The Blaxploitation Horror Film by Mustafa Jamil;

Author:Mustafa, Jamil;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wales Press

Horror in Black and White: Multiplicity and Hybridity in Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde

This white/Black opposition is ubiquitous in the film’s mise en scène. Pride first appears in a white lab coat, in a white hospital building, in bright white light. Tellingly, he wears white not only at work but also at home, where he dresses in white pyjamas and a white robe. Billie likewise wears a white lab coat, which covers a black blouse. Her outfit is reversed by the black suit and white shirt that Pride wears to the hospital, before removing his black suit jacket and putting on a white lab coat. These scenes illustrate how often ‘white is the positive term, holding priority and privilege over black’.89 The film associates whiteness with scientific objectivity, expertise and purity. Whiteness is also linked with wealth, for both the well-funded hospital and Pride’s mansion are white. More complexly, dressing in white suggests alignment with, if not assimilation into, white hegemony. Billie’s wearing black underneath white indicates that though she is ‘essentially’ Black, her professional role requires her to assume whiteness. Conversely, Pride’s wearing a white shirt under a black suit jacket signifies his acceptance of white values and ideology, thereby reinforcing Linda’s critique. His trading a black suit jacket for a white lab coat, while retaining his black trousers, bifurcates both his outfit and his symbolic significance: white above the waist and black below it, his clothing replicates the white/Black opposition, reinforces the conventional hierarchy of its constituents, and hints at the potent sexuality stereotypically associated with Blackness. This association, and that between Blackness and villainy, is strengthened and illustrated by the black hat worn by Silky, an abusive, knife-wielding, African American criminal.

While white/Black often functions conventionally in Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, the film follows Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and departs from canonical film adaptations by occasionally reversing and conflating the elements of this opposition. In a significant scene, Preston, a white pimp, supplies the drug-addled Silky, a Black pimp, with cocaine on the condition that he convince Linda to return to work for him. That Silky wears a black hat, and Preston a black suit, signifies their relative degrees of turpitude and underscores the latter’s dominance over the former. Yet, both figuratively and literally, white is more significant than Black in this scene. Preston’s influence, though not solely a function of his whiteness, is closely connected with it. He is a white man who employs a white drug to control a Black man – and, through him, a Black woman. Preston’s power play is enacted in his ‘office’, a restroom whose fixtures are white, a venue that – together with Silky’s calling the cocaine ‘shit’ – emphasises the execrable nature of Preston’s business. The white pimp’s malignity, however, pales beside that of the murderous albino Hyde, who kills Silky by crushing him against a wall with Pride’s Rolls-Royce. In Pride/Hyde, described by Lt O’Connor as a ‘black doctor that turns white at night’, the associated binary oppositions white/Black and good/evil appear to be reversed.

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