No one resembling him, or anyone resembling any of the Scottsboro
Boys, nor anyone resembling my father, has yet made an appearance
on the American cinema scene.
—
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
I accuse Hollywood of being the most anti-Negro influence
in this nation in the twentieth century.
—
John Oliver Killens, White Racism
Among his many roles, Sidney Poitier was never entirely
at ease as black America’s box office superstar. Yet
Poitier’s
early life on Cat Island was like that of a lot of poor blacks
in America. The family struggled to survive without the conveniences
of wealth, but managed to make do through blue-collar labor.
When economic depression forced the family to relocate to
Nassau, Poitier sought refuge in film. As an introduction
of sorts to the world beyond the islands, film took the place
of a liberal arts education. The more Poitier learned about
the world, the more he realized that “he" was
missing from it — that people who looked like him were
absent from the screen. Exclaiming: “[I] very rarely
saw a Negro man when I was looking for myself," Poitier
concluded that Hollywood was for the most part skeptical
about removing the color line on the silver screen. Despite
how discouraging this may have been, Poitier never stopped
projecting himself upon the world of the cinema. After a
few stints in the theater, Poitier set out for Hollywood.
This essay will examine Poitier’s role in liberal Hollywood’s
on-screen fight for civil rights in post World War II America.
Employing a methodology that blends film criticism with new
historicism, I will offer readings of two popular Poitier
films of the Cold War era that emphasize the social worth
of racial integration: Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant
Ones (1958), and Norman Jewison’s In the Heat
of the Night (1967). By situating Poitier in what is
commonly referred to as the “biracial buddy film" — liberal
Hollywood’s on-screen tactic of juxtaposing a black
male actor alongside a white one to showcase the possibility
of interracial friendship — we can measure the degree
to which liberal Hollywood attempted to fight racism and
fully incorporate African-Americans into the national scene.
Because Poitier in many of his on-screen performances of
the era embodies the Cold War rhetoric of containment — the
ideal blend of proper etiquette and restrained or suppressed
machismo — he signifies the possibilities of U.S. universalism
(the idea that democracy can work in that it provides a space
for blacks and various members of the “Other" to
pull themselves up by their bootstraps and enter the mainstream).
Acknowledging the fact that the mainstream is for the most
part an articulation of white experience, this essay will
question whether or not these films successfully debunk the
myths of black masculinity in relationship to the mystique
of white womanhood and middle-class identity. Because the
biracial buddy film begs us to believe that a black man and
a white man can befriend one another in the midst of racial
difference, I want to suggest that these on-screen relationships
are governed by the over-arching presence of whiteness and
the degree to which black men can perform the rituals of
whiteness. Performing whiteness becomes an essential component
in Hollywood’s cinematic effort to eradicate the color
line during the Cold War. In discussing the role of whiteness,
I seek to expose the pseudo-integrationist impulse behind
Hollywood’s civil rights.
As Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner point out in Radical Hollywood,
Hollywood had taken on the problem of the color line long
before 1958. According to Buhle and Wagner shortly after
its formation in 1942, the Office of War Information (OWI)
had “a full agenda of Hollywood priorities to build
victory spirit on the home front, including the improvement
of race relations." The OWI-NAACP-Hollywood alliance
was constructed upon the idea that “crisis bred reassertions
and enactments" that could be projected upon the silver
screen. At the insistence of Walter White and the NAACP,
Hollywood responded with a series of “problem films" that
tackled racism. From 1946 to 1950, problem films “flourished" primarily
for two reasons: 1) they dramatized what Donald Bogle describes
as “audience expectations and demands, their quirks,
their insecurities, and their guilt feelings"; 2) they
provided a quick fix for the box office slump. By the late
forties, ticket sales had declined drastically as more Americans
relied upon network television for entertainment. In 1946
weekly theatre attendance was around eighty-two million people.
