Dear White People Review

Dear White People

Directed by Justin Simien

Released in 2014

The title is what it is just to get you talking, and hopefully paying. Dear White People is a far more diplomatic, unguarded and ideologically adrift movie than its name or the thousands of defensive (and racist) comments below its YouTube trailer may imply.

This movie arrives at a time when issues of social justice, and the intersection of those issues, has finally, it seems, reached the mainstream, and writer-director Justin Simien packs so much of this political zeitgeist into his debut that it can be said to be, sight unseen, The Movie for Our Time. But while some of its strands wobble or else lapse into polemics, Dear White People assumes a freewheeling, even self-effacing pose in the face of this responsibility, for it knows it is a thoroughly college movie, in both subject and style.

In this film, the world entirely exists on the campus of Winchester University, a sprawl of gothic architecture and manicured landscape bound to be familiar to any Ivy League student. The student body is a white one, with exceptions, of course. We follow four of these exceptions: Biracial activist and filmmaker Sam White (Tessa Thompson); Troy (Brandon P. Bell), suave president of the predominantly black Armstrong Parker House and son of the school’s dean (Dennis Haysbert, excellent); Colandera “Coco” Chanders (Teyonah Parris), a South Side girl with an outsize personality she is pitching to a reality TV producer; and budding writer Lionel Higgens (Tyler James Williams), who is timidly gay and sports a gnarly afro that, in his words, doubles as “a black hole for white people’s fingers.”

Sam hosts the titular radio show, where she addresses the pale majority with such proclamations as, “Dating a black person to piss off your parents is a form of racism.” On top of everything else she is doing, like making the whiteface satire “Rebirth of a Nation” for her film major, Sam runs for president of the Armstrong Parker House on the platform to “Bring Black Back,” though she perhaps has ulterior motives because Troy is an old flame. Surprisingly, she wins, and her outspoken, self-segregating reforms exile the bratty Kurt Fletcher (Kyle Gallner), who is naturally the university’s president son, as well as the soft-spoken Lionel and lead to mounting conflict with the administration, her peers and eventually herself.

But enough of plot — Dear White People elaborates itself more through minute human interactions than through its overarching plot, which it only debatably has. All the aforementioned characters have face time with one another, sometimes in lecture halls and other times in bed. In case the poster and trailer have not made it clear, this is a sexy movie, with attractive people filmed under expressive, not necessarily realistic lighting set-ups. Simien has an eye and ear for sensitive interaction, which notably does not survive in the political arena, even on a college campus.

If this film gets at one of its issues with something resembling clarity, it’s not race, though the treatment of it is revealing and often hilarious. (Like when a huddle of black students browbeats a movie theater cashier over Tyler Perry stereotypes, the film sympathizes with their pent-up frustrations but pokes fun at the misdirection of their discourse.) What Dear White People handles with grace is the interrelated question of identity, and how with all the options and tolerance we cherish today, that question remains daunting. Through wardrobe and hairstyle changes, Sam and Coco take pains to present a truthful version of themselves to the world. Troy struggles to find a balance between appeasing his father and honing his own assertive voice, though that tension is quite clichéd, now isn’t it.

It is Lionel where much of the film’s, and undoubtedly Simien’s, sympathies lie, for he is the most resistant to classification. Like a ronin of questionable skill, Lionel wanders from the dean’s office to Armstrong Parker to the campus newspaper to Pastiche, the humor magazine, victim of Kurt’s homophobic hazing at the latter location and receiving little empathy at the rest. The film forfeits points for veracity by presenting each of these locations as walled-off institutions with strict barriers for entry when in actuality, I don’t know, campus institutions are looser than that, I think? (How else did I get in this paper all those years ago?) Institutions can be as lackadaisical as the people working for them, but a stylized film like this has to cut corners somewhere. So against his stuck-up, careerist or else inhumanly confident peers, Lionel stands out as a relatable and unpredictable work in progress.

