(BOOK) Black Women in American Film (2009)
(BOOK) Black Women in American Film (2009)
(BOOK) Black Women in American Film (2009)
Mia Mask
on
black women in
american film
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Dorothy Dandridge’s Erotic Charisma 13
2. Pam Grier: A Phallic Idol of Perversity
and Sexual Charisma 58
3. Goldberg’s Variations on Comedic
Charisma 105
4. Oprah Winfrey: The Cathartic, Charismatic Capitalist 141
5. Halle Berry: Charismatic Beauty in
a Multicultural Age 185
Notes 233
Selected Bibliography 269
Index 291
Acknowledgments
illustrations for the text. Were it not for my colleague Judith Weisenfeld, I
might not have met John Kisch when I did or sought his assistance with
photography. Finally, I would like to acknowledge “the elders”: the genera-
tions of African American cultural critics, scholars, and professionals who
came before us and led the way. The elders in my own family to whom I owe
eternal gratitude include (but are not limited to) my parents, George and
Barbara Mask, Melissa and Marc James, Cheryl Odim, and Ruth Jeffries. It
is my sincere hope that my generation can continue the tradition of provid-
ing increased access to opportunity for those who will follow.
Divas on Screen
Introduction
The charismatically dominated masses in turn become
tax-paying subjects, dues-paying members of a church,
sect, party or club (Verein), soldiers who are systematically
impressed, drilled and disciplined, or law-abiding “citizens.”
—Max Weber
Ever since the silent era, African American women—like their Asian
American, Hispanic American, and Native American sisters—have broken
new ground, paved the road, and struggled alongside their more privileged
white counterparts, seeking inclusion, access to acting opportunities, respect-
able roles, and professional treatment. Traveling this winding road, women
of color have met with varying degrees of career success. Divas on Screen is
an examination of the star personae of five African American women, all of
whom have transcended—but also been shaped by—personal, professional,
and sociopolitical obstacles to cross over into mainstream international ce-
lebrity. Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey,
and Halle Berry have deftly negotiated the uneven terrain of racial, gender,
and class stereotypes, ultimately complicating the conventional discursive
and industrial practices through which blackness, womanhood, and Afri-
can American womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema,
independent film, and network television. Arguably, these women—along
with many others—have helped pave the way for succeeding generations of
African American women in film and television (i.e., Sanna Lathan, Kim-
berly Elise, Thandie Newton, Persia White, Tracee Ellis Ross, Jill Marie Jones,
2 . introduc tion
Golden Brooks, Essence Atkins, and Rachel True), who now have relatively
more access to employment opportunities in mainstream entertainment.
Invariably, however, many of the trailblazing pioneers who came a gen-
eration or two earlier (e.g., Bessie Smith, Nina Mae McKinney, Fredi Wash-
ington, Louise Beavers, and Hattie McDaniel) and their successors (e.g.,
Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Vivian Dandridge, Abby Lincoln, Cicely Tyson,
Rosalind Cash, Carol Speed, Tamara Dobson, and Denise Nichols) possessed
untapped talents they were never given opportunity to cultivate or regularly
exhibit. Juanita Moore, for example, entered films in the early 1950s, a time
in which very few African Americans were given an opportunity to act in
major studio films. Fortunately, Moore’s roles began improving as Hollywood
developed a modicum of social consciousness toward the end of the decade.
In 1959 she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as
Annie Johnson in Douglas Sirk’s glossy rendition of Imitation of Life (1959), a
stylistically baroque (and overanalyzed) melodramatic remake of John Stahl’s
1934 adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s controversial 1933 novel.
Moore’s career trajectory exemplifies author James Baldwin’s now well-
known observation that black actors have been woefully misused (and that
few have ever been challenged to deliver the best in them).1 Baldwin’s in-
sightful remark (as well as his ruminations in the cathartic tome The Devil
Finds Work) still holds true today despite the Academy Award wins of actors
Denzel Washington, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Jamie Foxx and actresses Halle
Berry and Jennifer Hudson. The vast majority of African American actors are
still underutilized and underemployed. However, the roles in which many of
these actors appeared are layered palimpsests upon which the contradictions
and fictions of identity categories2 have been written and rewritten. Precisely
because these roles and personae are multilayered palimpsests, these perfor-
mances and career trajectories warrant additional archival research, closer
textual analysis, and thorough contextualization. Divas on Screen is indebted
to the legacy of theoretically informed, politically motivated scholarship in
African American film studies, as initiated by artist-intellectuals like James
Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Gordon Parks, Toni Morrison, Manthia Di-
awara, Isaac Julien, and Julie Dash.
One of the aims of this book is to depart from—while still acknowledging
the existence of—vacuous star-struck interviews, tabloid journalism, and
(un)authorized biographies, which sometimes encourage uncritical con-
sumption of pop idols, star gazing, and celebrity prattle. Divas on Screen
offers a contextualization of stars as intertextual, semiotic signs. The term
intertextuality derives from the work of literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin,
introduc tion · 3
and harness the human population as an energy source. The trilogy films uti-
lize and neutralize, mock and menace Frankfurt School theories, suggesting
its creators had an eye toward cinematic self-reflexivity and political theory.
The point is this: as we have become more appearance-oriented individuals,
our society has become more entertainment driven and star focused.
The intensification of graphic violence and brutality in television (The So-
pranos; The Wire; CSI; The Shield; Rome; Dog, the Bounty Hunter; The First
48 Hours; Criminal Minds; America’s Psychic Challenge), the proliferation of
reality shows, the expanding fan magazine market, the seeming racial/eth-
nic democratization of Academy Awards, the proliferation of award shows,
and the integration of new entertainment technologies (iPod telephones,
MP3 players, video games, the Internet) might be construed as the very
phantasmal distractions from U.S. foreign and domestic policies (i.e., a dys-
functional electoral college, an overburdened health care system, inadequate
environmental guidelines, growing militarism) Frankfurt School theorists
anticipated. Many hope President Barak Obama is the neo(phyte) politician
who can help deliver us from the postindustrial wasteland and the matrix of
our other-directed imaginations.
As intertextual signifiers, stars expose the way the culture industry manu-
factures charisma and thereby creates a market (or fan base) of spectators
conditioned to be moviegoing, fanzine- and game-purchasing consumer-cit-
izens. Divas on Screen—like any analytical discussion of the cinema’s broader
relationship to American politics and culture—integrates Frankfurt School
skepticism with more optimistic methodologies. Weber’s notion of charisma
and feminist film theory provide theoretical balance.
German sociologist Max Weber defined charismatic authority as one of
three forms of authority, the other two being traditional (feudal) authority and
legal or rational authority. Weber defined charisma as a certain quality of an
individual personality, by virtue of which someone is set apart from ordinary
people and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least
specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These traits are not accessible to
the ordinary person but are regarded as divine in origin or as exemplary, and
on the basis of these qualities the individual is treated as a leader. However,
for Weber, charisma is both an innate quality and artificially manufactured by
society. It represents both creativity and the rationalization thereof. In works
such as Economy and Society and in collections like Max Weber on Charisma
and Institution Building, charisma is a flexible and invertible concept.
Weberian interpretations of charisma have informed star discourse in
cinema studies for decades. Seminal scholarship in the discipline employs
charisma to analyze stardom as a sociological phenomenon. Chief among
introduc tion · 7
she might be disconnected from her rural working-class roots. Such cautious
public relations tactics help explain why some folks look askance at the word
diva and the very notion of being one.
For Divas on Screen, I appropriated the term diva to refer to the way
a performer’s charismatic talents, performance style, and screen presence
transcend the individual work (i.e., films, television programs, or comedy
specials), instead becoming part of an extracinematic, extradiegetic public
persona widely recognized and acknowledged by a national and international
community of mass-culture consumer-spectators. In my formulation, the
connotations are not negative or laden with notions of class privilege.
My divas of the big screen are analogous to divas in the popular music
industry, in that both are exceptional or uniquely endowed with traits or
talents. The assumption here is that these talents are both innate and manu-
factured by the culture industry. The current generation of black women in
mainstream film and television has shattered part of the glass ceiling. Even if
we find some of their work excessively commercial or explicitly mainstream,
we can acknowledge the ways in which their careers have challenged the sta-
tus quo at particular moments. These women enable us to articulate a new,
more nuanced critique of African American representation in popular cul-
ture. Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and
Halle Berry are divas on screen because they are successful, self-possessed,
self-aware icons of late twentieth-century Americana and avatars of new mil-
lennial multicultural sensibilities. In a longer study I would certainly include
the likes of Abby Lincoln, Eartha Kitt, Cicely Tyson, and Angela Bassett, to
name but a few.
The first diva addressed here is Dorothy Dandridge. The Dandridge chap-
ter begins by placing her celebrity in the post–World War II context of 1950s
American culture. Dandridge’s status as a sexy film persona needs to be
situated in terms of the decade’s contradictory discourses regarding race
and sexuality. She was an African American woman in a country that pre-
ferred European American women. She was a black woman in a society
in which white feminine pulchritude and virginity were synonymous with
piety and purity. Ironically, Dandridge was fashioned as a sex symbol in an
environment that was relatively sexually repressive. These facts alone made
her career difficult to navigate. Fortunately, for African American audiences,
she represented something unique. For colored audiences, Dandridge was a
sophisticated representative of African American beauty. Beyond the texts
of her films, she represented class, elegance, and style. In black fanzines like
Ebony, Our World, and Negro Digest, Dandridge’s image and celebrity were
10 . introduc tion
not proscribed by the limits of the Hays Code. Her iconicity resonated dif-
ferently with African American audiences, who brought their resistant and
critical spectatorship19 to the segregated balconies of American movie the-
aters in the 1950s.
Chapter 3 provides an examination of Pam Grier’s rise to stardom through
low-budget sexploitation and Blaxploitation pictures produced by offbeat
production houses like American International Pictures (AIP). Formed in
1956 from American Releasing Corporation by James H. Nicholson and Sam-
uel Z. Arkoff, American International Pictures was a low-budget production
company. At AIP, Nicholson and Arkoff were committed to releasing inde-
pendently produced, inexpensive films, primarily of interest to teenagers of
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Beginning with a brief biographical account, this
chapter recounts Grier’s discovery and work at AIP. It traces the emergence
of Grier’s tough-girl screen persona, which emerged in the wake of—and
possibly in response to—1970s feminism. Yet, like Dandridge, she encoun-
tered a series of contradictions in roles she played during her career. Grier’s
forceful screen characters were often contained and controlled by the narra-
tive conventions of sexploitation and Blaxploitation cinema. I interpret this
containment as a form of cultural backlash against the gains of the feminist
movement, given the way these films evince an iconography of misogyny.
Hence, this chapter addresses some of the aesthetic relationships between
different forms of exploitation cinema.
The following chapter, “Goldberg’s Variations on Comedic Charisma,” is
partially indebted to Kathleen’s Rowe’s indispensable book The Unruly Woman:
Gender and the Genres of Laughter (1995). Rowe provides a paradigm for dis-
cussing Goldberg’s performative penchant for menacing the dominant dis-
course with her unruly and defiant characters. Though a few published biogra-
phies on Goldberg have appeared (i.e., James Robert Parish’s Whoopi Goldberg:
Her Journey from Poverty to Megastardom), comparatively less has been written
about her.20 One wonders if this critical silence stems from the tension and
discomfort evoked by her unconventional public and screen personae.
Having followed Oprah Winfrey’s career closely for more than a decade, I
have seen several books written on her life and career. However, this scholar-
ship does not address her film work. My chapter culminates in a close read-
ing of Beloved. It was one of the first essays on the adaptation of this novel
to film and encapsulates some elements of Winfrey’s charismatic capitalist
persona. Furthermore, the scholarship on Winfrey has just begun to address
her extensive entrepreneurship, diverse media outlets, complex international
philanthropy, and cinematic endeavors.
introduc tion · 11
The final chapter, on Halle Berry, brings Divas on Screen full circle by ad-
dressing the intimate, if posthumous, relationship between the late Dorothy
Dandridge and the blossoming career of Halle Berry, acknowledging the ways
Dandridge’s career made Berry’s possible. Without Dorothy Dandridge, the
meteoric rise of Halle Berry simply does not make sense. This is an indisput-
able fact that Berry herself has acknowledged in interviews, in acceptance
speeches, and in film projects she has chosen to produce. Some aspects of
the relationship between Dandridge and Berry can be garnered from the
biographies of Berry.
None of the previous biographies—whether they are about Dandridge,
Goldberg, Winfrey, or Berry—absorb theoretical models and paradigms
into their discussions. As a consequence, they fail to address the resistance
of camp aesthetics; the implicit feminist sensibility in some of the films; the
precise nature of these women’s charismatic appeal; the manner in which
these performers portrayed characters that menaced the dominant discourse;
and the creation of a consumer culture that audiences negotiate. It is only
by employing various theoretical tools that we gain a more comprehensive
understanding of the multifaceted nature of their star personae, thereby
grasping how they have become divas in their own right.
1
Dorothy Dandridge’s
Erotic Charisma
For this reason above all Dorothy Dandridge is important.
I believe she is the only genuine black female star Hollywood
ever produced, if by star is meant that combination of an imme-
diately seductive image with the larger-than-life projection of a
persona, the combination that also produced Marilyn Monroe.
—Karen Alexander
The American cultural and political landscape of the 1950s was rife
with contradictions. As a decade, the 1950s were plagued by fear yet filled with
frivolity. The postwar era of relative economic prosperity led middle-class
Americans to believe the “good life” had finally arrived. Yet social injustice,
institutionalized racism, and bureaucratic mismanagement undermined the
promise of democratic freedoms, the enjoyment of civil liberties, and equal
access to opportunity. America was legally segregated by race (Jim Crow),
geographically stratified by class (in Levittown-like suburban enclaves), do-
mestically divided by gender (through the cult of domesticity), unnerved by
McCarthyism (the Hollywood blacklist), and embattled with communism
(the Korean War). Ironically, many Americans maintained their faith in “the
dream,” exhibited patriotic dedication, and displayed the jingoism accom-
panying the nation’s postwar global privilege.
14 . diva s on screen
If there was one individual whose personal life and public career epito-
mized the unfulfilled promise of a profoundly conflicted era, it was Dorothy
Dandridge. Too often film historians (Mills, 1991; Bogle, 1997; Conrad, 2000;
Rippy, 2001) have narrated the abbreviated days of Dandridge in terms of
the exploitation she endured at the hands of unscrupulous industry agents.
While there was tragedy in her life and career, there was also much to cel-
ebrate and admire. Though stunted by the conservative ideologies of the era,
Dandridge’s celebrity legacy—which is currently Halle Berry’s inheritance—
paved the way for black women to portray glamorous, sophisticated leading
roles in films marketed to mainstream audiences. More successfully than
her contemporaries, many of whom were exceedingly talented (i.e., Fredi
Washington, Lena Horne, Juanita Moore, Eartha Kitt, Louise Beavers, Abbey
Lincoln, et al.), she became the first major crossover film starlet. With its air
of bourgeois respectability, elegance, and sophistication, her persona broad-
ened the image of black womanhood in the public sphere. Eisenhower-era
African Americans connected with Dandridge because her élan contradicted
segregationist notions of black inferiority. Her celebrity image—like that of
Sidney Poitier—progressively negated Jim Crow ideology, which had dictated
a discourse of black subjugation. This chapter examines her stardom in the
context of 1950s America in an effort to understand how she became one of
the first divas of the silver screen.
By examining the public discourse around Dorothy Dandridge’s stardom,
we gain a sense of how she became a phenomenon of consumption and an
icon admired by African Americans, in the same manner as Marilyn Monroe
and Rita Hayworth before her were admired and idolized by mainstream
America. Through her celebrity, Dandridge was a phenomenon that helped
instantiate African Americans as consumers in twentieth-century public
discourse.1 Dandridge’s stardom existed in the context of America’s chang-
ing race relations, but it is impossible to discuss her public persona without
also considering how class functioned in the creation and solidification of
her image. Heretofore the term black middle class has been utilized, but not
in the traditional Marxist-Gramscian sense: as a hegemonic force assimilat-
ing to the mainstream and thereby alienating the masses of proletariat black
folks from themselves. Instead, the black middle class is discussed here as
a group seeking self-determination, economic independence, racial uplift,
and broader representation in the media as entitled citizens.
Wherever consumption is linked with class aspirations, and celebrity is
linked with consumption, famous people play a role in the formation of mid-
dle-class taste. By considering the star discourse revolving around Dandridge,
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 15
we gain a sense of her as the contested terrain upon which competing cultural
discourses of black middle-class identity and comportment played out.
In their study of 1950s American culture, historians Douglas Miller and
Marion Nowak capture the irony of the era in their description of the dis-
parity between recollection and reality. They discuss the return of repressive
Victorian ideals that sharply contrasted with the expectations of modern life
most Americans held as possibilities for themselves. Miller and Nowak are
among numerous scholars and historians who have recorded the era as a
period of complex cultural anxiety and self-denial. They write:
The fifties witnessed much less happy nonsense, much more conformity. In-
ternational tensions and conflicts were far greater than had been the case
during the relatively isolationist twenties. The daily reality of the cold war
caused persons to fear international communism, more importantly, internal
communist subversion. Such fears put a premium on conformity. Bourgeois
values reasserted themselves in a manner which would have pleased a twen-
ties fundamentalist. Domesticity, religiosity, respectability, security through
compliance with the system—that was the fifties.2
Miller and Nowak draw parallels between the 1950s and earlier periods in
American history. They were not alone in their observations, as similarities
between cultural trends of the 1920s and the 1950s are offered in much of the
historical literature of the era (i.e., Ellis, 1954; Miller and Nowak, 1977; Oakley,
1986; Halberstam 1993), asserting that postwar periods engender social con-
formity out of national necessity. Scholars have suggested these are moments
in which notions of national community are reconstructed and re-imagined.
There is considerable evidence Americans turned away from the realities of
the period (i.e., the bomb, the anti-Soviet Cold War, Truman’s 1947–initiated
witch hunts, and race riots) toward a wistful vision of themselves as happy
homemakers, fatherly breadwinners, dutiful daughters, and obedient sons.
As a consequence, socially designated roles and identity categories (i.e., race,
class, gender, and nation) were more narrowly circumscribed than in previ-
ous, or subsequent, years.
Throughout the decade, the cult of domesticity determined many white
women’s lives. The men they married defined these women, as did the chil-
dren they nurtured. Beginning in the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, for
example, white women endured these oppressive expectations. Many mar-
ried at younger-than-ever ages and bore as many children as their grand-
mothers. Masses of women attempted to conform to the dominant regimes
of marriage, coupling, and reproduction. Among those of childbearing age,
16 . diva s on screen
the most common response to the question of how many children were ideal
rose from two to four.3 Second-wave feminists argued that prevailing 1950s
discourses of gender and sexuality took their greatest toll on women, hold-
ing them unduly responsible for the nuclear family’s discontent as well as
the uncertainty of modern life.4 Nowhere was this discourse more evident
than in Philip Wylie’s 1942 work Generation of Vipers, in which he coined
the term “Momism” to refer to excessive mothering and excessive devotion
to one’s mother. Wylie’s thesis was later revived and repackaged in Hans
Sebald’s Momism: The Silent Disease of America (1976), which offered a so-
ciopsychological study of the tactics, effects, and cultural, legal, and familial
ramifications of domineering and manipulative mothering.
For African American women in particular, it was social activism—rather
than marital status—that determined family interests. Black women nation-
wide organized alongside, and in the tradition of, extraordinary activists like
Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy Height, Marian Anderson, Coretta Scott
King, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks.5 These women protested lynching,
fought for voter registration, campaigned for the desegregation of armed
forces, sought reform of the criminal-justice system, and organized black
churches. During the 1940s, while black American soldiers were fighting
armies of racial supremacists in Europe, their sisters, wives, mothers, girl-
friends, and families were fighting the racist dictates of Jim Crow at home.
The summer of 1943 echoed the summer of 1919 and proved particularly
violent. Race riots erupted in Los Angles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Harlem,
Beaumont, and other cities across the country. African Americans, who
initially believed they had migrated to a promised land, found northern
bigotry every bit as pervasive and virulent as in the South. But in the North
they were not the only targets of white racism. The climate was violently
hostile toward Filipino and Mexican Americans, who were targeted by white
backlash against California’s counterculture. Fueled by white supremacy,
this backlash was predicated on the perception that Roosevelt’s New Deal
policies created greater economic opportunities for blacks and other ethnic
minorities than it did for European Americans.
Film scholars have noted the relationship between generic conventions
and historical discursive formations. Chief among such scholars is Michael
Renov, who has analyzed the ties between female-oriented genres and post-
war institutional discourses. In his essay “Leave Her to Heaven: The Double
Bind of the Post-War Woman,” he asserts that the years immediately after the
war were confusing regarding the cultural messages shaping women’s roles.
Work versus motherhood presented one conflict. The ideology of mother-
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 17
hood, the cult of domesticity, and the tradition of black women’s activism
competed with the emergence of yet another image of womanhood: the
sexually ebullient film-star pinup. This was an iconic spin-off of the calendar
girl, who typified the image of seductive womanhood popularized in men’s
magazines before, during, and after World War II. The war sanctified the
idea of the pinup, and though some movies concentrated on wholesome
family entertainment, men plastered their barracks with inviting photos of
film stars.6 The contrast between sexy film stars and wholesome mothers was
one of the decade’s social paradoxes, but this contradiction would intensify
as American corporate interests increasingly relied on sexuality to revive the
financially struggling film industry.
For instance, the disappearing movie audience and the threat to filmgoing
posed by television resulted in an economic crisis for the film industry.7 This
crisis played a key role in bringing sexually and racially explicit subjects to the
screen. Titillating subjects were used to sell movie tickets, since Hollywood
found itself in transition both technologically and thematically. In addition
to providing the primary competition for film, television played a role in the
demise of the Hays Production Code. As movie audiences opted for home
entertainment, Hollywood producers began bending—then breaking—the
self-regulatory code to lure paying customers back to theaters. Film pro-
ducers knew sex and sensuality would sell movie tickets. Other sensational
subjects, like miscegenation (Duel in the Sun, 1946; Pinky, 1949), racism (No
Way Out, 1950), anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947), homosexuality
(Suddenly Last Summer, 1959; The Children’s Hour, 1961), and drug addiction
or alcoholism (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955; The Lost Weekend, 1945),
would sell movie tickets, too, but none so well as sex.
The 1950s film star was symptomatic of the sexual and racial contradic-
tions in America. For example, Hollywood feature filmmaking, with Euro-
American actors and themes, typically focused on the unmarried, innocent,
or virginal ingénue who presented the “repressive sexual bind.” Men were
forbidden to enjoy her sexually, except in fantasy. Sex, in mainstream films of
this era, was referred to coyly but rarely dealt with honestly. The projection
of sexual innocence by performers Sandra Dee, Debbie Reynolds, and Doris
Day—who laid bare the Oedipal fantasy of “daddy’s little girl”—typified the
contradictory ideals inherent in the regimes of sexuality.8
These contradictions—including the virgin–whore dichotomy—existed in
African American cinema, too. In the 1940s, films like Cabin in the Sky (1943)
propagated the dichotomy of “good girl” (Ethel Waters’s character Petunia
Jackson) versus “bad girl” (Lena Horne’s Georgia Brown). Even Andrew L.
18 . diva s on screen
Stone’s Stormy Weather (1943) positions Lena Horne’s Selina Rogers as de-
sirable because she’s virtuous. With a few early exceptions (i.e., Duel in the
Sun, 1946), it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the repressive sexual
bind linked sex with pathos, murder, and deviance (i.e., Carmen Jones, 1954;
Porgy and Bess, 1959; Island in the Sun, 1957; Band of Angels, 1957; Touch of
Evil, 1958; Imitation of Life, 1959; The Unforgiven, 1960; Flaming Star, 1960;
Rosemary’s Baby, 1968). In these films, unrepressed sexuality was punishable
by death, social ostracism, abandonment, and disownment.
In addition to their emphasis on sexuality as taboo, women’s films (from
the 1930s through the 1950s) emphasized physical attractiveness and the dom-
inant discourses of adornment. Many mainstream films divorced themselves
from controversial issues and timely plots (i.e., the displacement of women’s
labor after the war, postwar family relations, birth control, and abortion).
Instead, they became “how-tos” on white heterosexual romance, on catching
and keeping a man, and on appearance and sex appeal. Examples include
Three Coins in the Fountain, 1954; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953; How to
Marry a Millionaire, 1953; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 1954; Father of the
Bride, 1950; High Society, 1955; The Catered Affair, 1956; Pillow Talk, 1959; and
Boys’ Night Out, 1962. But beneath the veneer of fun, frivolity, and flirtation
lay profound tensions relating to the regimes of sexuality (i.e., heterosexual
monogamy, lifetime commitment, gender roles, and division of labor) exert-
ing power over social life. Studios relied on the proven formula popularized
by screwball comedies of marriage and remarriage, as the Doris Day–Rock
Hudson pictures demonstrate. With double entendre and subtext, they hinted
at homosexuality and called attention to the gender performativity of the
bachelor’s sexuality.9 On the surface—where most audiences engage movies—
these pictures played out cultural tensions around monogamy and appeared
to resolve issues happily, with plots in which women tricked boastful bach-
elors into becoming obliging grooms. In so doing, these movies ultimately
intensified the cultural pressure to marry. Not only did they emphasize the
importance of marrying and mating, they suggested women who failed to
wed would become lonely spinsters. Finally, they reified the dominant dis-
course regarding nonmonogamous, premarital, and interracial sex, depicting
them as socially unacceptable.
Meanwhile, external signifiers of sexuality—which were growing in impor-
tance in the 1950s—entered popular culture and the public sphere. Popular
images in film, television, music, and advertising stressed the secondary
sexual characteristics of both sexes. Male consumers purchased products to
accessorize their masculinity, while women—black and white—became the
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 19
Feminine Mystique, and the brooding, bad-boy machismo of stars like Marlon
Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. Monroe’s combination of sexuality
and innocence was part of this flux.
In many ways, Monroe was a sign of the times. The discursive regime
concerning what constituted sexuality mattered a great deal. Because Mari-
lyn Monroe acted out these specific ideas, and because these ideas appeared
to matter, she was the charismatic attraction that seemed to embody what
sexuality was taken to be.13
As instructive as these similarities are, however, the key differences in their ex-
periences, and the meanings of these differences, are equally informative.
More explicitly than Monroe, Dandridge was a celebrity whose personal
life and public personae reflected the contradictions embedded in the so-
ciocultural milieu of the decade. For the mainstream spectator, Dandridge
represented exoticized black sexuality at a moment when race relations were
particularly unstable, making her the symbol of sexual taboos and forbidden
desires. Monroe became a sign of Americana by virtue of her Kennedy family
associations. Unlike Dandridge, Monroe was not the figurative screen upon
which discourses of miscegenation, race relations, and class mobility were
played out. Thus it was Dandridge who symbolized black participation in the
armed forces as an army wife in Since You Went Away (1944). She embodied
miscegenation taboos as the sexual object of white male desire in Tarzan’s
Peril (1951), The Decks Ran Red (1957), Island in the Sun (1957), Tamango
(1958), and Malaga (1960). She represented black middle-class upward mo-
bility as a dedicated teacher in Bright Road (1953) and as a shop girl turned
secretary in Island in the Sun (1957).
Dandridge’s personal life was also emblematic of the social and political
climate. The public record of Dandridge’s personal life stands out as another
22 . diva s on screen
indication of her significance. She was a key figure of racial integration and
transgressive interracial relations. Over the course of her life she was involved
in numerous interracial relationships, including affairs with actor Peter Law-
ton and with director Otto Preminger and a troubled, abusive marriage to
nightclub owner Jack Denison. The difficult and unfortunate ways in which
these affairs ended underscore the notion of Dandridge as a tragic figure (e.g.,
as the woman never really accepted by the white Hollywood society folks
with whom she associated). Consequently, she is read as the sad concubine
of a string of white Lotharios. Most of these relationships, however, ended
for reasons that did not necessarily involve race but (with the exception of
Otto Preminger, who made Dandridge his mistress and refused to leave his
wife) for other reasons: new relationships, career demands, domestic neglect,
abuse, alcoholism, or financial indebtedness. The abusive relationships she
endured as an adult echoed the abusive treatment Dandridge experienced
growing up. Uncontested by the two major biographies, and one posthu-
mously published autobiography (Dandridge, 1970; Mills, 1970; Bogle, 1997),
is the fact she was physically and sexually abused by her mother’s lesbian
lover.
