2016 So White: The Year in Onscreen Diversity and the Same Old Bullshit
Entertainment
Many of the films and TV shows that held our attention this year were centered around the black experience. Barry Jenkins’s elegant depiction of a black man’s love in Moonlight earned due praise, and several other prominent titles told black American stories: Fences, Hidden Figures, Loving. On television, the subtle depth of Donald Glover’s Atlanta made the show an instant hit. Ava DuVernay gave us gorgeous complexity with Queen Sugar and her equally powerful prison documentary, 13th. Issa Rae’s Insecure, a modern portrait of black women in love, made it to HBO and connected with an audience eager for such under-told stories. In contrast to last year, awards season will not be all white. But as this year’s election has proven, the truth has many layers.
What’s disheartening is that the celebration of these projects has to be met with caution, partly because this was a year in which America chose to elect a man who stands in direct opposition to progress. In Hollywood, too, it’s clear that white mediocrity still dominates conversations and capital—see: Manchester by the Sea, La La Land, Nocturnal Animals, etc—and that inclusion across the board remains rare. In our discussion of film and TV in 2016, among other topics, we talked about the fraudulence of The Birth of a Nation, the evolution of the Oscars So White debate, tokenism, minority and LGBT representation, and the challenges of diversity in film vs. television. Read our edited conversation below.
Rich Juzwiak: I think a good starting point is Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, which is a case study in the tendency of contemporary cultural gatekeepers (and pundits) to prioritize art’s politics over aesthetics, and the overall wielding of commodified identity today. When that movie played Sundance, it was in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite movement, which started in 2015 via a tweet from April Reign, and went all the way to alter the way the Academy is assembled and operates (at least per Cheryl Boone Isaacs’s direct response to the outcry over a second round of nominations featuring no people of color in any of the Oscars’ acting categories). At the time, Nation must have seemed like an antidote—a sweeping melodrama specifically about racism that focused on the slave Nat Turner, whose righteous indignation is as relatable and perhaps more socially acceptable than ever to behold as a self-consciously woke, white moviegoer. It didn’t quite matter how it said what it said; it just mattered that it said what it said. Fox Searchlight figured it was the right movie at the right time and snapped it up at Sundance for $17.5 million.
Nation’s inability to make back Fox Searchlight’s money seemed primarily dictated by other social forces: rape charges against Nate Parker in 1999, for which he was ultimately acquitted. They became synonymous with the film, not in the least because of its own ahistorical rape scene and otherwise shoddy treatment of female characters, who have very little to do but sit around waiting for a man to save them.
Though Nation holds a 72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, by the time it was released, the consensus seemed to be that this is not a very good movie. It’s full of slave-movie clichés that we’re all too familiar with, hammy performances, and it’s incompetently paced (the uprising that the movie is supposed to be about is confined to its final quarter, while much of what precedes it serves to remind us that slavery was really awful). It’s just bad. I wonder if as many people would have felt emboldened enough to admit that if Parker were never accused of rape (or indecent exposure in 2000). The idea that any representation is good representation lingers on. I understand it given the crumbs Hollywood tosses at the feet of anyone who isn’t white and straight, but I also expect more and better, and I have a feeling that you guys do too.
Clover Hope: Not that this was a big revelation or anything, but that whole Sundance spectacle—and then the bad reviews coming months down the line after Nate Parker foolishly self-destructed—once again exposed how much the film world likes to promote symbolic material over substance to perpetuate this false image of Hollywood as an inclusive entity. And like you said, after the Oscars So White debate, the (white) people who control these projects were desperate to, not so much get rid of the whiteness on screen (I think many of them are fine with it), but to be the ones who got it right, in terms of inclusion. That the critics didn’t look past The Birth of a Nation’s poor quality and stale storytelling to see that it wasn’t very good says a lot.
We do want to move toward a point where essentially good black films and TV shows are rewarded for being good, not for being black. I just feel like that’s largely a pipe dream. As far as representation, there’s positive headway with shows like Atlanta and Insecure, which seem to be political just by being. They pushed past the expected archetypes and were rewarded for it. I think there’s some measure of hope in that, but Hollywood as a business will always be disingenuous.
Kara Brown: There are some interesting layers to this. On one hand, if we’re going to allow bad movies to be made in the first place, I think everyone should be allowed to make bad movies. Films by black people should not be held to a different standard than films made by white people. However, we saw exactly that with Birth of a Nation and we see it often with so-called “important” black films.
I tried to address this earlier in the year in regard to the slave movie genre, which I wrote in part as a response to Parker’s success at Sundance. At times it seems like any movie about slavery or the Holocaust or an HIV-positive gay person is automatically going to be a “good” “important” film because A) they tap into the guilt of viewers and allow their institutions some semblance of diversity and B) those tend to be only the types of “diverse” films we reward and acclaim.
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