Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies by Hooks Bell

Author:Hooks, Bell [Hooks, Bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: feminism
ISBN: 9780415918244
Amazon: 0415918243
Goodreads: 681868
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-11-22T08:00:00+00:00

15

THE CULTURAL MIX: AN

INTERVIEW WITH

WAYNE WANG

The Buddhist concept of “maitri” is translated as loving kindness by many teachers here in the West. In The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron shares that we are here to study ourselves, to live in a spirit of wakefulness. To that end we need to be curious and inquisitive, alive and open, and it is that path that will lead us to “the fruition of maitri-playfulness.”

Her words resonate in my mind as I think about the unique magical aspects of Wayne Wang’s work. All his early films—

Chan is Missing, Dim Sum—and the more recent Hollywood films— The Joy Luck Club, Smoke, Blue in the Face—reveal a passion for ordinary detail, the dailiness of life. Wang’s work is not documentary realism, instead he works to capture the meditative spirit of stillness and reflection that is often present in all our lives but goes unnoticed. He takes the fascination with small details, ordinary tasks that hint at a larger

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metaphysics. It is easy to see why the narrative of Smoke would intrigue him.

Working in enclosed space, without directing a great deal of attention to a large environmental context, Smoke reminds us of the way in which our lives are shaped and circumscribed by landscapes over which we have very little control. Wang juxtaposes those environments with the inner landscape—that place in the self where we can imagine and thus invent and reinvent ourselves. This spirit of tenderness is awesomely present in Blue in the Face, and is personified in the characters of Jimmy Rose (Jared Harris), who is a mixture of late bloomer, idiot savant, lovable “retard”; the Rapper (Malik Yoba) who is a combination scammer, street hustler, and philosopher; in the passionate and poetic longing of Violet (Mel Gorham), who desires fulfillment in love and cannot find it; and in Dot (a really powerful moving performance by Roseanne). In Blue in the Face, Wang teases out the complex inner layers of the psyche in a way that is marvelous.

This sense of magical complexity and the possibility of playful serendipity, of the beauty in the ordinary, is precisely what is not present in Smoke. When I first read the screenplay of Smoke I found it such a moving narrative. The story’s insistence that we can never really “judge” another person because we do not know enough about the path that they have walked is a powerful intervention in a culture where we are socialized to judge by appearances. And Wang’s decision to give racial diversity and identification to the characters, when this was not present in the original story, was all the more compelling. Evil cannot simply be designated as a characteristic of one group, and that which appears to be a lawless act might have a positive outcome. But when I saw Smoke, I was stunned by the way in which all the usual racial and sexual stereotypes are played out: the good guys are white, the bad guys black, loose women are working class or females of color, and on and on .

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