In 1950 it had dropped to only thirty-six million. The only
advantage the studio had over television was its ability
to treat heavier themes and subjects, and this is exactly
what it did. Poitier, who had left the stage for more money,
could not have come to Hollywood at a better time. His strong
on-screen presence and versatility made him a favorite, indeed
Hollywood’s favorite “Negro" actor.
But this was a title that Poitier found painfully limiting.
In 1950 he told Archer Winsten that the New Hollywood would “integrate
Negroes into the American scene, not as Negroes, but as persons." Clearly
Poitier found Hollywood’s interest in the Negro selfish;
blacks were often portrayed as the “problem" in
many of the so-called problem films of the 1940s, as Ed Guerrero
explains in Framing Blackness. Rarely cast as complex
characters, blacks were used to dramatize disparaging stereotypes
and
tropes. Many black activists and liberal-minded Hollywood
figures shared Poitier’s criticism. Director/producer
Stanley Kramer was also appalled with racism in Hollywood,
so he decided to make a movie about it. When Kramer presented
Poitier with the part of Noah Cullen in The Defiant Ones,
Poitier readily agreed to push the film’s political
message: the social worth of racial integration both on and
off the screen.
After The Defiant Ones was released, Kramer described
his intent behind the film as his desire “to tell the
glory of the sacrifice for a man." What is troubling
about this statement is that Kramer does not clearly identify
who
makes the sacrifice. Surely, it could not be Joker (Tony
Curtis) who is hostile towards Cullen throughout the film,
and attempts to abandon him with the assistance of his white
lover. Joker who has known his lover all of one night has
already forgotten about the hardships that he has endured
with Cullen’s assistance. Nevertheless, Cullen jumps
off a moving train to stay with Joker. So just who makes
the so-called sacrifice? I suppose that an argument could
be made in favor of Joker’s relinquishment of his blue-eyed
blonde as a sacrifice of sorts, but how silly and shallow
would it be to do so when the fact of the matter is that
Joker’s feat cannot even compare to Cullen’s?
After all, when Cullen abandons the train he gives up a chance
at freedom. But just what does Joker give up when he decides
to return to Cullen? A white woman who is all too eager to
abandon her son? Why even put a woman into a film that is
ultimately about the love that can develop between a black
and a white man? Why have one of the men — the white
one — become sexually entangled with her?
Perhaps it is the threat that black masculinity poses to
both white manhood and womanhood. This explains why Joker
and the husbandless woman make love. It is not so much an
act of lovemaking as it is an affirmation of domesticity.
Joker makes love to the white woman not because he falls
in love with her, but because she brings to mind the pleasantries
and conveniences of the marital bond, the bond between a
white man and woman. Joker’s sexual relationship with
her, albeit one night, is a refutation of what his “bond" to
Cullen represents — male desire outside of the domestic
space. Consider the exchange that takes place earlier in
the film where Cullen and Joker are attempting to break the
chain that ties them together. Joker, who suggests that the
two go south, is angered by Cullen’s dissatisfaction.
Angrily he shouts, “Get off my back! I ain’t
married to you." Cullen knowingly replies: “You’re
married to me alright, now here’s the ring," indicating
the chain, “but I ain’t going south."
This scene would seem to suggest that there is an underlying
fear, on Joker’s part, of what the physical closeness
to another male body, a black one, represents. Later on,
inside the home of the husbandless woman, this fear is exposed
when Joker pulls Cullen toward the hearth to break the chain.
Is it a mere coincidence that their “bond" is
broken upon the hearth? Not if you acknowledge the fact that
the hearth symbolizes home, warmth, and domestic order. However,
this is not to say that Joker desires a domestic union with
the husbandless woman. He only affirms it because he is afraid
of what lies on the other side of it, an emotional attachment
to Cullen. And just where is Cullen while Joker is making
love to the husbandless woman? He is stretched out across
the kitchen table, asleep, with Billy’s rifle under
his arms — that is of course until the woman takes
it away from him.