Dandridge’s stardom is best understood in terms of a confluence of per-
sonal and political events: namely postwar contradictions in U.S. interna-
tional and domestic policies regarding race, sexuality, and nationalism, and
a set of unusual family circumstances. As Robert Lightning notes, “An Oscar
nomination to Dandridge in 1954 and the international publicity surrounding
this achievement (including an appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony
as a presenter, and subsequent appearance at Cannes at the opening of Car-
men Jones) serves again to trumpet U.S. liberalism to the world as well as to
drive local attention from alternative political models.”16 Lightning is correct
in saying that Dandridge’s token status (as the major female crossover celeb-
rity) potentially functioned as a diversion from serious social issues. However,
a more fluid understanding of the relationship between material base and
ideological superstructure reminds us that African Americans read against
the grain of the dominant discourse. In other words, Dandridge’s interna-
tional visibility was also a source of pride for African American spectators
who relished in the achievements of her celebrity.
Much of the scholarship on Dandridge has focused almost exclusively on
the construction of her as stereotypical sexual figure vis-à-vis white male
costars. The existing work has discussed the starlet as either a stereotypical
sex siren or as a subversive image of blackness in relation to white characters.
Such dichotomous scholarship locks our reading of her celebrity into a Man-
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 23
She aptly calls attention to the gulf between Hollywood’s fictional represen-
tation of black life and the social reality of political activism in which black
Americans were involved in the 1950s. But such readings omit black audience
response to black films, leaving spectators out of the analysis. There was de-
votion among black spectators for Dandridge given the image of acceptable
bourgeois beauty and womanhood she presented, which heretofore had not
existed in mainstream media.
When queried about Dandridge, black women spectators often expressed
pride. As adult women, these spectators weren’t looking for role models.
They simply enjoyed seeing black women on screen. Speaking about her
experience watching Carmen Jones from the “Colored-Only” balcony of a
segregated Nashville movie theater, Ruth Jeffries said:
I had never seen a black woman in this kind of role. Not that the role was
profound. But it was a major role in a movie shown in theaters around the
country. She was pretty. She wasn’t fat. She wasn’t a Step-and-Fetchit model.
I remember reading her response to the nomination in some magazine. She
said, “You don’t know how much this means to me.” We felt that way too.
Young, black adults thought she was great.18
24 . diva s on screen
Dorothy Veal, another African American spectator, said she appreciated the
black subjectivity Dandridge brought to the big screen.
I liked Dorothy Dandridge. First of all, she was a beautiful woman. I liked
to look at her. And, I didn’t feel—at the time—that she played demeaning
parts. I didn’t feel she was a Butterfly McQueen or a Hattie McDaniel. She
was different. She wasn’t shuffling. She didn’t have a handkerchief. She wasn’t
a handkerchief head. She spoke English. She didn’t roll her eyes. She wasn’t
what you saw in others. I felt comfortable. I don’t remember cringing. You
know when you see certain things you want to go under the seat. You want
to cover your face. Oh, my God, you just wanted to cover your face. It upset
me. I can remember Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel and Louise
Beavers, Step-and-Fetchit and Mantan Moreland. I can remember them as
making me want to just disappear, go up in a puff of smoke. I know didn’t have
that reaction with her [Dandridge]. It was the same thing with Lena Horne.
I didn’t have that feeling with her [Horne]. But then maybe it’s because they
looked more like me. I’m not saying that I’m beautiful. But I could relate.
She wasn’t a maid.19
These views typified those of young African American women in the 1950s.
Moreover, scholarship in other fields confirms these views were typical of
black spectators through the 1940s and 1950s. For example, Joan Nestle’s
research in queer studies reveals how black working-class audiences took
visual pleasure in the memories and images of black stars and celebrities.
Nestle’s essay “I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told
by a White Woman” revealed Ms. Hampton’s pleasure and pride in seeing
black performers. Hampton saved her scarce resources to purchase tickets
for Broadway plays and to follow the careers of Josephine Baker, Marian An-
derson, and Paul Robeson. According to Nestle, Ms. Hampton was “creating
for herself a nurturing family out of defiant African American women and
men . . . Her lesbian self was part of what was fed by their soaring voices.”20
In seeking out these entertainers, black women sought the cultural images
they longed to see.
By citing these viewpoints, I want to call attention to black audience re-
sponses as part of the social equation of black stardom. Historically, Afri-
can American audiences have negotiated what Manthia Diawara eloquently
termed “problems of identification and resistance.” As Diawara demonstrated,
“whenever Blacks are represented in Hollywood—and sometimes when Hol-
lywood omits Blacks from its films altogether—there are spectators who
denounce the result and refuse to suspend their disbelief.”21 By the same
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 25
is in him. The most powerful example of this cowardice and waste are the
careers of Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters. If they had ever been allowed re-
ally to hit their subtle stride, they might immeasurably have raised the level
of cinema and theater in this country . . . What the black actor has managed
to give are moments—indelible moments, created, miraculously, beyond the
confines of the script: hints of reality, smuggled like contraband into a maudlin
tale, and with enough force, if unleashed, to shatter the tale to fragments. The
moments given us by black performers exist so far beneath, or beyond, the
American apprehensions that it is difficult to describe them.27
the star’s major films. In so doing, historians and scholars omit patterns of
star consumption and the ways black critics and audiences might have re-
sponded to and consumed Dorothy Dandridge. Recall that the 1950s marked
the instantiation of the black American as a consumer recognized by the
consumer-product industry sector. Stars were not only bodies on display
providing ideals of feminine beauty—they were also utilized to sell products,
particularly to female spectators.
I want to move beyond these studies—and the Baldwinian approach—
by revisiting the biographies, scholarship, and public discourse circulating
around Dorothy Dandridge’s star persona. The conversations around her
stardom demonstrate that her “charismatic appeal”30 was a function of both
her class position vis-à-vis the newly emerging black middle class, and her
socially constructed sexuality tossed amid the rising tide of regulatory sexual
discourse. This includes, but moves beyond, physicality as a basis for analyz-
ing Dandridge’s celebrity. It involves (1) considering extratextual industrial
issues and (2) sociological dynamics of class as they informed her persona. We
ought to interpret her sexualized charisma as a function of the intersection
of race, gender, and class dynamics. Therefore, I view Dandridge’s celebrity
in terms of sexual appeal but by also taking class into account as a key vari-
able in the construction of beauty and—by extension—sexual desirability. In
focusing on class(ed) constructions of beauty and desirability, we follow the
legacy of Roland Barthes to consider how celebrities enable people to mask
awareness of themselves as class members, reconstituting social differences
in the audience into a new polarity: pro-star versus anti-star.
a special actress to pull this off. She will have to be outstandingly beautiful
and possess a vulnerability that very few people have . . . Halle Berry is nearly
as beautiful and has shown some vulnerability. But the portrayal of Dorothy
could be the toughest job for any actress.”36
Evidence of Dandridge’s representativeness can also be found in the self-
fashioning of Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey has—to some extent—emulated as-
pects of Dandridge’s star persona in an attempt to represent a similar brand
of bourgeois comportment, those techniques of self-enhancement that Dan-
dridge mastered (exercise, diet, hairstyling, fashion, and glamour).
32 . diva s on screen
Winfrey’s most public attempt at such self-fashioning came with the pro-
duction and release of Beloved, during which she presented herself as an al-
luring film actress, starring in a major Hollywood picture. In publicity stills
for Beloved, she appeared in Vogue and Woman’s Day dressed in ball gowns,
coiffed and made up to look remarkably similar to Dorothy Dandridge. The
Vogue layout not only revealed the impact of Dandridge on an already popu-
lar television talk-show host, it demonstrated the difference between visual
codes for television and film stardom. Whereas TV stars dress to project
the image of the everyday woman, the film star dresses to project an ideal of
womanhood, an ideal to which women are expected to aspire. Embedded in
Oprah Winfrey’s self-fashioning as a film star are vestiges of the Dandridge
discourse of representative beauty.
The film Carmen Jones and actress Dorothy Dandridge have had an im-
pact on younger celebrities like Beyoncé Knowles. In 2001, Robert Townsend
directed the MTV movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera, a contemporary remake
of the 1950s version. The film starred Beyoncé Knowles as Carmen and Me-
khi Phifer as Sergeant Derrick Hill, the corollary to Harry Belafonte’s Joe. It
also featured Mos Def as Frank Miller, an updated version of the character
Husky Miller portrayed by actor Joe Adams in 1954. Though conceptually
based on Prosper Mérimée’s novel and Bizet’s opera, this Def Jam audience
film owed its greatest debt to the all-black-cast production. It modernized the
story and setting by placing the fateful couple in urban rather than in rural
America. It utilized the hip-hop style and vernacular trendy among youth
audiences/consumers. And it featured two mainstream artists, reigning diva
Beyoncé Knowles and hip-hopper turned actor Mos Def. It seems fair to say
that Dandridge—and the films she starred in—were representative. She was
a mass-mediated character through which multiple meanings, references,
and roles are remembered.
Dandridge’s Charisma
The notion of representative characters dovetails with Max Weber’s notion of
charisma. For Weber, a charismatic person is someone other people follow
because of his or her individual qualities (i.e., strength, intelligence, beauty).
“Charisma may be of two types: primary charisma is a gift that inheres in a
person simply by virtue of natural endowment. Secondary charisma is pro-
duced artificially.”37 Dandridge’s charisma was the composite of primary (i.e.,
innate gifts) and secondary (i.e., rehearsed effort, industry enhancement)
talents. It was the intersection of physical endowments and the manufactured
charisma produced by routine commercialism and publicity.
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 33
sire to overcome early-life adversities. Within film studies, star analysis has
presented considerable evidence that many film stars share the experience
of having had an absent, or inconsequential, father figure. A large percent-
age of stars suffered decidedly unstable childhoods during formative years.40
Out of the adversity of early life, many of these celebrities have fashioned a
charismatic persona.
For example, Marilyn Monroe experienced the sensation of belonging
to the universe as the first intimation of her charismatic appeal. In her au-
tobiography, My Life (1974), she described herself as belonging to nobody
and everyone at the same time, finding “the public” was her only home. Her
admission that she belonged to the public (“because I had never belonged
to anything else”) was literally true, as she had been raised on public funds
virtually from birth. Born Norma Jean Mortensen in Los Angeles in 1926,
she never knew her father and hardly saw her mother, who was an institu-
tionalized schizophrenic. She is one of many stars whose individual charisma
grew out of a union between emotional difficulties and personal desires to
transcend the trauma of youth. David Aberbach’s description of Monroe’s
celebrity readily pertains to Dandridge. Aberbach writes:
Her charismatic appeal seems to have emanated from the aura of public
availability which surrounded her and which she cultivated . . . Her luscious
persona belonging to the ocean and the sky and the whole world was largely
her own creation, the blend of sexual allure, wit and pathos, the product of
much calculation and art. She spent hours each day in front of mirrors with
lipstick, powders and mascara. “There is not a single movement” she said, “not
a single inflection in a line that I haven’t learned by myself, working it over a
thousand times” (Lembourn, 1979). She spoke of “the face that I’ve made,” a
face and an image she did not believe to be naturally beautiful but which she
virtually willed into being. She transcended her roles, using them as show-
cases for moments of child-like wistful radiance, innocence and freshness.
She was tragic and suggestive of unfathomable disturbance yet sweetened this
image with physical beauty and the honey of sex. Her roles are memorable
not for themselves as much as for her screen persona, and the fascination of
her persona does not lie in the acting, fine as it often is, but in the hints of
the real, vulnerable creature behind the mask.
one of her most remarkable physical assets, as she was believed to possess
the desirable complexion.
Through her childhood, her skin color (which friends and associates in later
years described in different ways) went from a deep burnt yellow to a star-
tling golden brown, close to Vivian’s but somehow richer, neither dark nor
extremely light. “It was pure café au lait,” said Dorothy’s friend Geri Branton,
“absolutely gorgeous.” Her skin also would take to lights, camera filters, and
makeup extraordinary well, and she would be blessed, like most great film
stars, in having the type of beauty that could be heightened with makeup.
During this era when light skin, keen features, and straight hair were valued
in both Black and White America, Ruby considered the girls’ complexions
a blessing.45
Conversely, there were also those who maintained her skin was too fair
to represent African Americans. Some believed she was not black enough.
Take Nichelle Nichols’s comments on attitudes toward Dandridge during the
shooting of Porgy and Bess (1959) as one example.
At that time, Dorothy Dandridge’s delicate beauty was out of sync with the
Black response . . . I think because she had very Caucasian features and a
delicate body and a delicate demeanor she was made to feel she was not Black
enough by people who were jealous of her, by some people on the picture who
were jealous and by some people just in general who were jealous.46
two ways. First, it helps us understand the historical specificity of her celeb-
rity: what might be considered stereotypical today was viewed differently by
1950s audiences. Second, it is also a matter of understanding that black stars
knew their stardom as bittersweet, if not altogether oxymoronic. Dandridge
knew her celebrity involved playing multiple roles: as an American, as a
Negro, as a bourgeois woman, and as a historically gendered subject whose
body signified the sexual excesses projected onto the black female body by a
white patriarchal visual economy.55 Chief among the many African American
publications engaged in multifaceted discussions of her stardom were Ebony,
Our World: A Picture Magazine for the Whole Family, and Negro Digest, to
name but a few.
notes that ten years later, in November 1965, in an article on what it called its
“nativity,” Ebony set out its position within the context of the slowly changing
economic position of black Americans.
To “accent the positive” as EBONY has done, is to give Negro America a sorely
needed psychic lift. Nowhere is this lift more in evidence today than in the
advertisements of high caliber, which it has attracted to its pages within the
last decade. When EBONY first began publication, it had never occurred to
most national manufacturers of commodities, which millions of Negroes as
well as whites buy, to place advertisements in Negro publications. When major
firms did advertise in the Negro press, which was very seldom, it never crossed
their minds to use Negro faces in the ads, or to picture black youngsters eating
nation brand cereals, or colored people riding in an automobile, be it Ford or
Lincoln, or buying a soft drink for their children. Now in EBONY there are
strikingly beautiful ads of Negroes doing all these things.
Look at the handsome young brownskin couple extolling the delights of Coca
Cola in full-page color, or the good-looking young Negro in the “Camel Time”
ad, the stunning brown girl smoking a Newport, and those wholesome Negro
families pictured getting into sleek shining cars. Twenty years ago, to expect to
see such advertisements in a colored magazine would have been unthinkable.
In the field of the American commercial, EBONY has been as much pioneer
as was brownskin Matt Henson when he became the first man to set foot on
the North Pole. That EBONY can now afford not only to have color covers,
but feature articles in color inside the magazine is due to its determined and
dogged assault on the white battlements of Madison Avenue advertising. It
was not easy to make “the walls come tumbling down.” But they did. Result:
now even the New York Times, Life, and The New Yorker picture Negro models
in ads—not of the once popular “ham what am” variety either.
Five years after the birth of EBONY, its publisher presented a series of au-
thenticated facts to the advertising agencies that helped open their eyes to the
dollar value of the Negro market. Nine out of ten EBONY readers carried life
insurance. Four out of ten EBONY readers owned cars. Two out of ten in 1950
possessed television sets, and the same percentage bought pianos. One out of
four had graduated from college and were potential culture buyers. EBONY
had its circulation authenticated by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, and its
contents indexed in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. The result is
that today EBONY’s advertising is voluminous, the format of the ads most
attractive and, if they were to be one hundred per cent visually believed, all
Negro Americans are good looking. Typical example, the charming café au
lait couple at their lovely dining table advertising simplicity patterns. To see
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 41
fees for Negroes have risen along with the increased demand for their services.
Five years ago, the average hourly pay to a Negro model was $5. Today, the
average is $10, and a few earn $25.60
Elsewhere in the article, the author laments the paucity of black women cur-
rently able to earn enough money to make modeling a full-time career but
emphasizes the gradual changes under way in the industry. Articles about
the fashion industry ran alongside articles about the film and television in-
dustries. In 1955, Ebony ran an article captioned, “Do Negroes Have a Fu-
ture in Hollywood?” It was similarly optimistic in its account of the gradual
changes taking place in the film industry and cited Dandridge’s successes as
an example of the changing attitude toward colored actors.
Almond-eyed Jeanna Limyou, Ebony’s alluring cover girl, is a sun-bronzed
California teenager with a face and figure that could stop traffic on the Penn-
sylvania Turnpike. Only 17 years old, Jeanna is one of the most charming and
talented youngsters in the new crop of Negro lassies seeking fame in motion
pictures. Conceivably, her break could come soon for Hollywood is chang-
ing its attitude toward Negro actors and actresses. Movie people who only a
decade ago would not dream of giving a Negro performer the “big build up”
are doing an about face that holds real promise for the Negro stars of the fu-
ture. Dorothy Dandridge got the glamour treatment in the highly successful
(it grossed $5 million) Carmen Jones and both Dorothy and Lena Horne are
in line for other good roles.61
womanhood than in Ebony. Take for example the 1962 cover story captioned
“The Private World of Dorothy Dandridge.” A standard star layout, it places
Dandridge at home amid beautiful housewares, domestic amenities, and ac-
coutrements of material success. Clearly, the image of domestic perfection is
being sold to black consumers. Robinson’s article presented her as the picture
of fame and a representative character. She is both extraordinary and part of
everyday life.
A performer at five. The scene opens with the star of the show: a honey-colored,
brown-eyed beauty of surprising slimness and indeterminate youth. Clad in
tailored slacks and bulky over-blouse. She sweeps down a winding stairway
and into a sunken living room to extend her hand in greeting to a visitor . . .
Except for the fact that her face would be instantly recognizable to millions,
there is nothing in the scene which suggests that this is the private world of
Dorothy Dandridge, one of the great beauties of our time, a sex symbol to
magazine editors the world over, and Hollywood’s first authentic love god-
dess of color.62
This is one example of how her complexion and physique were linked—in
star discourse—to notions of black exceptionality, erotic sexuality, and a
bourgeois lifestyle. This discourse portrays her as sharing the simple desires
of the common citizen (home, domesticity, the American “good life”) yet
celebrates the qualities setting her apart from the average citizen.63
This type of promotion exposes a tension in celebrity discourse. Accommo-
dating both the extraordinary and the everyday, star discourse must resolve
domesticity and commercialized sexuality. But this tension was not particular
to African American stars of the 1950s. It was an issue for Rita Hayworth
and her contemporaries in the 1940s. And it appears to have been an issue
more recently for young white celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt.
Star discourse reveals the material construction of sexuality. It discloses the
way in which all sexual leisure and lifestyles ultimately become colonized
by consumer culture. Such discourse deploys coded messages to further the
commercialization of all commodity forms.64 Star discourse creates a chain
of signifiers linking sexuality and the body with the social and material ac-
coutrements of bourgeois lifestyle and desirability.
The recognition of black and bronzed beauty (something we cannot take
for granted) in American film contributed to a sentiment of optimism regard-
ing the possibility of gradual institutional change. Trailing Jeanna Limyou’s
story, Ebony ran an article captioned, “Public Disapproval Ends Era of Uncle
Tom Casting,” followed by another story headlined, “Negro Market Is Too
44 . diva s on screen
Large to Offend.” Citing the growing numbers of black moviegoers, the writer
of the second article claimed surveys revealed as many as 3½ million blacks
attending movie houses each week. Implicit in these stories and their head-
lines is a sense of optimism.
The trend in Hollywood today is toward integrated casts. The pattern, Louella
[Parsons] says, was set five years ago when Stanley Kramer filmed Home of the
Brave, a controversial race theme movie about a mixed Army unit in which
James Edwards had a key role. The picture set off a cycle of racial problem
pictures, which opened the way for later films (Unchained, The Egyptian, The
Robe, The Ten Commandments, The Black Widow) in which Negroes were
given parts in which no attention was called to their color at all. They simply
became “human beings.”65
Such articles revealed the naive optimism embedded in the rhetoric of inte-
gration. Throughout black communities, moviegoers believed that once Hol-
lywood integrated its movies, American society might follow. Obviously, this
never happened and the optimism was false hope—as noted by Henry Louis
Gates Jr. in Marlon Riggs’s seminal documentary on the history of television,
Color Adjustment. Nonetheless, articles in Ebony, Our World, Sepia, and Cue
propagated the rhetoric of integration without questioning how this discourse
promoted the misguided notion of “colorblindness.” Implicit in the liberal
ideology of colorblindness is the false notion that blackness is a handicap
progressive whites should graciously overlook. It implies African Americans
must undergo “de-negrification”66 to be accepted by mainstream spectators.
Some writers maintained that to be taken seriously by Hollywood, black ac-
tors needed to embrace the “assimilationist imperative,” a euphemism that in
effect meant cease being African American and start signifying the universal
humanity associated with Euro-American subjectivity. In fact, this is precisely
what actor Sidney Poitier attempted in films like No Way Out (1950), Paris Blues
(1961), Lilies of the Field (1963), Patch of Blue (1965), To Sir with Love (1967),
In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).
However, this call for black actors to emphasize their transcendental hu-
manity and downplay their historical blackness was articulated on screen
(almost exclusively) in terms of blacks seeking relationships with whites
and in terms of the taboo of miscegenation. One of the only American-
made films of this era to escape the double bind of representation and still
depict African American subjectivity in terms of its humanity was Michael
Roemer’s Nothing But a Man (1964). But Roemer’s film was released more
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 45
than a decade after stars Dandridge and Horne made their first major screen
appearances. Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne, and their fans
broke the ground that later became fertile soil for Roemer’s work to thrive.
Dandridge was integral to the newfound sense of black identification with
media images and the newfound optimism discussed as a transitional stage
in Hollywood.
Stars presented as transcendental figures could also be used to sell prod-
ucts to female spectators.67 The sense of integration-era optimism and black
consumer-citizenship—symbolized by the employment of these women—
also helped sell cosmetics and feminine products advertised in fan maga-
zines. The fan discourse circulating around their careers informed the sale
of commodities to those women who wanted to participate in an imagined
black bourgeois community. In her work on the social construction of beau-
tiful white film stars, Jackie Stacey notes that the body-as-commodity was a
venue used to sell white Hollywood starlets to spectators. One characteristic
of consumption practices among spectators of the 1950s in relation to stars
is the centrality of the female body.
Following Stacey, I am asserting that the black film star’s body is a venue
through which black feminine identity is marketed to spectators. It is sold as
an idea and as the composite of a variety of products. Horne and Dandridge
were sold to African American women spectators as the sign-bearing, sign-
wearing ideals to be emulated. Copying their look meant consuming the
right products: cosmetics, fashions, and hairstyles. The class-conditioning
commodities included hair-straightening techniques, skin bleaching creams,
feminine hygiene products, and makeup.68 Such items were advertised in
Ebony info-adverts extolling the virtues of douches, lotions, hair pomades,
bleaching creams, and the like. Moreover, in selling these items, these maga-
zines propagated narrowly defined concepts of black beauty.
Ebony actively propagated this narrow notion of black beauty, linked as
it was to the cult of black celebrity. For example, the magazine ran a story
with photographs of black female celebrities shot by French photographer
Philippe Halsman. At the time, Halsman was one of Life magazine’s top pho-
tographers. He took many covers for Life, including the then-recent color
cover of Dorothy Dandridge. The Ebony article with Halsman’s images was
audaciously captioned: “The Five Most Beautiful Negro Women.” It featured
Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Hilda Simms, Joyce Bryant, and Eartha Kitt
as they lay seductively in satin and silk nightgowns with plunging necklines.
The short text read:
46 . diva s on screen
When Ebony’s editors met to select five women to sit for glamour photog-
rapher Philippe Halsman, the acknowledged master at capturing the beauty
of women on film, quite a controversy developed. It seems that after Lena
Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, there was very little agreement. After long
and sometimes violent argument, all agreed to limit the group to beautiful
entertainers and the five shown on these pages comprised the final selec-
tion. In appearance, they offer a fascinating physical range. One thing they
have in common is a striking, though different beauty. Lena Horne, Dorothy
Dandridge, Hilda Simms, Joyce Bryant and Eartha Kitt are five of the most
beautiful and talented women in America today.
that Lena is a great performer, but they are two distinct types . . . There is
however, a striking resemblance between Dorothy and Lena. Both have the
ability to wear clothes, are beautiful women and can sell sex with a song . . . If
Dorothy Dandridge is finally able to outshine Lena Horne, it won’t be a mat-
ter of chance. Show business is in Dorothy’s blood. She was born into it. Her
mother, Ruby Dandridge, currently a radio actress on the Beulah show, was
an actress when Dorothy was born. Dorothy has always loved the spotlight
and has been preparing for a theatrical career all her life . . . Lena has done
almost everything in her field and Dorothy Dandridge knows that outshining
the most popular Negro female song stylist is no mean feat. She is, however,
willing to try, if it doesn’t destroy her freedom.69
Dandridge on Film
Fan devotion to Dandridge was a result of the urbanity and modernity she
projected through her womanhood. But it was not only in the public dis-
course of her stardom that we find discussion of her exceptionality and repre-
sentative bourgeois womanhood. Her star vehicles also evince the recurring
theme of her exceptionality.
In movies like The Bright Road (1953), Island in the Sun (1957), and Tamango
(1958), for instance, her characters stand out as liminal.71 The definition of
liminality employed here is derived from Victor Turner and Kathleen Rowe.
Turner uses the term liminal to describe things associated with transitions,
margins, and thresholds. He writes, “All societies carve out spaces or times
that exist on the edge of normal activities and that are marked by contradic-
tion and ambiguity. Often dramatic or performative, these spaces and times
allow a society to comment on itself through experimentation and play.”
Liminality is never a permanent state but exists in relation to dominant or
indicative time. Liminality, which includes spaces and times situated at the
48 . diva s on screen
Lightning asserts that certain black stars were deemed acceptable because
they were culturally assimilated and physically attractive, therefore less
threatening. Consequently, he reads Dandridge as a symbolic mulatto.73
Problematically, however, this “symbolic mulatto” conceptualization of her
cinematic persona functions to describe and decode her liminality in racial
terms. It fails, for instance, to provide an analysis of Dandridge’s persona in
black-cast pictures like Bright Road (1953) and all-black-cast movies Carmen
Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959).
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 49
Dandridge as Jane Richards is the image of respectable womanhood in The Bright Road (1953).
50 . diva s on screen
film, one often ignored by film scholars like Rippy who tend to emphasize
the way Dandridge’s characters were victimized by a racist patriarchal dis-
course. Indeed this is accurate. Dandridge portrayed many women who were
victimized by black and white men. But in Bright Road, the character and
circumstances are quite different. If anything, Bright Road is a film that—in
its innocence and gentle romance—prefigures Nothing But a Man (1964),
with equally beautiful leads Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln. In the narrative
of Bright Road, Dandridge’s costume, makeup, and self-sufficient character
cannot be interpreted in terms of the “symbolic mulatto” metaphor or read
as belonging to the classic black victim. Rather, she functions here as the
embodiment of bourgeois womanhood. Therefore, Lightning’s model does
not provide a template for reading the narrative relationships between her
characters and other African American characters.
Whereas white feminist film theory articulates gender masquerade in
terms of costume (dress, lipstick, high-heeled shoes), props (purses, ciga-
rettes), and physical space (spatial arrangements of domesticity and mother-
hood) that function as fetish objects negating the putative lack of woman, I
view Dandridge’s complexion, physiognomy, and class affiliations as the fetish
objects that negated the threat of her supposed “difference,” for white audi-
ences. Colorism in the black community meant it also made her appealing
to African American audiences because these signifiers allowed her to affect
the dominant facade (or mask) of bourgeois femininity, thereby rendering
her a sexual object. She was able to embody and signify the cultural capital
of the black habitus partially because—as mentioned—light skin in black
communities has historically signified class mobility.
In the films Carmen Jones (1954)74 and Porgy and Bess (1959),75 both directed
by the acclaimed auteur Otto Preminger (who was also Dandridge’s control-
ling lover), her eponymous characters Bess and Carmen are also intermedi-
ary figures. James Baldwin was cognizant of the relationship between color
and class in Hollywood cinema—and in Dandridge’s films particularly. He
made the compelling argument that color cast(e)ing in Carmen Jones revealed
the film’s ideological structure and Dandridge’s liminal place within it. For
Baldwin, Carmen was one of the most explicit, self-conscious weddings of
sex, color, and social value Hollywood had ever turned out.
