Bad Feminist

In Part 3, Gay emphasizes the Representation of Marginalized Identities and The Burden of Responsibility Placed on Marginalized People with discussions of how film and TV depict Black people. The section contains three significant arguments about Black representation in media: that white creators have typically mishandled race/racial representations; that a part of this mishandling stems from Hollywood’s desire to see Black people depicted in specific and simple ways; and that Black creators also succumb to representational simplicity and are limited in the creative and narrative avenues they can explore.

The essays on The Help and Django Unchained exemplify how white creators mishandle Black people and Black people’s historical experience. Gay points out that with some critical distance and the experience of being Black, The Help is wildly offensive: “The overexaggerated dialect spoken by the maids evokes cowed black folk shuffling through their miserable lives, singing negro spirituals” (215). She also points out the “gross implication” that Skeeter’s childhood nanny’s “will to live came from wiping the assess and scrubbing the toilets of white folks” (215). Similarly, Gay notes “a moment [in Django Unchained] with a slave merrily enjoying herself on a tree swing on a plantation [. . .] while nearby, another slave is about to be beaten” (221). In addition, Gay notes the way that Django is made into a caricature for the audience to laugh at when he “picks a bright blue fop of a suit” (224).

An underlying idea in both essays is that the movies are not really about Black people. They center white characters and white perspectives, and the simplistic, condescending depictions of Black people are merely devices to drive the white narrative forward. On The Help, Gay discusses the “magical negro” trope, which she defines as “the insertion of a black character into a narrative who bestows upon the protagonist the wisdom he or she needs to move forward in some way” (209). Gay counts 12 or 13 such characters in The Help “who use their mystical powers [. . .] by helping Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan grow out of her awkwardness and insecurity into a confident, racially aware, independent career woman” (210). In a similar manner, Django is not Django’s narrative but Schultz’s. Arguably, Django serves as Schultz’s “magical negro,” helping “a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt” (225). Gay identifies Django as a “white man’s slavery revenge fantasy” (225), replete with lack of historical accuracy and imagination about what Black enslaved people actually desired in terms of autonomy and freedom.

What these flawed and offensive depictions come down to is the creators’ exploitation of racism as a mere plot device, fueled by white privilege and insensitivity to the experiences and humanity of marginalized people. In the case of Tarantino, Gay suggests that he wields this privilege and insensitivity deliberately:

Tarantino […] managed to find a traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people that has little to do with his own history, and used that cultural experience to exercise his hubris for making farcically violent, vaguely funny movies that set to right historical wrongs from a very limited, privileged position (222).

Meanwhile, Kathryn Stockett (the author of The Help) and Tate Taylor (the writer of the screenplay) do not even make a credible effort at writing the Black characters in a realistic and complex way. Gay writes that Stockett’s “depictions of race are almost fetishistic unless they are downright insulting” (217). She goes on to say that Stockett “caricatures black women, finding pieces of truth and genuine experience and distorting them to repulsive effect” (217).

Tarantino, Stockett, and Taylor are part of a larger problem in Hollywood. Gay more explicitly discusses the specific and stereotypical ways that Hollywood wishes to see Black characters in Essay 25, writing, “Hollywood has very specific notions about how it wants to see black people on the silver screen [. . .] all too often, critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation” (227). By first discussing The Help and Django and then pointing out Hollywood’s hunger for limited depictions of Black people, Gay draws an important link between the outright racially insensitive and the efforts of Black creators to gain representation and success in the entertainment arena. What these creators, both white and Black, choose to put out reflects and perpetuates a wider cultural malaise: the denial of The Fullness and Complexity of Humanity to marginalized people in both real life and artistic renderings.

This calls back to Gay’s discussion of Thornton Dial and happy endings, where she notes that both pain and happiness characterize the experience of the marginalized (as they do all humans). One wouldn’t know this, however, from the cycle that the film industry perpetuates: “Filmmakers take note and keep giving Hollywood exactly what it wants. Hollywood showers these struggle narratives with the highly coveted critical acclaim” (231). The more Black filmmakers are limited in what they can do, the more struggle narratives dominate, impeding the possibility of “more narrative complexity, more artistic experimentation, more black screenwriters and directors [being] allowed to use their creative talents” (232). Furthermore, there is an inordinate amount of responsibility placed on Black creators and Black consumers, whereby “[e]ach time a black movie is made, it has to succeed or risk fallout for the movies that follow” (249). With this quote, Gay reminds her readers of Part 2’s discussion of the burden on female filmmakers and show creators.

