On Thu, 21 Nov 1996, Denis Seguin writes: >Is not this phenomenon a byproduct of Hollywood tokenism, whereby black actors were introduced into films as martyrs (like Dirty Harry's partner in Magnum Force), then later as bland sparring partners (like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon franchise)? In "raising" the black male, Hollywood abased him.< I just finished reading a very interesting piece from Fred Pfeil's recent book, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (Verso: 1995), which suggests that a lot more is going on in black/white buddy films than just "bland sparring." Through close readings of several of these late Eighties action films, Pfiel argues that each is engaged in a project of reconstructing the meanings of white masculinity by way of a complex set of negotiations with both "blackness" and "femininity." For example, it's extremely telling in Lethal Weapon that Riggs (Mel Gibson) is represented as the Wild Man (unstable Vietnam vet with the hair trigger, damaged emotionally, etc.,etc.) while Rog (Glover) is figured as the solid, stable, "domesticated" family man, on the verge of retirement and loath to ever draw his gun, much less use it. By the end of the film, Pfeil points out that a kind of symbolic exchange has taken place between the two buddies: Riggs' influence has allowed Rog to unleash his own potential for "wildness" and violence (in response to the terrorist threat against his family), and Rog, by providing a "safe space" for male introspection and "sensitivity," has given Riggs an opportunity to acknowledge his grief and guilt over the death of his own wife. If the most urgent project for white masculinity at this historical moment is to make some sort of concession to the ongoing cultural effects of feminism, as Pfeil seems to be arguing, then these partnerships afford a means for creating a discursive space in which masculinity can still be violent but now in a more "sensitive" and caring way. The blackness of these buddy characters (Rog in the LW series and Al in the Die Hard films) serves, then, as a way not only for white guys to work through their own fantasies of black men's "hypervirility" but also to deal with "feminine" tropes of sensitivity and domesiticity very conveniently by not involving actual women at all. The other interesting point to be made about these films is the way that the interracialism of these buddy relationships serves as a kind of defense against what Eve Sedgwick would call homosexual panic. That is, if any public representation of two similar-looking guys together is now instantly open to accusations of homoeroticism or at least a homoerotic possibility (Butch Cassidy might have been the last film to slide by on this count; Midnight Cowboy makes the problem explicit, but it's Quentin Tarantino's "queer theoretical" monologue about Top Gun in that otherwise boring Gen-X film that signals the definitive demise of unsuspect, "naive" white/white buddying), then adding the element of racial difference seems to offer a provisional way to deflect this awareness. Of course, even more complexly, the only way this can work is by drawing on a generalized racism that sees the potential for white/black eroticism as even more remote than homosexuality at this point! I guess the broader point that I'm trying to make here is that black/white relations in contemporary film are never just about race. Racial differentiation is a process that always takes place in a heterogenous discursive field, intersected at *every* point by other modes of differentiation - racialization, that is, is always already overdetermined by the vectors of gender, sexuality, and class too. David Conner History of Consciousness UC Santa Cruz ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]