As Ed Guerrero suggests in The Black Image in Protective
Custody, this scene should be read as a “strategy
of containment." Cullen, an armed black man, poses
a threat to white domesticity even while he is sleeping.
Therefore,
the white woman must “strip" Cullen of his masculinity
(by taking the rifle away) to reduce him to the level of
a child, like her own who is also asleep in the next room.
Aside from believing that Cullen is dangerous, the woman
also views him as an obstacle in her plan to run away with
Joker. This is why she sends Cullen to the swamp, hoping
that he will die. But what she does not anticipate is Joker’s
trouble with this. Believing that her feminine wiles will
win out, the woman never suspects that Joker’s attachment
to Cullen is stronger than what brings them together for
one night. And when she is forced to confront the truth about
American masculinity, she is in utter dismay.
Andrea Levine spells out exactly what the truth about American
masculinity signifies for white women. According to her,
it is degraded value. Because black and white men can come
together
in the absence of white women, white womanhood loses its
social worth. Levine argues that historically it was the
white woman who was the “anchor of racist ideology." Her
very presence positioned her as something to be guarded against
black men. In the historical racial hierarchy, black men
were described as savage in a large part due to the social
worth of white womanhood. Often celebrated as the epitome
of beauty, Levine argues that white women were largely responsible
for many of the violent crimes committed against black men.
In “Sidney Poitier’s Civil Rights: Rewriting
the Mystique of White Womanhood in Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night," Levine
summarizes the history of black-white male relationships
and the role
white women played in constructing it:
Resting on the presumption that white
women were the fragile property of their white fathers,
husbands, and brothers,
the mystique of white womanhood ostensibly motivated thousands
of lynchings. White female sexuality in the South thus always
functioned as a means by which white men could regulate their
relationships with black men.
Because the presence of white women has historically been
responsible for hostile relationships between black and white
men, once gone, men can befriend one another through gender.
As Robyn Wiegman argues, biracial buddy movies do not work
because white liberal Hollywood’s dreams of racial
integration are materialized, nor because of the socio-political
punch of their themes, but for no other reason than that
they feature a pairing whose relationship is not based upon “possessing" the
white woman. Beth McCoy enhances this argument exclaiming
that the “intramasculine" differences arrived
at by class and race are replaced “by the prevailing
framework of gender" only after the white woman is
removed from the narrative. Her absence allows the black
man to reclaim his masculinity. As McCoy explains, the black
man has been feminized by the social power of the white man,
and the removal of the white woman allows the black man to
enter a “putatively aracial fraternity." In her
absence, men are able to identify with one another through
gender because sex with her is not an option. Once this bond
is established, it cannot be broken even by her. This is
because the transcendence of racial difference can only occur
after the threat of white femininity is discarded. At the
end of The Defiant Ones this is why Joker returns to Cullen.
After he has already “conquered" her sexuality
by bedding her, Joker pushes the white woman away declaring: “Lady,
I ain’t got time." Though she coaxes him and
he quickly gives in to her charms, he does not do so without
expressing his reservation. Ultimately, he leaves her to
go rescue his buddy in the swamp.
Despite the film’s good intentions, The Defiant
Ones raises questions that put its liberalism in peril. In terms
of its portrayal of a black convict, the film does not stray
away from unfavorable stereotypes. Within the first five
minutes of the film’s opening, we see Cullen singing
cheerfully in chains like a dutiful slave perfectly content
in his captivity. We also see this unwavering fidelity during
a scene in which Cullen, having made it successfully onto
the freight car, jumps off to be with Joker. Of course it
has to be Cullen who makes it on board the moving train;
everyone knows “how fast Negroes run." But if
underneath all of this there lies a greater good, does it
really matter what it is? How can we champion Hollywood’s
endorsement of “integration" in films like The
Defiant Ones when we see no other black besides Poitier?
Surely this is not Hollywood’s understanding of racial
integration, the insertion of one black man in an all white
world, or is it?