A movie is, literally a series of images, and what one sees in a movie can
really be taken, beyond its stammering or misleading dialogue, as the key
to what the movie is actually involved in saying . . . Dorothy Dandridge—
Carmen—is a sort of taffy-colored girl, very obviously and vividly dressed,
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 51
but really in herself rather more sweet than vivid. One feels—perhaps one
is meant to feel—that here is a very nice girl making her way in movies by
means of a bad-girl part . . . Harry Belafonte is just a little darker and just as
blankly handsome and fares very badly opposite her . . . Pearl Bailey is quite
dark and she plays, in effect, a floozie. The wicked sergeant who causes Joe
to desert the army . . . 76
brawl. He flees but returns later to collect Bess. Only now he must confront
Porgy, a love-struck cripple who has fallen in love with Bess. When he kills
Crown, Porgy is hauled off to jail and Bess is enticed to New York City by the
flashy gambler Sportin’ Life (Sammy Davis Jr.). At the end of the film—and
the opera before it—Porgy is heading to New York to search for her. Here,
Dandridge portrays a pawn in a game of male desire. She is a liminal figure
who stands between respectability and impropriety. She offends respectable
womanhood (by virtue of her association with Crown) yet upholds and re-
spects family values (in her domestic arrangement with Porgy).
In 1967 historian Harold Cruse was chief among the films’ critics. Cruse
viewed the entire arts scene as a white-dominated misrepresentation of black
culture, the epitome of which was George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and
Bess. He viewed the opera—and its manifestation as cinematic Americana—
as at the heart of a debate about the civil rights movement and “civil writers”
subordinating themselves to the cultural values of the white world. Accord-
ing to Cruse, these European values were used to negate the Negro cultural
equality and exploit black culture. Cruse wrote:
In May 1959, following the successful opening of A Raisin in the Sun, its au-
thor Lorraine Hansberry debated Otto Preminger on a television program
in Chicago, over what she labeled the deplorable “stereotypes” of Porgy and
Bess. The film version of the folk-opera had just been released . . . This was
not the first time Porgy and Bess had been criticized by Negroes. Ever since its
premiere in 1935, it has been under attack from certain Negro quarters because
it reveals southern Negroes in an unfavorable light. Hence Miss Hansberry’s
criticisms were nothing new or original. What was new, however, were the
times and the circumstances. Miss Hansberry objected to Porgy and Bess
because stereotypes “constitute bad art” when “the artist hasn’t tried hard
enough to understand his characters.” She claimed that although Gershwin
had written a great musical score, he had fallen for what she called the exotic
in American culture: “We, over a period of time, have apparently decided
that within American life we have one great repository where we’re going to
focus and imagine sensuality and exaggerated sensuality, all very removed
and earthy things—and this great image is the American Negro.”78
During this debate Hansberry also complained about Carmen Jones. Accord-
ing to Cruse, Hansberry weakened her argument on the subject of “artistic
integrity” by wanting to know why no whites had been cast in this caricature
of Carmen. The entire muddled question of integration in the arts loomed
largest. Cruse maintained that Hansberry’s whole debate was a waste of time
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 53
groups: the black workers and the white planter class. Typical of 1950s Hol-
lywood cinema, designed to bring back the declining audience, it exploited
the sexual and racial taboos of the 1950s in a salacious tale of miscegenation,
adultery, denial, and betrayal. The film is thematically similar to Hollywood’s
genre of hysterical prairie/plantation social problem melodramas like Duel
in the Sun (1946), Pinky (1949), Giant (1956), The Searchers (1956), Band of
Angels (1957), Flaming Star (1960), and The Unforgiven (1960), all of which
exploited themes of gender, race, class, nation, miscegenation, citizenship,
and land appropriation.
The blacklisted Robert Rossen directed Island in the Sun, which paralleled
two interracial love stories set in the British West Indies. The film’s producer,
Darryl F. Zanuck, chose the island of Grenada to depict the fictitious Santa
Marta Island of Waugh’s novel. According to film historian Thomas Cripps,
novelist Alec Waugh intended Island as “a Caribbean metaphor for American
racial tensions, and 20th Century-Fox purchased it in the same spirit—as
much a crusade as a moneymaker.”81 Not coincidently, Island in the Sun was
a financial success, returning significant capital on its investment. Audiences
must have loved its tropical setting since, according to Cripps, it earned 20th’s
biggest profit since The Robe. Donald Bogle confirms the film’s financial re-
cord, reporting that it “earned a then healthy $8 million, out-drawing The
King and I in many of the spots where [it] opened.”
The picture starred Joan Fontaine as the lithe Mavis Norman, a guilty,
liberal-minded white aristocrat who falls in love with Harry Belafonte’s physi-
cally dynamic David Boyeur, a labor organizer and political pundit who
threatens white rule of Santa Marta. Mirroring David and Mavis’s transgres-
sive, transracial desire are Margot Seaton (Dorothy Dandridge), an island
shop girl turned secretary, and the British character Denis Archer (John
Justin). In the film, Julian Fleury and his wife (Basil Sydney and Diana Wyn-
yard) have two adult children, Maxwell (James Mason) and Jocelyn (Joan
Collins). Jocelyn falls in love with Ewen Templeton (Stephen Boyd), the son
of the governor of Santa Marta, Lord Templeton (Ronald Squire). But when
she learns, through the investigations of a visiting American journalist, that
she has black blood in her ancestry, she refuses to marry Ewen but contin-
ues to see him. Maxwell uses his family name and reputation to stand for
the legislative council, opposing the popular native-born trade union leader
David Boyeur (Harry Belafonte).
At the end of the film, Margot and Dennis elope (off-camera) and leave for
London. The other successful heterosexual union occurs when the biracial
Jocelyn (Joan Collins)—who later learns she’s really white—marries Ewen
Templeton, the young, rich officer with an exotic past life in the Middle East.
dandridge’s erotic charisma · 55
Jocelyn’s brother, Maxwell Fleury, and his wife are left behind, as is David
Boyeur, who wins the election and subverts white political dominance. Mavis
and David end their sexless affair with “a parting played as though carved
in stone,” wrote Cripps. David’s reasons for dismissing Mavis’s affections
in favor of kith, kin, and countrymen are articulated in his cold good-bye
speech to her: “My skin is my country. Maybe the men looking at Margo
[Dandridge] at some cocktail party in Bloomsbury or at a literary tea, well
they’d envy Dennis Archer. Their own wives look sort of dull when she walks
into a room. But if I were to walk in with you, or a girl like you, well . . . You’d
forget yourself and call me a nigger—no, this is my world.” Thus while Dan-
dridge’s Margot and Collins’s Jocelyn (the not-quite-white women seeking
bourgeois respectability) escape the sugarcane and coconut agrarianism in
favor of modernized Europe, Belafonte’s labor organizer David Boyeur—and
the other racially coded characters elect to stay behind. In the verbal and
visual lexicon of Island, we find the discourse of Dandridge’s color emerging
yet again. Her complexion is the capital purchasing free movement between
racially segregated communities. Dandridge’s Margot is granted social privi-
lege as a function of physical capital.
Tamango (1957) similarly places Dandridge’s character in the interstice
between two opposing worlds. She moves between the free white world of
those who possess capital and the captive black world of those who are capi-
tal: between the slaves and the slave catchers. The film, based on Prosper
Mérimée’s short story, with a screenplay by Lee Gold and Tamara Hovey,
recounts a slave revolt onboard a ship en route from the African Gold Coast
to Havana, Cuba, in 1830. The film’s narrative parallels the development of the
two original male protagonists: the Dutch captain Reinker (Curt Jurgens),
commander of the slave ship Esperanza, and the eponymous Tamango (Alex
Cressan), a captured African and leader of the rebellion.
Throughout the film, Jurgens’s aged Captain Reinker is a merciless Euro-
pean slaver who has taken Aiche (Dandridge) as his mistress. Initially, she
tries to dissuade the slaves from rebelling. Dismissed by the other slaves as
“the white man’s trash,” Aiche begins to question Reinker’s devotion and the
reality of her circumstances. Out of spite against Reinker—whom she now
thinks is tiring of her—Aiche helps the slaves planning rebellion. Learning
of the captain’s counterattack, she tries to stop their uprising, and when she
cannot, she elects to die with her people in a last desperate affirmation of the
right of human freedom.
Throughout Tamango, Aiche functions as a narrative go-between: she
traverses between slaves and freemen, the captain and Tamango, blacks and
whites, the private (bedroom) and public (ship deck). She is the currency,
56 . diva s on screen
as acceptable. Thus I’m not making a case for Dandridge’s star charisma as
independent of Anglo-American cultural hegemony. However, I’m asserting
that Dandridge and her contemporaries found constituents in black audi-
ences, in women who identified with and admired black female film stars.
They had fans in women who took solace and found pride in images of
glamorous black women on screen. Even though black audiences found Dan-
dridge’s roles lacking dimension, discourse in fanzines and structural analysis
of films provide venues through which we come to a better understanding of
the oxymoronic nature of black stardom and black audience identification
with black stars. Part of Dandridge’s success entailed how the Negro com-
munity consumed her as a representative of black bourgeois identity. Hers
was an image that helped define, for a given group of people, what kinds of
feminine traits, comportment, and public performance of womanhood were
appropriate and fashionable to develop. As a film star, she represented physi-
cal ideals, donned the mask of femininity, and embodied the sexual charm
that 1950s film stars were believed to possess.
2
Pam Grier
A Phallic Idol of Perversity
and Sexual Charisma
The early 1970s screen persona of exploitation movie diva Pam Grier
is best understood in the context of social and political events of that dec
ade. In the final years of the 1960s, major social policy changes engendered
the sexual liberation of American film culture. First introduced in 1960,
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 59
the birth control pill became a symbol for societal change in the Western
world. In November 1968, the second major change occurred: the restrictive
Hollywood Production Code gave way to the new Rating Administration.
The new classification system did not solve the problems Hollywood faced
with censorship but relaxed preexisting codes that forbade any depiction
of obscenity, sexual slavery, miscegenation, nudity, homosexuality, kissing,
or references to sexual perversion. The third significant change was a shift
in legal statutes. In 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Stanley v. Georgia
that people could read and look at whatever they wished in the privacy of
their own homes. The U.S. Congress, in hopes of finding another approach
to controlling what many considered a threat to traditional American values,
authorized $2 million to fund a presidential commission to study pornog-
raphy in the United States and to recommend what Congress should do
about it. By 1970, the sexual revolution had shown its effects. Films were
no longer subject to prior restraint, nor were they all appropriate for the
same audience. These pharmaceutical, legislative, and industrial initiatives
meant that even when sex, sexuality, and corresponding gender roles were
not explicitly the subject of 1970s cinema, they were often just beneath the
surface, informing the ideological tone, formal texture, or narrative structure
of a motion picture.
At the beginning of the decade, growing distrust of government, struggle
for civil rights, increased influence of the women’s movement, a heightened
concern for the environment, and enhanced space exploration confronted
Americans. The antiwar movement became both more powerful and less
cohesive between 1969 and 1973. Many Americans opposed escalating the
U.S. role in Vietnam yet disapproved of the counterculture that had arisen
alongside the antiwar movement. Leaders of pacifist movements became
increasingly strident, greeting returning soldiers with jeers and taunts on
public streets. Hippies, known for their long hair, casual drug use, and pro-
miscuity, subordinated the clean-cut, well-dressed Students for a Demo-
cratic Society as movement leaders. The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program
(COINTELPRO), discovered in 1971, suppressed Black Panther Party activ-
ity.1 Their efforts culminated in Angela Davis’s indictment on murder and
conspiracy charges. Protesting injustice, inequality, and U.S. militarism, mu-
sicians such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, and Jimmy Hendrix
performed songs that revealed the widening generation gap. And in 1973
the Supreme Court struck down state laws banning abortions.2 Amid this
climate of war, social realignment, and presidential impeachment proceed-
ings, dystopian visions of American culture thrived.3
60 . diva s on screen
Books published in the 1970s revolved around the broad theme of human-
ity’s alienation from its spiritual roots. John Updike portrayed characters
trying to find meaning in a spiritually empty society on the brink of moral
decay. Joyce Carol Oates wrote of the search for spiritual meaning. Kurt
Vonnegut explored the loneliness of contemporary society and the power
of hungry materialism pervading it. Author Toni Morrison emerged as one
of the most poignant literary voices to narrate the black American experi-
ence as an American experience. Whereas literature addressed mounting
alienation, popular culture wavered between realism and escapism.4 On one
hand, reality sitcoms like Norman Lear’s All in the Family—white America’s
top-rated TV program for the first half of the decade—showed family life
ridden with bigotry and strife. On the other hand, escapist fantasy, horror,
and nostalgia pictures like The Exorcist, Jaws, The Way We Were, American
Graffiti, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Saturday Night Fever captured
mainstream imagination. For African Americans, Blaxploitation offered both
a hint of reality and a dose of fantasy by depicting institutional and indi-
vidual incidents of racism while simultaneously offering the fantasy that—
like Sweetback, John Shaft, and Cleopatra Jones—brothers and sisters could
kick the Man’s ass. Still, many others rejected such escapist fare and its crude
depiction of black Americans in confrontation with the predominantly white
power structure.
Amid this atmosphere of disaffection and rebellion, the voluptuous Pam
Grier rose to prominence as an idol of perverse sexual pleasures in sexploita-
tion pictures and as a vengeful, coffee-colored femme fatale in Blaxploitation
movies. Her screen persona encapsulated the ethos of personal frustration,
sexual liberation, and political upheaval permeating American society. In an
interview with filmmaker Isaac Julien, Pam Grier acknowledged the direct
relationship between the changing culture and her film roles. “Coffy was
my mom, Foxy Brown was my Aunt and they were women who were very
demonstrative but yet very feminine and knew how to use sexuality. The
sexual movement was raging through the streets, shorts were getting shorter,
skirts were getting shorter, and men’s pants were getting tighter. People were
throwing underwear bras out the window. We had Woodstock. You loved
your naked body. So all of that was about who we were too. And, you could
see that in film.”5
As the freshness of 1950s and 1960s starlets Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha
Kitt, and Abbey Lincoln faded, Pam Grier emerged as one of the new black
female film stars. After all, the time seemed right for Grier to soar, since ac-
tresses like Dandridge had already broken some of the color-casting barri-
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 61
ers. “Well, the 70s for me was the moment when we could really live out the
freedoms and political gains won by the 40s, 50s and 60s,” Grier told Isaac
Julien. “I could come out here, and go to Beverly Hills, and the doors were
open for me to go to night clubs and restaurants and be treated very equal.”
Grier ultimately became the next mainstream African American crossover
phenomenon and sex symbol. Her onscreen persona, which combined brazen
sexuality, physical strength, and Black Nationalist sentiment, informed the
portrayal of action heroines in popular culture years after her early exploi-
tation career had waned (i.e., Posse, 1993; Original Gangstas, 1996). Grier’s
trademark (i.e., her image as a bad-ass femme fatale) left an indelible impres-
sion because she embodied the 1970s attitude of cultural defiance manifested
as a kind of Afro-kitsch.6 The uniqueness of her screen persona explains her
appeal to younger audiences and illuminates why Grier was able to make a
late-1990s comeback (i.e., Jackie Brown, 1997; Bones, 2001) rather than fade
into the shadows of film history like some of her contemporaries. Even to-
day, Pam Grier is thankful to the younger generation of film and recording
artists for rediscovering her early film work.
The hip-hop nation found me and put me on a pedestal. Now I’m in the rap
and hip-hop videos. I like the music. I dance to it. I work out to it. These young
people could be my children. They love R & B. Snoop loves R & B. That’s all
he plays. He gets all his style and a lot of his sampling from R & B back in the
day ’cause that’s all his parents played. So, all of a sudden, Quentin said: “You
know what? What you did, and who you were, what you represent . . . are still
very important. And, these kids see something and feel something. Most can
articulate what it was but many can’t. They just like the fact that you stood
up, you were a hero and who do we have to look up to now? There’s you, you
know. Black Jane Bond.”
As a result of her unique persona and resurgent career, Pam Grier is—and
will remain—a definitive icon of 1970s popular culture, an exploitation movie
diva of the silver screen.
By confronting male authority onscreen and representing black women as
both sexually and intellectually self-determined, Grier altered the depiction
of black women in cinema. No individual actor can single-handedly subvert
the exclusionary practices, institutional racism, heterosexist logic, ageist
mythos, or nationalist tendencies endemic to Hollywood. Nor are Grier’s
superwoman characters defendable as socially minded portraits of real po-
litical figures. The exploitation roles she accepted were limiting, repetitive,
and often-simplistic caricatures. But like other forms of kitsch and camp,
62 . diva s on screen
2, The Blair Witch Project, Freddy vs. Jason, Final Destination 2, Scary Movie,
Alien vs. Predator). Pam Grier’s 1970s characters and star vehicles were simi-
larly shaped by cinema and subsequently shaped succeeding films. Coffy
(Jack Hill, 1973), for instance, contained drug kingpin characters popularized
by 1930s gangster movies like Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1931). Friday Foster
(Arthur Marks, 1975) employed a plot structure made familiar by 1940s film
noirs like The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). The Twilight People (Eddie
Romero, 1973) was produced on a shoestring budget, featuring cheap cos-
tumes, cheaper makeup, and cheesy special effects like the ones seen in 1950s
science fiction features Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954)
and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (Gene Fowler, 1958). If her films
were cult movies, then, by extension, Grier became a cult figure, represent-
ing what Christopher Lasch termed an “ego-ideal”: the admired, idealized
image13 of this alternative pop-culture landscape.
Early 1970s cult films solidified her statuesque “Amazonian”14 image and
her specific brand of star charisma. The culture industries (i.e., film and
advertising) packaged Grier as a woman possessing a kind of masculine—
almost phallic—charismatic authority. The concept of phallic charisma used
here to discuss Grier is simply a metaphor describing the combination of
sexual bravura, physical prowess, and sassy attitude encompassed in her
screen persona. By discussing Grier in terms of phallic charisma we gain a
sense of her as both a phenomenon of consumption (consumed by audience-
consumers) and a phenomenon of production (produced by industrial institu-
tions like American International Pictures). Her unique brand of charisma
enabled her—unlike other actresses from this period—to remain popular
throughout the 1970s and stage a career comeback in the late 1990s. This
chapter addresses her exploitation star vehicles. Pam Grier was both an object
of the gaze and a subject of narrative action in films utilizing her as a vehicle
of camp aesthetics.15
and buy clothes. My clothes came from Sears & Roebuck catalogues and we
had hand-me-downs. I loved clothes from Goodwill because they were prac-
tically new,” the actress recalls.16 Part of Grier’s youth was spent on military
bases in the American South. During her childhood, Grier learned about
and experienced American racism and racial discrimination.
On the base, there’s no race or gender. You’re just military and you’re all mili-
tary and they take good care of you. There are buses and shuttles. Everyone
lives next to each other and there are no racial problems. But when you’re in
the South and you come off the base, now its gets a little serious. We would
go shopping and bring food and things home. But the city buses wouldn’t
stop to pick us up because we were Black. The buses would be half filled or
have just a few people on them. We’re standing there, its 110 degrees in the
shade with humidity and bugs. They’d go right by us and we’d have to keep
walking until the next bus stop and then maybe he’d stop. There weren’t any
black bus drivers. They were all white. Sometimes they would see us, and my
mother, dragging. Then, they would stop.
Until the age of fourteen, Grier lived on various American military bases in
Europe. When her family finally returned to the United States, they settled
in Denver, Colorado, where the teenager was a foreign oddity to her new
American peers. Speaking with a British accent, she was accustomed to af-
ternoon tea and carried herself in a way others deemed pretentious and
standoffish. Grier explained this cultural difference, saying: “Denver wasn’t
bad. It was rough. I wasn’t very big then and I found that you had to fight all
the time. You had to fight for your lunch money or act like you didn’t have
any. You had to put it in your socks or tape it under your shoes or something.
It was pretty rough, especially for a young kid who had been sheltered on
air force bases.”
Following the death of her boyfriend, eighteen-year-old Pam entered Met-
ropolitan State College in Denver. At this school her self-confidence flour-
ished. Planning to become a doctor, she also entered the Miss Universe Beauty
Pageant for prize money to help finance another year of school. A second
runner-up, Pam still needed money for tuition. She entered a local beauty
pageant in Colorado, in which she was the only black woman competing. She
did not win but caught the eye of Hollywood agent Dave Baumgarten. The
professional meeting with Baumgarten followed a failed romance with basket-
ball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. With little reason to remain in Colorado, Grier
accepted Baumgarten’s invitation to accompany him to Hollywood. Initially,
she declined, but her mother urged her to accept. Grier agreed, and Baum-
66 . diva s on screen
garten set up a meeting. He became her agent, sent her to acting classes, and
employed her as a switchboard operator with his agency. Once in Hollywood,
Grier encountered old-fashioned but still prevalent institutional racism.
Auditions proved frustrating. Repeatedly, she encountered racial discrimi-
nation bolstered by Euro-American beauty standards. After readings and au-
ditions, Pam was repeatedly rejected for petty reasons. One agent rejected her
for not being “Negro enough.” Another complained about “the gap between
her two front teeth being too distracting on film.” At times she was considered
too thin, or, conversely, too fat. Grier’s difficultly auditioning lends credence
to the tyranny of thinness argument proffered by scholars Kim Chernin and
Susan Bordo, both of whom discuss the unobtainable physical standards
women—celebrity women, in particular—are expected to maintain.
Browsing through classifieds, Miss Grier noticed American International
Pictures advertising for a switchboard operator. The job paid twenty-five dol-
lars more a week than her current salary. She told the AIP personnel director
she could operate the switchboard and was hired. Grier recalls:
When I started working at AIP I knew I wanted to learn about the business
because I wanted to be in the business. I started listening in on calls, and got
to know a lot about what was going on . . . I wanted to see how things work,
what makes a success and what makes a failure. When I relieved the production
secretary, I would study the storyboards in the production room. I got to know
who was doing what, where they were doing it, and how long it would take. Ev-
erything went click in my head. I was a little monster for the information.17
Her first small role was a part in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer,
1970). She had no idea what the film was about beforehand, and her part in
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls turned out to be a small cameo. Thereafter she
appeared onstage in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie and Carnival
Island with the Ebony Showcase. Throughout the decade she sang background
vocals for her cousin Rosey Grier, and for Bobby Womack and Lou Rawls,
while also appearing in commercials. Her first leading role was in The Big
Doll House, for which she also sang the theme song.18
Hearing discussion around AIP of casting for B movie producer Roger
Corman, Pam seized the opportunity to audition. At the time, Roger Corman
reigned as the most prolific producer of low-budget movies. His sixteen-year-
tenure at AIP taught him film advertising strategies and the basic formula
for making pictures inexpensively. During his career at the small studio,
Corman learned everything he could from AIP’s president James Harvey
Nicholson and vice president Samuel Zachary Arkoff, and he perfected the
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 67
the mother. Fetishism arises when a substitute object takes the place of the
supposedly “missing” female phallus, serving to reassure the boy child—
and later the adult male—that women are not much different from men
and can be safely approached. When the fetish is a separate object, like a
shoe or material like fur or leather (the feel of which may recall infantile
closeness and intimacy with the mother), it appears to deliver control of
the problematic missing phallus and assuage surrounding anxiety through
disavowal. Fetishism may occur when part of the body (i.e., breast, thigh,
hair, neck) is overvalued so much that it becomes more important than the
whole—it is displaced through synecdoche. Breast fixation, for example, is
fetishistic, and by transference upward, breasts assume phallic properties. In
Eurocentric cultures where whiteness has historically been linked to notions
of white supremacy and light complexions are given greater value, race and
skin complexion may also become fetish objects. Slavery, colonialism, class,
and caste stratification along color lines reveal race as a prominent bodily
signifier. The racial fetish is unlike Freud’s sexual identity fetish because “skin
color functions as the most visible of fetishes.”22 Scholars W. E. B. Du Bois
and Frantz Fanon long ago established that the black body occupies a unique
ontological position in Euro-American cultures. The black (actor’s) body—
in this case Pam Grier’s body—has historically been a site at which multiple
fetishes (i.e., sexual and racial) were simultaneously objectified.
Sigmund Freud’s theory of fetishism is problematic, particularly as a clini-
cal phenomenon of sexual pathology and perversion. It is therefore limited
in its application. But the central notion of the fetish as a substitute for the
absent phallus enables an understanding of the psychic structure of dis-
avowal and the splitting of conscious and unconscious belief.23 Feminist
theories of fetishism have been used to explain male audience fascination
and identification with “phallic heroines”: those fictional female action fig-
ures (i.e., Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Ripley in the Alien quadrilogy, Buffy
the Vampire Slayer) engaging in heroic activities generally considered the
domain of their male counterparts. The phallic heroine is a variation of the
phallic woman. As defined by J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, the phallic
woman is endowed—in fantasy—with a phallus. “Fantasy,” in this context,
is the illusory realm of narrative cinema viewed in a darkened room, which
according to Christian Metz mimics the structure of human dreamscape.
The image of a phallic woman has two primary cultural forms: (1) she is
represented as having either an external phallus or phallic attribute, or (2)
the woman has preserved the male’s phallus inside herself. In general, the
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 69
AIP Camp
Camp is generally understood as an aesthetic style in which humor and
unserious or flippant behaviors are key features. It is a style of exaggeration,
poking fun at or parodying traditional gender roles, characters, and modes
of behavior. Camp reveals the artificiality of all identity categories (racial,
gender, class, sexual, etc.) in American society by showing how unnatural
these roles are. Camp is also an approach taking the so-called “natural” way of
being (the “essence”) and executing it excessively. It presents a self-conscious
mimicry or mocking of behavioral codes by taking them beyond their tra-
ditional boundaries. One popular example of camp is Da Ali G Show. Host
Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G Indahouse) mockingly performs various
identities with such subtlety as to fool only his on-camera interviewees and
not the viewing audience.
Camp, which has existed for ages, gained wider currency in the 1960s with
Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” She pushed it beyond
the aesthetic domain of the gay and lesbian community, spurring a host of
critical investigations into camp as a mode of aesthetic engagement. In the
intervening years, there has been a denunciation of Sontag’s concept and a
subsequent movement to reclaim it as part of oppositional queer aesthetics—
a “queering of camp,” as Fabio Cleto has suggested. As a humorous aesthetic
sensibility, camp articulates double entendre in objects, persons, and dia-
logue. It amounts to the exaggeration of behavior in performance and the
flamboyance of mannerisms susceptible to double interpretation. It may be
the sensibility of failed seriousness, or the playful dethronement of the seri-
ous and the theatricalization of experience.30
A stylistic device used in exploitation cinema, “camping” intensifies the
fetishistic, soft-porn atmosphere because, through it, filmmakers and actors
exaggerate the sensory and parody the sexual. Grier’s prison pictures con-
tained enough nudity, lesbianism, and sadomasochism to be read as a kind
of soft porn. Intercourse and vaginal penetration never occurred onscreen
but were implied, suggested, or occurred in off-screen space. These films
demonstrate the existence of a continuous pornographic tradition running
through dominant culture.31 Nonetheless, campy women-in-prison films—in
all their strangeness and multiple marginality—present images of women and
women’s relationships seldom found in more mainstream genres. As Suzanna
D. Walters notes: Women in this world live together, love together, fight each
other, and fight back against the largely male system of brutal domination
keeping them all down.32
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 71
Since the publication of these books, Black British and postcolonial schol-
ars have offered incisive readings of the relationship between the scopic prac-
tices of the nineteenth century and the disciplinary discourses of the body
(Bhabha, 1994; Mercer, 1994; McClintock, 1995). Together with Dijkstra’s and
Shefer’s work, this literature suggests a correspondence between nineteenth-
century social-scientific discourses pathologizing womanhood and “images
of misogyny” that emerged as backlash against early women’s liberation and
suffrage movements. Throughout the history of art, women have been com-
pared to a storehouse of animal, vegetable, and floral objects. In nineteenth-
century English (and Western European) art the favorite analogy was that
of the bird. The association of “the woman” with “the bird in the cage” was
a persistent and cherished image. According to Shefer, the bird-in-the-cage
symbol allowed both artists and writers to preach “woman’s mission” in so-
ciety. This “mission” was a Victorian euphemism for “women’s rights” and
an issue that began agitating social critics by the mid-nineteenth century.37
These avian Victorian portraits prefigured twentieth-century (and twenty-
first-century) iconography (i.e., film, television, and advertising) in which the
woman in the bird cage repeatedly appeared, both literally and figuratively.
