Los Angeles Film Festival

‘Dear White People’: Satire, But Serious

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded ‘Dear White People’, which has its US release (and real distribution) this Friday, Oct. 17, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris, whom at first I didn’t recognize in modern hair, dress and light contacts: she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The following is a slightly modified repost.

When Go Fish was released 20 years ago, a straight guy friend who was in his 50s (we had met at a former workplace) couldn’t understand why I liked the film. We usually had very similar tastes in movies: both of us had enjoyed watching Winona Ryder playing a slacker in Reality Bites and had shaken our heads over how overrated Kieslowski’s Blue was. I tried to explain to him why Fish was special: the women in it looked like, dressed like, talked like and even had similar haircuts to the queer women I knew. The writer/star and writer-director were out queer women and their film had a real release and real distribution, instead of just being relegated to festivals or one or two nights at the smallest independent theater in town, the way most other queer films–especially those made by and featuring women–had been. But all his life this guy had been seeing films about straight men, by straight men and starring straight men (or at least men who could convincingly pass as straight), so he couldn’t understand why I would make such a big deal of seeing on the big screen some part of my community recognizably reflected back to me.

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded Dear White People, which opens in US theaters (with real distribution) this Friday, Oct. 17, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris: at first I didn’t recognize her in modern hair, dress and light contacts–she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The film’s tagline: “Being a Black face in a white place” is an issue sometimes brought up online (as in the viral “I Too Am Harvard” video) and elsewhere but pretty much never addressed in film: Black students navigating majority white campuses in which individuals, policy and curriculum are often either unfriendly toward or clueless about the needs of students of color. Winchester’s President wants to dismantle the all-Black dorm students gravitate to. He is either misreading the consolidation of Black students as “reverse racism” (Sam later explains to the Dean why there’s no such thing) or fears the Black students banding together will be too strong a foe for his administration.

Sam, although “political” had previously shown no taste for campus elected office but runs as a protest candidate for “head of house” against the incumbent, her ex-boyfriend Troy, who will not fight the administration decision to break up the house. To everyone’s surprise–including her own–Sam wins.

: Sam

Because we’re not used to seeing films that feature more than one Black person (and often not any) in an environment full of both opportunity and microaggressions, we haven’t before observed the different approaches students (and others) take in walking this minefield. Confrontational Sam tells the campus “humor” magazine’s core of white, frat brothers (including the son of the University’s president), “On behalf of all the colored folks in the room let me apologize to all the better qualified white students whose places we’re taking up,” then throws them out of the house’s dining hall. Troy jokes and plays cards with the same group, hoping to earn a byline at the magazine: the president’s son Kurt (Kyle Gallner) brags it’s the main pipeline to Saturday Night Live’s writing staff (which makes “Winchester’s” parallels to Harvard more explicit–and is perhaps one way to understand some of the problems the real-life SNL has had in diversifying their cast of performers and writers).

Coco wants to use the fraternity and magazine to further her own goals, while the brothers use her inclusion to deflect charges of racism–and she doesn’t care what activists like Sam think of her affiliation. Conflict-averse Lionel just keeps moving–from the frat at the very beginning of the film to dorm after dorm hoping the next place he lives is the one where he isn’t the target for harassment: for his sexual orientation at the frat and for not being “Black” enough at Sam’s hall.

There’s more plot (so much more) but all of it is a fairly flimsy pretext for one-liners (many of which feel like they were gathered over a lifetime) and sketches like “The Tip Test” which begins “”Your waitress mistakes you for someone who looks like you–Black–who once ran up a $30 bill and left a dollar tip.”

Like Looking, White People also examines interracial relationships, and as in Looking the white people in those relationships don’t (with one notable exception) come off very well. But I was disappointed that the film didn’t explore the impunity with which racist (or even just microaggressive) white guys will sexually harass, demean and even assault women of color: the film’s main villain, Kurt (whose irredeemability is on the level of Joffrey in Game of Thrones) doesn’t lay a hand on (or even use any slurs to describe) Sam or Coco in spite of his deep hostility to the former and his proximity to the latter. With the barrage of rape threats outspoken women (especially women of color) continue to receive over social media, the film’s neglect to include that kind of backlash in Sam’s storyline makes it seem a little spotty. Tessa Thompson’s perpetually unimpressed but engaged face and clarion voice are the ideal vehicle for Sam’s pronouncements, but the script suddenly asking her, at the end, to become Julia Roberts in Notting Hill also fell flat–and is a missed opportunity to depict how activists need supportive relationships, even ones their peers might not approve of.

: Coco (on the left)

Coco though skillfully played by Parris (her skeptical double takes could populate an entire feature) also seems incomplete. The character is so calculating that only rarely, like at the climactic blackface party do we have a clue what she is really thinking and feeling. She’s also one of the few characters who doesn’t seem to come from an affluent or middle class background and has darker skin than the others, but the script barely addresses this disparity.