Gay points to three Black filmmakers to illustrate her point about the predominance of the struggle narrative: Steve McQueen, Tyler Perry, and Ryan Coogler. She points out the artistic choices that these writers and directors make, emphasizing how they play into Hollywood’s hands with the stories they choose to tell and the sometimes exploitative manner in which they tell them. In each discussion, Gay also foregrounds the gender and/or class dimension interacting with the racial dimension. For example, on McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, she notes that “Black women’s suffering is used to a tell a man’s story [. . .] it is more often the women who suffer and Northrup who becomes more miserable by being forced to bear witness. It is his suffering that is painted as more profound” (229). This observation recalls Gay’s argument about the brokenness that patriarchy produces and reinforces; while men are indeed broken by the distortions of dominance and power, women are typically in the line of fire as well. Privilege and perspective play an important role here, with Gay implicitly questioning whether McQueen’s depictions of physical and sexual violence against women would be so gratuitous if he weren’t a man.

Gay’s criticism of Tyler Perry is harsher, leaving no room to doubt that women’s suffering is central to his narratives. In fact, their suffering and punishment is the vehicle through which Perry promulgates his lessons on morality:

In many of Perry’s movies, women are not to be trusted. Women are regularly punished in these movies, whether by abuse, addiction, or adultery. While there are “good” women in his films, there are so many bad women—women who are unfulfilled by their lives and/or marriages and are then punished when they try to find fulfillment. An unspoken message, all too often, is “You should be grateful for what you’ve got” (234).

This description indicates Perry’s complicity in dominant cultural messaging that the little bit of progress against patriarchal dominance should satisfy women’s desire for liberation (Gay earlier found a similar message in Rosin’s The End of Men). This idea again points to privilege and perspective—particularly to the nuance required to understand the unique struggles of Black women and other women of color. This becomes a more explicit discussion in Part 5.

The same idea connects the discussion of Perry to Gay’s analysis of Orange Is the New Black and the choices that its creator makes. Gay points out the pressure that people put on her to like the show—the expectation that she’s “supposed to be grateful for the scraps” (250). Given Kohan’s shallow and tokenistic diversity (252), her reliance on racist tropes for the “diverse” characters (253), and the fact that the show centers a white woman (252), Gay questions why she should settle for “the famine from which we must imagine feast” (253). Similarly, she questions the popularity behind Perry’s poorly written and misogynistic work, noting the sentiment that the work’s existence is “better than nothing, even if the something we have is hardly anything at all” (242).

Gay also notes Perry’s exploitation—and specifically fetishization—of the working class. She points out the irony in his demonization of ambition “given the enormous wealth Perry has amassed from a largely working-class audience” (236). While Perry exploits and romanticizes the working-class experience, Coogler handles working-class realities more carefully in Fruitvale Station. Gay points out that the underlying tone of the movie is Grant’s exhaustion with the reality of institutional barriers designed to impede his success as a young Black man. For example, Gay notes the scene where Grant is “[f]orced to decide whether to sell drugs to support his family” (248), as well as his attempt to “get his job back at a local grocer after being fired” (248). Coogler’s depiction humanizes Grant, who, like so many young Black men, is barred from the very opportunities that would prevent him from resorting to criminality in order to survive. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion of the burden of responsibility: Coogler needs to accurately present this young Black man’s experience so that society might have some “insight into the consequences” of institutional racism and its intersection with economic inequity (248).

Part 3 illustrates the ways that pop culture representations indicate a wider sociocultural milieu in which full humanity and complexity are denied to Black people and other people of color. Thus, Parts 2 and 3 are an important prelude to Part 4, where Gay more explicitly deals with the politics and real-life implications of gender and racial oppression.