In the mid-seventies, film studies witnessed an increased awareness of the place of blacks in the history of American films. A rich and generally informative series of books appeared around the overall subject of “the black image in films.” Among these were Edward Mapp’s Blacks in American Films (1972), Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (1973), James P. Murray’s To Find an Image (1973), Gary Null’s Black Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures (1975), Daniel Leab’s From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (1975), and Thomas Cripps’s Slow Fade to Black (1977). These studies all, in various ways, stressed the need for more positive roles, types, and portrayals, while pointing out the intractable presence of “negative stereotypes” in the film industry’s depiction of blacks. While the thoroughness of such books was welcome, their clustered appearance contributed to an unfortunate homogeneity. For the mid-seventies were also the period of a most productive ferment in film theory, one which the above-mentioned books on blacks in film either uniformly ignored, or of which they were unaware. Invaluable semiotic, poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic tools were neglected, and still have not been adequately applied to the large body of Hollywood films in which blacks appear. The “black Hollywood” books of the seventies took a binary approach, sociological in its position, hunting down either “negative” or “positive” images. Such a method could not grasp what closer rhetorical and discursive analysis of racial imagery can. Few of these books investigate the filmic text or its implied audience. When black images and spectatorship are the issues, then such an approach seems indispensible.
I submit that this is part of a larger project, one that understands film as (in the words of Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni) “ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself.”1 My work on Hollywood film analyzes film stereotypes in terms of codes they form, and makes these codes legible, inspecting their inner workings, as well as the external historical subjects they would conceal. My term “code” is informed by the usage developed by Umberto Eco in A Theory of Semiotics: roughly, a set of conventions defining perception in limited and predictable ways within any given culture. Roland Barthes, particularly in his S/Z, conceives of an allied concept of codes, one related to the social and artistic conventions and rituals of everyday life. There are, according to Barthes, three major categories of narrative codes: codes which involve conventions of plot content (code of enigma and action); codes involving the structure of the plot (symbolic codes); and codes that the text borrows from outside sources (cultural or semic codes), or what we might call “stereotypes.”
I shall outline a general conceptual framework and then move to a discussion of a well-known Hollywood film, King Kong.
My work on Hollywood films has to do with broad issues of power, domination, and subordination as represented in visual media, but I shall be concentrating here mainly on Hollywood’s perceptions of blacks. In other words, much of what I say here might apply to other non-white groups that filmmakers have depicted in their stories: American Indians, Spanish Americans, Asians, and so on. But I agree with W.E.B. DuBois, when he said that the “Negro” is the metaphor of the 20th Century, the major figure in which these power relationships of master/slave, civilized/primitive, enlightened/backward, good/ evil, have been embodied in the American subconscious.
From the very first films, black skin on screen became a complex code for various things, depending on the social self-conception and positioning of the viewer; it could as easily connote white superiority and self-regard as black inferiority. The message of black inferiority, however, was addressed to viewers who desired a sense of clear-cut dominance within the often confusing uncertainties of American history. Historical ambiguity requires some sense of transhistorical certainty, and so blacks were as if ready-made for the task. Onscreen and off, the history that Western culture has made typically denies blacks and black skin of historical reference, except as former slaves or savages.
One of the prime codes surrounding blacks on screen, then—one much at variance with the narrative codes that mandate potential mobility for other screen characters—is an almost metaphysical stasis. The black—particularly the black woman—is seen as eternal, unchanging, unchangeable. (Recall Faulkner’s appendix to The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.”) The code of stasis arises in order to justify blacks’ continuing economic disadvantage. Throughout the history of Hollywood cinema, in films from King Vidor’s 1929 Hallelujah! through Steven Spielberg’s 1985 The Color Purple, blacks’ character is sealed off from the history into which whites have trapped them. The notorious “Africa” films have as their main function to reinforce the code of the “eternal” or “static” black. From Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) right through such recent efforts as The Jewel of the Nile (1985) blacks in Africa are seen to behave with the same ineptitude and shiftlessness, even before the three hundred years of slavery and oppression, that they exhibited, according to Hollywood films, years later in America. The only explanation can be an enduring “black nature” that no historical tragedy or intervention has ever or could ever have been responsible for.
In such examples and others, one may formulate the history of black film stereotypes as the history of the denial of history in favor of an artificially constructed mythology about unchanging black “character” or “nature.” The problem is that, especially in film, stereotypes and codes insulate themselves from historical change, or actual counter-examples in the real world. Caricatures breed more caricatures, or metamorphose into others, but remain in place.
