State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 10025 Krin Gabbard Associate Professor Comparative Literature 212 749-1631 31-Jul-1994 11:43pm EDT FROM: KGABBARD TO: Remote Addressee ( [log in to unmask] ) Subject: The Mask and Blackface I would like to enter _The Mask_ into our discussions of both blackface and the exclusion of African Americans from recent blockbuster films such as _True Lies_. It seems to me that the green face in _Mask_ is really blackface. Don't forget that Jim Carrey was for several years the only white male in the cast of _In Living Color_. In the film, when he is transformed into the comic book hero, his speech patterns and much of his body language is taken from black vernacular. As Eric Lott has pointed out in _Love and Theft_, young white men have internalized a black paradigm of masculinity for almost two centuries now. The principle element in Carrey's transformation is that he is more aggressively male in the way that adolescent boys conceptualize it as they first begin to emulate black models of masculinity. Even when Carrey takes on the guise of the French apache lover (actually the cartoon character Pepe le Pugh) or when he sings "Cuban Pete," it has more to do with how stereotypes of the Latin lover constitute additional versions of a sexual Other which are easily folded into the African American Other. For me, a crucial moment in the film is when the police attempt to arrest the green-faced hero, and he says directly to the camera, "Where is a camcorder when you need one?" Here is another level on which the hero is identified with black males. Also, I can recall only one _real_ black man in the film, a barrel-chested actor in a tuxedo who turns out to be the mayor of Edge City. This too seems to be significant. I would guess that a more svelte, street-smart, Wesley Snipes-type character would have confused the issues by getting in the way of the image that the Carrey character is supposed to represent. Finally, it is significant that Carrey "grows up" and finds out that he need not play the super hero in order to achieve his sexual maturity. Again, although Hollywood loves to represent hyper-masculinity along the lines of African American models, it also stigmatizes it as pre-adult in one way or another. Ultimately, Carrey gets the girl by acting white. Krin Gabbard SUNY Stony Brook