Because Simien is black and his movie stars a multi-racial ensemble cast and ends with a race riot (here, in response to a student party featuring blackface), the parlor game of influences will draw us to Spike Lee and, specifically, Do the Right Thing. The comparison is apt, since both movies track multiple characters that encounter prejudice, in its many forms, and alternately ignore, laugh at or lash out against it. But as Sam’s boyfriend guilts her into remembering, “Your favorite director is Bergman but you tell everyone Spike Lee.” Indeed, you can see some Ingmar Bergman in the way two lovers’ faces overlap and are draped in shadow during a post-coital scene, as well as some Wes Anderson in the font and shot symmetry and some Kubrick, circa Barry Lyndon, in the painterly frames that capture ennui at Pastiche headquarters.

There are even a few times when the camera zooms in, slowly and during innocuous moments, like when Troy and his girlfriend (Brittany Curran) scale a set of stairs. That’s a move out of the Robert Altman playbook, another director mentioned here by name, and I’m not sure it’s a wise one. In fact, with Satie, Swan Lake and “Für Elise” on the soundtrack, Simien indulges in the kind of on-the-nose music and visual mixtapes you’d expect from a precocious college student. But for some reason I like that approach, because it’s honest and fitting for the setting. Like the characters in his movie, Simien is still working through his influences to emerge with a voice of his own. That voice right now may be more prolix than clear, but it’s exciting for what it’s trying to say as well as how it’s saying it, and in the world of American independent film, you can ask for little more.

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Education Through Exploitation

Courtesy of Nils Axen

If empathy is a sorely lacking human virtue, and if “movies are like a machine that generates empathy,” as Roger Ebert once said, then why does a Hollywood movie diet leave us so empathetically barren?

I long took it at face value that ‘the movies’ — the popular, American ones — reflected life in a truthful fashion, bad parts included. For the ‘bad parts’ find attention and awards at the Oscars, where a certain fusion of trite liberalism and belittling sentimentalism thrives. Every year I watch a number of new films that claim to engage with ongoing issues, racism being number one (because this is America). The Help, for instance, would very much like its bourgeois viewers to think that they now know what true racism is, when really its plot boils down to a binary conflict between good and evil that precipitates a best-selling memoir by Emma Stone.

But can a preachy Oscar-movie do good? If it falls short of subtle artistry, can it wield its cudgel of enlightenment toward open, discursive ends? Last year gave us an abundance of awards-caliber films about black American life, such as Fruitvale Station, The Butler and 12 Years a Slave, which all happen to be helmed by black directors. I’m still arguing with myself over the greatness I saw in The Butler, where the story pits an obsequious but hardy breadwinner — Forest Whitaker’s White House butler Cecil Gaines — against his militant, proudly black son, played by David Oyelowo. That dialectic, and the ennobling and tear-jerking way it resolves at the end, flirts with the profound on its own, and it is the rare melodrama to take a firm stand on politics, only after taking a hard look at the pros and cons to both sides.

Yet I worry if I praise the film because it flatters some white middle-class-ness in me, and then I worry if I should be worrying. I recall my initial reaction, which I shared with a friend after watching it, was that I learned about 1960s civil right history from that film. I had known about sit-ins, Freedom Riders and the Black Panther party since middle school, but I did not grasp their do-or-die importance until seeing three-dimensional characters enact them and quarrel over their implications. Part of this belated education no doubt owes to my largely homogenous areas of residence, yet I imagine that, for some few younger black viewers, too, the film filled an embarrassing gap not of information but of empathy for the brave players in this era of history.

The same can be said of 12 Years a Slave, only more so. It’s not a perfect movie but it is one of the few truly necessary ones, for it renders a pre-cinematic American institution in all its aloof and unceasing savagery. I was angry to find the film such a revelation, for how surprised I felt that slavery was, indeed, this bad and that my public education up to that point had failed to drive that point home on its own. That’s white guilt, I guess, and no doubt the film seeks to wring that out. By tearing a free man, Solomon Northup, from comfortable suburbia, where he kisses his children before bed, and abandoning him, alone, onto a plantation to fend for himself, the script does not force identification with a lifelong slave but with a man whose vague, given notion of freedom reflects that of the viewer, be him black or white or brown.

