Quote of the Day: bell hooks

One of the issues that no one wants to talk about is that finally, the most successful political movement in the United States over the last twenty years was really the feminist movement, and that there is a tremendous backlash to feminism that is being enacted on the stage of mass media. So that films like Leaving Las Vegas really are about ushering in a new, old version of the desirable woman that really is profoundly misogynous based and sexist. It’s no accident; we know that when women went into the factories in the World Wars because men were not here–that when those wars ended–mass media was used to get women out of the factory and back into the home. Well in a sense, mass media is being used in that very same way right now, to get women out of feminism and back into some patriarchal mode of thinking, and movies to me are the lead propaganda machine in this right now.

hooks said this in 1997. Almost fifteen years ago. So have movies gotten better or worse since then in contributing to the feminist backlash? When I try to come up with some truly great feminist-leaning films released (in Hollywood) in those fifteen years, it’s admittedly a struggle–and that doesn’t mean I’m saying they don’t exist. Yet when I think about sexism in Hollywood films, it takes about three seconds to recall a handful of misogyny-laden movies released only within the past several months. In fact, it’s virtually impossible not to find sexist films hitting the mainstream every opening weekend.

hooks continues her discussion of movies, referencing the filmmaker Spike Lee and critiquing representations of blackness in Hollywood:

A major magazine like Time or Newsweek just recently carried a story on Spike Lee as a failure. I mean, it just was amazing! How could you talk about Spike Lee as a failure? It was something like, Malcolm X was made for thirty-seven million, but it only made forty-some million. And I thought, well, how is that a failure? You not only paid for your movie, but you had some excess profit–though not a great deal, not what Hollywood would want. But that can become talked about in mass media as a failure, even though Woody Allen, who has made many films that do not make a lot of money, does not then get talked about as a failed filmmaker. And so that is in the interest of a certain structure of white supremacy and patriarchy, to put Spike Lee down at this point in his career, and to make it seem that somehow he could not deliver the goods, because part of that is about sanctioning white people to become the new makers of so-called black film.

As in, for example, a film like Waiting to Exhale, which is sold and marketed in ways that suggest this is a black film. I mean, people kept telling me, this is a film about black women, this is going to be for black people. In fact, this was a typical Hollywood shitty, uninteresting film–the script written by white people, all marketed as being a film by and about blackness, successfully. Nothing Spike Lee has done can match the financial return of this piece of shit. This is how blackness can be done successfully, and the problem lies not with the terms of what makes blackness successful in Hollywood or on the screen, but with Spike Lee as an individual. And that I think is tragic because so many black people are buying into that mode of thinking. That Spike Lee somehow represents a failure, when in fact, Spike Lee will continue to be the most successful black filmmaker in the United States, and he’s not by any means a failure.

Here’s a way in which, as Hollywood decides to occupy the territory of blackness, it becomes very useful to say, “We let black people have that territory, and they just didn’t know what to do with it. They made these strange films like Girl 6–it didn’t even have a plot. I mean, Crooklyn didn’t even have a plot.” Which of course is completely bogus, because the plot of Crooklyn was very obvious and very simple; it was about a family where the mother is dying in the family. But I can’t tell you how many white reviewers wrote that it didn’t have a plot. When what they should have said is that it didn’t have a plot that interested us. That White America is not interested in black mothers that are dying. So I think that is going to have deep ramifications for the future of representing blackness in Hollywood–because it is really almost a public announcement of the white takeover of that particular territory, the issue of representing blackness in Hollywood. 

It’s interesting to look at how films represent blackness in Hollywood currently, and if it’s changed for the better or for the worse within the past fifteen years. Tyler Perry has certainly become one of the most prolific and successful–if not the most successful–black filmmakers in Hollywood, but there’s also much controversy surrounding his representations of race in film. Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, garnered Oscar nominations and a Best Supporting Actress win for Mo’Nique, and Dreamgirls catapulted Jennifer Hudson’s career after she won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar. And within these past fifteen years, the Best Actress Oscar was awarded, for the first time ever, to a black woman, Halle Berry.

I don’t have the answers. I think it’s important in general to look at the kinds of roles Hollywood rewards women for playing; but it’s perhaps even more important to keep insisting that Hollywood filmmakers create better roles for women. Overall, I’d argue that we’re much more inundated with pop culture imagery everywhere now than we were fifteen years ago, with advancements in technology (and the increased and constant advertising that comes with it). So if the representations of race and gender in the media, and movies in particular, haven’t changed much–or have in fact gotten worse–and the pop culture and mass media machine is churning out this shit faster than it ever has in history, where does that leave us?