In “The Black Image in Protective Custody," Guerrero
discusses the common industry practice of placing black actors
in films where there are isolated from other blacks. The
black actor, “surrounded and appropriated by a White
context" becomes the sole representative of blackness
in the “protective custody" of a white male lead.
Guerrero believes that the containment of the black image
in film is Hollywood’s internalization of the racial
dialogue that goes on beyond the screen. As he sees it, Hollywood
does not seek to include blacks because it values their cultural
experience, but by including at least “one" they
can appear liberal without compromising the social hierarchy.
Guerrero’s claims provide a valuable context within
which Poitier’s performances in films such as The
Defiant Ones and In the Heat of the Night might be read. In both
films, Poitier is placed in the “protective custody" of
the white male lead who must overcome his bigotry so that
he can identify with a black male. As Cynthia J. Fuchs points
out, in biracial buddy films, both men, despite their differences,
desire to identify with one another.
In In the Heat of the Night, however, the possibilities
for male identification are undercut by class and racial
differences.
Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), a successful Philadelphia detective,
and Gillespie (Rod Steiger), the rough, racist, gum-chewing
Sheriff of Sparta, Mississippi must overcome their prejudices
to solve a murder. While the two can hardly be called friends
they do reach an impasse of sorts at the end of the film — proving
that black and white men can overcome their differences and
work together. Despite the film’s liberal message,
it nevertheless features the containment of the black male
body. But unlike earlier Hollywood films, In the Heat
of the Night does not seek to make a joke about black male identity.
In fact, the film challenges many harmful assumptions about
black men by reversing what Christopher Ames calls “the
conventional polarity of civilization and savagery." Because
the film challenges society’s stereotypical conventions,
it passes as progressive and is, therefore, celebrated as
a milestone on the road to equality in the liberal community.
But what happens when white people see a film like In
the Heat of the Night and their point of identification is reversed?
Instead of the middle class white man educated and polished
they get Poitier, highly intelligent, well dressed, and black?
What happens to mainstream audiences’ expectations
when it is the white man who is coarse and unsophisticated?
According to Guerrero, their expectations are met in the
representation of the black character in the protective custody
of the white actor. In this sense, the film does not challenge
society’s conventions by portraying blacks in a positive
light. Rather, those expectations are met by the black actor
who “conforms" to mainstream society’s
ideas of what black people should be like, which is ultimately
white like them. Even though the white man does not satisfy
mainstream audiences’ sensibilities in terms of class,
he is only there because of the point of identification provided
by his white skin. As Guerrero suggests, Hollywood understands
the expectations of mainstream America even better than those
who comprise it. Hollywood understands that mainstream Americans
needs to see those expectations met on screen. More often
than not, those expectations are the reflections of their
own experiences. Richard Dyer best expresses this when he
writes that “mainstream cinema is predominantly an
articulation of white experience." Knowing that this
is the bottom line, Hollywood only casts black male leads
when it can override their on screen performances with a
white actor.
Guerrero argues that it is because white audiences demand
a white point of identification that white actors are placed
alongside black actors in film. He believes mainstream audiences
do not entirely feel at ease with having a black actor on
screen, alone. And neither would they feel comfortable with
a movie with too many black characters, and too little white
ones. Perhaps Robert Townsend, black producer and filmmaker,
best expresses this when he argues: “Hollywood is afraid
that if you have more than one black person in a movie you
have a black movie." And considering that blacks make
up less than fifteen percent of the population, why would
anyone who is not black want to see a black film? But of
course this is not acceptable to say, not aloud anyhow. Yet
it is said nonetheless in films like In the Heat of the
Night.
Because Hollywood wants to appear liberal, it creates a character
like Virgil Tibbs. Moreover, it creates an unbelievable plot
that begs us to believe that a successful black man would
stay in a town like Sparta longer than the few minutes it
might take to board another train. Why does Virgil stay?