12 Years a Slave or The Butler should age well, since they already take place in the past, but it can be fascinating to see how Hollywood addressed systemic problems in problematic times. A week ago, Cornell Cinema screened 1968’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, inaugurating a semester-long series on Blaxploitation. In her introduction, Prof. Cheryl Finley, history of art, clarified that this Oscar-winning film directed by Stanley Kramer does not qualify as “Blaxploitation” — it’s too middlebrow, too restrained, too Hollywood for that.

But it’s an incredibly valuable text, more so than its creators likely intended. That is not to dismiss its superficial, Hollywood pleasures: Sidney Poitier’s awkward laugh, Beah Richard’s trenchant monologue, all the expected tears and fire from Katharine Hepburn. It’s good entertainment. But it’s the story of a rich white girl who brings home a black man, so it’s clearly trying to say something. There are some delicious complications: Her shocked parents, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, raised her a liberal; he is a rich, philanthropic, genius doctor, whose only ‘problem’ appears to be the color of his skin. It is a given that they both love each other very much.

The film builds to a treacly ending where Matt (Tracy), the girl’s father, approves of this interracial union because, as he says, “The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other.” But with stuck with me is not his words but the way he went about them. By that point, the women in the house (including Poitier’s African-American mother) needed no more convincing; the burden of change lay on the men. It is Matt who sits the two families down, tells them to “Shut up,” and gives them that climactic spiel on the power of love. It’s good writing, but it betrays the patriarchal view that the final, and right, word belongs to the man, and the white man, of course.

I’d get up in arms about this conclusion if not for the fact that it’s true, and that regardless of what Kramer intended, his film offers a remarkably clear-eyed, self-incriminating view of white privilege that is almost Frederick Wiseman-esque. I’m not sure the average viewer would come to this same conclusion — especially with the Wiseman namedrop — and the movie has fallen to legitimate claims that it’s part of the problem, not against it.

Yet there was something to Matt’s arrogance that prohibited me from swooning over his final speech. Due to the film’s construction, my political inclinations or maybe just my useless white guilt, there stood a barrier of empathy between me and this powerful man on-screen. I became aware that, to the end, the simple nuances of Matt’s behavior, not even his words, prevented others from having a voice. I thought of myself. To watch and revere a film that empathizes with the victims of history is one thing; to see the bad guys for who they really are, family men who have no clue of their own aggressions, is another education entirely.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Courtesy of Santi Slade

For the first time in what feels like forever, I had a real conversation with my brother. His name is Nick, he is a freshman at UCLA and he is just over a year younger than me, though you would not think it if you put the two of us back-to-back. By that, I mean he frequents the gym a lot, and it is there, back home, where he would advise me on what exercise to do and  precisely how to do it. He makes a great trainer, and I thank him for helping his little older brother, but in our house or driving around, at dinner or just lazing about with nothing better to do, I sensed a distance between the two of us.

So it was a pleasure to call him Wednesday evening, after missing two of his calls, and hear nothing about video games, money or fitness — our go-to topics for half-hearted discussion over the last few years. Instead, he could hardly contain his excitement as he ran through everything that’s lately been on his mind: student government, campus activism, careers and the Westboro Baptist Church. Regarding that last one: Apparently members protested near UCLA a few days prior, brandishing their infamous “God Hates Fags” signs. I told him to save his bile for evils less fringe and trollish than that dinosaur, but I knew his head was in the right place.

Nick is starting to look at the bigger picture. It took me until second semester freshman year to do the same, to see college as a means not only to read books, have fun or get a good job but to change: First internally and then, you hope, out in the open. I never thought I’d talk divestment, the Israel-Palestine conflict and diversity in college admissions with my brother, but there he was, chewing through these issues and more with a passion that tells me further research and even action await in his future. In all likelihood, he will best my knowledge on these subjects, regardless of whether they are tied to his college curriculum or not. That is what is special about this kind of awakening: Important questions, regarding geopolitics, racism, faith and so on, leave the classroom and colonize your downtime, breeding lifelong pursuits and realigning your priorities.

