Race, Philosophy, and Film

Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Dan Flory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415624459
• eBook ISBN: 9781136250439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This collection fills a gap in the current literature in philosophy and film by focusing on the question: How would thinking in philosophy and film be transformed if race were formally incorporated moved from its margins to the center?

The collection's contributors anchor their discussions of race through considerations of specific films and television series, which serve as illustrative examples from which the essays' theorizations are drawn. Inclusive and current in its selection of films and genres, the collection incorporates dramas, comedies, horror, and science fiction films (among other genres) into its discussions, as well as recent and popular titles of interest, such as Twilight, Avatar, Machete, True Blood, and The Matrix and The Help. The essays compel readers to think more deeply about the films they have seen and their experiences of these narratives.

Part I

Epistemology

1 Imaginative Resistance and the White Gaze in Machete and The Help

Dan Flory

Based on a fake trailer inserted between the two features that make up Grindhouse (Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, 2007), Machete (Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Manquis, 2010) went into production due to the audience interest that trailer for a nonexistent film created and began provoking controversy months before it was theatrically released in September 2010. Some critics roundly condemned it as manipulating viewers into imagining a world that is deeply racist, antiwhite, and indiscriminately proimmigration. Machete’s infamous “Arizona” trailer (2010), which premiered on Cinco de Mayo four months before the film itself, was specifically condemned as advocating violence against “real,” racially white Americans, a category that rather pointedly excluded Hispanics and Latinos. ¹ Libertarian Alex Jones of infowars.com argued that this trailer “glorifies and potentially incite[s] attacks on white Americans” (Jones and Dykes 2010); John Nolte (2010), writing for the conservative website Big Hollywood, argued that it embodied a “blatantly racist double standard” that “intentionally stoke[s] racial tensions” and “race war” by promoting “racial divisiveness” and plays into the hands of “effete leftist critics and writers” through furthering “their racist agenda.” The conservative Christian website movieguide.org (2010) deemed Machete itself “one of the worst movies ever” with “a racist, AntiAmerican worldview,” in which the United States “is a corrupt, miserable, horrible place.” Additionally, the Texas Minutemen, Inc., a group of selfappointed immigration-law enforcers, felt targeted as subjects of ridicule by the “Arizona” trailer, and the filmmakers themselves were clearly criticizing the state of Arizona for the passage of its restrictive immigration bill (noted in Fernandez and Kit 2010).

Why did these viewers react so negatively to Machete, whereas others felt they were offered a more positive cinematic experience? How, for example, can we reconcile these assessments with that by Geoffrey MacNab (2010), who in writing for The Independent (UK) describes Machete as “throwaway entertainment” that is “ingenious” in many places, and fitfully makes “polemical points about the racist treatment of Mexicans”? Karina Longworth (2010), writing for the Village Voice, generally agrees with MacNab, noting that in some parts of Machete “Rodriguez efficiently delivers social commentary via slapstick, and elevates the goofy-gritty ethos of exploitation films at which he’s nodding to the bombast level of a blockbuster”; as does James Berardinelli (2010), who in reviewing the movie for the ReelViews website declares that Machete is “fun” because it “delivers everything one craves from” the exploitation genre, even if he also laments that it is “hard to shake the feeling that Rodriguez is making a [political] statement.” While perhaps not the rousing notices that the filmmakers might have hoped for, these reviewers clearly saw something of value in Machete—and in many ways seem to have seen a different film from the former set of viewers.

Setting aside for the moment certain obvious political differences, this divergence raises a deeper, epistemological issue; namely, the possibility that one kind of viewership may be resisting imagining Machete cooperatively because they find the imaginatively vivid, morally weighted assessments implicit in its narrative somehow “deviant” and therefore difficult or even impossible to imagine, whereas other viewers do not. While I do not wish to psychologize about particular individuals and will not presume to do so here, I would like to use the divergence exemplified here as an occasion to propose an analysis of different kinds of viewership. Much of the former viewership’s difficulty, I will argue, concerns certain presumptions and default values they carry into the movie concerning ‘race’ and how those presumptions and values affect their ability to imagine elements in the film. In short, I analyze this kind of cinematic viewership as a form of imaginative resistance. I further explore the implications this refusal has for the challenges such viewers may face in imagining detailed, morally charged characterizations of racial others in film, especially for “central imaginings” of such characters—that is, imagining these characters “from the inside.”² I then contrast such reactions with a different set of viewer responses to The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011). Some viewers have argued that we should resist full imaginative engagement with this movie on the grounds that it offers gross misrepresentations of not only the U.S. civil rights era but of African Americans themselves, while others feel that it provides a more positive cinematic experience, morally speaking, that helps to clarify crucial details concerning race. How can we account for such different perceptions of this film? Again, my explanation focuses around the role of imaginative resistance in distinguishing different kinds of viewership. I conclude my essay by speculating on how a better understanding of imaginative resistance in general provides insights into viewers‘ capacities to understand both filmfictional and real-world racial others.