Even though Sam is presented as the main protagonist in the film, Simien is better at fleshing out his Black male characters. Nerdy Lionel with his notepad, passive demeanor, huge, messy afro, whom we see from the beginning (when we are introduced to all the different cliques of Black students at Winchester) as a misfit even among the other queer Black people, is a fully formed person and Williams plays him, including his transformation at the end, well. Simien is an out gay man and I’m probably not the only one who wondered how autobiographical Lionel is. Bell’s Troy at first seems like nothing more than a dapper A-student and class officer, but then we learn that he wants to deviate from his father’s carefully laid plans for him–and that in spite of his clean cut persona and protests to the contrary, he spends a lot of time smoking weed.

: Lionel (in front)

Dear White People cites as its influences both Spike Lee’s School Daze and National Lampoon’s Animal House, tackling a lot of thorny issues under the cover of its humor (not all of which is successful) and bringing to light scenes most audiences won’t have seen in movies before. The Independent Film Festival of Boston screenings where I saw White People were packed (as were its screenings at Sundance which were declared “one of the hottest tickets“): if its main release follows suit, many people will be going to and talking about this film. In one scene White People makes fun of the dearth of Black people in movies (one activist demands from the ticket seller at a movie house “I want my $15 back for Red Tails II.”) Perhaps the best thing Dear White People will do, like Go Fish before it, is to become a gateway for films and television in the same vein. In the two decades since Fish’s release series and films from queer women have become an indelible, if still small, part of the larger culture, from Ellen’s “Puppy Episode” to, for better or worse, The L Word–which the filmmakers of Fish had a hand in–and The Kids Are All Right to last year’s fantastic Concussion. Fish’s influence has spread so far that today 20-something queer women themselves, much like my straight friend back in the day, can’t understand why anyone made a fuss about the film in the first place.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwJhmqLU0so”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Uncertain Terms’: A Pregnant Teenager and a So-Called “Nice Guy”

The obsession of glossy celebrity magazines with “baby bumps” and “post baby bodies” (both of which were completely absent in the 80s from People and Us– and made them a lot more interesting to read) doesn’t extend into actresses playing complex protagonists who are visibly pregnant for most if not all of the action. There’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Juno’ and… ? Full-term pregnancy for most women is a big fork in the road, with life changes that extend beyond bikinis and maternity wear, but in films it’s more like a plot device, so we can hear and see how the male protagonist feels about the pregnancy (as in ‘Knocked Up’ or the recent ‘Locke’), as if we don’t already have more than enough films in which men let us know what they think about women’s experiences.

The obsession of glossy celebrity magazines with “baby bumps” and “post baby bodies” (both of which were completely absent in the 80s from People and Us— and made them a lot more interesting to read) doesn’t extend into actresses playing complex protagonists who are visibly pregnant for most if not all of the action. There’s Rosemary’s Baby and Juno and… ? Full-term pregnancy for most women is a big fork in the road, with life changes that extend beyond bikinis and maternity wear, but in films it’s more like a plot device, so we can hear and see how the male protagonist feels about the pregnancy (like in Knocked Up or the recent Locke), as if we don’t already have more than enough films in which men let us know what they think about women’s experiences.

So I was excited to see up-and-coming indie director Nathan Silver’s Uncertain Terms (showing tonight, June 17, as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival) which is set at a group home for pregnant teenagers. India Menuez (so memorable as the American hippie girlfriend in Olivier Assayas’s Something In The Air) plays one of the teenagers, Nina. Menuez has worked as a model, but has the type of beauty that isn’t typically featured in magazines. With the deep copper red of her long, full, wavy hair cascading from her high forehead past her narrow shoulders, her pale skin possessing the glint of gold leaf, her face often in repose, Nina resembles both a Renaissance portrait of the Virgin Mary and the woman in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini painting–complete with pregnancy bump.

But Nina, like the rest of the residents at the home (which includes It Felt Like Love‘s star, Gina Piersanti in a small role), don’t talk like they come from the past, especially in the support group in which they tell the stories of their pregnancies. “I was drunk. There were three guys,” says one. Carla (Cindy Silver, the director’s mother), who manages the house, tells the story of going to a home during her own early pregnancy–which is why she runs the house today. She admonishes the girls to stop fighting, but as they continue with GED studies, one silently writes on a notebook which she shows to the other, “Your (sic) a cunt.” For one girl’s birthday party they dance to “My Neck, My Back” with each other, their late-stage pregnancy bellies becoming just another curve they move in time to the music.

The girls are allowed “visitation” three times a week so we meet Chase (Casey Drogin) Nina’s pierced boyfriend who can never keep a job even though she will be having their baby very soon. “Just don’t fucking worry about it,” he tells her.

uncertain_termsChaseNina — Nina and Chase

Robbie (David Dahlbom) is at the home (the rainy, lush green woods surrounding it seem to be in upstate New York: the excellent cinematography by Cody Stokes reminded me of Jody Lee Lipes framing of a similar setting in Martha May Marcy Marlene) to get away from his troubled marriage, which he at first doesn’t tell his Aunt Carla about as he completes odd jobs she needs done around the site. He sleeps at night on an air mattress in the basement and smokes pot on the house steps where Nina joins him to take a hit or two herself. When he tells her he’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to be doing so, she laughs and says, “I feel like I should be smoking for two.”