I have used this line before, and I’m sure I stole it from somewhere, but the way I see it, you go to college to become a person. Sure, you may have scored a 2400 on the SATs and led your debate team to the championships and wrote a tear-jerking college essay that, together, proved to an Ivy League admissions office how much of a hot commodity you are. But the real test comes after, away from parents, class rankings and other ruthless motivators. In fact, college offers so many avenues for distraction that it can undo all that high school overachieving, which may not be a bad thing for some. For the rest of us, however, bridging the obligation (studying, worksheets, etc.) with the distraction (music, writing, activism, etc.) becomes the newest and mind-blowing possibility.

I realize now how little I thought before. Maybe I was also a little happier, on the whole, back then — me in my ignorance. Then one day, months into the college experience, away from home and immersed in ideas that I didn’t totally understand, I came to a deflating realization: I do not matter. I was taking an astronomy course at the time, so the verdict may have been closer to “None of this matters.” If we keep this to comprehensible earthbound terms, the ramifications are the same: All those superlatives on your transcript amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things. It’s a rather depressing subject of consideration and it will always be, since once that internal switch turns on it cannot be turned off.

The only viable response to that humbling epiphany is as follows: But I want to matter! Whether you scream it aloud or never summon those exact words, therein lies the reason you get excited at anything more substantial than ice cream, from here on out. You think humanitarianism motivates fracking protesters or U.S. presidents? It does, of course, but so does reputation, self-importance, ego. We are too narcissistic a species to base our lives solely on the needs of others, and anyone trying to do good, by writing some preposterous novel or building the most efficient solar panel, knows this, deep down.

My brother is coming to grips with the effort, fueled from within, it will take to realize his dreams in life. His idealistic, go-getter oratory spells a future politician, entrepreneur or physician. Whatever path he chooses, he will outearn me, that’s for sure. I look forward to being there as witness and, now, confidante.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

More Than a Feeling

William Blake's illustrations to Milton's
"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (1816-1820)

So last week, the College Board announced big changes for the SATs, an awful and borderline anti-intellectual institution most of us — in college and beyond — survived and have since tried to forget. Who cares, right? Well, unfortunately, I do, because, effective in 2016, the College Board will no longer require students to write an essay. If you shoved any of my SAT essays (I took the test thrice) into my face today, I would hurl expletives, and maybe my lunch, back at you, because I’m sure they were platitudinous, benign and boring. But, goddammit, did I ace them. Removing the essay component in the SAT puts our academic priorities in all the wrong places, away from the written word, the value of a good argument and the process of creation.

I swear I’m not going to spend this whole column talking about SATs — I’ll get to movies shortly — but humor me for a little while as I reminiscence on that time of so much undue stress. On test day, a Saturday, I woke up around 6:15a.m., stood outside in the cold and waited on a slow-moving line just to flash my pass and student I.D. to some underpaid teacher. It was a miserable migraine of a so-called academic experience, yet the mood shifted once the SAT actually started.

I had 25 minutes to fill two pages with the best points, vocabulary and gerunds I could muster. There was no guessing, process of elimination or wasted seconds. You had to just go at it, and that’s what I did. Some impotent, probably underpaid knockoff of the Muse that Milton invoked so religiously in his poetry visited me in that high school classroom, for the thrill of besting my peers and the crunch of time inspired some … I wouldn’t call it literature, but it was some pretty good bullshit. And what surprised me, reading it over before the proctor called time, was how I packed all this ephemera into a discernible structure, with a shape to my argument and, most crucially, some evidence backing it up.

The rest of my SAT experience sucked, of course, but I value its essay component for reminding me what I excelled at, and how writing mattered as much as a doing a bunch of math problems. The College Board only introduced the writing section, — and the 800 points that came with it — in 2005. Whatever its motivations then, the dismissal of SAT writing now pushes the narrative that the humanities are on their way out — that numbers and filled-in circles equip prospective patrons of higher education better than an inspired, never-before-seen arrangement of words. This is a big problem in academia right now, one The Sun will dedicate a “Dialogue” to tomorrow in Ives Hall.

