Renewing Rhetoric's Relation to Composition by Borrowman Shane;Brown Stuart;Miller Thomas;

Author:Borrowman, Shane;Brown, Stuart;Miller, Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2009-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Predecessors

Good Night, and Good Luck is hardly the first movie in which an African American serves the audience as a guide to what a white hero thinks or should think. Consider the interracial male “buddy” film, which has received much critical attention. Such movies often star a white man but include a Black sidekick who is capable of being wiser or more humane than his partner. A widely seen set of examples is the Lethal Weapon series, where Danny Glover tries to temper Mel Gibson’s rashness amidst their detective work. Discussing this “buddy” genre in his 1995 book The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race, Benjamin DeMott lists dozens of examples (13), even as he excoriates these films for suggesting that racial tensions can be healed through personal intimacy. The years since DeMott’s survey have seen no end to the scenario he scorned. The 2004 Oscar winner for Best Picture, Million Dollar Baby, features Morgan Freeman as the worldly wise assistant of Clint Eastwood, just as ten years earlier he was Tim Robbins’s mature friend in The Shawshank Redemption. In addition, Freeman’s character serves both movies as narrator, helping viewers fathom the psyche of the white leading man.

In another recurring type of film, a Black actor portrays the otherworldly mentor to the white lead. The occult African American has become such a stereotype on screen that the figure is now widely known as “the magical Negro,” a term so established that it has earned its own Wikipedia entry. Among the many films that the entry identifies as featuring this character are The Shining, Ghost, The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Green Mile, What Dreams May Come, The Matrix, and The Family Man. In each, a Black person has divine or supernatural powers, which he or she uses to shape the white main character’s life. Hollywood’s frequent recourse to this figure implies that African Americans are more connected to the spiritual (while perhaps being less rational?) than whites are. Even so, “the magical Negro” remains a marginal character, not the movie’s focus.

Prior to Good Night, and Good Luck, several other films have used Black singers to emphasize emotions implicit in a white-dominated plot. Sometimes the performers fulfill this purpose entirely off-screen, their voices being heard merely on the soundtrack. In his book Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture, Krin Gabbard analyzes examples of this phenomenon. He points out that in Next Stop Wonderland, a film whose main characters are white, the heroine’s move toward promising romance is accompanied by passionate off-screen singing by Sarah Vaughan (3–4). Gabbard also notes that the burgeoning sexual liberation of Pleasantville‘s white teenagers is signaled by Etta James’s off-screen singing of “At Last” (101). He observes as well that crucial to The Bridges of Madison County are the Johnny Hartman recordings that air on the heroine’s radio or otherwise play on the soundtrack Gabbard argues plausibly that these songs, all of them ballads, serve to underscore the masculine sensitivity of Clint Eastwood’s character as he falls in love with Meryl Streep’s (59–68).

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