Dijkstra draws an inverse connection between the publication of Nicholas
Francis Cooke’s Satan in Society and social gains made by women. Cooke and
the British pre-Raphaelite painter William Lindsay Windus and their cohorts
were representative of the writers, artists, and intellectuals who viewed the
women’s movement as “indicative of a perverse strain of delusion in the fe-
male mind.” For these male intellectuals, feminine self-assertion represented
a reversion to a more primitive stage of human civilization.38 The new em-
phasis on women’s education was also perceived as a threatening perversion
of the status quo. Coincidentally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the
number of women college students had greatly increased. Higher education,
particularly, was broadened by the rise of women’s colleges and the admission
of women to formerly all-male colleges and universities. Some of the most
prestigious women’s colleges emerged during the latter half of the nineteenth
century, the same moment Dijkstra addresses.39
What specifically concerned Nicholas Cooke and his contemporaries was
the proliferation of female boarding schools, which Cooke viewed as an arena
in which masturbation, sexual impulses, and female relationships might be
routinely practiced or indulged. Interestingly, this single-sex environment
parallels the penal enclaves presented in Grier’s women-in-prison pictures.
Nonetheless, Cooke believed he and his colleagues had found an “explana-
tion for vice in the dangerous—one might even say incestuous—energies
74 . diva s on screen
released by women who consorted with each other.”40 In this milieu, Di-
jkstra finds opposing trends: the “iconography of misogyny” emerging in
cultural spheres (the salons of Europe and North America) concurrently
with a more favorable response to women’s education in the public sphere.
Implicit in Dijkstra’s analysis is the contention that this imagery flourished
in reaction to the temporary instability of patriarchy at a moment of feminist
achievement. The iconography of misogyny was evident in artistic images of
feminine weightlessness, languidness, and fatigue, and feminine likeness to
earthliness, repeatedly presenting (white) women as passive sexual entities
inviting aggressive male sexuality.
The turn-of-the-century painters, in creating these images of helplessly ec-
static women, were playing directly on their audiences fantasies of aggression
and “invited” rape by depicting women who were extremely vulnerable and
naked, usually sprawled flat on their backs in primarily sylvan surroundings,
yet who appeared to be in the last throes of an uncontrollable ecstasy. Inevi-
tably these paintings must suggest a perverse combination of intense sexual
need and abject helplessness on the part of the women depicted. There is only
one way in which these creatures can be joined: we must descend to their
level, become part of their world of earth and trees, part of the preconscious
universe, responsive to nature’s barbaric invitation to engage in the purely
sexual, purely materialistic ritual of reproduction . . . 41
The movie Women in Cages (1971) marked the beginning of Pam Grier’s
sexploitation film career. Like many of these movies, it was shot on a low
budget in the Philippines using Philippine extras as cast and crew to keep
production overhead low. Pam Grier plays Alabama, a sadistic dominatrix
and prison supervisor. The story begins aboard the ship Zulu Queen, a floating
house of prostitution, topless dancing, and drug trafficking. Lost onboard, an
innocent young white American, Carol Jeffries (Jennifer Gan), is mistaken for
one of the ship’s dancing dope smugglers. Apprehended for drug possession,
she is falsely accused and sentenced to confinement at Gargel del Ingierno,
a deplorable prison deep in the heart of an unnamed tropical jungle. At the
penitentiary, Carol is strip-searched and housed with a motley crew of hostile
cellmates including a dope addict nicknamed “Stoke” (Roberta Collins) and
a merciless husband killer, Sandy (Judy Brown). Actors Collins and Brown
were cast as these callous characters, but exploitation filmmakers, conscious
of their predominantly male audiences, usually employed actresses who re-
sembled models more than hardened criminals.
Typical of exploitation, Women in Cages is laced with sexual innuendo,
lesbian sexuality, racial conflict, and social commentary. Even Grier’s char-
Pam Grier portrays sadistic prison guard Alabama in Women in Cages (1972).
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 77
uniform looks on.46 When Alcott is caught relieving her sexual frustrations
with Fred, Lucian punishes her in the same medieval cell. Dr. Phillips (Jack
Davis), the prison physician, is incredulous when the girls complain about
Lucian’s abusiveness. Staging an escape, they start a food fight in the mess
hall, overturning tables and throwing trays. But guards subdue the riot, and
for punishment Lucian confines Alcott, Bodine, and Ferina to the “hotbox,”
a merciless steam room. In the final scenes, a shootout in the prison leaves
few survivors. The heroin-addicted Harrad stabs Grear to death. Bodine
is brutally shot down. Alcott takes her revenge by blowing up their escape
truck. Only Collier escapes the nightmare.
The Big Doll House also presents a racialized, gendered economy of power
and privilege in which white women are positioned as naturally feminine.
There is a clear ethnic distinction between the butch Philippine prison guards
and the mostly femme white inmates. Whereas the guards are stout, fully
clothed, short-haired, and armed (i.e., visually coded as masculine), the pris-
oners are svelte and scantily clad, with long tresses and nubile bodies (i.e.,
visually coded as feminine). That the guards signify masculinity or butch
womanhood and the prisoners signify femininity suggests that gender in-
heres in the role function itself. There is something about the victim-prisoner
function that wants manifestation in racially coded conventions of feminin-
ity.47 In this racialized visual economy, Grier/Grear stands out as a liminal
figure positioned between the feminine white world of captives (prisoners)
and the masculine, Philippine world of free persons (armed guards). Grier’s
symbolic liminality (as go-between traveling to and from two symbolically
different gender poles) manifests in the film’s narrative: she supplies inmates
with heroin obtained from Lucian in return for being the prison snitch.
It is not only Grear’s lesbianism or identification with the sadistic Lucian
that suggests her difference, her perversity. Grear also prostitutes herself to
male guards despite loathing men and male sexuality, as when she tries to
bribe Harry with sex in exchange for drugs she can no longer obtain from
Lucian. She lures Harry to her cell pretending to be a sex-starved, help-
lessly ecstatic, eager-to-be-vanquished inmate and allows him to fondle her
breasts. When Harry predictably double-crosses her, she snaps “You’re rotten,
Harry . . . you know why? ’Cause you’re a man! All men are filthy. All they
ever want to do is get at you . . . But no more . . . I’m not gonna let a man’s
filthy hands touch me again!” In this scene Grear is semiotically coded as
tough and perverse. Her status as a prostitute notwithstanding, she embod-
ies the perverse combination of intense sexual need and abject helplessness
Dijkstra’s describes when analyzing the iconography of misogyny in West-
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 81
ern art. The moment she signifies as sexually deviant, as an idol of perverse
sexuality, the campy dialogue comments on sex and gender roles. Men are
denounced as “filthy” and as capable of exploiting women even when women
are most vulnerable. Finally, the intentional homonymic slippage between
Grier and “Grear” strengthens the symbolic connection between the actor
playing perverse characters (Grier) and the perverse onscreen characters
she portrays (Grear). Such semiotic slippage fortified Grier’s image in the
popular imagination.
cal landscape and its pseudorevolutionary theme, it’s probable that War-
den Zappa is a campy caricature of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata
(1879–1919), champion of the poor, a land reformer, and a guerrilla fighter
during the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.
At the prison campsite, inmates are deprived of so-called natural sexual
desires. For instance, the male guards are openly homosexual, which is the
warden’s way of denying the women any temptation. This is yet another in-
dication that sexploitation was self-consciously parodying sex and gender
roles. Heterosexual transgressors are disciplined with confinement to “the
Birdcage,” Zappa’s giant bamboo sugar mill with huge, dangerous grinders.
Prisoners are also sent there for failing to meet daily quotas in the rice and
sugarcane fields. Interned at the camp are several prisoners: the garrulous
Bull Jones (Teda Bracci), the leggy new girl Terry, and Mickie (Carol Speed),
a diminutive but sassy young black girl. But before Django and Blossom can
break into the prison and free their would-be comrades, they return to the
base for additional weapons and supplies.
Meanwhile, Django fails to make the rendezvous point, so a jealous Blos-
som threatens him. Witnessing her cocky possessiveness, a fellow revolution-
ary says: “If only we had more women like her, what a revolution we could
have!” This scene typifies the sexploitation genre’s emphasis on aggressive
women situated in tropical locales in which an unnamed “revolution” is sup-
posedly taking place. The need to recruit more women like Blossom propels
the diegesis. Blossom, Django, and comrades plot to infiltrate Zappa’s prison
camp and liberate and then enlist the inmates. Once interned as an under-
cover inmate, Blossom demands that the other women submit to her author-
ity but encounters resistance and racism. Fights between prisoners continu-
ally erupt, providing narrative justification for prurient mud-wrestling and
food-fighting scenes.
In keeping with the loutish spirit of camp, racial tensions between char-
acters are garishly scripted in Bird Cage, as when one adversary taunts Blos-
som by asking her, “Where do you want to be buried, nigger?” Provoked
but not unsettled, Blossom dismissively responds, “It’s Miss Nigger to you!”
Glibly insisting on the conventional title “Miss,” rather than objecting to the
racial epithet “nigger,” Pam Grier’s Blossom shifts the linguistic balance of
power by evoking the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified
in language. She demonstrates that the relationship between signifier (i.e.,
“nigger”) and signified (i.e., any individual) is a result of a system of social
conventions specific to each society and to particular historical moments and
cultural contexts. There is no single, unchanging, or universal meaning. This
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 83
roads had to be rebuilt to permit passage. . . . Typhoid and cholera epidemics
were sweeping parts of the Philippines while Black Mama, White Mama was
being filmed and one of the stars, Lynn Borden, contracted “H” type typhoid.
. . . The jungle adventure is the fifth motion picture of her recent credits which
was filmed entirely in the Philippine Islands.50
The movie paired Grier with blond actress Margaret Markov playing
Karen Brent, an idealistic guerilla fighter also interned at the prison. Together
Markov and Grier made two of the first female interracial buddy films. Black
Mama, White Mama (1972) and The Arena (1973) were transitional films for
Pam Grier, as each broke with the prison-picture formula structure in which
her characters were repeatedly killed in the final act. In Black Mama Grier’s
character literally sails off into the sunset with a small fortune in hand. In
The Arena both she and Markov survive but Grier triumphs as the stronger
of the two, walking away uninjured. Faithful to the novel on which it was
based, Black Mama, White Mama used prison life as a backdrop for a story
about two women—one white, the other black—on the lam.
At a women’s detention camp somewhere in an unidentified jungle, a bus
pulls up carrying a slovenly group of women prisoners. The setting is familiar,
but Black Mama reverses Pam Grier’s Big Bird Cage role as a revolutionary
fighter, casting Markov as the political rebel. That night, Lee (Grier) rebuffs
the sexual advances of matron Densmore (Lynn Borden), a sleazy blonde
with lechery on her mind. We get an appreciation for the movie’s sensibili-
ties right away when we’re treated to a lengthy shower scene, complete with
Densmore peeping through a crack in the wall as Lee pleasures herself. This
scene goes on for over two minutes, with the nude girls giggling throughout.
When Densmore approaches Karen (Markov) with the same offer, she ac-
cepts, hoping it will facilitate her escape. Karen’s acceptance angers Lee, and
the two start fighting in the mess hall. As punishment for unruly behavior,
they are stripped and sentenced to the “hot box.” Upon their release from
the hot box, Lee and Karen are chained together. Karen’s guerillas ambush
the bus, and the women escape.
Imitating the racial dynamic of The Defiant Ones, Black Mama, White
Mama has Markov’s Karen and Grier’s Lee chained together at cross-purposes:
Lee needs to retrieve a suitcase full of money hidden at one end of the island;
Karen plans to rejoin her guerillas and continue fighting the revolution led
by Ernesto (Zaldy Zshomack). Meanwhile, word of their breakout reaches
island gangsters Ruben (Sid Haig) and Vic Cheng (Vic Diaz). Vic knows
about the money Lee has hidden and dispatches gunmen to track her. As the
86 . diva s on screen
women forage deeper into the jungle, stealing provisions from local farmers
and villages, the police, led by Captain Cruz (Eddie Garcia), follow.
One key difference between The Defiant Ones and Black Mama is that
Grier’s Lee does not sacrifice herself for Markov’s Karen the way Sidney
Poitier’s Noah Cullen does for Tony Curtis’s John “Joker” Jackson. Through-
out cinematic history, black characters have typically been sacrificed so
their white costars/counterparts could live. Jeanine Basinger argued that
this narrative pattern gained full expression in the World War II combat
film.51 We see vestiges of this narrative outline in contemporary horror
and science-fiction films (i.e., Alien 3, Scream 2). Such patterns reproduced
the stereotype of the dying slave from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. Tom is beaten, chased, insulted, and enslaved, but when he dies, he
dies content because he has been loyal to his white master. Black Mama
presents a racial role reversal with respect to this paradigm. Grier’s Lee
not only saves herself, she survives Markov’s character Karen. In the 1970s,
audiences enjoyed a reprieve from narratives of black sacrifice because ex-
ploitation films (sexploitation and Blaxploitation, in particular) broke this
mold. Black Mama proved transitional in another way. It broke the generic
pattern common in Grier’s pictures. Sexploitation’s women characters were
rarely—if ever—spared excessive punishment for their transgressions of the
patriarchal social order. In Black Mama, Grier’s Lee ultimately triumphs
rather than dies in the final reel.
That Grier’s characters were often sole survivors is significant in terms of
feminist film history and theory. These narrative endings are noteworthy
because they suggest evidence of a precursor to Carol Clover’s notion of the
Final Girl. In a seminal study of slasher films as a subgenre, Clover defined
the Final Girl in terms of horror film. There are parallels between the aggres-
sive action heroines of exploitation and the Final Girls of horror pictures.
Like the Final Girl, who looks for the killer, the exploitation heroine looks
to satisfy her revenge against monstrous male villains. Much like the Final
Girl of horror films, the exploitation heroine is—by the conclusion—aligned
with the camera and audience. Like the Final Girl, the exploitation heroine
is presented as tomboyish, or “butch,” or somewhat androgynous (i.e., Jamie
Lee Curtis in Halloween). And, like the Final Girl, who shares masculine
qualities with the killer, the exploitation heroine shares masculine qualities
with the sadistic villains and prison guards.52 Grier was a phallic symbol
par excellence. Her only contemporaries in this respect were predecessors
who—a few years earlier—appeared in sexploitation pictures prior to Grier.
The most notable example is Japanese-Filipino-American Tura Satana, who
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 87
starred in Astro Zombies (1967), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), and Doll
Squad (1973).53 It was after Grier’s initial success with Roger Corman that
others began entering the scene. Making this observation, Grier told film-
maker Isaac Julien:
I think after the first three or four films with Roger, other actresses said you
know what, “I just wanted to be the prissy love interest. But I think I’m going
to kick some butt too, make some money like Pam.” So there were other ac-
tresses entering, from Tamara Dobson to Gloria Hendry. They started coming
in and getting the work that I . . . [had] not turned down, but I was already
hired to do a certain amount of work and I can only be in so many places at
once. So, other actresses were doing pretty much what I was doing.
The Arena
Following Black Mama, White Mama, Grier starred in the Steve Carver–
directed, Corman-produced picture titled The Arena (1973). Grier and Mar-
garet Markov received equal billing in this low-budget but lavish—by Roger
Corman standards—New World release. Filmed quickly and cheaply (for
$75,000) in Italy by Carver, The Arena (released overseas as La rivolta delle
gladiatrici) was dubbed a “mini-spectacle rip-off of Kirk Douglas’s star vehicle
Spartacus” (Stanley Kubrick, 1960).54 Years later, in the summer of 1988, The
Arena was re-released for the videocassette market under the more sensa-
tional title Naked Warriors. In keeping with the exploitive distribution strat-
egies of its production, publicity material for videocassette store distribu-
tors enticed retailers with the following: “The competitive spirit of the [1988
Korean] summer Olympics will put your customers in the perfect mood for
this Olympian-theme release.”
Shot on location in Italy, The Arena is set during the decadent days of
ancient Rome. In the opening scene, Roman soldiers scour the country-
side, carrying off beautiful women to be sold as slaves. One of these captive
women is the proud Bodicia (Markov), a Druid high priestess. Another is a
voluptuous African woman named Mamawi (Grier). In the Roman town of
Brundisium, the owner of a local arena where gladiatorial contests are staged
purchases the women. By day, the women must serve patrons of the arena. At
night they’re obliged to warm the beds of fatally injured gladiators, or those
sentenced to death. Internal dissension among the slavewomen erupts one
day into a wild free-for-all in the kitchen of the owner’s villa. Their masters,
who see a chance to tickle the jaded palates of arena patrons, watch this
impassioned but comic melee with condescending approval. Henceforth,
88 . diva s on screen
Grier (as Mamawi) and Margaret Markov (as Bodicia) are luscious gladiators in the The Arena (1973).
the women will be trained as gladiators and will challenge each other in the
arena. The first fight turns out to be a farce. But soon blood begins to flow
and the women are forced to fight to the death just like men. Horrified by
this barbarity, Bodicia and Mamawi lead a revolt against their masters. Many
of their sister slaves are killed in the uprising, but these two manage to fight
their way through the labyrinths and beyond the city walls to freedom.55
Grier in Transition
Black Mama, White Mama (produced by AIP) and The Arena (produced by
New World) were transitional films for Pam Grier. Precursors to her Blax-
ploitation films, these sexploitation-action roles maintained her forceful
woman-warrior iconicity but downplayed the lesbianism prevalent in earlier
pictures, making her image more mainstream and therefore acceptable to
straight women and traditional African American spectators. In these later
films, Grier’s characters have more autonomy and control of their sexuality
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 89
genre. For cultural historian Van Deburg, the objectifying phallocentric gaze
curtails and contains female performers.
Female love interests in the Blaxploitation films sometimes acted as if they
were attempting to join the pin-up goddess aloofness of Lena Horne with
the overt sexuality of Eartha Kitt and Dorothy Dandridge. Some slyly witty
femmes even managed to toss in a few stinging wisecracks à la Pearl Bailey.
Most, however, were firmly fixed in the “phallocentric gaze,” which students
of modern film culture have identified as a major hindrance to the develop-
ment of fully realized cinematic portrayals of women. In terms of both filmic
representation and reception, male definition dominated. Attractive female
characters in supporting roles were to be looked at, desired and possessed. At
all times, they were expected to subordinate their own needs to the preroga-
tives of the male culture hero. Presented as passive, erotic objects pleasing to
the hyperactive and voyeuristic male gaze, such characters contributed im-
portantly to the creation of a Hollywood fantasy world in which the woman
as ornament, victim, or spectacle could hope to influence events only through
her sexuality. Her main concern—and what she did best—was to satisfy the
patriarch’s lusts and to boost male egos on both sides of the camera.59
While Van DeBurg aptly describes the sexual construction of icons like Grier,
he describes them as passive objects when they are also active narrative agents
and protagonists in these films. Scholars Pam Cook, Carol Clover, and Yvonne
Tasker have demonstrated that both male and female spectators move in and
out of an identificatory relationship with active narrative agents. Van DeBurg’s
literal analysis fails to account for exploitation’s playful comic sensibility or
women’s aggressiveness or the way women turn their hostility against the
male world, thereby parodying male violence as campy butch violence. His
reading reductively maintains woman-as-object, precluding any notion of
generic continuity between 1970s exploitation and 1990s action, horror, or
neo-noir, replete as they often are with strong women characters.60 Generic
continuity from the 1970s to 2000s is traceable through filmmakers like Jona-
than Demme, who coscripted Black Mama, White Mama (1972) and directed
Caged Heat (1974) only to later direct Silence of the Lambs (1991). It is also
traceable in the film-studies literature. Carol Clover, for instance, noted how
films like The Accused, the Aliens quadrilogy, Silence of the Lambs, and Thelma
and Louise are predicated on the “low-budget, often harsh and awkward but
sometimes deeply energetic films that preceded them by a decade or more—
films that said it all, and in flatter terms, and on a shoestring.”61 Clover is
clearly referring to the exploitation films and their various permutations. Her
thesis also applies to more recent films like Domino (Tony Scott, 2005).
92 . diva s on screen
overdose, she explains her plot to avenge Lu Belle. For Coffy, Lu Belle’s fate
is symptomatic of the exploitation of poor black folks by organized crimi-
nals. She confesses to her friend Officer Carter Brown (William Elliot) that
the problem is more pervasive than she initially believed. From a prostitute
named Priscilla (Carol Lawson), Coffy learns that a big dope distributor and
pimp, King George (Robert Doqui), works for Las Vegas drug lord Vitroni
(Allan Arbus) and that Vitroni is hooked in with police through Carter’s
crooked white partner McHenry (Barry Cahill). Despite sympathizing with
her motives, Carter urges Coffy to relinquish her vendetta. “Why kill some
junkie who’s paying for his own habit? He’s only part of a chain that reaches
back to some poor farmer in Turkey or Vietnam. What good would it do to
kill one of them?”
Superficially political dialogue, sprinkled throughout Blaxploitation mov-
ies, typified the genre’s cursory nod to social problems and political issues
(e.g., women’s liberation, Black Power, drug addiction, prostitution). Jack
Hill and Roger Corman (among others) made a routine practice of weaving
social issues into exploitation narratives because this recipe worked success-
fully in precursors Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Filmmak-
ers sought to captivate politicized black audiences already galvanized by
civil rights activism, Black Panther protests, Stokely Carmichael’s speeches,
“free Huey Newton” rallies, the murder of Fred Hampton, and the arrest of
Angela Davis. The films operated according to a Manichean schema: black
self-determination (a fusion of Black Pride, Black Power, and Black Nation-
alism)65 coalesced to defeat white villainy. Brilliantly sporting dashiki shirts,
kente cloth, bell-bottom pants, and well coiffed afros, black actors playing
these protagonists (Shaft, Coffy, Cleo, and Sweetback) signified nationalist
sentiment through their performance of the esthétique du cool.
Encoded through performance and costume, the esthétique was demon-
strated by a character’s cool pose, a chameleon-like ability to fool the unsus-
pecting, a commitment to ferret criminals, and a black aesthetic.66 Esthétique
dictated eschewal of black bourgeois values (and concomitant excesses) in
favor of characters supporting a working-class black community (i.e., Blue
Collar, 1978). For decades, African Americans assimilated to mainstream
American culture. Unquestioned assimilation ended for a cross-section of
1960s and 1970s progressives. Younger African Americans rejected middle-
class mores and embraced the experiences of blacks from inner-city ghettoes.
Youth-oriented counter-culture began valorizing anti-establishment ideolo-
gies. Participants of the underground economy (pimps, sex workers, and
drug traffickers) were suddenly valorized as real, as authentically black, and
94 . diva s on screen
Black and white audience sympathies are readily aligned with Grier’s Coffy not
only because Vitroni’s the villain, but also because his sexist and racist behav-
iors render him even more deplorable. This scene supplies another example
of exploitation cinema’s emphasis on the fetish of sexual racism. In a typical
seduce-and-betray scene, she corners him, pulls out the pistol hidden in her
bag, and taunts: “So, you want me to crawl, white motherfucker?” Unfortu-
nately, Coffy’s attempt to teach Vitroni a lesson is thwarted when his henchmen
suddenly intervene. She returns later to kill him and his hirelings, giving them
the generic vigilante sendoff. Her victory furnishes the predictably binaristic
spectacle of subversion: good black woman defeats evil white man.
In addition to legitimizing Grier’s acting by enabling her to jettison the
residue of seedy sexploitation, Coffy exemplified Blaxploitation’s racial re-
venge motif in which black women were vigilante-survivors hunting white
male criminals. This new victim-survivor’s quest for justice inverted the ra-
cial and gender hierarchies of mainstream vigilante cinema popularized by
white male stars Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, and Clint Eastwood.68 The
appearance of female vigilantes in recent action films (i.e., Kill Bill, Kill Bill
2), neo-Blaxploitation (i.e., Undercover Brother, I’m Gonna Get You Sucker),
horror (i.e., Scream 2, The Ring), and neo-noir (i.e., Jackie Brown) suggests
structural continuity between old and new films as well as the existence of
cult cinema’s intertextual archetypes— preestablished, frequently reappear-
ing types recycled by innumerable texts, provoking déjà vu in the spectator.69
Grier’s career as a subversive phallic femme was predicated on her narrative
function as an intertextual archetype. Her characters’ rancorous remarks
resonated with those of other characters in similar situations, evoking the
same satisfaction audiences derived from similarly triumphant vigilantes.
Coffy—like other Grier pictures—succeeded in becoming a campy cult film
not because it is one movie but because it is the movies.
Foxy Brown
Foxy Brown (1974), a sequel to Coffy, was based on the same narrative formula
and catalogue of intertextual archetypes. Both were directed and scripted by
Jack Hill, and both yielded significant returns at the box office. Foxy Brown
96 . diva s on screen
grossed $2.46 million in domestic rentals. Once again, Grier plays the epony-
mous lead whose mission is to defeat predatory drug kingpin Steve Elias
(Peter Brown),70 the villain responsible for the death of her undercover nar-
cotics agent boyfriend Michael Anderson (Terry Carter) and her younger
brother Link (Antonio Fargas).
Cornered at a local taco stand by Eddie (Tony Giorgio) and Bunyan (Fred
Lerner), two members of a local dope ring, Link frantically phones Foxy.
As the assassins are closing in on Link, Foxy appears, opens up a can of
whoopass, wreaks havoc on the dealers, and takes Link to her apartment
for safekeeping. Later, when Foxy brings home her lover, Michael, who has
had his face altered to prevent recognition by the mob, Link identifies him.
Trying to improve his position with the mob, Link phones Miss Katherine
Wall (Katherine Loder), head of the local dope and prostitution ring. Kath-
erine passes the information to her lover-henchman Steve Elias, who sets
up an ambush to kill Michael. An enraged Foxy decides to go undercover
and infiltrate the syndicate. She ingratiates herself with Miss Katherine and
becomes part of her high-class call-girl operation. Her first appointment is
to accompany one of Katherine’s most experienced girls, Claudia (Juanita
Brown). Their mission: satisfy and bribe a local judge to release members of
Miss Katherine’s gang who are awaiting trial.
But just as Foxy prepares to strike against Katherine and Steve, she’s cap-
tured and sent to the “Ranch,” a filthy backwater farm where she is tied,
drugged, and repeatedly raped by two slovenly racists. As film scholar Ed
Guerrero noted, villainy is linked to racist sexism in Foxy Brown. Guerrero
aptly noted how this scene evokes memories of black women’s plight under
slavery, since it contains visual references to the plantation, including a mo-
ment when Foxy is lashed with a bullwhip. Guerrero’s observation under-
scores my thesis that sexual racism is endemic to exploitation cinema. When
Foxy eventually escapes, she persuades a handful of militant youngbloods
to join her fight against drug lords by convincing them that her cause is not
only personal but the plight of all black people.71 This is yet another example
of how writers, directors, and producers of Blaxploitation cinema exploited
the sentiments of politicized black audiences to garner box office revenue.
The image of sleazy racists and grubby sexists violating the heroine justifies
the narrative’s rape-revenge crescendo. After enlisting the righteous young
brothers to help her exact revenge, she plans the ultimate reprisal: to castrate
Steve with a hunting knife. The castration obviously occurs off-screen but
is powerfully staged nonetheless. And its significance is underscored when
Foxy personally delivers Steve’s member (now placed in a pickle jar) to his
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 97
lover, Katherine, who, upon recognizing his genitals cries out, “Steve!” Foxy’s
revenge has literal and figurative significance. It is a literal expression of
Foxy’s personal triumph over Steve (i.e., the penis) and a figurative expres-
sion of the black community’s collective victory over a criminal figurehead
(i.e., the phallus). It’s also a symbolic appropriation by Foxy of the proverbial
phallus. Symbolic order is restored: the corrupt Law of the deviant father is
subverted by the righteous ways of the black mother. Steve’s physical castra-
tion metaphorically endows Foxy with phallic properties.
Foxy Brown’s retaliatory castration anticipates the classic rape-revenge
scene of Meir Zarchi’s cult film I Spit on Your Grave (1977).72 Generically
speaking, Foxy Brown is a harbinger of rape-revenge films and ought to be
98 . diva s on screen
considered a cinematic antecedent for its plot structure. Both films’ protago-
nists (Jennifer and Foxy) are the antithesis of their perpetrators. Foxy is an
urban-based, northern, black female who abstains from drug use. The per-
petrators are rural, southern, white male drug abusers. Jennifer is similarly
juxtaposed against her perpetrators. She’s an educated, urban-based journalist
who is viciously attacked by country bumpkins. Just as the assault on Jennifer
is an act of so-called generosity toward one of the group members, “a gift”
to Matthew, so Foxy’s confinement to the “Ranch,” where she’s drugged and
abused, is a gift to “the [good old] Boys” on the farm. Both women ultimately
achieve vengeance in the form of physical castration. And both I Spit on Your
Grave and Foxy Brown are intertextual archetypes, films produced in relation
to other films with the purpose of becoming a cult objects.
after that, and I haven’t worn it since. I just wanted to bring more truth to my
life. I survived a wall, and didn’t need a Rolex to say anything about me.