The delusion governing this administrative decision-making, in favor of STEM fields and against the liberal arts, is that the latter is not “practical” or even “rigorous.” This world needs more problem-solvers and fewer manchilds pouring their feelings onto a page or piece of canvas. While the belittling of art bothers me, I take issue with the fundamental dichotomy being drawn. The worst English essay abandons “practicality” just as the laziest scientific paper tosses out the scientific method. A misguided student may ignore form, coherence and citations when writing about To Kill a Mockingbird, and instead lapse into solipsism, asserting how touched he or she was by the book and why that emotional response is so precious. 1000-plus words later, the reader of this essay learns nothing and wonders how someone forced through the crucible of college essays and SAT writing could so thoroughly forget the lessons they were supposed to learn.

Art should never be devoid of feeling, but those evaluating it must keep that side of themselves in check. University humanities education focuses more on critical and analytical engagement with texts, whether they be books, paintings, films or songs, than the process of creating them. Whereas the former requires schooling and immersion in a medium’s theory and history, the latter depends on shakier, unteachable tenants like vision, originality and, again, the Muse. Great criticism is an art on its own, for the author tests and engages with those three things during the act of writing. But in order for an analysis to carry absolutely any import, a critic must follow some form and move past his or her initial emotional reaction: Okay, you like this movie. Now, what evidence can you share?

That word “form” matters. Even the most perplexing film, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., hits you at a rational, analytical and thematic level. Part of the thrill of watching that movie depends on an ineffable engagement with it, yet I know it is truly great because I detect a rigorously constructed chassis of ideas and storylines underneath all the superficial and beautiful obfuscation. If I can glean order from a surrealist nightmare such as Mulholland Dr., what can I learn, and subsequently teach, from the crisis in Ukraine or our ongoing economic imbroglio? I’m not sure, since I have not invested much time investigating those issues and am content sticking with the arts, thank you very much.

But the point is that criticism, when done right, is inherently constructive. The act itself, of putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, constructs ideas, as if from whole cloth. Of course, we borrow and steal thoughts and turns of phrase more than we even know, but the balanced critic has come to terms with this. And when I use the word “critic,” I don’t mean the professional pundits who write for newspapers. Someone who just finished an SAT essay may find the cogs in his brain whirring at a most unusual brisk speed, surprised that such a stupid exam with such a stupid prompt can inspire such elevated, almost automatic thought. He continues to think; he continues to write; he wonders how to channel an awakened passion for good.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

At Berkeley Review

At Berkeley
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Released in 2013

At Berkeley is four hours of lectures, labs, debates, administrative meetings and construction workers laying concrete. It is, by definition, tedious and a test of endurance. It is also distressing, alarming and above all, urgent.

Beneath the mundaneness of what veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman elects to show us, strife simmers at a medium boil. In true U.C. Berkeley fashion, this discord breaks out into a rousing protest near the film’s end, yet it leads to nowhere. Wiseman understands that our country is in a state of paralyzing crisis, and with that thesis in mind, At Berkeley looks and sounds less like a cut-up collage of video TakeNotes and more like a love letter to a system of higher education with an uncertain, frightening future.

During a lecture on Walden, an English professor stresses that Thoreau may write “a jumble of observations,” but that there is nonetheless a “pattern” to be discerned. Wiseman must have included this line, about midway through the film, as a wink to his audience trying to draw conclusions from this seeming mess of raw footage. He includes no lower-third captions (everyone we meet, including that professor, goes unnamed), no didactic voiceover, no convenient graphics or cutesy animations. Yet, of course, there is much to learn from the film — to say nothing of the lectures themselves. It helps to break At Berkeley into three rough acts: Education, Bureaucracy and Change (Or Lack Thereof).