Aside from the realities of the narrative (his boss demands
that he stay), he must stay so that he can change the attitudes
and beliefs of the people around him. This is a high-minded
objective if ever there was one. Regardless of Virgil’s
talents for detective work, he still both treated and viewed
as a black man. In terms of the movie’s treatment of
him, this means that he is something to be contained and
feared.
Consider the scene where we first see Virgil. He is sitting
on a bench at the station quietly awaiting his train. The
chief, a not too bright voyeur, spots him and approaches
him suspiciously. The first words the deputy speaks to Virgil
are: “On your feet, boy . . . Now!" Surprised
by this type of language, Virgil rises only after the deputy
pulls out his gun. Virgil, facing the wall with a gun to
his back, listens as the chief tells him that there is a
police car out front and that he wants him to “plant" himself
in it “like a good boy." In the next scene, Virgil
is at the station like a prisoner, at least that is what
one of the officers calls him. For the racist officers of
Sparta, black skin is an automatic indicator of guilt. This
marker is what makes it so hard for Gillespie to believe
that Virgil is a police officer, and makes more money than
him too. Not until Virgil’s credentials are authenticated
by his boss does Gillespie take him seriously. Nevertheless,
he is threatened by Virgil’s expertise and what it
means for his masculinity. This explains why Gillespie continuously
calls him “boy," or “Virgil," rather
than “Mr. Tibbs."
Andrea Levine suggests that the relationship between Gillespie
and Virgil acts to contain Virgil’s masculinity by
positioning Gillespie as a father figure of sorts over the
stubborn Virgil. There is an exchange between the two in
which Gillespie tells Virgil that “he’d like
to ‘horsewhip’ him." Virgil, who has overlooked
the racial implications of this comment, passively responds
with, “My father used to say that . . . He did a few
times, too." In this scene, Gillespie acts as a substitute
for Virgil’s late father. But this is not necessarily
indicative of fraternal bonding. It is more representative
of a father-son relationship that operates on an established
hierarchy of power. There is also the scene that takes place
in Gillespie’s office where the late Mr. Corber’s
wife is present, pleading for the detectives to solve the
case. When Virgil’s intelligence and sense of self-worth
appears too self-assured, Gillespie orders his men to take
Virgil down to a jail cell to be locked up with a juvenile
delinquent. Rather than treat Virgil with the respect of
a man, Gillespie punishes him like a boy who has overstepped
his boundaries and puts him on “time-out" with
another bad little boy. Yet what makes Virgil’s outburst
anymore threatening than it was before? Earlier when Gillespie
asks Virgil to take a look at the dead body, Virgil rather
loudly shouts, “Take a look at it yourself!" Is
it the presence of Mrs. Corber, a white woman that makes
Virgil’s outburst inappropriate? Is it too far fetched
to suggest that Gillespie feels threatened by Mrs. Corber’s
fondness for Virgil? After all, she is the one who demands
that Virgil stay on the case, threatening to take her late
husbands business elsewhere if they should dispose of him.
Now this is not to say that Mrs. Corber has any sexual interest
in Virgil, but the implication is that she feels more confident
about his abilities as a detective than the other men in
Sparta. She knows that as a woman, a white woman for that
matter, that by evoking the presence and power of another
white man, her husband, that she can enter the masculine
world and position herself in such a way to endorse Virgil’s
male credentials.
What about the town’s reaction to Virgil? Despite his
professionalism, they still treat him like an unintelligible
boy. After Virgil asserts himself by slapping Mr. Endicott,
a wealthy white cotton producer who seems to find it necessary
to remind Virgil: “There was a time when
I could have had you shot"—Gillespie demands
that Virgil return to Philadelphia. Perhaps it is because
he genuinely fears for Virgil’s life. But underneath
his growing respect for Virgil, he is still nevertheless
intimidated by the bold articulation of his masculinity.