With the 1980s slump and her bout with cancer behind her, Pam Grier
began working again. First she secured a substantial role in Original Gangs-
tas (Larry Cohen, 1996), which reunited her with fellow Blaxploitation stars
Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Ron O’Neal, and Richard Roundtree. Unfor-
tunately, Gangstas was met by mediocre reviews and had a less than stellar
performance at the box office, earning a domestic total gross of $3,718,087.
Next the star played yet another tough, phallic femme, the dangerous trans-
sexual Hershe Las Palmas in John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996). This
film fared better at the box office than Gangstas but was not a major role for
her. Following Escape, she starred as divorced mother Louise Williams in
the science fiction comedy Mars Attacks! (Tim Burton, 1996). Fortunately,
Mars performed reasonably well, grossing $37 million domestically and $63
million overseas for a worldwide total of $101.3 million.
Grier took smaller roles in Fakin’ da Funk (Timothy A. Chey, 1997) and
Strip Search (Rod Hewitt, 1997) before starring in Tarantino’s Jackie Brown
(1997) and Ernest R. Dickerson’s Bones (2001). The fact that she successfully
obtained these roles evidences the longevity of her star persona. None of
her 1970s contemporaries have reemerged to assume leading (or prominent
supporting) roles in mainstream, theatrically released pictures. For Grier,
featured roles in Original Gangsters, Jackie Brown, and Bones utilized the aura
of her 1970s screen persona to create a feeling of nostalgia for that decade.
Jackie Brown is a perfect example of postmodern nostalgia. According to
Pam Grier, the “role of a lifetime” emerged with Quentin Tarantino’s third
film, based on the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch. One of Grier’s most
enthusiastic fans, Tarantino wrote the screenplay adaptation of Rum Punch
as a star vehicle for the actress he had admired since his adolescence to play
the novel’s Jackie Burke. As homage to Grier’s most famous role, Foxy Brown,
Tarantino changed the character’s name to Jackie Brown. Jackie Brown not
only reanimated the myth of the phallic woman striving for revenge, it also
reinvented Grier’s former persona. Jackie recharged Grier’s screen persona
and snowballed into new projects: Ernest Dickerson’s horror film Bones and,
later, a role as Kit Porter on Showtime’s lesbian soap opera The L Word.
Both Bones and The L Word utilize the aura of Grier’s 1970s persona, but
in different ways. Set in the present day, Bones tells the history of one Afri-
can American neighborhood crippled by organized crime; the film’s plot is
reminiscent of Grier’s earlier work. In a series of flashbacks, we return to 1979,
when Jimmy Bones (Snoop Doggy Dogg, aka Cordazer Calvin Broadus), an
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 101
Snoop Dogg (Jimmy Bones) and Grier (Pearl) are reunited lovers in Bones (2001).
While this lesbian soap opera doesn’t invoke the political militancy of
Grier’s 1970s Blaxploitation image, it does call to mind the soulful sisterhood
always embedded in her screen persona. On the show, Kit’s music career gets
a boost when Slim Daddy decides to sample one of her old hits on his new
record. Through Slim Daddy, the TV viewing audience is made cognizant of
grier: idol of perversit y and se xual charisma · 103
Kit’s cultural relevance. While shooting the music video for their song, Slim
Daddy reminds a frustrated director not to forget his place.
Kit: I love the song. And, I really want to be in the video. But I can’t be
in it like this. When I stopped drinking I promised myself I would
never make a fool of myself again.
Slim Daddy: It’s my bad. I put the girls in the video cuz I thought this is
what you wanted. I thought this was your thang.
Kit: You did that for me?
Slim Daddy: Yeah.
Kit: Listen, it’s not about the girls. It’s just that . . . well, hell, I’m not
twenty. And, I ain’t nobody’s hoochie. So, why am I puttin’ myself
through all this? If they don’t like me and my song, this is not gonna
convince them.
Director: Sorry to interrupt. But I have to keep shooting. Are you in, or
not?
Slim Daddy: Excuse me, Kit. If it wasn’t for Kit Porter, wouldn’t none
of us be here. Wouldn’t be no song. Wouldn’t be no video for you to
shoot. So, what you meant to say was, you ’bout to sit yo’ ass over
there and figure out how to get this right. Right!?
What makes this scene interesting is its double articulation. It has diegetic
(narrative) and nondiegetic (nonnarrative) significance. At the diegetic level,
it articulates the difficulties encountered by older women artists trying to
speak through a youth-dominated music video vernacular. Kit knows the
concept for the video is wrong for her. Yet the narrative world of the TV
show is consistent with the African American tradition of paying respect to
blues, R & B, or Motown artists who preceded hip-hop. At the nondiegetic
level, the scene resonates with the real-life screen career of Pam Grier. Con-
temporary artists ranging from Quentin Tarantino to Snoop Dogg (not to
mention writers of The L Word) recognize their debt to the pop-culture
legacy of Grier and her contemporaries—those on whom they rely to evoke
that “old-school” feeling. Here the term old school is not only a reference to
1970s funk, it also refers to traditional dating practices. For example, when
a cross-dressing drag king named Ivan (Kelly Lynch) begins romantically
pursuing Kit, Bette warns, “She’s courting you, old-school, and you’re letting
her!” Throughout, The L Word displays similar signs of nostalgia in narrative
genuflections to Kit’s/Grier’s memorable past. Take the nightclub scene, in
which Slim Daddy opens Kit’s act, saying, “Kit Porter is a real motherfuckin’
diva,” as a case in point.
104 . diva s on screen
Having moved on to new projects in both television and film, Pam Grier’s
screen career continues to evolve. Yet because of the cultural impact of her
early work, she still functions as one of the definitive and enduring icons of
1970s soul music, badass attitude, and sheer elegance. On the strength of her
earlier screen persona she became an entity that evokes the aura of the 1970s
in contemporary films. In Jackie Brown, Bones, and Original Gangsters—a film
whose very title suggests a return of the past—Pam Grier is a semiotic sign
of the reemergence of the past in the present, a true diva of the big screen.
3
Goldberg’s Variations
on Comedic Charisma
It is scarcely possible to think of a black American actor who
has not been misused; not one has ever been seriously
challenged to deliver the best that is in him.
—James Baldwin
have they perpetuated the Big Lie. As a black woman, she’s been excluded
from conventional romantic comedies. In diegetic contexts, and in the ex-
tradiagetic world, the comedienne has commented on her exclusion from
traditional romantic couplings. She is one of the few female stars whose en-
tertainment persona is not predicated on traditional notions of femininity,
nubile sexuality, and happy-ever-after endings of heterosexual union. Evoking
roguery rather than romance, Goldberg’s celebrity calls to mind Kathleen
Rowe’s suggestion that the comedic, “unruly” woman is a transgressive figure
who disobeys, confronts, and menaces the patriarchal order.
This chapter analyzes the semiotics of Goldberg’s star persona. While her
early career was built on standup comedy routines like The Spook Show (1983)
and its Broadway version, simply titled Whoopi Goldberg, her current star
persona is predicated on a long career of leading film roles in The Color Purple
(1985), Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Burglar (1987), The Telephone (1988), Sister
Act (1992), Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993), Corrina, Corrina (1994), Ed-
die (1996), and The Associate (1996), to name only a few. An analysis of all her
films is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, the critical commentary
circulating around Goldberg’s discursive subjectivity motivates my readings
of select cinematic performances. The films I have chosen were central in
the formation of her star persona. Viewing Goldberg’s characters as always
already problematized by the lingering specter of racial stereotypes, I locate
the ways her diegetic and extradiegetic personae resist and even undermine
privileged categories of identity and defy her marginalization. By foreground-
ing the political register and witty dimensions of her work as a comedienne,
I discuss Goldberg’s stardom in terms of a series of transformations that
menace conventional categories of race, gender, and sexuality. My central
argument is that her charismatic comedy is rooted in a transgressive reper-
toire through which she disrupts the dominant social order as presented in
these narratives.
Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines comedy as “any type of play or
motion picture with more or less humorous treatment of characters, situa-
tion, and non-tragic ending.” It also defines comedy as “the art, technique,
or theory of writing, producing, or acting in such plays or motion pictures.”
Generally speaking, comedy refers to the genre and subgenres of film comedy
and to the generic maneuverings of filmed slapstick or farce. Here the term
comedy refers to Goldberg’s specific comedic idiolect or repertoire of humorous
and carnivalesque routines. In her routines, she continually shifts, critiques,
and signifies on the existing hierarchies (i.e., race, gender, class) as they are
reflected in society and the entertainment industries. Though her critiques
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 107
comedy. These criticisms omit the generic conventions of comedy and the
instability of identity within the genre, which often flaunts a carnival-like
atmosphere positing most identities as unstable. Closer readings of her star
vehicles demonstrate the way her characters—and the situations in which
they are placed—trouble supposedly stable gender categories, critique no-
tions of white identity, question whiteness as a social formation, and identify
white racism.
Burglar is one film that comments critically on racism. Goldberg plays a
female version of characters played by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy,
comedians who pioneered mainstream audience acceptance of audacious,
cocky African American actors employing crude language and acerbic patter
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 109
to deliver real and unspoken truths about American race relations.5 In the
film, white divorcee Cynthia Sheldrake (Lesley Ann Warren) hires female
ex-convict Bernice (Whoopi Goldberg) to commit a simple robbery. Cyn-
thia needs Bernice to “steal back” jewelry taken by her miserly ex-husband.
Bernice is double-crossed when Cynthia actually frames her for murder.
Throughout the movie, characters comment on the racism implicit in a pro-
fessional white woman’s ability to frame a black working-class woman for
homicide. The film calls attention to the overtly racist police practices and
bigoted officers who presume Bernice’s guilt. Bernice even comments on these
circumstances. As if evoking the cacophony of competing social discourses
concerning black criminality, black recidivism, and rates of incarceration,
Goldberg’s Bernice critiques the assumption of her guilt as a counterpoint
to police discussions that link blackness and criminality. Nonetheless, this
is one of the films—and Bernice is one of the many characters—that film
critics cite as exemplifying the coon caricature. Simply put, there are mo-
ments in Goldberg’s films—and aspects of her roles—that resist subservience
to white patriarchal authority and challenge the unilateral assumptions of
her identity. We can read her films in terms of the polyphony of competing
social discourses they present and the workings of comedy as a genre, while
also considering Goldberg’s function as a chameleon-like comedienne.
Comedy as a genre is not necessarily concerned with representative types.
In his seminal study of wit and its relation to the unconscious, Sigmund
Freud asserted that comedy is an assertive genre. Because humor depends
upon a perception of events or behaviors as unexpected or incongruous, the
individual who publicly points up such inconsistencies issues a statement
about the status quo.6 This is a fundamentally assertive social function. Unlike
drama and melodrama—or genres indexing reality through their use of the
discourses of sobriety, comedy deals with people who cultivate extremes—
either as excess or defect, as too much or too little. One aspect of comedy is
that characters and situations are often out of proportion, disharmonious,
and incongruous with their circumstances and are therefore funny. The char-
acter “types” in comedy are often not realistic portraits of average wo/men
in everyday situations. When they are ordinary people, these characters are
catapulted into extraordinary complications, bizarre misunderstandings,
freak accidents, and unbelievable coincidences, and they offer a peep into the
possibilities of chaos and mayhem from which they usually recoil.7
Goldberg performs extraordinariness through her comedic idiolect of per-
formance traits. These traits include gestures, expressions, movements, and
postures for which a given performer becomes known.8 The comedienne’s
110 . diva s on screen
insightful points for launching critiques. For instance, one of Goldberg’s early
stage routines was based on a little black girl who fantasized about having
luxurious long blond hair. Through the black child’s self-loathing desire for
whiteness—evoking Pecola Breedlove from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye—
Goldberg subtly casts aspersions on a society conditioning young people to
accept socially constructed notions of Euro-American beauty. Through her
comedic persona, she identifies and challenges the predominance of Euro-
centric aesthetics. Revealing black body consciousness as a negating activity11
in an American sociocultural context, she points to the psychological dis-
tortions implicit in an African American identity based on Euro-American
concepts. The sociopsychological commentary issued by this character in
Goldberg’s repertoire is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the “Fact
of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks (1967). Fanon articulated some of
the ways in which blacks in the Antilles developed a negative self-image as a
result of their encounter with the white, colonizing world. Like his predeces-
sor Albert Memmi, Fanon outlined how this sense of inferiority came into
being through an encounter with the white colonizer.
The troubled gender identities of Roseanne Barr, Ellen Degeneres, and
Whoopi Goldberg demonstrate that associations between gender, sex, and
desire are themselves predicated on the hyperrational, patriarchal social
order of Western societies. All three female entertainers are positioned as
“less feminine” because (as comediennes, working-class women, lesbians,
or nonwhite persons) they occupy marginal subject positions and possess
idiolects expressing these subject positions. Being active rather than pas-
sive, daring instead of dainty, public as opposed to private, and vulgar rather
than virginal, they call attention to the false polarities defining (wo)men in
relation to men. Their public personae and performance traits manifest the
social and discursive constructions of gender, as well as the binaries upon
which gender dimorphism is predicated.
Judith Butler claimed the presumption of a binary gender system implic-
itly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender
mirrors sex. Nowhere has this mimetic relationship between sex and the
signifiers of gender been more apparent—and more regularly inscribed—
than in the cinema. Within these terms, “the body” becomes a passive me-
dium on which cultural meanings are inscribed, or the instrument through
which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning
for itself. Gender in comedy is doubly performative. It involves a certain
amount of play, of mutability in how we perform, and in how we inherit,
gender discourse. Whoopi Goldberg occupies a liminal position relative to
112 . diva s on screen
really great to look at.” So, I hope I will be doing the same stuff that I’ve al-
ways done. I’m only interested in conquering what I’m interested in . . . the
intricacies of an actor. I want to be Brando, I want to be Bette Davis. I want
to be De Niro. I want to be Pacino. I want the essence of those people. I want
the essence of what they do to be the foundation . . . I can’t think about that
[the powers that be] because then I would have to hear the static of “Your
nose it too big, your ass is too big, you’re too dark, you’re too light, your hair
is too weird, your feet are too long . . .” You know? Who the fuck wants to
hear that?14
scribed as too fat, too funny, too noisy, too old, and too rebellious, the unruly
woman unsettles social hierarchies, crosses social boundaries, and appears
in the genres of laughter, or those sharing common structures of liminality21
and inversion. The unruly woman embodies the spirit and form of carnival
parody, freedom, and celebration: what Bakhtin explains as the essence of
the carnivalesque. She is in the state of becoming. Associated with beauty
and monstrosity, the unruly woman dwells close to the grotesque. The figure
of the unruly woman contains potential for a feminist appropriation, for re-
thinking how women are constructed as gendered subjects in the language
of spectacle and the visual.22 The trope of the unruly woman is analogous to
the comedienne and therefore evident in the cinema (and the screen per-
sona) of Whoopi. Rather than view Goldberg as a sexless coon caricature, we
can consider the ways her characters are rebellious. Her rebelliousness, her
vulgarity, her attitude, and even her blackness are the rule-breaking charac-
teristics that upset the civility, temperedness, and whiteness associated with
order in daily life. Unsettling hierarchies and crossing boundaries, she is
unruly in nature and nonconformist in appearance.
The comedienne’s chosen celebrity name, “Whoopi Goldberg,” is a case
in point. Her name literally and figuratively disrupts the patriarchal order
with its comedy of transformation and its carnivalesque qualities. First, it
literally disrupts—as all pseudonyms do—the form of social organization in
which the father, as head of the family and familial descent, is reckoned in the
male line through the father’s surname. Second, it disrupts figuratively and
metaphorically because the name is predicated on ideas of playful disguise.
Third, her name invokes grotesque realism as well as the digestive and sexual
functions of the body.
The first part of her name is derived from the common colloquialism
whoopee cushion and concomitant jokes about flatulence, indigestion, and the
uncontrollable nature of the lower stratum. A playful term for the industry
of stand-up comedy from which she emerged and for revelry, it nonetheless
has origins in her biography. The actress admits it derives from her own flatu-
lent tendencies. But whoopi also has sexual connotations. The phrase making
whoopi has long been a euphemism for sexual intercourse and for fooling
around. Through a chain of signifiers, this name invokes the material body,
the flesh, the foul matter eliminated from the body, and corpulent excess.
Consonant with the grotesque realism we find in her name—and by exten-
sion her screen persona—images of the human body as multiple, bulging,
oversized, protuberant, and incomplete. The openings and orifices of her
carnival body are emphasized in an image of corporeal bulk with the ori-
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 117
fices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and lower regions (belly,
legs, feet, buttocks, and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head,
spirit, reason). In her name we hear the displacements as effected between
the high/low image of the physical body and other social domains. This
grotesquely real body is always in the process of becoming. It is a mobile and
hybrid entity, outgrowing its limits, obscenely decentered and off balance, a
figural and symbolic resource for parodic exaggeration and inversion.23 The
name Whoopi symbolizes these excesses, this obscenity, and her transgres-
sive tendencies, on screen, on stage, and in the playful-parodic hosting of
the seventy-first and seventy-fourth annual Academy Awards ceremonies.
The second part of her pseudonym, Goldberg, is derived from an extended
family tree. According to biographers, she drew upon her family tree and
came up with a distant relative who was Jewish and went by this name. Use of
the traditionally Jewish family name proved an effective attention-grabbing
gimmick, making her stand out immediately from other entertainers. The
surname Goldberg invokes disguise by alluding to the Jewish and Irish tra-
ditions of racial border crossing common in minstrel entertainment.24 That
Goldberg’s own genealogy includes the Jewish Diaspora introduces yet an-
other category of carnival: hybridity. The surname brings into play the racial
hybridity of her family tree. Hybridity is a hallmark of carnival. Therefore,
both parts of her pseudonym introduce aspects of the carnivalesque: inde-
cency, impropriety, masquerade, pretense, border crossing, and hybridity.
Her celebrity name invokes the disruptions of patriarchal social order with
its suggestion of modes of transformation and racial crossing. It prefigures
transgressions of the bourgeois social order by implying and expressing the
willingness to offend and be offensive. The name signifies an idiolect—a
repertoire of unruly, unfeminine, unrestrained, and undisciplined behaviors
typifying her persona.
not limited to, The Telephone (1987), Ghost (1990), Sister Act (1992), Sister Act
2 (1993), Boys on the Side (1995), and The Associate (1996).
Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway stage routine, The Goldberg Variations,
marked the beginning of her acting career.25 The stage material initiated her
technique of signifyin(g) within the performance, to constitute a performance
within the performance—a definitive characteristic of Goldberg’s comedic
and dramatic acting. Exploring Goldberg’s performances in the aforemen-
tioned films adduces my claim that her charismatic comedy of carnivalesque
transformation is a comedy that reappropriates, signifies, and critiques cat-
egories of identity as well as her own liminality.
The Telephone—an improvisational, one-character-driven movie—was
the first film in which Goldberg transposed the grotesque realism of her
stand-up comedy to screen. Directed by Rip Torn, The Telephone was released
after Goldberg played an abused housewife in Spielberg’s The Color Purple
(1985); portrayed Terry Doolittle in Penny Marshall’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986);
played a reformed cat burglar in Hugh Wilson’s 1987 film of same name; and
was an undercover cop in Tom Holland’s Fatal Beauty (1987). None of these
earlier, mediocre movies (with the exception of Spielberg’s Color Purple) did
much to develop Goldberg’s career. Some failed miserably both critically and
financially. For example, Fatal Beauty was a commercial failure as well as a
poorly constructed film. Made at a cost of $18 million, it grossed a meager
$4.7 million in domestic film rentals in the United States and Canada.26
A low-budget feature, Torn’s The Telephone was no exception to this pat-
tern. Written by screenwriters Terry Southern, Academy Award–winning
co-screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove; Harry Nilsson; and Goldberg, the movie
was a string of a half-dozen character routines for Goldberg to perform. It was
partially based on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 one-woman drama La voix humaine.
Before the film’s release, Telephone was tied up in legal battles between Gold-
berg and Torn over the final editing. Once finally shown in limited release, it
was critically disparaged as “claustrophobic,” as “self-inflicted character assas-
sination,” and as “monumentally unfunny.” All the film’s characters revolve
around a schizophrenic young woman alone in her apartment. Telephone
tells the story of a lonely, eccentric, unemployed actress, disconnected from
reality. Holed up in her apartment, she amuses herself with a zebra-striped
telephone: ignoring threatening phone calls from creditors, arguing with a
girlfriend, waiting for an ex-boyfriend to call, and pranking the Catholics’
call-in confession line by pretending to be an Irish priest.
Despite its litigious production history, limited release, and negative re-
views, The Telephone is a film worth rereading. My contention is that critics
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 119
connection with the world. Sal’s attack upon the radio, and—by extension—
Raheem’s rap aesthetic, parallels the serviceman’s attack upon the telephone
and—by extension—Vashti’s performance art. Coincidentally, both films
end with a homicide. The film’s abruptly violent conclusion underscores
the interpretive mistake of viewing The Telephone as comedy. Ending with
a homicide, it presents a bleak portrait of a woman’s life and the attempt to
use comedy as a means of personal-feminist resistance against the negations
of bureaucratic consumer culture.
In consumer culture, the body functions as a commodity form. The body’s
value in the marketplace, particularly the entertainment industry, is com-
mensurate with its phenotypic and aesthetic conformity to dominant ideals
of beauty. Vashti’s inability to produce herself as conventional commodity-
spectacle in a visual economy renders her unemployable, invisible, and non-
existent. The film’s narrative evokes—by metaphor—Guy Debord’s often
quoted statement that spectacle grasped is both the result and the project
of existing (ideological) modes of production: “In all its specific forms, as
information, as propaganda, as advertisement or as direct entertainment
consumption, the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social rela-
tion among people mediated by images. It is the omnipresent affirmation
of the choice(s) already made in production and its corollary consumption.
The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the
existing system’s conditions and goals.”29
The social relations among people as mediated by images situate Vashti on
the periphery, preventing her from having access to modes of production.
Goldberg’s character Vashti therefore rebels with unruly violence against
her proletarianization,30 her increasingly lowered standard of living, and
her consequent invisibility at the hands of agents, managers, servicemen,
and the communication-culture industries. She rebels against what cultural
critic Michele Wallace has elsewhere (and in another context) described as
“invisibility blues,” the phenomenon of black women being denied critical
and artistic voice in popular and mainstream American culture.31
Subsequent to The Telephone, there were other films in which Goldberg
offered a carnivalesque performance of rebellion. Ghost (1990) was the next
film in which Goldberg performed her carnivalesque rebelliousness. Directed
by Jerry Zucker—who gained notoriety for producing slapstick comedies
like Airplane (1980), Police Squad (1982), Naked Gun (1988), Naked Gun 2½:
The Smell of Fear (1991), and Naked Gun 33⅓:The Final Insult (1994)—Ghost
proved a major star vehicle for Goldberg. It became the surprise summer
hit of 1990. According to Goldberg biographer James Robert Parish, the film
was produced on a budget of $25 million and grossed $218 million in forty-
122 . diva s on screen
one weeks at the box office. Its soundtrack sold over 500,000 copies, and
Paramount Home Video enjoyed a record of 595,000 preorders from North
American retailers alone. In addition to its financial success, Ghost earned
Goldberg an Academy Award for best supporting actress. On March 25, 1991,
the night of the sixty-third annual Academy Awards, she became the second
black woman in history to win an Oscar. While the Academy Awards are
really an indication of commercial viability rather than artistic merit, Ghost
nonetheless demonstrated Goldberg’s improving ability to render a perfor-
mance within performance.
The narrative of Ghost revolves around New York banker Sam Wheat (Pat-
rick Swayze) and his potter girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore), who have recently
moved into a swank Manhattan loft. Although the two are in love, Sam fears
commitment to marriage. One night, on the way home, a mugger murders
him. Stunned to discover he’s dead, his spirit remains alive and attempts to
contact Molly. Because she is unable to hear him, he seeks the assistance of
phony spiritual medium Oda Mae Brown (Goldberg) but discovers that she’s
not a phony, after all. She can actually hear and speak to him.
Within her performance of character Oda Mae Brown, Goldberg makes
a clear distinction between the supposedly real interactions with the spiri-
tual world Sam inhabits and the obviously phony con-artist interactions she
knowingly and self-consciously performs to earn a living. The false spiritual
relationship is performed differently from that of the real liaison she makes
with Swayze—especially at those moments when Swayze’s is not in the frame.
Even the narrative and dialogue foreground this dualistic performance, as
Demi Moore’s Molly must learn to distinguish between Oda Mae’s performa-
tive personality and her actual communicative interactions with Sam.
An analysis of Goldberg’s performance in Ghost evokes the literary schol-
arship on signifying by Henry Louis Gates Jr., for whom signifyin(g) has
several meanings. As a principle of language, signifyin(g) is not the exclusive
domain of black people. However, as an African American term and rhetori-
cal device it (1) refers to the ability to speak with innuendo, (2) can mean
the mocking of a person or a situation, (3) denotes speaking with the hands
and eyes, and (4) is the language of trickery, of words achieving direction
through indirection. Gates offers that historically, when African Americans
mentioned signifyin(g), they were referring to a “style-focused message, styl-
ing which is foregrounded by the devices of making a point by indirection
and wit.”32 Signifyin(g) as a structural component of performance applies to
literary, musical, and visual texts. In Ghost, and later in the The Associate,
Goldberg’s expressive use of voice, gesture, and costume function as modes of
signifyin(g) that critique the actress’s placement between what Judith Butler
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 123
The happy medium between Ghost costars Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze (1990).
Sister Act
Emile Ardolino’s film Sister Act (1992) is another text in which Whoopi Gold-
berg’s character—and by extension her screen persona—becomes associated
with carnival transgressions. Her rebelliousness, noisiness, vulgarity, and
124 . diva s on screen
attitude are viewed as the rule-breaking behaviors upsetting the social or-
der and transgressing the rules of everyday life in the narrative world of the
film. Importantly, her blackness (i.e., her racial otherness) also functions as
a signifier of menacing cultural difference and deviance.
During production, Goldberg’s menacing relationship with studio chief
Jeffrey Katzenberg paralleled her character’s menacing behavior in the film.
According to press reports, the comedienne fought for many changes in
the final script: plotline changes, the perspectives and grievances of real
nuns, concerns about how women are treated in the church, and an ex-
tended relationship between herself and the other nuns. It became common
knowledge throughout Hollywood that Goldberg was fighting a battle with
Disney management over the shape and progress of Sister Act.33 Unlike The
Telephone, Sister Act was a huge financial success and earned the actress a
Golden Globe nomination in the Best Actor category and a People’s Choice
Award as Favorite Movie Actress. Despite negative reviews in the press, the
film grossed $139.4 million at the domestic box office in the United States
and Canada. The production history behind the film reveals the irony of the
movie as a major star vehicle for Goldberg. Fortunately, actress-singer Bette
Midler turned down the role as the lead, fearing audiences might not accept
her—a Jewish woman—as a Catholic nun. This created an opportunity for
Goldberg to star in the role.
In the film, Goldberg plays Deloris Van Cartier, a Vegas casino showgirl
and the girlfriend of gangster Vince LaRocca (Harvey Keitel). When she wit-
nesses Vince’s execution of an employee, Deloris seeks the authorities and
agrees to testify against LaRocca. First, however, she must wait for a court
date. In the interim, officer Eddie Southern (Bill Nun) places her in a wit-
ness protection program. He hides Deloris in “the safest place in the world
. . . the last place Vince will look for her.” The hiding place is St. Catherine’s
Convent, home to an order of traditional women-religious who have liter-
ally cloistered themselves away from the secular world and their immediate
surrounding neighborhood. The unlikely notion that an African American
lounge singer would/could live harmoniously with an all white order of nuns
is the structuring gag or peripeteia of the film narrative.34
I maintain that this is the peripeteia of the film because it structures the
reversal of Deloris’s situation in the plot from misfortune (i.e., hunted ho-
micide eyewitness) to comic fortune (i.e., peaceful inhabitant at a convent).
This relatively easy change of fortune, or transition, occurs contrary to the
likelihood that these racially and culturally dissimilar women could live to-
gether harmoniously, making their situation humorous and surprising. The
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 125
carnival, not only because the hybrid entity is considered mongrel, impure,
and grotesque, but also because moral panic is produced by the idea of pro-
miscuous mingling of high and low.