I wish the film had continued to show the girls in all their complexity, but instead it devolves into scenes we’re familiar with from other films and TV written by men (the script is by Silver and Stokes as well as Chloe Domont): a girl climbs into a much older man’s bed and he leaves. And even though her leaving his room later might look to everyone else like he had an inappropriate sexual encounter with her, he didn’t. And if he had, that encounter would have been all her fault. I am tired of directors and screenwriters of both independent and big budget entertainment continually showing male characters in what looks like compromising or criminal positions and then make them all a big misunderstanding–like Louie’s recent show about the title character “accidentally” hitting a woman he has sex with.

Nina, who needs someone to talk to in the face of her boyfriend’s burgeoning unreliability and verbal abuse, has long conversations, then flirts, with Robbie–in a manner obvious enough that the other girls notice. This competition between the girls for a much older guy’s attention seems unseemly and unlikely. As we know from their background stories, most of these girls have had devastating experiences with boys fairly recently, and will soon give birth, so hooking up with someone new probably wouldn’t be first priority. Also the girls would make fun of a man like Robbie, who is old enough to have started to lose his hair, the same way they make fun of him when he says, “tie the knot” instead of “get married.”

uncertain_termsNinaRobbie — Nina and Robbie

Robbie has conversations with Nina about her relationship with her boyfriend that could just as easily be about his relationship with his wife (an over-the-top villain who saddles him with debt, cheated on him–of course–and now harasses him to get back together: the buzz of his phone is a constant background noise in all of Robbie’s scenes). Robbie, because he’s so much older, sees that Nina and Chase’s relationship won’t improve–and pretty much tells her so. What the script neglects to do is explore how an older man could use the age discrepancy (and the life experience that goes with it) to manipulate a teenager at a very vulnerable point in her life. Age-related manipulation is a pretty common story: most teen pregnancies are the result of an encounter or relationship with an older man.

Male staff at institutions of every kind (including penal and therapeutic ones) are often caught sexually abusing women patients/residents/prisoners to the point that some facilities choose to no longer employ men in direct care positions. Silver and his co-screenwriters including these cliched, unrealistic scenarios where the girls are “seductive” or as in Orange Is The New Black “in love” with a man who works onsite is more than lazy writing: it, like an endless loop of similar scenes from past movies and TV, provides a ready-made excuse for some real-life asshole to say, “She wanted it, your Honor, I swear.”

Robbie at one point says to Nina, as if he were a teenager himself, “I just want to be with you.” This scene reminds me of the Ryan Gosling character’s offer to marry Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine to help her raise her unborn child. The difference between the characters is Gosling’s, with his ukelele and his dare-devil stunts on the bridge is, unlike Robbie, a dreamy, reckless kid himself and doesn’t foresee how the dreariness of home life and dead-end jobs will kill the love he and Williams’ character have for one another (as the latter part of the film shows).

uncertain_terms_birthday — A birthday party at the home

Robbie is only supposed to be 30, but the actor looks older and the apparent age of the aunt (who had her son–who seems close to Robbie’s age–very young) would also seem to place him in an older bracket, so his pairing with Nina is even creepier. Menuez was born in 1993, but Nina’s soft, open face, mercurial nature and especially her breezy, unwarranted optimism about Chase, make her seem very much a teenager.

In Robbie’s final confrontation with his wife he carries and physically restrains her to keep her from going someplace he doesn’t want her to. Seeing the wife yell at and even slap a pregnant girl afterward shows us Robbie was “right” to try to prevent her from entering. Again, I’m pretty tired of seeing, especially in indie films, “nice guys” with reasonable explanations for doing abusive, criminal things to women (as also happens in the latter part of Blue Valentine). At the end of Uncertain Terms we’re supposed to think that (spoiler alert) if not for his drunk, psycho, violent, cheating wife, 30-year-old Robbie could have had a perfectly loving, balanced and beautiful relationship with a pregnant teenager, something those of us with life experience of our own might be skeptical about.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Dear White People’: Satire, But Serious

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded ‘Dear White People,’ which will play the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 18 and will have its US release (and real distribution) later this year, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded Dear White People, which will play the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 18 and will have its US release (and real distribution) later this year, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris, whom at first I didn’t recognize in modern hair, dress and light contacts: she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

Even though Sam is presented as the main protagonist in the film, Simien is better at fleshing out his Black male characters. Nerdy Lionel with his notepad, passive demeanor, huge, messy afro, whom we see from the beginning (when we are introduced to all the different cliques of Black students at Winchester) is a misfit even among the other queer Black people is a fully formed person and Williams plays him, including his transformation at the end, well. Simien is an out gay man and I’m probably not the only one who wondered how autobiographical Lionel is. Bell’s Troy at first seems like nothing more than a dapper A-student and class officer, but then we learn that he wants to deviate from his father’s carefully laid plans for him–and that in spite of his clean cut persona and protests to the contrary, he spends a lot of time smoking weed.

LionelDearWhitePeople — Lionel (in front)

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwJhmqLU0so”]

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