IMAGINING FILM AND IMAGINATIVE RESISTANCE TO MACHETE

Films engage our imaginations in numerous ways, from prompting us to see the fictional characters portrayed on the screen, rather than merely the actors who portray them, to helping us understand what it is like to be in a situation vastly different from what we have ever experienced. Movies have an astonishing ability to engage us in perspectives that are radically different from our own; they possess a capacity to offer subtle challenges that expand our senses of what others are like—how they think, how they feel, and how they view the world. Narrative fiction films in particular can make situations experientially remote from us, such as the lives of our ancestors or even space aliens, palpable, accessible, and plausible. Ultimately our imaginations to a large extent make this access possible: our ability to create ideas, images, or sensations that are not and perhaps never have been present to our senses greatly facilitates our admission into these other worlds.

Crucial here are the ways in which imagination operates through stories, which can evoke unfamiliar characters and even entire ways of life by means of narrative. In literature, for example, the choice and tonal nuance of words fundamentally affect the fabric of what we imagine, even as those words leave vast lacunae in what that imagining might be. To conceive in a full-bodied way what we have read, we typically use our own values, presumptions, knowledge, and past experiences to fill in substantive informational gaps in the story. ³ Similarly, we understand cinematic fictions not because they offer literally everything we are supposed to imagine, but because we fill in enormous gaps left by what the screen and the soundtrack actually present through combining them with many of our standard “default values,” presumptions, knowledge, and experiences.⁴ When I watch Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011), as a cooperative viewer I do not merely see actresses Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph delivering their lines and hitting their marks, but rather the characters Annie and Lillian, who are lifelong friends living in Milwaukee, trying to work out the difficulties of being twentieth-first-century women in middle America. Of course, I can also see these actresses delivering their lines and hitting their marks, but my point is that, to enter the fictional world the movie presents, I need to Imagine them as Annie and Lillian. This mental act requires that I perceive not only literally what these actresses are doing and saying onscreen but also presumptions that their images represent human beings, as opposed to, say, cleverly constructed automata, that normal space-time determinations continue beyond the edges of the frame (and incorporate at least some real-life aspects of the largest city in Wisconsin), that these characters have nuanced emotional lives extending far beyond what I literally see portrayed at that moment, and so on. ⁵

But what happens when someone reports a sense of having been criticized or even attacked as a white person by a movie, when what another saw was a parody of white racial paranoia? In other words, how can profoundly divergent perceptions of race manifest themselves from the same movie? Naturally, such differences may arise from multiple origins, but one of the major contributing factors in many cases is how imagination functions—or fails to function—in the construction of cinematic narrative.

A helpful model for explaining such imaginative failure is Tamar Szabó Gendler’s theory of “Humean resistance,” a form of imaginative resistance involving in-depth, normatively charged assessments stipulated by written fictions. Gendler tells us that when readers perceive what are to them “deviant, imaginatively involved, valenced normative appraisals” in a literary fiction, they often experience difficulty or even a sense of impossibility at entering into its fictional world (2006, 153–54). Such a world furthermore strikes them as morally improper and involving vicious sentiments (154). These two features (senses of imaginative barriers and imaginative impropriety), according to Gendler (154), amount to key elements in the sort of imaginative resistance Hume described so vividly in “Of the Standard of Taste” (1977, 19–22).

Gendler notes that our resistance here is primarily a matter of unwillingness, not inability: readers have the basic human capacity to imagine these sorts of appraisals, but do not wish to do so. Rather, a form of what she calls “authoritative breakdown” occurs. Instead of cooperatively imagining whatever the author of the fiction prompts (our standard “default response”), we instead resist it, often to the point of not doing it at all (2006, 157–58). Our resistance or refusal is prompted by what she calls “popout”: we take the fiction to be asking that we imagine the troubling moral appraisal not only in the fictional world but also in the real world, which in extreme cases we refuse to do and therefore “pop out” of the fiction itself (159). This presumed “simultaneous invitation to imagine and to believe” forces us out because we refuse the invitation to entertain believing the appraisal in the real world and we cannot disentangle that presumed real-world invitation from the fictional-world invitation that only asks us to imagine it within the confines of the story (160).⁶ Critical here is the role that “principles of generation” for moral appraisals play in rejecting what are perceived as “deviant” judgments and assessments (162–64). ⁷ We are “implicitly aware of the psychological costs associated with allowing ourselves to frame things in certain ways,” Gendler tells us (152), such that some framings will strike us as very costly to perform. This general sense of imaginative resistance may reach the point that we find ourselves unwilling to do so, even though we could in terms of our basic human imaginative capacities. We cannot “imagine a certain moral claim as being true in a story” because we will not adopt the required generative principles for it—the way of framing the world that could make that moral claim true, even if only in the fictional world (164). There are certain “default values”—that is, generative principles—that we are simply unwilling to give up when appreciating fictions that preclude our successful imagining of the story in question, with its p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Philosophical Approaches to Race in Film
• Part I Epistemology
• Part II Aesthetics
• Part III Moral Philosophy
• Part IV Social and Political Philosophy
• Part V Technology and the (Lived) Body
• Contributors
• Index