The emotional resonance of Sister Act hinges on the symbolic power of
the soundtrack. More specifically, it hinges on the emotive and corporeal
sign-function of Deloris’s popular black gospel music. By virtue of carrying
the emotional weight of the film and its position as antithetical to “white
music,” gospel recalls the primordial role of music in culture as discussed by
Nietzsche in The Joyful Wisdom. Deloris’s gospel music functions in much
the same way Nietzsche claimed certain musical forms can: by “calling the
entire symbolism of the body into play, triggering the pantomime of danc-
ing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement.”39 This is manifest in
the film in Deloris’s dancing nuns, who step out of choir formation to dance
along with their solo parts. However, the emotive sign-function delegated
Deloris’s hybrid black music manifests the duality of carnival discourse.
This emotive sign-function problematically repositions “black” music as
the more primitive, animal, and elemental component of hybridized popu-
lar music. Implicit in the strict separation of the European Christian music
and (African American) secular music is an attempt to maintain the moral
wholesomeness coded as a Christian aesthetic. Here the nun is reproduced
as the archetypal symbol of innocence—and also of corruptibility—evoking
the concept of first temptation/sin and the loss of Eden in Judeo-Christian
cultures. Mother Superior rebuffs hybridity in music, and the pantomime of
dance, as threatening the moral virtue of the nuns, who might be corrupted
by the polyphonic rhythms offered by Deloris.
However, the new combination of musical styles in Sister Act’s narrative
gives rise to new, enlivened social dynamics in the convent and—by exten-
sion—the parish at large. Deloris’s musical direction erases the primacy of the
old tradition and implies a new, more reciprocal relationship between main-
stream and religious cultures. Rather than position these varying traditions
as antithetical and incongruous, the film repositions them—initiating the
resignification of gospel, demonstrating the two traditions as complementary.
This is facilitated by the narrative’s reliance on the logic of multiculturalism, in
which low culture not only troubles high culture, it also reveals high culture
as dependent upon low culture for its own contemporary relevance.
Notions of musical harmony and hybridity in Sister Act function as a
metaphor for concordant relations in the social realm. They are metaphors
for the realization of mellifluously orchestrated social relations among per-
sons of different racial, religious, and class backgrounds. Therefore, Sister Act
130 . diva s on screen
Between starring in Sister Act and its sequel, the actress-comedienne ap-
peared in a handful of other films, including Gail Singer’s Wisecracks (1992),
Darrell James Roodt’s Sarafina (1992), Gene Quintano’s National Lampoon’s
Loaded Weapon I (1993), and Richard Benjamin’s Made in America (1993).
Yet none of these films provided the same kind of platform for Goldberg to
perform her repertoires of various characters and charades. In 1993, Disney
approached Whoopi about making Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, which
would repeat the formula of its predecessor but without director Emile Ar-
dolino, who was now dying with AIDS. Sister Act 2 was to be directed by Bill
Duke. An African American director, Duke was familiar with the subjects
and themes structuring the narrative: the aspirations of disaffected inner-
city black and Latino youth. Duke would also have greater sensitivity for the
film’s multicultural sensibility.
Gospel hip-hop, a metaphor for multicultural education in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993).
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 133
nature. By asserting the carnival right of criticism and mockery, she earns their
respect. Her carnival mockery of their adolescent behavior parallels the process
of signifyin(g), mimics the structure of “playing the dozens” and “dissing.” Her
“dissing” them into order is a mode of signifyin(g), which depends heavily on
humor and the bravado of exchanging insults in a game of one-upmanship.41
As the only black teacher, Goldberg’s Sister Mary Clarence employs this mode
of discourse as evidence of her cultural blackness, as evidence she can speak
youth vernacular, and as proof she can relate to their experiences.
Between filming Sister Act and its sequel, Goldberg also appeared in the
screen comedy Soapdish. When the possibility of a Ghost sequel fell through,
Goldberg joined the cast of Herbert Ross and Aaron Spelling’s parody of day-
time soap operas. Soapdish provided Goldberg the opportunity to be costumed
in a sophisticated and mature manner. More specifically, it offered her the op-
portunity to dress in a conventionally feminine manner, as opposed to dressing
solely for laughs or for her repertoire of comedic transformation. This film
raises the issue of costume and its function in creating her screen personae.
In addition to scrutinizing the narrative function of her characters, I want
to consider the narrative function of costume in creating her screen persona as
rebelliously comedic. Goldberg’s reflections on Soapdish prove revealing. Ac-
cording to biographer James Robert Parish, when the film’s costume designer
Nolan Miller and the star met, she solicited his assistance with wardrobe.
Nolan would later reflect: “I think Miss Goldberg has been dressed up for films
in the past, but it was always to make everyone laugh, to be funny. And this
time she was dressed seriously as a woman. And I think it was a wonderful
feeling for her, and she liked it.” She not only thought Miller was “very, very
cool,” but he taught her “That I could actually look any way I chose and be
elegant. You know all of those women [on screen] who had great style and
class—I could be part of that if I chose to be.”42
These comments from Miller and Goldberg express the extent to which her
narrative function as comedienne, her liminal characters, and her figural
status as a menacing presence of carnival have mandated comedic costum-
ing. These reflective statements evoke one of feminist film theory’s major
interventions regarding the status of gender categories: namely, that femi-
ninity is a masquerade. Masquerade is a product and function of vestments,
accoutrements, and props worn to effect the disguise of gender difference.
Vestments are also easily discarded to reveal similarities between genders.
Goldberg’s comic costuming in films must be viewed in light of the feminist
articulations concerning gender’s social construction.
134 . diva s on screen
The Associate
In The Associate (1996), Goldberg effectively demonstrates her comedy of
carnivalesque transformation as a comedy of gender transvestism. She plays
two characters, or a character within a character, much like she did in Ghost,
in which she acts out male and female gender roles/differences and—to a
lesser extent—male and female sexual desire. Her performance of gender
identity (and heterosexual desires) in these films recalls other cinematic
texts in which a single actor performs opposing male and female genders.
Such performances remind us of what film theorist Chris Straayer has aptly
described as the “temporary transvestite film.”44
In describing gender-coded behavior in cinema, Straayer explains that
the transvestite is a figure often adopting the opposite sex’s gestures and
behaviors, either “naturally” or for parody. These gender-coded behaviors
and gestures are often used to remind the film audience of the character’s
“original” gender and also to suggest the threat of exposure in the diegetic
world. Straayer writes:
Sometimes obvious male characteristics, such as a hairy chest or even a beard,
contribute to a subversive and contradictory play of signification. The disguise
goldberg’s variations on comedic charisma · 135
men (as virile, rugged, and sexually desirable). Thus Goldberg’s Oda Mae
is transformed from a woman who fails to signify natural femininity into a
woman who can embody and signify masculine virility. This same kind of
gender slippage is evident in other Goldberg vehicles.
The Associate also inverts the tradition of transracial transvestism. Within
the film, Whoopi’s character Laurel Ayers is a dedicated and ambitious banker.
The victim of gender discrimination, Laurel is passed over for a promotion
in favor of another associate who enjoys career advancement because he is
white, heterosexual, and male. She quits and starts her own firm, only to
realize the powerbrokers on Wall Street still refuse to take her seriously. To
break the glass ceiling and enter the “old boys’” network, Laurel creates the
fictitious company figurehead Robert Cutty. Cutty is an old white man who
serves (in absentia) as the CEO of her investment firm until Laurel is forced
to produce Cutty in the flesh. To do so, she must actually become him, un-
dergoing transracial transvestism.
While biographer Robert Parish insists that the buildup to seeing Whoo-
pi’s character transformed into an eccentric-looking white man is the main
suspense of the movie, I maintain that the moment of her unmasking is the
suspenseful climax. Up until the unmasking, Goldberg performs the gender
charade of white masculinity, suggesting both womanliness and manliness
are gender masquerades. These masquerades invoke Straayer’s description of
temporary transvestism as a disguise sufficient to trick other characters but
inadequate to trick the film audience. At the moment of unmasking, when
the characters are let in on the secret, she reveals the gap between gender
and the physically sexed body in a racial and gender striptease.
This reappropriation of transracial transvestism is a moment of signifiyin(g)
on the denigrating discourse of black representation in minstrelsy. Goldberg’s
masquerade is a disruption at the level of the signifier. When she dons the
Cutty mask, Whoopi revises the signs of blackness by performing white-
ness. Within the fictional narrative she abandons bodily gestures and vocal
tonality believed to signify blackness, replacing them with signifiers of white
masculine comportment. Whether Goldberg, dressed as Cutty, could actu-
ally pass for a male in the extradiegetic “real world” is less relevant than the
way this comedy of temporary transvestism is signifyin(g) on minstrel in
the reel world—suggesting through resignification that gender binaries are
expressed through performances of race and gender.
There are multiple ways of reading Whoopi Goldberg’s celebrity persona.
Her screen, standup-stage, Broadway, and television appearances (i.e., Hol-
lywood Squares,Whoopi [the NBC Tuesday-night sitcom], and The View)
140 . diva s on screen
demonstrate the various texts and intertexts in which her discursive comedic
persona manifests. I have argued here that some media critics have resisted
examining the ways her screen persona is rebellious and challenging. Through
her comedy she resists dominant cultural notions of gender binaries and
moves far beyond some of the limitations of racially stereotyped caricatures
like Mammy or Topsy. My intervention with this essay was to examine the
way a black comedienne challenges the boundaries and menaces borders.
The 2003 television sitcom Whoopi continued the tradition of Goldberg’s
earlier film work. Making jocular mention of Saddam Hussein or raising the
prospect of an undiscovered Iranian missile system might seem to be a sit-
com’s kiss of death. It might seem unlikely, even impossible, for a show with
such commentary to be a presumptive fall-season hit. But Goldberg tried
once again—in the context of the show—to challenge mainstream sensibili-
ties. In the sitcom she played Mavis Rae, an irascible Manhattan hotelier who
savors her memories as a chart-topping R&B singer while dealing with fam-
ily, friends, and customers in today’s New York City. Living at the hotel with
Mavis is her brother Courtney (Wren T. Brown), a man who is the opposite
of his sister. Whereas Mavis is loud and liberal, Courtney is conservative
and dates a white woman named Rita (Elizabeth Regen). Rita is the kind of
black-identified white woman who uses black vernacular freely, listens to rap
music, dresses in hip-hop gear, and is considered “blacker” than her African
American boyfriend. Courtney and Rita are examples of the way Goldberg’s
comedy sets the stage for a critique of rigid identity categories, showing them
as unstable and untenable. The program also pushed the envelope regarding
what’s considered acceptable on network television. Goldberg’s Mavis poked
fun at President Bush’s malapropisms and mispronunciations of simple words
like “nuclear,” and she was not afraid to chastise people in interracial relation-
ships. Far from politically or environmentally correct, Mavis Rae was also an
unapologetic chain smoker. In fact, the program’s pilot episode began with a
cigarette joke. A hotel guest reminded Mavis that “secondhand smoke kills.”
Her rapid-fire retort: “So do I, baby . . . walk on!”
4
Oprah Winfrey
The Cathartic, Charismatic Capitalist
She has talked of ending her program in the next year or two
and moving on to other projects, but her charismatic appeal
is unlikely to diminish. Oprah is probably the greatest influ-
ence on the adult population . . . she’s almost a religion.
—Fran Lebowitz
didn’t have time for her own kids. She can’t have kids. She’s taking care of all
the other little lost children.”6
In the context of the television program, Gray’s comments have a cultural
significance of their own. On one level, his remarks inadvertently lend cre-
dence to the notion that as a cultural icon, Winfrey can be interpreted as a
metaphorical mammy. After all, in American folklore, mammy was never
depicted as taking care of her own children. Instead, she worked tirelessly
and professionally as the caretaker of other people’s children. This is not to
say that mammy and mommy are indistinguishable signifiers. However, it is to
recognize the implicit linguistic slippage and the (mis)conception of Winfrey
as one who resembles the mammy figure. In American folklore and popular
culture (i.e., literature, theater, film, television), the mammy figure has been a
sexually nonthreatening, economically disenfranchised fixture of plantation
family life, evoking nostalgia for the “old days” of the antebellum South.7
It is not only in the context of the show that the issue of Oprah’s mammi-
fication has been addressed. Gloria-Jean Masciarotte suggests that a facile
application of the mammy stereotype to Winfrey’s star persona8 negates the
double-voiced nature of Winfrey’s celebrity sign. For Masciarotte, this double-
voiced celebrity manifests the problematic of representation between what is
represented and what it signifies. She argues that the conflicting and confusing
evaluation of Oprah’s “person” depends on her double-voiced public identity
as a large black woman: the matriarch of difference, the phallic mother, the
sign of negativity in bourgeois, white patriarchy. And, at the same time, as
a rich, glamorous television producer/star: the patriarch of representation,
the Law, the signifier of transcendental capitalist subjectivity.9 I concur with
Masciarotte’s first assertion that Winfrey’s celebrity sign is a multivalent sig-
nifier. However, Masciarotte comes to a dubious conclusion. Problematically,
she concludes that Winfrey-as-star speaks from the position of that which
is abjected by culture, thereby never transcending the materiality of “nega-
tive aesthetic evaluation” to be figured as a metaphysical vehicle by which
spectators transform the limits of fixed subjectivity.10 Masciarotte writes:
It is important to note that the sign of Oprah Winfrey traverses not only race
and gender but also declines these determinates within the cultural politics
of body and presence . . . her media sign cannot deny the inherent abjection
of her differences. The result of her over-determined subjectivity is manifest
in the televisual and media gossip that delights in her battles with food, her
troublesome relationship with a good-looking guy that foregrounds and (ac-
cording to the common wisdom of white patriarchal aesthetics) contradicts
144 . diva s on screen
her own more “mammy-like” appearance and function, and her fluctuating
hairstyles and fashion choices.11
P. David Marshal (1997) also asserts that the emergence of Oprah Winfrey
as a television celebrity is built on a series of binarisms that work to differenti-
ate her presented subjectivity. However, Marshall’s and Masciarotte’s analyses
of binary constructions prove reductive on two counts. First, this binary
analysis resurrects Cartesian dualism, which places the mind—engaged in
spiritual contemplation—in a position of hierarchical superiority over the
corporeal nature of the black star’s body. Second, such analyses diminish
the significance, as does other scholarship on Oprah, of the unconventional
aspects of Winfrey’s career. Consider, for example, her book club’s cultural
capital; her access to modes of television and film production; her ability to
influence the conditions of her stardom; her authority as an arbiter of middle-
class American taste and her influence over consumer society’s cult of the
body. As an activist, she has challenged corporate exploitation of consum-
ers during her involvement in the anti-beef industry campaign. And, in the
film industry, consider her willingness to embrace (and render cinematic)
the complex and traumatic legacy of slavery in her production of Toni Mor-
rison’s novel Beloved.
Emphasis on the Oprah-as-mammy metaphor obscures the aspects of
Winfrey’s iconographic status that align her with the dominant social order.
These analyses position her as a reconfigured stereotype, when she is actually
the reigning representative of America’s disciplined, heteronormative, and
bourgeois body. She is America’s leading representative of late twentieth-
century (and early twenty-first-century) technologies of self-embourgeoise-
ment. Winfrey’s weight-maintenance programs, her “well-dressed” body,
and her conventionally styled hair inform her iconographic status—her star
persona—as the nation’s leading representative of transforming, moderniz-
ing self-help technologies. Who better than an Oprah Winfrey—a woman
who has struggled with the stigma of weight, race, class, gender, and wavy
hair—to demonstrate the transforming effects of technology on the self as
methods of embourgeoisement?12
My reading of Winfrey’s celebrity sign employs the Oprah-as-mammy
metaphor as a point of departure rather than a conclusion. Winfrey’s ce-
lebrity sign is not merely double voiced, it is also charismatic. She is charis-
matic, in part, because her celebrity is a sign based on transitions from the
site of abjection to the site of assimilation, from anonymity to fame, from
poverty to prosperity, from culturally insignificant to successful producer
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 145
Abundance Journal of Gratitude (1998), Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul
(1990), Naomi Levy’s To Begin Again (1998), Alice Walker’s By the Light of
My Father’s Smile (1998), Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path
to Higher Creativity (1995), and Frederic Brussat’s Spiritual Literacy: Reading
the Sacred in Everyday Life (1998). Clearly, spirituality was being appropriated
and commodified into a variety of feel-good, self-help technologies.
Critical of the program’s pseudoreligious format—namely, its concomitant
shift from self-reference to self-reverence—New York Times media critic
Jeff MacGregor described the new format as little more than aptly timed
programming. MacGregor objected to the “hourlong interpretation of the
Gospel-According-to-Oprah . . . [s]hot through with the usual platitudes of
New Age unmeaning.”
It is a self-help anthology, presented with the missionary zeal of someone who’s
already got hers. Thus it is about nothing so much as Ms. Winfrey herself,
and her pilgrimage toward a more rewarding state of Oprahness. Given our
nation’s endless search for the short cut to our better selves, it is a brilliant
programming move. Which is not to say that Oprah’s quest for human bet-
terment is insincere, but rather that she has again anticipated the next pang
of her audience’s appetite. Oprah was among the first to book the sort of
pathological sideshows that daytime is so roundly criticized for today. She was
also among the first to abandon them. Her regular appearance in the financial
monthlies as one of the highest paid/most powerful people in entertainment
are based on more than her performance as television’s most beloved ubiq-
uitous empath. She is a shrewd businesswoman. Thus, like many gurus and
circuit riders before her, Oprah has found a way to shamelessly market the
history of her own misery and confusion as a form of worship. She is helped
in this enterprise by a stable of experts, each appearing in rotation to explain
for us the metaphysics of joy and sorrow and 401–K plans.17
The program’s commodification of spirituality does not mitigate the fact that
Winfrey’s “Remembering Your Spirit” segment enables the program to func-
tion in the precise way critics implied the show, Oprah!—and by extension,
the celebrity, Winfrey—could not: as vehicles for self-evaluation and meta-
physical contemplation—however faddish—and as positions from which
these might transpire. In fact, the show undermines the Cartesian dualism
informing analyses of Winfrey’s stardom.
I am suggesting that the religious tenor of The Oprah Winfrey Show (i.e.,
Oprah’s Angel Network, “Remembering Your Spirit”) reveals a relationship
between the cult of the body and the cult of the soul in consumer culture.
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 147
Winfrey’s Charisma
Richard Dyer’s seminal text on stardom advanced discussions of celebrity
because it brought multiple theories of stardom (i.e., semiotic models of
communication and behavioral/manipulation models) into dialogue with
one another. Dyer’s Stars (1979) was one of several examinations of the star
system to acknowledge instances of stardom in which individuals who were
given full promotional treatment still did not “make it” in the film industry.
His observation suggested that film scholars needed to conceptualize why
some stars become social phenomena and others do not. He was also one of
the first scholars to demonstrate that sociologist Max Weber’s (1864–1920)
theory of charismatic authority has relevance for film studies, particularly
star phenomena. More recently, P. David Marshall (1997) joined Dyer in his
application of Weberian notions of charisma to the cinema, thereby concep-
tualizing social and ideological aspects of stardom.
Charisma may also grow out of the creative union of an emotional (and/or
physical) disability or trial and unusually developed gifts or talents that coun-
terbalance the adversity. Gifts of leadership may come to fruition through a
correspondence between the charismatic’s ideal inner world (i.e., religious
contemplation, desire for fame, career aspirations) and an adverse external
social, political, or economic reality. Theoretical articulations of charisma
are sometimes bound by this very paradox: does crisis in the social order
create the individual leader whose particular charismatic talents are thereby
awakened, or does the charismatic individual engender the social change by
his or her extraordinary behavior (Aberbach, 1996) or actions?
Like the charismatic figure, the celebrity demarcates an area of social life and
identification that is fundamentally irrational. Weber’s hypothesis concern-
ing the resolution of irrationality into bureaucratic rationality offers a useful
model for studying the “resolution” of celebrity status into rationalized forms
in contemporary culture. The institutionalization of Winfrey’s program, as a
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 149
Jib Fowles has made a similar observation in his work on stardom. He claims
that a stereotype exists about the families of stars. The father is either ab-
sent or inconsequential, while the mother pushes the performer onward
to glory. A large percentage of stars do seem to have suffered a decidedly
unstable life during the formative years. Thought to be a stereotype, this
condition does, however, receive some confirmation in various star studies,
150 . diva s on screen
bourgeois body. Her advocacy of the vast range of dietary, slimming, exercise,
and cosmetic body-maintenance products evokes Foucault’s analysis of the
historical process by which bodies have been disciplined and normalized.
We are reminded that through organization, regulation, and movement, our
bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing his-
torical forms of selfhood. For example, studies of prevalent eating disorders
and breast implants demonstrate that women are spending more time on the
management and discipline of their bodies than in years past.32 Increasingly,
as men become the targets of body-maintenance consumer products (i.e.,
Viagra, Rogaine, weight loss products), they feel the increasing disciplinary
pressure, as well.33 Winfrey figures prominently in this equation because, as
an idol of consumption, she is a model of cyclical body maintenance.
Winfrey’s charismatic appeal is rooted in her television program’s success-
ful presentation of self-help, body-maintaining techniques. These techniques
help expand the market for such commodities. Within consumer culture,
the body is a vehicle of pleasure: it is desirable and desiring, and the closer it
approximates the idealized images of youth, health, fitness, and beauty, the
higher its exchange value.
As a talk-show host, Winfrey’s value (popularity with audiences) is par-
tially derived from her having streamlined and glamorized herself, thereby
embracing idealized images of youth, health, and beauty. She, like millions
of Americans, desires to conform to idealized images of youthfulness, health,
and beauty. The host represents scores of women (Caucasian and women of
color) worldwide who struggle with existing hegemonic and Eurocentric
images of youthfulness, healthiness, fitness, attractiveness, and spirituality
and who hence identify with her. She therefore represents a global model
for assimilation of conventional, bourgeois techniques of body and soul. In
the late 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, this meant she
adopted the disciplinary cult of fitness, in which mind-body health/healing
is not so much a biological imperative linked to survival as a social impera-
tive linked to status, prestige, and display. The body enters a competitive
logic expressing itself in an unlimited demand for medical, dietary, surgical,
cosmetic, and pharmaceutical services. For example, Winfrey continually
speaks of having cosmetic surgery to make her breasts perkier, her arms
thinner—and possesses the physical features millions of women worldwide
covet. She routinely calls attention to her (on-again, off-again) successful
diet and fitness practices.
As an African American woman, she is not necessarily resistant to the
dominant beauty–body–mind cult of womanhood in consumer culture. Con-
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 153
C. J. Walker, the first African American woman millionaire, did not simply
cease to be “black” after inventing a hair-straightening chemical process.
Thus Winfrey’s adoption of commercial, bourgeois techniques of the self is
linked with other life-changing transitions that make her celebrity sign the
nexus for these discourses of mind, body, and soul.
Winfrey’s celebrity as a charismatic talk-show host is the convergence
of her professional aspirations (news anchor, actress, talk-show host) and
the cultural gravity of millenarianism, which began—in the late 1970s and
early 1980s—to pull popular culture toward the spectacle of New Age tel-
evangelism as inspirational talk television. Her charismatic appeal has been
especially effective at this moment of late twentieth-century economic pros-
perity tempered by millenarian anxiety, a zeitgeist in which technologies of
self realization are inextricably linked to the quest for spiritual salvation.
Therefore, parallels between Winfrey’s star charisma and the televangelist’s
star charisma become evident in a historical context.
In 1979, cultural critic Christopher Lasch observed that the 1970s retreat
from community and communal responsibility resulted in a climate of nar-
cissism. The climate of late 1970s capitalism, Lasch insisted, “is therapeutic,
not religious.” People long not for personal salvation, but for the feeling, the
fleeting illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security. Lasch
contended that even the radicalism of the 1960s served—for those who em-
braced it for personal rather than political reasons—not as a substitute re-
ligion but as a form of therapy. He writes: “Narcissism appears to represent
the best way of coping with the tensions and anxieties of modern life, and
the prevailing social conditions therefore tend to bring out narcissistic traits
that are present, in varying degrees, in everyone.”35
Nowhere is narcissistic self-indulgence, met by the desire for community,
more obvious than in the context of Oprah! Winfrey’s promotion of best-
selling money maven Suze Orman is a case in point. It typifies the show’s
psychospiritual approach to various forms of self-help. Orman, one of the
experts appearing on rotation in the 1998–99 season, promised to change
our lives by enabling viewers to clear up financial debt.
Winfrey: Starting today, you, too, can commit to become truly rich and free
of all the money worries that control your life. I know it sounds like pie in the
sky, but it’s not. By the millennium—make that your goal. And if you haven’t
been following our crash course in financial freedom with Suze over the last
few months, it’s not too late to get up to speed. Here’s a look at some of the
steps that we’ve covered, starting with ways to remove blocks to your own
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 155
personal wealth with real people just like you. First, Suze asked everyone to
get in touch with an early childhood money memory and connect it to their
money problems today. Then Suze showed us how fears about money can
block financial freedom. And how to place those fears with what she calls a
“new truth.”
After several exercises and interventions with a group of young adults who
formed a financial freedom team with Orman, to get control over their debt,
the program concluded with the financial wizard reiterating her new truth
and millenium mantra:
Orman: Each and every one of us needs to take a vow that we’re going to walk
into the millennium financially free, powerful, the powerful beings that we
were meant to always be. . . . Oprah—that’s right—you’ve been trying to do it
every day on these shows by remembering your spirit. By remembering who
you are. How do you remember who you are every day? That’s where the truth
comes in. You start your day by saying that you are more, by feeling that you
are more, by reconnecting to who you really are. . . . Let’s seriously walk into
the new year, the new millennium, powerful, financially free, knowing that
we all have what it takes to do it. Please have faith in who you are and what
you can create. Let’s start there today.36
Lears sums up his argument by claiming the therapeutic ethos was rooted
in a reaction against the rationalization of culture—the growing effort, first
described by Max Weber, to exert systematic control over “man’s” external
environment and ultimately over “his” inner life. By the turn of the century,
the iron cage of bureaucratic “rationality” had begun subtly to affect even
the educated and affluent. Many began to believe their sense of autonomy
was being undermined and that they had been cut off from intense physi-
158 . diva s on screen
Schultze accurately captures the way consumer culture has harnessed religion.
In doing so, he also unknowingly provides a description of the way Winfrey’s
program works. He captures the way she markets self-help programs and
techniques such as Suze Orman’s money-management strategy. In essence, the
larger argument he makes about televangelism can be made of the business of
quasi-religious talk television—particularly of Oprah, with its “Remember-
ing Your Spirit” segment that might more aptly be titled “Remembering the
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” The business savvy with which
media critics like MacGregor cynically discredit Winfrey is better understood
as the culmination of an ongoing American cultural phenomenon dating
back to the 1970s, with deeper roots traceable to modernity.
It is no accident that at the same moment media scholars were making
links between mass-mediated religion and consumer culture—a sure sign of
televangelism’s decline—another wedding of religion and consumerism took
place. Nowhere was this shift clearer than in the ratings war. In the late 1970s,
just as the electronic church was sinking into a ratings slump, the daily reli-
gion of talk television was riding the tide of rising ratings. Shortly thereafter,
Oprah began to surpass Donahue in the race to become the nation’s leading
talk show with the most popular host. Schultze’s analysis evinces a debt to
Max Weber’s and T. Jackson Lears’s work. However, this does not diminish the
significance of his contribution: the most popular televangelists were notable
for their personal charisma and natural salesmanship. Therefore, the spirit of
American business is both what Winfrey’s celebrity sign symbolizes—in her
personal embodiment of the Horatio Alger narrative49—and what Winfrey
herself proselytizes, in the Oprah! ministry.
This brings me to the third, and final, parallel between Winfrey’s celebrity
charisma and the televangelist’s charisma. As mentioned earlier, the charis-
matic figure is like the celebrity because each demarcates an area of social life
and identification that is fundamentally irrational. Recognizing that Winfrey
and the televangelist are both salespeople begs the question: what does their
merchandise have in common? My point is that while their merchandise as-
sumes different names, characters, dispositions, and behaviors (i.e., Christ,
162 . diva s on screen
abstinence, forgiveness, dieting) their product is the same. Winfrey, like the
televangelist, is in the business of selling hope. Whether in the form of salva-
tion or self-realization, the product is hope that the inevitable future will be
more promising, more enjoyable, more spiritually fulfilling than the present.