Although films are not necessarily myths, as is sometimes asserted, certain films have managed to remain repeatedly compelling and thus to assume a permanent, quasi-mythic status in a society’s consciousness. The tireless popularity of such films might be related to Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss’s notion of myths as narratives that endure because they resolve—by venting latent social contradictions—conflicts that otherwise would remain troublesome.2
Yet poststructuralism has somewhat revised LĂ©vi-Strauss’s contentions, and the difference is crucial for understanding Hollywood stereotyping of blacks. For whereas LĂ©vi-Strauss sees myths as unifying communities by giving concentrated and vicarious form to contradictions that plague them, I would suggest that modern myths precisely illustrate social divisions, exposing audience fantasies that are anything but communally shared. In a pluralistic society, myths—especially where they rely on the subordination of particular groups in society—are inevitably political and cannot enforce or sustain a uniform scheme of mythic reconciliation.
The three most frequent devices whereby blacks have been consigned to minor significance on screen include what I refer to as: mythification; marking; and omission.
Mythification involves the realization that filmic codes describe an interrelationship between images. American films do not merely feature this or that debased black image or this or that glorified white hero in isolation, but rather they correlate these images in a larger scheme of semiotic valuation. For the viewer, the pleasure of recognizing this ranking displaces the necessity of verifying its moral or actual validity.
Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of elevation or demotion along a scale of human value. Mythification also implies identification, and requires a pool of spectators ready to accept and identify themselves with film’s tailor-made versions of reality. This device engages audiences on the level of their racial allegiance, social background, and self-image. Film translates the personal into the communal so quickly that elevation of the dominant and the degradation of the subordinate are simultaneous and corporate. When we consider The Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, for example, the mechanisms of racial mythification are clear—the dominant “I” needs the coded “other” to function: white female stars (themselves coded as subordinate to white males) employ black maids to make them seem more authoritatively womanly; white male stars need black butlers or sidekicks to make them seem more authoritatively manly. Soon, by mythification and repetition, white and black filmed images become large-scale models, positive or negative, for behavior, describing (in the manner of myth in non-Western societies) structures, limits, and an overall repertoire from which both white and black viewers in the real world select possibilities of action and thought.
The second tactic is marking. As if the blackness of black skin itself were not enough, we seem to find the color black repeatedly overdetermined, marked redundantly, almost as if to force the viewer to register the image’s difference from white images. Marking makes it visually clear that black skin is a “natural” condition turned into a “man-made” sign. Initially because of the shortcomings of early lenses and film stocks, but later due purely to the needs of image-making rhetoric—black skin has been over-marked in order to eliminate ambiguity. (In his article for the Fall 1985 edition of Daedalus, Brian Winston argues that from Edison through the present day, film stocks were designed to show off white skin to greatest advantage, but have never conveyed other skin tones with any degree of verisimilitude or subtlety.3)
Marking is necessary because the reality of blackness or of being “colored” cannot always, either in films or in real life, be determined. The racial terms “black” and “white” refer to a wide range of hues that cannot be positively described—by being this or that—but only by negative contrast: black is not “white” (where “white” itself is a term difficult to fix). In early films, white actors used blackface, but even when black actors and actresses played black roles, studios required them to darken their skins (Bert Williams, Lena Home, Nina Mae McKinney, and Fredi Washington are only a few examples of black stars who had to be so marked). The Hollywood black had to be made either very black or very light. In the movies Pinky (1949), and the second version of Imitation of Life (1959), the roles of mulatto black women passing for white are actually played by white actresses, to make sure that a visual ambiguity does not compound an already difficult conceptual leap.
Film is a medium of contrasts in light, and so the shades of skin color between black and white often must be suppressed, so that binary visual opposites might serve cinematographic as well as political purposes. Chauffers, domestics, porters, jazz musicians, and other blacks are marked by the black/white codings in the contrast between their skins and white articles of clothing. Aprons, gloves, dresses, scarves, headbands, and even white teeth and eyes are all signifiers of a certain coding of race in Hollywood films that audiences soon came to recognize. This is not to say that whites on film would not bulge out eyes, or wear servants’ clothes; only that 1) blacks seemed to do it exclusively; and, 2) these signifiers have a different coding when whites are associated with them—indeed, this is what makes looking at them so interesting. White gloves, for instance, on a white butler spell “reserve, efficiency, and service,” whereas on a black butler, they might contribute to an overall connotation of “racial inferiority.” A white with an apron on might mean: “poor/lazy/unfortunate person—could end up either on the high or the low end of society, depending on the outcome of the film (role not connected to color).” A black with an apron on might mean: “they’re so good with food/children/animals—will remain in that position forever (role indistinguishable from color).” Other common markings include “Negro dialect” (early title cards in silent films even felt constrained to write dialect when blacks were seen to speak!); elevation/lowness; motion/stasis; cleanliness/dirtiness; distinction/group-mass. All these semes, or smallest units of meaning, combine to form larger codes, like letters combining into words.
The third device is omission, or exclusion by reversal, distortion, or some other form of censorship. Omission and exclusion are perhaps the most widespread tactics of racial stereotyping but are also the most difficult to prove because their manifestation is precisely absence itself. The repetition of black absence from locations of autonomy and importance creates t...