For the first “act” (which runs over 90 minutes), Wiseman immerses us in the college classroom. A current Cornell student may wonder why she or he would watch hours of lectures when we have enough of that already, and that concern is not unfounded: There are a few really, really boring slogs here. While this just might be a symptom of my liberal arts education, I justify these trying sections for a dialectic they explore between STEM and humanities majors. Wiseman shows us students railing against their money-obsessed peers in finance and whatnot, but he has a more fundamental opposition in mind than that oft-mentioned, though no less worrisome, cliché.

Early on, a professor leads a discussion with her students. She says, “We need to talk about not individual behavior but structures of power and systems of decision-making that shift that behavior.” Wiseman must disagree with that quote, to an extent, for he props up the individual behavior of students and administrators as a macrocosm for higher education today. Yet he surely finds fascinating the back-and-forth that follows the professor’s prompt, where students raise their voices about debt, philanthropy and Tea Party rhetoric. They do not arrive at a solvable conclusion, nor does the metaphysics professor who wonders aloud whether, in the realm of spacetime, we approach time or time approaches us. These are questions wedded to the humanities, inherently unsolvable yet beautiful for the way they test and expand the boundaries of the human mind.

That is one side of the coin, and then Wiseman cuts to a pair of robot arms folding a towel with the grace of a wushu master. This long, random and near-silent scene plays like slapstick comedy. Wiseman does not belittle scientific pursuits, mind you, but, with this scene, he quarantines them from the insurmountable concerns currently engulfing the university and the world. The focus on STEM education these days should, at least we hope, amount to a safer, healthier and more efficient world. Yet the most torpid passages in At Berkeley isolate highly educated students to talk about their highly specialized scientific endeavors. What starts as an inspiring look at medical technology restoring a paraplegic’s ability to walk before long eschews the young man benefiting from this technology and instead lets the student talk in exhaustive detail about his Ph.D. I do not think this is me just speaking as a humanities student and “not getting” what he has to say. Rather, I see Wiseman allotting praise for the advances made in STEM fields yet advising those in them to flirt with the questions — whether they be in partisan politics or abstract philosophy — looming over the rest of the world.

This humanities-STEM tension permeates the first third of the film, while the rest hones in on the bureaucracy of the U.C. Berkeley establishment, and how it works hard, with good intentions, to fix problems beyond its control. The smiling Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau leads most of the closed-doors meetings which Wiseman faithfully depicts as dull, occasionally delirious affairs. In one shot, an administrator in the background talks business while a woman in the foreground drinks a Starbucks coffee, swirls it around for a good five seconds and drains it with gusto. “Faculty meetings, in general, are just awful,” former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says during a standout lecture in the film. Wiseman agrees, so he leaves in moments like that to remind us that, above science, politics and literature, we love the taste of something good.

The film culminates with a student takeover of Wheeler Hall (Berkeley’s equivalent to Goldwin Smith). Crosscutting between the hall and the offices where administrators scramble to quell the type of uprising so core to Berkeley’s culture, Wiseman escalates tension while acknowledging the intractable mess of the situation. Some of the student demands conflict with one another and many more target the California government rather than anything within Chancellor Birgeneau’s purview. But, you know, these students are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore! Wiseman remains stubbornly neutral throughout, to the extent that a “moderate” political group on campus complaining about the protest after the fact comes across as left of center, or right, or I cannot really tell.

At Berkeley entertains in its tedium. It takes the issues — a vanishing middle-class, rising tuition, budget cuts to humanities in the midst of non-stop, overwhelming on-campus construction (*COUGH*) — seriously, while snickering at how intractable our problems appear to be. Perhaps Wiseman, 84 years young, with a career of perceptive documentaries on American institutions behind him, senses the same issues of the past have only intensified over the years. As one of his last projects, At Berkeley encapsulates the frustrations embedded within institutions, even one as exceptional as U.C. Berkeley. But the higher education experience cannot be matched, whether you are studying spectroscopy, reading e.e. cummings or mowing the lawn all day because the school cannot afford another landscaper.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be found at its original location here.