In this sense, watching Oprah—like watching Pat Robertson—may offer the
same irrational but participatory pleasures as, for example, playing the lottery,
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 163
Beloved
Though the term magical realism has been used primarily to categorize a Latin
American literary practice, it is also relevant, I would argue, to the African
American novel Beloved.52 Mingling the mundane with the fantastic, Toni
Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel53 superimposes one perceived reality
upon another, treating the fantastic as quotidian. It uses magic and fantasy
to recuperate the real and reconstruct histories that have been obscured or
erased by political and social injustice.54 Gabriel García Márquez, whose
One Hundred Years of Solitude epitomizes the magical realist style, locates
the roots of magical realism in the African Caribbean coast of Colombia.
The notion of magical realism persists because it retains explanatory value,
but also because it describes the common historical and cultural conditions
shared by African and Latin American authors. Such writers are familiar with
transition, border crossing, and ambiguity, as well as with the mingling of
capitalist and precapitalist modes within societies that have been postcolonial
since the nineteenth century. They deploy the carnivalesque-grotesque—
one complex theme of magical realism—to convey the notion of unfinished
metamorphosis, the idea of something aborted, or incomplete. In Beloved,
Toni Morrison uses magical realism as the structuring device to syncretize
the supernatural with a realistic historical perspective. Beloved addresses the
historical moment at which a newly manumitted African American commu-
nity found itself between slavery and freedom, horror and relative happiness,
antebellum tradition and Reconstructive modernity. In the filmed adaptation
of Beloved, aspects of magical realism and the carnivalesque-grotesque55 come
to the forefront in ways that complicate the cinematic text.
On October 16, 1998, Touchstone Pictures released the Harpo Films/Cli-
nica Estetico Production of Beloved. Directed by Jonathan Demme, the film
starred producer Oprah Winfrey as Sethe and Danny Glover as Paul D. Oprah
Winfrey worked on the adaptation of Beloved to film for over a decade, hav-
ing purchased the film rights shortly after the book was published in 1987.
Although Winfrey considered producing Beloved as a theatrical feature a
“personal triumph,” the film was considered a commercial failure (by Hol-
lywood industry standards) for earning $24 million at the box office against
a $65 million investment. When the additional $15–20 million for marketing
and advertising campaigns56 are considered, the film’s production deficit was
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 165
Archibald Gaines in Kentucky, crossed the Ohio River, and sought refuge in
Cincinnati. Gaines and a party of officers pursued her. Margaret Garner, her
husband, Robert, and their four children were surrounded and overtaken.
Realizing hopes for their freedom were bleak, Garner seized a butcher knife
and with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter—probably the most
“beloved” of them all. Garner chose death for herself and her child rather
than return to the state of chattel slavery. Implicit in the “herstory” of Be-
loved is a fusion of the past and the future in a single act of death. Garner was
tried not for attempting to kill her child, but for the “real” crime, of stealing
property—herself and her children—from her master. In Beloved, Morrison
leaves some of this historical material behind, for although Sethe kills her
child, Beloved, Sethe is freed and ostracized from the black community.65
In the 1970s, historians began reexamining both the status of family life
under slavery and the variegated forms of resistance to slavery, ranging from
subtle sabotage to outright revolts. Earlier schools of scholarship saw slavery
as devastating to black family life and genealogy, yet newer research on the
history of women and family examines how African Americans tried to lessen
or outwit the dehumanizing effects of slavery. Although slaves had no formal
right to marry or develop kinship ties, for example, running away constituted
a major challenge to the slave system. Family loyalties were factored into the
decision to flee and risk patrols, dogs, recapture, punishment, and harsher
enslavement. Reviewing this history, Morrison read extensively about slavery,
abolitionists, fugitives, and Cincinnati in the mid-nineteenth century.66
Morrison rewrites African American history as literature in her novels.
The dialogic relationship between literature and history evident in her work
reverberates with Hayden White’s claim that history, too, is a form of écri-
ture, an interpretive form of narrative emplotment. Historians choose, on
aesthetic grounds, different plot structures by which to endow sequences of
events with various meanings.67 Morrison has often stated that the history and
literature of the United States are “incoherent” without an understanding of
the African American presence. Much like Jewish Holocaust literature—also
known for its forms of magical realism—Beloved gives expression to intrica-
cies, erasures, and surrealist disjunctions of conflicting histories. The film
Beloved, for its part, reflects on these disjunctions through innovative formal
techniques (expressionist, surrealist, magical, and postmodern techniques)
in order to re-vision what is meant by history.
Given Morrison’s literary objectives and Winfrey’s personal commitment
to the historical material, Jonathan Demme seems an unlikely choice of di-
rector for surrealist-experimental African American cinema. Directors Julie
168 . diva s on screen
Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991) or Charles Burnett (To Sleep with Anger,
1990), for instance, would seem like more obvious choices, especially since
both are well known for successfully mingling the mundane, the spiritual,
and the historical realms in magical-realist renditions of African American
cinema. This is not to suggest that directors’ racial identity essentially de-
termines their ability to effectively direct a film. It is, however, to note that
Beloved was Demme’s first historical film to address African American issues,
although he had made two documentaries about the black diaspora in other
contexts (Haiti: Dreams of Democracy, 1987; and Cousin Bobby, 1991).
Winfrey’s decision to select Demme as director articulates one of the ten-
sions in making and marketing an experimental-historical black film that is
part slave narrative, part magically real ghost story, and part maternal melo-
drama. The film innovatively combines disparate genres, nonlinear narrative
construction, and an Afrocentric vision of American history to create what
is in some ways an avant-garde film. Winfrey and the producers (i.e., Ronald
Bozman, Kate Forte, Gary Goetzman, and Edward Saxon) may have been com-
pelled to employ an A-list white male director whose Hollywood status and
commodity-sign value would lend the picture prestige and name recognition
and would balance its art-house qualities with a commercial trademark.
Unfortunately, Winfrey failed to anticipate the extent to which this di-
rectorial decision could adversely affect the film. Selecting an A-list direc-
tor certainly endowed the film with Hollywood industry name recognition
and lent it the aura of auteur cinema, but it also raised questions regarding
cultural authenticity and experiential credibility. For instance, was Demme
familiar with the politics of racial representation and the necessity for re-
visioning African American history? Was it clear that this film presented a
series of intellectual relationships between literature and historiography?
Would Demme understand Toni Morrison’s long-term professional project
of examining the social constructions of blackness? While some white di-
rectors have represented African American subjects beautifully on screen
(Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man), there are those topics that are simply
too sensitive to ever be completely free of cinematic essentialism. After all,
even Steven Spielberg felt he needed to remind the viewing public he was
Jewish and therefore an insider uniquely qualified to represent the horrors
of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List.
Revising constructions of African American history and identity consti-
tutes an essential form of resignifying for Morrison. As she argues in Playing
in the Dark, it is the examination of constructions of literary “blackness” that
make it possible to discover the nature—even the tacit grounds—of literary
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 169
Sethe, since the story revolves around her maternal confrontation with the
incarnated ghost of her murdered woman-child daughter, Beloved.
The tropes of unspeakable and unrepresentable acts render Beloved par-
ticularly challenging material to adapt to screen. A novelist’s portrayal in-
duces us to imagine characters and events. A film, by contrast, designates
specific performers, props, settings, and landscapes. The selection of these
signifiers imposes limits, restricting the imagination each spectator brings
to the cinema.71 In making Beloved, director Jonathan Demme not only ma-
nipulated concrete signifiers, he also concretized magical and supernatural
events already unrepresentable, unspeakable, or difficult to signify. Beloved
as a film therefore assumes a double “burden of representation,” beyond that
incumbent upon a novel.
The eponymous Beloved (Thandie Newton) instantiates this unrepresent-
ability. Morrison wrote Beloved as a supernatural character that transcends
epistemological and ontological bounds. “In magical realist texts,” as crit-
ics point out, “ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and
cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring
readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality,
motivation.”72 As the fulcrum of magical realism, Beloved as character is an
oxymoronic literary construction that troubles convention and captures the
paradox of uniting opposites. Simultaneously a corporeal presence and an
ethereal ghost, she is also the matrilineal connection between indigenous
black Africa and colonizing white America. As a symbol, she is the haunt-
ing avatar of many Beloveds—generations of mothers and daughters hunted
down and stolen from Africa. A parapsychological epiphenomenon of slavery,
invulnerable to barriers of time, space, and place, Beloved is both vacant and
omnipresent.73 As Sethe’s offspring, she incarnates the newly formed black
collective body, a hopeful populace reborn on the cusp of Reconstruction
and bent on democratic participation.
Regrettably, critics hastily dismissed Thandie Newton’s performance of
Beloved as campy and farcical. Some cited Newton’s Beloved as proof of the
novel’s untranslatability, an inevitable calamity in the passage from novel to
film. But Newton’s performance should not be dismissed as an inevitable
betrayal of the source material or as a symptom of the film medium’s intrin-
sic incapacity to capture the characterological complexity. The disparity is
actually a matter of emphasis rather than translation. Precisely because the
film foregrounds Beloved’s actual return, her physical presence, and her life
with Sethe, she becomes less the symbolic ghost of the written text than the
corporeal reality of the film. More specifically, the film calls attention to the
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 171
growth and development of her body, to its fluids and functions. She is Sethe’s
unformed, uncontrollable woman-child, blurring the boundaries between
self and other.
To understand Beloved’s prominent function in the film, it is useful to dis-
cuss her corporeality in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque
body and Mary Russo’s notion of the female grotesque. Their notions of the
grotesque inform (and overlap with) the category of magical realism. For
Bakhtin, the unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth, and being
born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is
blended with the world, with animals, with objects. The grotesque body is
an incarnation of this world at the absolute lower stratum, as the life of the
belly, the reproductive organs, and the acts of defecation, copulation, con-
ception, pregnancy, and birth.74 “Bakhtin found his concept of the grotesque
embodied in the laughing pregnant hags of the Kerch terra-cotta figurines,
which combine senile, decaying flesh with fresh new life, conceived but as yet
unformed.”75 In the enslaved body, which was a vehicle for white enjoyment
and coerced festivity, one finds a negative, nonfestive version of Bakhtin’s gro-
tesque. For in the carnivalesque pageantry of the coffle, the enforced dancing
on slave ship decks, and the obligatory live stepping on auction blocks, we
see spectacles of black pain, which entangle terror and enjoyment.76 Perhaps
because the magical realism of the story is encoded into the story narrative
itself, both the novel and the film share equally in these twin realms of the
carnivalesque and the grotesque.
Mary Russo critiques Bakhtin for failing to incorporate the social relations
of gender in his semiotic model of the body politic. Bakhtin’s grotesque,
pregnant hags for Russo remain underanalyzed, representing only paradox:
in effect, pregnant death, senility and nubility, aged and new flesh. Within
Russo’s feminist perspective, the female grotesque can be used to destabilize
idealizations of female beauty and realign desire, disrupting the familiar
world, and, I would add, to introduce the state of cognitive dissonance typi-
cal of Beloved. I interpret young Beloved as a grotesque female body, one
in the process of becoming. Beloved’s arrival even coincides, it is implied in
the novel, with carnival in the narrative (p. 235). At first she is the haunting
ghost, but she later materializes into the grotesque corporeal body, repre-
senting the return of the repressed and the reemergence of Sethe’s horrific
maternal past as an irrepressible present. Once impregnated, she grows like
the pregnant hag whose body symbolizes both young life and aged death.
Beloved’s continual physical metamorphoses parallel the narrative’s aesthetic
traversals between carnivalesque and grotesque realms.
172 . diva s on screen
The trope of the female grotesque aptly describes mother and daughter,
as Beloved’s grotesque body mirrors Sethe’s. Toni Morrison’s text and Ako-
sua Busia’s screenplay are replete with examples of abused, enslaved bodies.
Sethe’s body exemplifies the subjected, abused, and tortured corpus. In the
film, the abuses endured by her are particularly visible. She is on display as
the primary object of terror and victimization. Her body, bloodied feet, preg-
nant womb, swollen back, and incontinent bladder constitute what Saidiya
Hartman terms the scene of subjection—the site of terror and violence per-
petrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and property. We can
extend Hartman’s concept to an analysis of the film. The abuses perpetrated
against Sethe—both overtly and covertly—constitute the very mise-en-scène
of subjection in the film.
Recall, for example, Amy Denver (Kessia Randall), who stumbles upon
pregnant Sethe (Lisa Gay Hamilton) as she lies stranded in the woods ooz-
ing, bleeding, birthing, and lactating with a blossoming cherry tree on her
back. Throughout the novel and film, Sethe’s body is associated with beasts
of burden, blended with the world of animals. Schoolteacher chastises his
nephews for beating Sethe as if she were a horse (149). Learning of the in-
fanticide, Paul D tells Sethe she’s “got two feet not four” (165). At one point,
Schoolteacher tells the boys to write Sethe’s “human characteristics on one
side, and her animal characteristics on another” (193). Then there is the ter-
rorizing day “two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on [her] breast the
other holding [her] down,” took her milk (70). All of these incidents are
foreshadowed by the description of Sethe’s arrival at Sweet Home. When she
arrived, “The five Sweet Home men looked at the new girl and decided to let
her be . . . They were young and so sick with the absence of women they had
taken to calves” (10). These incidents in the story evoke the grotesqueries of
slavery, as written upon the enslaved body. Moreover, these incidents parallel
the way Sethe literally and figuratively bestowed them upon baby Beloved’s
body (i.e., “with one stroke of the knife”). Taken collectively, these textual
moments evoke the magical realist intermingling of man and beast, trading
places within the slippery hierarchy of a grotesquely carnivalized world.
As a consequence of the film’s emphasis on Beloved’s developing self, New-
ton’s performance does seem campy and comedic rather than solemn and
severe. But the sounds and images of young Beloved drooling, defecating,
burping, vomiting, and mumbling are clearly intentional, even unavoidable.
Whereas readers of the novel move quickly through descriptions of Beloved’s
offensive physical fluidity, spectators of the film are confronted with lingering,
embodied spectacles of her amorphousness, her protuberances, triggering
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 173
a much more visceral kind of disgust. The grotesque body in cinema is usu-
ally a generic concomitant of slapstick comedy (i.e., Jerry Lewis’s and later
Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor); it is not usually a dynamic component
of historical melodrama, therefore rendering Newton’s performance “exces-
sive” and difficult to assimilate. Newton’s Beloved stands out as generically
incongruous with other aspects of the film. Whereas descriptions of Be-
loved’s grotesque body in the novel are simply components of the verbally
constructed character, the live performance of Beloved’s grotesque body in
the film enters into intertextual dialogue with other performances in Beloved,
which by contrast appear more measured. Her performance also enters into
dialogue with other genres and individual films in which the grotesque is
synonymous with comedy and/or horror.
As a film, Beloved dialogues with the vast genre of maternal melodra-
mas also known as “women’s films” and specifically with a subset of films
functioning as a counterbalance to the dominant male genres, called “the
woman’s weepie.”77 These Hollywood genre films typically depict women as
subordinated to the Law of the Father. Tragic mother-daughter melodramas
have enjoyed commercial success in American theaters since the 1930s. In
the transcription from novel to film, director Jonathan Demme, producer
Oprah Winfrey, and screenwriter Akosua Busia were cognizant of the novel’s
potential relationship to classical Hollywood films scripted to address pre-
dominantly female audiences. As a film, Beloved could be categorized as an
African American maternal melodrama (rather like such films as A Raisin
in the Sun, 1961; Sounder, 1972; Crooklyn, 1994). Like classical melodrama,
Beloved reveals how the mother strives to gain unmet gratifications by estab-
lishing an intimate relationship with her child. Sethe’s yearning to merge with
her children as love objects exposes this desire as excessive, uncontrolled. The
social, moral, legal, and racial system is unable to accommodate her exces-
sive love, a point Paul D expresses when he says: “Your love is too thick . . .
what you did was wrong, Sethe” (165).
One key difference between Beloved and classic melodrama is that it over-
turns the trope of the sacrificial mother. Here the mother’s personal sacrifice
is the life of the child itself. Another important difference between Beloved
and Hollywood’s typical tragic maternal melodrama is that the latter usu-
ally exploits sensational or sordid subjects like sexual jealously (i.e., Mildred
Pierce), class mobility (i.e., Stella Dallas), the tragic mulatto (i.e., Pinky, Imi-
tation of Life, Lost Boundaries), interracial marriage (Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner), or transracial adoption (Losing Isaiah) in ways complicit with the
dominant ideology. The denouements of these pictures—mainstream and Af-
174 . diva s on screen
rican American—inevitably reassert the Law of the Father, since the mother
is ultimately revealed as excessive, overbearing, or somehow inadequate.
Because of the painful memory of slavery, Beloved approaches its maternal
themes with more solemnity than most filmed melodramas. It raises questions
of historiography in the context of maternal melodrama by treating the brutal
genealogical legacy of slavery with high artistic seriousness. The cinematic
Beloved even deploys a level of gravity and impact that surpasses the literary
Beloved. After all, the cinema has a greater capacity to engage various senses
and synthesize antecedent arts.78 These resources for expression enable it to
attain more emotional weight when the arts are synthesized with generic
coherency. Whereas the novel offers description, the film presents mise-en-
scène. More effectively than the novel, the film graphically (and acoustically)
presents horrific representations of brutalized black bodies, of the enslaved
body as the inscribed surface of historical events. Sounds of whips cracking,
sights of bloody skin flayed open, nooses around necks, and the imprint of the
chokecherry tree on Sethe’s back momentarily conjure up the horror of chat-
tel slavery in ways unavailable to novels. Even Baby Suggs’s (Beah Richards)
sermonizing plea for recovery and celebration of the black body are more
vivid in the film than the written depictions of sermons at the Clearing.
One problematic consequence of the film’s narrative emphasis on the tragic
domestic drama, however, is the partial erasure of Paul D’s (Danny Glover)
post–Sweet Home survival story. Paul D’s role in the film is limited to that
of the man who reenters Sethe’s life, who drives the ghostly spirit out of 124
Bluestone Road, and who later is in turn “moved out” by Beloved. His post-
slavery traumas are abridged in the motion picture in favor of emphasis on
Sethe’s self-sabotage, trauma, re-memory, and guilt. Consequently, Beloved as
a film becomes a “woman’s film,” focusing on efforts by Baby Suggs, Denver
(Kimberly Elise), and Sethe to transcend the trauma of the past still threat-
ening in the present.
Paul D’s internment experience in Georgia, and his work on the chain
gang, carefully described in the novel, is notably absent from the film. In
the novel, Morrison recounts that Paul D was sent to prison after trying to
kill Brandywine, the man to whom Schoolteacher had sold him. Brandy-
wine was leading him, in a coffle with ten others, through Kentucky into
Virginia. “He didn’t know exactly what prompted him to try—other than
Halle, Sixo, Paul A, Paul F, and Mister. . . . but the trembling was fixed by the
time he knew it was there” (Beloved, 106). Just as Sethe’s relationship with
Beloved represents the link between many mothers and daughters, Paul D’s
incarceration and work on the chain gang represents the literal and figura-
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 175
tive link between himself and many African American men who shared an
abusive history of internment during Reconstruction. His subjugation at the
hands of Reconstruction-era correction officers parallels Sethe’s subjection
at the hands of antebellum authorities. Relaying “his story” and setting it in
Georgia is central to the historiographic intervention Morrison initiates.
Historians continue to unearth the relationship between slavery and mass
incarceration. Prior to the 1920s, African Americans convicted of breaking
the laws—petty and grand—in the New South found themselves “farmed
out” to the highest bidder and destined to labor for the duration of their
sentence or their life, whichever came first. Convicts built railroads, mined
coal, manufactured brick, forested lumber, paved roads, and picked cotton.
According to Alex Lichtenstein, convict leasing remained the predominant
form of punishment until the closing years of the nineteenth century and
contributed to the region’s industrial expansion and postbellum economic
transformation.79 Various states, including Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida,
and Alabama, relied heavily on convict-lease (chain gang) penal systems. The
penal system in the New South was not only a corrupt system of labor recruit-
ment, control, and exploitation; it was also suited to the political economy
of a postemancipation society. “From a purely penological point of view, the
convict lease was a fiscally conservative means of coping with a new burden:
ex-slaves were emancipated from the dominion of the slaveholder only to be
subject to the authority of the state.”80
Benefiting from the scholarship of literary critics and legal historians such
as John Edgar Wideman, Randall Kennedy, Horace Cayton, and St. Clair
Drake, Loïc Wacquant writes: “On the morrow of Emancipation, Southern
prisons turned black overnight, as ‘thousands of ex-slaves were being arrested,
tried and convicted for acts that in the past had been dealt with by the master
alone’ and for refusing to behave as menials and follow the demeaning rules
of racial etiquette.”81 The racial disproportionality in U.S. imprisonment can
be understood only against the backdrop of the full historical trajectory of
racial domination in the United States.
Morrison recounts the internment experience of Paul D as a way of recu-
perating the historical experiences of incarcerated black men. Sexual abuse
was a routine concomitant of this imprisonment. Thus the author recounts
the daily practice by which black inmates were forced to fellate white prison
guards (e.g., “Hungry, nigger?” Beloved, 108) as a way of re-presenting a
variant of sexual racism that has long been suppressed. Enslaved men (and
newly freed men) were sexually vulnerable both to the wanton abuses of
their owners and to those operating as punitive agents for the state. Hayden
176 . diva s on screen
White’s assertion that narrative broadly defined “has to do with the topics
of law, legality, legitimacy, or more generally, authority,”82 calls attention to
the strong political intervention implicit in this aspect of Morrison’s text.
The filmmakers may have omitted Paul D’s story from the screenplay for
any number of reasons. Including Paul’s story material might well have earned
the film an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.
Second, some of the novel’s material had to be eliminated to narrow the
film’s scope. Third, Beloved was made to appeal to female audiences. Retain-
ing something of Paul D’s perspective, however, enables the film to preserve
facets of the gendered multivocality of the novel and the “multivalence of
subjection” as endured by Morrison’s characters.
When the film actually does include Paul D’s perspective, it is rendered
through unrestricted narration and perceptual subjectivity. The latter refers
to the internal and psychological; it includes thoughts, dreams, fantasies, and
sensory experience. Although both the novel and the film are multivoiced, the
film is more adept at showing spectators the internal psychological states of
characters. Flashbacks to Sweet Home, haunting memories, and encounters
with ghosts, for example, are communicated in the film via focalized percep-
tual subjectivity. When Paul D first enters the house at 124 Bluestone Road,
for example, the camera aligns the spectators with his point of view. What we
see is his inner-subjective experience of the ghostly presence in Sethe’s home.
As he walks through the corridor, it appears as if he’s walking through the
annals of slave life at Sweet Home. Demme reportedly borrowed this eruptive
memory technique from the death camp flash memories of Sidney Lumet’s
The Pawnbroker, forging a subliminal link between two forms of holocaust.
First, Paul D sees visions of family and friends bloodied and chained. Then
he’s startled by the image of Sethe’s murdered daughter. Finally, he takes his
last steps through a barn door to enter her home. Throughout the foyer he’s
confronted with flesh-and-blood memories of abuses perpetrated on the
plantation. Here the film develops the synthetic properties of the medium
(i.e., closeups, wide angles, zoom-in shots, props, makeup, ambient sound,
and point of view) to rouse our horror at the atrocities of slavery, by con-
veying a subjective experience. In the novel, by contrast, Paul D’s entry into
Sethe’s home is described rather understatedly:
Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed her
through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked
him where he stood.
“You got company?” he whispered, frowning.
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 177
While this description aptly details Paul D’s actions, it does little to con-
vey the subjective experience of his character or communicate his startling
encounter with the ghostly presence haunting Sethe’s home. Here the film
effectively enlivens the original source material by synthesizing the various
antecedent arts into focalized perceptual subjectivity. Because spectators are
aligned with Paul D’s perspective, they momentarily share his fear, dismay,
and terror. This amplification suggests that film—rather than being inferior
to the novel—can actually enrich written texts in ways that go far beyond
what a prejudiced view would have us believe about the film medium.
Literary critics have discussed the way the novel created an aesthetic by
playing against and through the cultural field of postmodernism. Both Beloved
the film and the novel are polyperceptual: they engage numerous voices and
narratives by telling and retelling the same event from Sethe’s, Denver’s, and
Paul D’s perspectives.83 Like the novel, the film is innovative in linguistic ways
that originate in the black tradition of oral narrative.84 It mixes vernaculars
and modes of response. Thus another key difference between the novel and
the film is that the latter translates narrative voice into focalized perceptual
subjectivity, bringing spectators and characters into closer relation.
The film manifests another hallmark of a kind of resistant postmodernism.
By eroding the boundary between high (literary) culture and mass televi-
sion or popular (low) culture, the film collapses a boundary, for example,
between Toni Morrison, the erudite cultural producer and Nobel Prize win-
ner, and Oprah Winfrey, the TV icon and arbiter of bourgeois taste. The
novel’s story of slavery (invoked by Beloved and endured by Baby Suggs)
is premised on “the absence of power, the quest for self-determination, the
loss of a homeland, and of a language.”85 But the film—at the level of its pro-
duction, at least—comes wrapped in the aura of Winfrey’s career success,
as media mogul, a career marked by the presence of power, the realization
of self-determination, the existence of a cinematic language. As producer
and star in the transcription from novel to the screen, Winfrey’s approach
is “inevitably partial, personal and conjectural.”86 In what follows I explore
178 . diva s on screen
the reception of Beloved in general and the impact of Winfrey’s star persona
on the media’s response to Beloved in particular.
Oprah Winfrey, Thandie Newton, and Kimberly Elise star in Beloved (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1998).
values, its positive reviews in the black press, an expensive advertising cam-
paign, a story based on a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, and a cast of stars,
Beloved was unable to gain recognition from African American audiences.
The mainstream press coverage began with a Time magazine cover story
featuring the film’s star-producer in costume. As Time covers are usually
reserved for persons (and events) reflecting the tenor of the zeitgeist, the
cover itself seemed to mark a milestone because (like the Time cover fea-
turing recording artist Lauryn Hill with the caption “Hip Hop Nation”), it
appeared to substantiate the claim that black cultural idioms are continually
moving from margin to center. Oprah Winfrey’s image on the cover marked
a milestone because it announced that a theatrically released African Ameri-
can film about the legacy of slavery and the reality of Reconstruction was a
significant cultural event.
The four Time articles in this issue were so celebratory as to prod The New
Yorker critic David Denby to begin his censorious review of Beloved by ad-
monishing Time magazine. Denby wrote: “Weeks before the movie opened,
Time unfurled the ceremonial bunting in a journalistic package so elevated
in tone that the magazine seemed awed by the importance of its own cover-
age. When the public gets a proper look at the movie, the bunting may turn
180 . diva s on screen
Writing for the Chicago-Sun Times, Roger Ebert echoed Hoberman’s obser-
vations: “Her whole persona is about controlling her own destiny—owning
herself. No wonder she was powerfully attracted by Beloved, which is about
a woman who tastes 28 days of what freedom feels like and is willing to kill
her daughter rather than see her taken back into slavery.”
winfre y: c athartic, charismatic c apitalist · 181
Writing for the British Film Institute’s glossy Sight & Sound, Charlotte
O’Sullivan made a similar observation. Even Winfrey herself made connec-
tions between her talk show and the film when she shrugged off criticism of
Beloved’s limited commercial appeal by contending that America’s current
race problem is rooted in its failure to honestly confront its emotional is-
sues and history: “If you don’t acknowledge the pain in truth, then you carry
forward the pain in distortion . . . It’s no different from your own personal
history and wounds. If you don’t heal your personal wounds, they continue
to bleed. And so we have a country of people who have continued to bleed.”88
Thus in her own proselytizing plea, Winfrey pursued the project as a partial
extension of the themes, ideas, and technologies of self-help presented on
the program. Her appeal thus manifests the intertextual impact of television
stardom on an American literary classic.
On one level, the Beloved project was cultivated from a progressive desire
to provoke American audiences to consider the dehumanization at the core of
the nation’s foundation. On another level, the film was based on a profoundly
naive and commercial premise: that viewers would heed Winfrey’s clarion call
to “heal” the American family of its dysfunctional race relations. And that
all that was necessary for this “healing” to occur—if not begin—was for the
“mother of America” to tell her adoring public to go see this film. However,
if it is naive for a celebrity like Winfrey to expect audiences to support an
aesthetically and ideologically progressive project, it is worth asking another
question: what does it take to get audiences (mainstream and ethnic) to sup-
port innovative, historically audacious black films?89 What does it take to
motivate African American audiences to support films other than Blade ($23
million) or How Stella Got Her Groove Back ($29 million)—films that earned
more in two weeks than Beloved earned during its entire theatrical run?
