Jun-Dai wrote:I'll repeat myself by saying that the whole Spike-Lee-like notion that you have to be black to make a movie about Malcolm X or Rubin Carter or Ali is preposterous and is just the kind of attitude that only maintains cultural strife.
You can repeat it, but it's kind of meaningless if you don't have some sort of rationale to support it.
Besides, I don't think the point was ever that you can't make a film about Malcolm X if you aren't black, the point was that you can't make a film about Malcolm X that's any good if you aren't black, and this idea depends on "good" being defined as (a) reflecting Malcolm X's struggle and cultural and social background with any kind of authenticity and (b) offering an insight into Malcolm X's thinking and relevance that will be meaningful to a significant black audience. I suspect that Spike Lee wouldn't doubt for a second that a white director would be capable of directing a film about Malcolm X that is "good" by the terms of conventional white cinema.
Even if you set aside the notion that a white person, without having gone through the difficulties that Malcolm X was fighting against, would lack the personal capability to relate the story effectively, there's also the fact that a white director wouldn't have any credibility, and his attempts at focussing on authenticity would have a ring of condescension--at the very least the fact of him directing it would be tantamount to saying that the story can't be told effectively by a black director.
To quote Jane Elliott (who I suspect was quoting someone else): "white people talking to white people about racism is simply sharing ignorance."
How does this maintain cultural strife? I would suggest that colorblindness, the notion that people are capable of not being racist, de facto segregation, inequitable educational privileges, and the fact that the dominant cultural group is reluctant to cede power over the cultural definition of this country are significant reasons why cultural strife continues to exist in this country. The idea that minority groups feel that their viewpoint cannot be effectively told by white men doesn't strike me as having any significant effect on the cultural strife in this country.
Going back to
Brokeback Mountain, I don't think anyone here (except to some extent me) is really advocating the notion that straight directors are incapable of directing a good film about gay people. The biggest critics of
Brokeback Mountain have listed more films directed by straight men about gay people that they consider quality than most of their antagonists have mentioned about gay people that they've seen period. Similarly they have listed straight actors that have carried off convincing gay roles. In the end, however,
Brokeback Mountain is a production that seems to be completely absent of any gay input, which seems like it would be a pretty serious limitation of its capabilities in speaking about a gay experience.
