocked?
When Morgan Freeman plays opposite
Ashley Judd in High Crimes and Kiss the
Girls, both actors are energized; it’s a revelation
to see how much more fun Judd
is when she gets it going on in relation to
1 2 2 . G Q . J U N E . 0 5
On the rare occasions when an interracial
romance does blossom on-screen, it’s invariably
the movie’s whole point, leaching
any individuality from the characters.
somebody, instead of vamping in a vacuum.
These two adults don’t just look like they’d
have a great time in bed; they look like
they’d have an even better one over breakfast.
But we know it’ll never happen—and if
you think their age di≠erence is the reason,
tell it to Warren Beatty.
On the rare occasions when it does happen—that
is, when an interracial romance
does blossom on-screen—what’s wrong
is that it’s invariably the movie’s whole
point, leaching any individuality from the
characters. In this respect, things haven’t
changed a lot since the creaky days of
1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,
which is why it’s too bad that this spring’s
race-reversed remake, Guess Who, with
Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher, ended
up mushier than the original instead of
the unapologetically dumb farce the ads
promised. (I was hoping they’d stick to
doing an interracial Meet the Parents.)
Instead the funniest thing in the movie
is its bright idea of overcoming racial
antagonisms by promoting sexual ones—
Bernie and Ashton finally bond by realizing
that men are from Mars and women
are from Venus. When Spike Lee tackled
the subject in 1991’s Jungle Fever, it began
his decline; even admirers had to admit
that he came on like an angry head
case. Lee’s basic lack of compassion was
clear from his determination to make the
definitive movie about black-white sex—
not only an impossible goal but a grotesquely
coldhearted one. Looked at today,
the movie is touching only in its reminder
of what an interesting actor Wesley Snipes
could be before he gave up and went for
the money.
Still, Lee’s agenda was clear—bonkers,
but clear. That’s why Jungle Fever is less bewildering
than Monster’s Ball, which is up
there with Mary Poppins as one of the most
ridiculous movies to win its lead a best-
actress Oscar. Black women reportedly hated
it, and good for them. When scriptwriters resort
to this much contrivance simply to convince
us that a woman as gorgeous as Halle
Berry would mate with a knob of gristle like
Billy Bob Thornton, you wonder why they
don’t find another plot, or maybe another
profession. To me, the gimmick of making
Thornton’s character the prison guard who
executed Berry’s husband looked like claptrap
chasing a point, and that’s the kind
interpretation. If it’s supposed to be a metaphor
for race relations in America, she ought
to throttle him, not schtup him.
Yet if black male performers too often
end up by default in witless action pictures,
it’s noteworthy that Berry—currently
the only black actress who qualifies
as a marquee name—is proving almost
uncastable by Hollywood standards. That
Academy Award may be the only reason
her career hasn’t stalled the way Lisa
Bonet’s did after her similarly steamy turn
with Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart. Because
Berry’s looks outclass her game but immature
talent, there’s no point in putting
her in unsexy roles, and yet cartoonish
fantasies are the studios’ only idea of safe
places to let her be tempting: It says a lot
that, relatively speaking, her Bond flick is
the realistic one. As a result, she’s already
looking to TV (thanks, Oprah) and smallscale
projects from her own production
company (thanks, Oscar) for decent parts.
Unless things change, we’re about as likely
to see her playing a recognizable human being
in a major-league-studio film as we are
to catch Condi Rice—who’s been starring in
her own real-life Bond flick, from what I can
tell—reading Jane Fonda’s autobiography at
a cabinet meeting.
On the other hand, I think there’s
some reason for optimism that things will
change—not only in Hollywood’s outdated
gingerliness about cross-racial love tangles
but in white moviegoers’ willingness
to respond to monoracial ones. There are
too many African-American actors the
audience is primed to see playing romantic
leads, and the under-25’s don’t give a
hoot about racial pathology anyway. To
them, the elaborate schizophrenia of the
industry’s current mind-set must look
as bizarre as Stepin Fetchit, and my own
guess is that the breakthrough will come
from some smart commercialite, not a
filmmaker on a mission. I’m no great fan
of Nancy Meyers, but she does understand
star personae and interpersonal
dynamics; if she’s looking for a follow-up
to Something’s Gotta Give, why doesn’t
she pair Diane Keaton with Morgan Freeman
next time? Otherwise, I don’t know
about you, but I’d give anything to see a
romantic comedy starring Halle Berry as
secretary of state—and Jamie Foxx as the
boyfriend who finally convinces her that
unilateralism isn’t the way to go. Stoppard,
get cracking.
tom carson is a gq correspondent.
To see his DVD picks, log on to
www.gq.com.