Consider the scene that follows, where Virgil, cornered by
several white high school boys, attempts to fight them off
one by one. Once Gillespie appears Virgil, almost embarrassed
by his presence, quickly abandons the scene. But Gillespie
on the other hand seems to feel empowered by having to save
Virgil. Forcefully, he tells the boys to, “Get out
of here," threatening them with violence. What is troubling
about this scene is that Virgil’s power is silenced,
or overshadowed by Gillespie’s intervention. It means
nothing that as a black man he has slapped a rude, racist
old white man who he believes to be guilty of the crime,
or that he has managed to survive for seconds in the presence
of the armed white boys who want to kill him. Neither does
it seem to matter that he solves the case. In the end, Virgil
Tibbs is just another Negro who has gotten to be too big
for his britches and must go home.
But not before the truth about the so-called precious femininity
of white womanhood is exposed. The investigation of Dolores
Purdy and her sexual behavior exposes the degree of racism
that is involved in defending her honor. This point is best
expressed in Gillespie’s office when Purdy and her
brother are attempting to convince the Sheriff that her pregnancy
is a result of a rape-like seduction, rather than the freedom
she takes with her sexuality. When Purdy’s brother
wants Virgil to leave the room — to salvage the remnants
of her honor — he is angered by the Sheriff’s
decision to keep Virgil present. Because the presence of
white womanhood
introduces the racialized hierarchy of male masculinity,
Purdy’s brother is deeply offended by the Sheriff’s
endorsement of Virgil’s male credentials. By granting
Virgil the right to stay in the room, the Sheriff places
him on an equal footing to the other white men in the room.
But Virgil is only allowed to stay because Gillespie has
authorized his masculinity. Ultimately, the truth about Dolores
Purdy is revealed — the father of her child in none
other than Ralph, and her brother is shot in the impending
chaos.
The resolution of In the Heat of the Night, which
does not really resolve anything in terms of its treatment
of black-white
relations, nevertheless begs the question: Why Poitier? According
to Levine, Poitier’s success
can be attributed to “the consistent nobility, altruism,
and pacifism of the characters he played" and its distance
from what Donald Bogle calls “ghetto cultural baggage." What
this means is that Poitier was the preferred black actor
by white America because his characters effectively moved
in the white world without demanding recognition of their
own. In “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier
So," Clifford Mason argues that Poitier’s characters
never retreat into their own black communities, but live
in “the white world . . . helping the white man solve
the white man’s problem." In a similar vein,
we can view Poitier’s figurative “passing" in
relationship to Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s claim that: “One
must give up all claims of ethnicity to be properly white." In
this respect, we can conclude that since Poitier was for
the most part detached from the black cinematic community,
he was widely accepted by mainstream America because he fit
their ideas of what black men should be like — white
like them. No other scene in the movie articulates this assimilationist
bent better than the final scene at the station where Virgil
and Gillespie shake hands. (Arguably, they do so because
Gillespie has accepted Virgil as his intellectual superior,
giving him the status of a white man.) But if we read this
gesture as James Baldwin does in The Devil Finds Work, this “obligatory,
fade-out kiss" becomes an act of reconciliation. The
handshake is supposed to convince us that the men have erased
all of their prejudices and have reached a new understanding
of one another. Yet what Gillespie’s and Virgil’s
parting really represents is their mutual acceptance of their
proper positions on either side of the color line. Although
the men have developed a newfangled respect for one another,
the film’s ending ironically invokes the ideology behind
the “separate, but equal" campaign. Though the
men learn how to get along, they acknowledge the fact that
they cannot work together peacefully in Sparta. It is with
this in mind that Gillespie tells Virgil to “take care
now, you hear," and the two part ways. Despite Jewison’s
efforts to endorse racial integration on screen, In the Heat
of the Night fails to properly depict social integration
amongst blacks and whites. Instead, the film demonstrates
that the only way a black man can change the low opinions
others might hold of him is to silence all markers of difference
in order to more fully embrace the whiteness that surrounds
him.
January 2007
From guest contributor Melissa Daniels
|