The tension around Beloved-as-epic emerged in the racially polarized
struggle for discursive control of its reception. Consider, for example, reviews
by the African American New York Press critic Armond White and The New
Yorker reviewer David Denby. White’s complimentary review lauds every
aspect of the film. White correctly notes, “Demme achieves in a commercial
format what avant-gardists Carl Dreyer, Jean Cocteau, Maya Deren and Jean
Genet could communicate to their intimates.” But White’s praise of Demme
rises only to eventually fall into the trap of simplistic racial and aesthetic es-
sentialism, as when he offers Demme’s “black heart” as the explanation for
his sensitivity to African American cultural idioms. White’s own paradoxical
racial essentialism is implied in the statement that lumps together dissimilar
black-oriented films like the aesthetically innovative Beloved and the narra-
tively conventional Steven Spielberg film The Color Purple. He writes:
182 . diva s on screen
of awards from institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2001 she was
nominated for a Golden Globe and an AFI (American Film Institute) award
for acting. Shortly afterward, she won the Berlin Silver Bear and the Best
Actress Oscar at the seventy-fourth Annual Academy Awards.
The Oscar ensures Berry’s place in the Hollywood pantheon. Historians
will remember her as one in a long line of African American entertainment
industry “firsts.” The William Foster Photoplay Company of Chicago was—by
most accounts—the first black-owned movie production house (circa 1911).
Oscar Micheaux’s Birthright (1918) was the first black-directed feature-length
African American film. Hattie McDaniel was the first black woman to receive
an Oscar for her supporting role in Gone with the Wind (1939). Sidney Poitier
became the first black man to receive an Academy Award for his perfor-
mance in Lilies of the Field (1963). Forty years later, Halle Berry became the
first African American woman to win Best Actress. These achievements are
cause for African Americans to observe, but with skepticism. After all, the
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences typically rewards the most
commercially profitable pictures. Their designation as marketable in the
global entertainment economy means these pictures comply with dominant
ideological frameworks, as these structures and practices are recuperated
within a film’s diegesis. Market demands on commercial cinema explain why
award-winning films are rarely—if ever—politically progressive or socially
groundbreaking. Invariably, these pictures reveal the economic base and its
relationship to the cultural superstructure.
The ensuing chapter examines Halle Berry’s screen persona, which itself
is a text shaped by career maneuvers fortuitously well synchronized with
the zeitgeist. Her celebrity—like that of her predecessors—raises as many
questions as answers. Foremost among such questions is whether her screen
persona reproduces racial stereotypes (i.e., the jezebel, the tragic mulatto,
the welfare queen), many of which predate the invention of the cinematic
apparatus and overdetermined African American representation in litera-
ture and theater. Berry’s African American critics fault her for “selling out”
to the establishment by reproducing racial stereotypes about black women
in mainstream film and popular culture. This chapter complicates such criti-
cisms by considering the polyvalence of her star persona. This polyvalence
propels discourse on representation beyond racial binaries into questions
of hybridity and multiracial identity. For Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier,
Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry, succeeding in the pre-
dominantly white, heterosexist, capitalist patriarchy of Hollywood or network
television required capitulation, complicity, compromise, and contradiction.
These women are necessarily complex figures—profoundly Du Boisian in
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 187
their double and conflicted consciousness about the film industry yet com-
pletely assimilated in their drive to succeed as crossover stars in mainstream
America. Of all the celebrities discussed here, Berry has enjoyed the most
conventional career trajectory, gradually rising through the ranks with a
steady stream of respectable motion-picture vehicles. She has obtained a
wider variety of film roles than any other African American–identified ac-
tress in U.S. history. This is an accomplishment in and of itself, because it
may enable the next generation of actresses to exceed existing institutional
boundaries. Having sustained a lucrative film career as an award-winning
actress, Berry deserves recognition as a diva of the American screen.
As a consequence of winning the Oscar, Halle Berry’s celebrity status has
soared. She avoided the notorious “Oscar curse,” becoming an A-list leading
lady.2 But it was not the Oscar alone that solidified her stardom. Her profes-
sional traversal from small roles (i.e., Jungle Fever, 1991) to niche-audience
films (i.e., Executive Decision, 1996; The Rich Man’s Wife, 1996; B.A.P.S., 1997)
to social-problem pictures (i.e., Losing Isaiah, 1995; Bulworth, 1998) to high-
concept summer blockbusters (i.e., X-Men, 2000; Swordfish, 2001; Die An-
other Day, 2002; the campy Catwoman, 2004; X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006)
was a process involving several career-building movies, a few television mini-
series, and one decisive biography picture.
The HBO biography movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (Martha
Cooliage, 1999) was more influential than any other film or accolade in ad-
vancing Berry’s career. Despite its status as a made-for-TV-movie—or even
perhaps because it was widely seen on TV—it established a cultural connec-
tion (in the minds of viewers, producers, and spectators) between Halle Berry
and the late Dorothy Dandridge. Historian Donald Bogle, scholar Marguerite
Rippy, and biographer Christopher Farley are among the researchers and
celebrity watchers to suggest that Berry greatly benefited from portraying
the late 1950s starlet. Farley summed it up well:
Introducing Dorothy Dandridge was a case where the death of one star helped
give birth to another. Playing a screen legend is a bid at immortality; however,
it is usually a losing one that makes the living actor seem small by compari-
son. Halle, by showing as much sexual charisma, charm and acting ability as
Dandridge, posed this silent question: Isn’t she just as big a star? Ironically,
Dorothy Dandridge provided Halle Berry a better part than Halle had ever
gotten in her life or Dandridge had ever gotten before her death.3
Ebony magazine journalist Walter Leavy agreed with Farley. For its sixtieth-
anniversary issue, Ebony published Leavy’s cover story on the new trio of
Oscar winners: “Denzel, Halle & Jamie: Celebrate 60 Historic Years of Civil
188 . diva s on screen
Halle Berry portrays Dorothy Dandridge in the HBO special Introducing Dorothy
Dandridge (dir. Martha Cooliage, 1999).
was . . . It reminded me how easy I have it today . . . What she had to endure
was mind-boggling . . . While making the movie, I realized I have no reason
to complain about anything.”4
Berry’s seven-year effort to make the film, and her willingness to help fi-
nance the TV movie, speaks volumes about her passion for—and recognition
of—the picture as a definitive career maneuver. From a professional stand-
point, the numbers of spectators who watched the movie mattered less than
what it accomplished for its leading lady. It legitimated Berry as an actor (in
the eyes of production executives and Motion Picture Academy members)
by associating her public persona and professional ambitions with Dan-
dridge’s screen persona and civil-rights struggle for inclusion. Furthermore,
it simulated a familial or genealogical relationship whereby Berry became
the descendant-beneficiary of Dandridge’s Hollywood legacy.5 Introducing
Dorothy Dandridge articulates the semiotic relationship between diegetic
and nondiegetic elements of an actor’s persona. The diegetic (or narrative)
content of Dandridge’s turbulent biography was symbolically and semioti-
cally linked to the nondiegetic (or nonnarrative) celebrity persona of Berry.
During the classical Hollywood studio era (circa 1930–60), stars routinely
portrayed important historical figures whose magnitude or prominence had
a residual effect on their own public personae.6 On a lesser scale, but with
the same effect, Introducing Dorothy enabled Berry to augment her role in
American film history.
The African American–oriented Johnson Publishing Company magazines
Ebony and Jet helped solidify the Berry-Dandridge connection with promo-
tional articles similar to Leavy’s. Take the article “Halle Berry: On How She
Found Dorothy Dandridge’s Spirit and Healed Her Own” (Ebony, March
1999) as a case in point. From the preproduction press coverage through
to Berry’s Oscar acceptance speech, she continually reminded viewers that
she was the continuation of Dandridge’s lineage, the realization of Dorothy’s
deferred dreams.
Awarding Berry the Oscar made for an interesting moment of redress for
the systemic exclusion of women of color from mainstream motion pictures
and nationally recognized award-granting institutions. Even her acceptance
speech implied as much. Token moments of inclusion and recognition—
Cicely Tyson’s Oscar nomination for Sounder (1973), Whoopi Goldberg’s
Golden Globe for The Color Purple (1986), Goldberg’s and Oprah Winfrey’s
Oscar nominations for The Color Purple, Denzel Washington’s many acco-
lades for Glory (1989) and Training Day (2002), Cuba Gooding’s Oscar for
Jerry Maguire (1997), and Jamie Foxx’s Oscar for Ray (2005)—siphon off and
190 . diva s on screen
An elated couple, Oscar winners Halle Berry and Denzel Washington strike a pose
for the paparazzi.
Nation (1915). Du Bois’s critical project was revived periodically over the in-
tervening years by various critics and again in the 1990s with the rebirth of
Independent Black Cinema and outspoken filmmakers like Spike Lee (She’s
Gotta Have It, 1986), Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle, 1987), the Hudlin
Brothers (House Party, 1990), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1992), Mario
Van Peebles (New Jack City, 1991), Carl Franklin (One False Move, 1992), and
Darnell Martin (I Like It Like That, 1994). Barring the NAACP image awards,
their films made little impact at nationally recognized, revenue-generating
award ceremonies, and many filmmakers have had difficulty securing subsidy
for subsequent projects. The African American response to this situation has
involved a series of critical articles in national periodicals.
On March 18, 1996, on the eve of the sixty-eighth annual Academy Awards,
the film industry received some unflattering publicity. Journalist Pam Lam-
bert, author of a People magazine cover story, “Hollywood Blackout,” indicted
the industry for its contradictory practice of saying all the right things but
continuing its exclusion of African Americans. Lambert referred to this exclu-
sion as a national disgrace. The statistics, she argued, tell the story. African-
Americans constituted 12 percent of the U.S. population [in 1996] and 25
percent of the moviegoing audience, but only one of the 166 nominees at the
Academy Awards was African American—a live section short film director.
Of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 5,043 members, who
nominate and choose the Oscar winners, fewer than 200—or 3.9 percent—
were African American. Only 2.3 percent of the Directors Guild membership
was black, according to the guild’s 1994 figures. A mere 2.6 percent of the
Writers Guild was African American. And blacks accounted for less than 2
percent of Local 44, a four-thousand-member union that includes set deco-
rators and property masters.7
Lambert’s article was published almost concurrently with Reverend Jesse
Jackson’s open letter to the entertainment community titled “From Selma,
Alabama, to Hollywood, California: A Thirty-One-Year Struggle for Fair-
ness and Inclusion in the American Dream.” Reverend Jackson eloquently
tackled the issues. The paucity of nominations for people of color, he argued,
is directly related to the lack of films featuring the talents of people of color.
Reverend Jackson likened the practice of excluding minorities to Jim Crow
laws enforcing racial segregation.
Today, the adversary is not a group of racist individuals but institutions that
continue to lock out people of color from significant levels of participation
and decision-making. The same coalition of conscience that tore down the
192 . diva s on screen
cotton curtain of American apartheid must pull down the celluloid walls in
Hollywood. Just as segregation—legal forms of apartheid—defined the rules
of behavior for both whites and Blacks in the South, Hollywood’s films and
television industry defines how we see ourselves and each other. Our pres-
ent and future generations should be seen as part of a multiracial society, a
Rainbow Coalition.8
relative to many African American actresses. The privilege derives from her
propinquity to whiteness in a society where color consciousness has shaped
race relations.
The contemporary politics of skin color in America exists as a vestige of
three distinct but interrelated events: the scientific creation of unequivocal
racial categories during the Enlightenment; the trans-Atlantic slave trade;
and the political economy of American plantocracies, which determined
patterns of racial segregation, integration, and assimilation for decades after
Reconstruction. The racialization of slavery—designed to support colonialism
and safeguard the privileges of colonizers—occurred in connection with the
growth of the world market and the rise of capitalism. Marx deals with this
in outline in Capital, which Eric Williams takes up and analyses in Capital-
ism and Slavery. Scholars across various fields (e.g., the phenomenology of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the psychology of Frantz Fanon, the sociology of
Pierre Bourdieu, the labor history of Alex Lichtenstein, the anthropology
of Ann Laura Stoler, the critical race theory of Cheryl Harris, or the legal
theory of David Theo Goldberg) have demonstrated that race, class, and
color consciousness impact the value modern nation-states assign to bodies
and behaviors.15 Because bodies are racially categorized and these categories
are endowed with varying degrees of and “forms of capital,”16 race and color
figure prominently in the valuation of bodies as objects of desire. From such
scholarship we know that “the very concept that a body possesses or reveals ‘a
color’ is indebted to the privileging of vision and its attendant systems of rep-
resentation that measure and quantify differences of skin hue and tone.”17
women in cinema. White women in film, he argues, are typically bathed in,
and permeated by, light. The connotations of light and dark are unmistak-
able: their luminescence emphasizes virtue and desirability. For example, the
southern U.S. ideal of womanhood intensified in the period after the Civil
War. The celebration of the Victorian virgin in the cinema with stars Lillian
Gish and Mary Pickford was part of a bid for the respectability of cinema as
a medium. “The white woman as angel was in these contexts both the symbol
of white virtuousness and the last word in the claim that what made whites
special as a race was their non-physical, spiritual, ethereal qualities.”22
Dyer’s argument becomes more convincing when paralleled with empiri-
cal evidence provided by anthropologists Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins in
their study of the semiotics of race, gender, and nationality in photography.23
As a consequence of this shared visual vernacular, or collective semiotic,
contemporary actresses of color (e.g., Asians, African Americans, Hispanics,
and Indians) still contend with idealized constructions of white femininity
upheld by the culture industries as the standard. Consequently, most film
roles are still envisioned with white actresses in mind. Halle Berry, however,
is one of the few African American actresses to cross the proverbial color line
without adversely affecting her celebrity or alienating her fan base.
In the African American community, color preference subsided with the
Black Pride, Black Power, and Black Arts movements of the 1960s. Many
African Americans jettisoned hegemonic beauty standards. But the cultural
revolution was uneven, incomplete, and unable to withstand what Cornel
West has described as “racist bombardment at the level of aesthetics.” In the
multiracial, multicultural, and transnational new millennium, contemporary
media (film, television, video, music, Internet)—and, by extension, society at
large—embrace a wider range of corporeal schemas and skin complexions as
physically attractive, sexually desirable, commercially marketable, and profes-
sionally promotable. In film, however, including African American–directed
cinema, color has had an impact on casting. The impact of race and color-
ism on casting specifically, and filmmaking generally, has been important
enough for various directors of color to address in silent films like those by
Oscar Micheaux; in more recent comedies like Hollywood Shuffle (Robert
Townsend, 1987), School Daze (Spike Lee, 1988), and Mississippi Masala (Mira
Nair, 1991); and in progressive documentaries like Coffee Colored Children
(Ngozi Onwurah, 1988) and A Question of Color (Kathe Sandler, 1992).
Physical appearance is an essential part of any celebrity’s commercial appeal
and mainstream marketability. The body is an especially loaded symbol in the
overall structure of representation that serves to organize society.24 Yet racism
198 . diva s on screen
Apparently Hollywood doesn’t think America is ready for Mos Def and Kate
Hudson heating up the screen. But out in the real America, more black men
are married to white women than to Latinas and the conventional wisdom
is, as actress Nia Long puts it, “two black characters equals a black film and
not just a movie about two people.” Hispanics are now the largest American
minority group: business-wise it’s a no-brainer . . . But it’s tough on African-
American actresses and on Hispanic actors. Nia Long says Smith has called
her several times about roles, though not for Hitch. “If we can’t play the girl-
friend, then Hollywood has to figure out what to do with us.” Even Mendes
herself thinks it’s odd. Why is she considered too dark to be paired with a
white lead but just right for an African American? “I don’t even know what
to say about it anymore,” Mendes told Newsweek in an interview before the
movie opened. “Certainly I’ve benefited, because I’ve got to work with Ice
Cube, Denzel and Will. But it’s lame. I wish the mentality wasn’t so closed.
We don’t know what to say either, except that in Hollywood, Hollywood is
a work in progress.”44
Though Eva Mendes did not immediately cross over into mainstream ro-
mantic roles, Puerto Rican actresses Rosie Perez (i.e., White Men Can’t Jump)
and Jennifer Lopez did (i.e., U-Turn, 1997; Out of Sight, 1998; The Wedding
Planner, 2001; Maid in Manhattan, 2002; Enough, 2002; Gigli, 2003; Monster-
in-Law, 2005). Lopez and Perez are atypical but share career beginnings as
cast members of the TV variety show In Living Color. Lopez’s precinematic
success as a “Fly Girl” dancer on television, and later as a recording artist,
facilitated her marketability in mainstream pictures. Rosie Perez was a cho-
reographer before Lee cast her. These women had access to roles typically
reserved for white actresses. As Mary Beltrán has aptly observed, scholarship
on the dynamics and politics of Latino celebrity reveals the contradictory
dynamics and ambivalent role Latinos have historically played in the U.S.
racial hierarchy.
However, the ambivalent nature of this role may be changing as the demo-
graphic balance shifts. Eva Mendes’s observation is correct. This is a moment
when the biracial ingénue, the beige or bronzed beauties, and the Latina ac-
tresses have increased—albeit uneven—access in Hollywood because they
represent a growing segment of the population. Recognizing this gradual but
increasing trend contextualizes Halle Berry as a phenomenon of consump-
tion. She, like her predecessors and contemporaries, is a commodity to be
consumed by the largest reachable market share. Her star appeal to media
consumers ought to be understood in terms of her talent and, more point-
edly, in terms of the latitude she has in traversing the racial spectrum.
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 205
Berry began her public career as a beauty pageant contestant and model,
which she has claimed taught her “how to lose without feeling devastated.”45
Her screen debut occurred when she landed a role on the ABC sitcom Living
Dolls. According to biographer Frank Sanello, she referred to herself as the
“token Negro” on a television show with white producers who didn’t know
how to write dialogue for an African American woman character. But the
program enabled her to audition for roles that launched her film career.
Jungle Fever
It is an interesting coincidence that the director responsible for casting Berry
in her first major film role also launched the careers of Rosario Dawson
and Rosie Perez. Both Berry and Dawson appeared in smaller productions
(Dawson in Larry Clark’s kids, Berry on TV in Living Dolls) before Spike Lee
cast them in his pictures, but the filmgoing public knew neither well before
they landed their first major roles in the 40 Acres and a Mule’s productions
Jungle Fever and He Got Game, respectively. Despite initial concern that she
was “too beautiful for the role,” Lee cast Halle Berry as Vivian, the crack-
addicted girlfriend of Samuel L. Jackson’s character Gator Purify, brother of
protagonist Flipper Purify. This role, writes biographer Sanello, “provided
an entrée to the film industry, allowing her to shed her physical self and play
a serious character.”
The events of Yusef Hawkins’s murder inspired Spike Lee to write Jungle
Fever.46 The film is about an interracial affair between the upper-middle-
class brownstone-dwelling architect Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) and his
working-class Italian American secretary, Angela Tucci (Annabella Sciorra).
These unlikely lovers meet when Angela shows up for temporary employ-
ment at the architectural firm where Flipper expects to make partner. Initially,
this self-conscious “race man” refuses to work with Angie, having requested
an African American secretary. But he reluctantly agrees, and eventually a
friendship develops. Working late nights together, Angie and Flipper be-
come closer. One night, when the conversation turns to sex, a passionate af-
fair erupts. Before long, Flipper’s fair-skinned African American wife, Drew
(Lonette McKee)—who is grappling with her own color issues—learns of the
affair, kicks him out, and sinks into her own identity crisis.
Jungle Fever’s subplot, involving Gator’s and Vivian’s drug addiction, pres-
ents a critique of the devastating effects of crack cocaine on African Ameri-
can families. The film effectively communicates this message because the
performances are so strong. Christopher Farley accurately describes how
206 . diva s on screen
well Berry performed her role as Vivian. When she first appears, she is seen
at Gator’s side on an outdoor basketball court late at night. Her eyes are
wide, as if she’s permanently startled; her movements are quick and jerky,
as if she expects attackers to leap out from the shadows. Vivian and Gator
launch into an obscenity-laced, drug-fueled argument that proceeds quickly
and inaudibly. The indecipherability of their words suggests that they are a
pair of doomed souls. Jungle Fever is as much about exploring the myths of
interracial sex as it is about misdirection. The film seems to be saying that
it’s absurd for people to be obsessed with interracial sex when real, material
problems (i.e., racism, drug addiction, domestic violence, and prostitution)
need attention in African American communities.47
The portrayal of Vivian remains one of Halle Berry’s strongest perfor-
mances because of the intensity she brought to the character. It marks a
moment in her career when the performance was so strong that spectators
could suspend disbelief, seeing only Vivian rather than Halle Berry playing
a character. The performance was certainly aided by her work with veteran
thespian Samuel L. Jackson, who gave the actress a strong character to play
off and who reportedly accompanied Berry around New York City to various
drug-infested neighborhoods so they could get a feel for the kinds of places
their characters were living in.48
Released on June 7, 1991, Jungle Fever was a modest commercial success
by blockbuster standards, grossing $31.7 million in the United States. Since
it only cost $14 million to make, it is considered a financial success. Unfor-
tunately, the success of the film was marred by personal tragedy. As Berry
biographers Frank Sanello and Christopher Farley noted, a man Berry was
dating (and whom she still refuses to identify) injured her, causing 80 percent
hearing loss in one ear. Fortunately, she moved on personally and profes-
sionally and appeared in two films that year, the romantic comedy Strictly
Business and a buddy movie titled The Last Boy Scout.
In Kevin Hooks’s Strictly Business, Halle was cast as Natalie, the love inter-
est of Waymon Tinsdale III, an upwardly mobile African American business
executive played by handsome heartthrob Joseph C. Phillips. Shot in Manhat-
tan’s Harlem neighborhood, it was released on November 8, 1991, to mixed and
negative reviews, and it earned only $7.6 million on a budget of $4 million. Not
exactly a commercial success, Strictly Business was less well received than its
predecessor Coming to America (John Landis, 1988), which demonstrated the
existence of a mass audience for black romantic comedies. However, Landis’s
1988 collaboration with Murphy benefited from Murphy’s charismatic persona,
at its height after Trading Places (John Landis, 1983), Beverly Hills Cop (Martin
Brest, 1984), and Beverly Hills Cop II (Tony Scott, 1987).
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 207
Berry’s next film project—a role in Tony Scott’s The Last Boy Scout—was
also a commercial failure, but for reasons beyond her input or control. Boy
Scout’s story is about burned-out detective Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) and
his partnership with ex–LA Stallions player Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans).
Hallenbeck is hired to protect a stripper named Cory (Halle Berry), who is
also Dix’s girlfriend. But things go terribly wrong when Cory is executed
during a drive-by shooting. Together Hallenbeck and Dix attempt to solve
the case. What they discover is deep-seated corruption between a crooked
politician and the owner of a pro football team.
The Last Boy Scout was scripted in the tradition of successful interracial
buddy films like the Beverly Hills Cop movies and the first two Lethal Weapon
pictures (1987, 1989). But by the time it was released on December 13, 1991,
the formula was well worn, and Boy Scout did little to improve the existing
narrative template. The previous vehicles were successful because the comic
banter between male leads (Eddie Murphy and Judge Reinhold in Beverly
Hills Cop, and Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon) was bit-
ing, if not razor-sharp. The more sensible, levelheaded Reinhold and Glover
characters tempered the instability, trickery, and insanity of Murphy and
Gibson. But this dynamic was missing from The Last Boy Scout. A substan-
tive or memorable role for Halle Berry was also absent. Boy Scout earned
only $59.5 million on a budget of $70 million, proving a commercial and
critical flop. Neither Strictly Business nor The Last Boy Scout provided much
substance for Berry, but her next role would prove an important outing and
reinvigorate her career.
Boomerang
The role of Angela Lewis in Paramount’s black romantic comedy Boomerang
was Berry’s next major part. This film marks the first time she appeared on the
radar screen for many viewers, who would see her as the beautiful newcomer
to big-budget, all-black-cast films. A beautiful ingénue, Berry would play op-
posite one of the most charismatic male stars. Scripted by Barry Blaustein and
David Sheffield, Boomerang was directed by Reginald Hudlin and produced
by Warrington Hudlin. Tall, handsome, and Ivy League educated, the Hudlin
Brothers were known as the fraternal team responsible for the enormously
popular teen comedy House Party (1990). Giving top billing to charismatic
Eddie Murphy and sultry Robin Givens, Boomerang featured a cornucopia
of black talent. The cast included Martin Lawrence, Grace Jones, Geoffrey
Holder, Eartha Kitt, Tisha Campbell, and Lela Rochon. According to War-
rington Hudlin, Berry was the first to audition for the role of Angela. She
208 . diva s on screen
gave such a strong reading for the part that Murphy hired her immediately,
refusing even to screen other actresses waiting to audition.49
Boomerang begins as a story about a player who’s about to be played. It
opens with the romantic exploits of Marcus Graham (Murphy), a wom-
anizing ad executive employed at the African American advertising firm
Chantress. Infamous for breaking women’s hearts, Marcus finally meets his
match in the ravishing Jacqueline Broyer (Givens), a man-eating cosmetics
executive hired as his direct boss after a company merger. A beautiful, bold
bombshell, she’s got the goods to outdo Marcus in every way. By trampling
Marcus’s overgrown ego, Jacqueline erodes his confidence until he’s so inse-
cure that everything—including his performance at work—begins to suffer.
In response, Marcus starts dating Jacqueline’s sweet, down-to-earth assis-
tant, Angela Lewis (Berry). Angela’s quiet dignity, self-respect, and caring
demeanor ultimately disarm Marcus and enable him to see the error of his
womanizing ways. When she discovers he’s two-timing her with Jacqueline,
Angela explodes, calling him a dog and providing a few needed lessons in
house training. Eventually, Marcus wants to reconcile and realizes he has to
change his ways to win her back.
Throughout the film, Berry is convincing as the kinder, gentler girl next
door. In fact, her character Angela is one reason the film’s narrative coheres.
Boomerang’s conventional narrative resolution in the form of heterosexual
union hinges on Angela’s ability to make you believe the happily-ever-after
fairy tale: that a lothario like Marcus would prefer nesting with Angela to
casual sex with Jacqueline. Halle Berry’s status as a relatively unknown entity
helped her credibility in portraying the angelic Angela, an innocent young
woman whose very name implies virtue, purity, and wholesomeness. These
characteristics enabled her to function as a narrative foil for the sexual cyni-
cism provided by Givens’s Jacqueline. After all, Givens’s extradiegetic persona
included her aura as Mike Tyson’s ex-wife. This real-life extracinematic fact
gave Givens’s Jacqueline a reel-life tough-girl exterior that Ebony- and Jet-
reading spectators would likely take to the cinema with them. Ultimately,
Boomerang reproduces a conservative narrative of heterosexual union: hand-
some, eligible bachelors relinquish their playboy freedom only for the sexu-
ally guileless and pure at heart.
Ironically, the entertainment value of Boomerang derives less from ro-
mantic entanglements than from the supporting cast. Chief among them
is Eartha Kitt playing Lady Eloise, a sixty-something, sex-starved company
figurehead who seduces Murphy’s Marcus under the guise of promoting
him. Second is Tisha Campbell as Marcus’s jilted motor-mouth neighbor
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 209
who crazily tries to warn women not to sleep with this Don Juan. A young
Chris Rock dressed in rainbow colors (resembling TV’s Urkel) plays skinny
mailroom peon Bony T. Singer. Grace Jones has a role playing herself: an
over-the-top diva appropriately named Helen Strangé (read: strange). And
there’s Martin Lawrence’s racial conspiracy theorist, Tyler. One of Marcus’s
best friends, Tyler finds racism in the most mundane events, including when
a Caucasian waitress offers them asparagus “spears” instead of asparagus
“tips” as the vegetable du jour. Tyler’s explanation of the racist meaning be-
hind billiards is also not to be missed (“It’s about the White man’s fear of the
sexual potency of black balls!”).
Eddie Murphy viewed Boomerang as a political film. He told the Los An-
geles Times in 1992 that Boomerang is political because it features a black cast
yet it’s not necessarily about being black, and it cost $40 million.50 His state-
ment reflects the challenges of producing African American–oriented films
that naturalize rather than pathologize black experience like so many ’hood
films. Murphy said investors are willing to underwrite ghetto films but reluc-
tant to subsidize projects normalizing black life. Unlike the fantasy feature
Coming to America (1988)—also scripted by Blaustein and Sheffield—or the
quotidian Strictly Business, the glittery, retro world of Boomerang is popu-
lated with black urban professional people as young adults (aka the BUPPY
phenomenon). The presentation of upwardly mobile African Americans in
mainstream cinema was, and still is, political—or so Murphy maintains.
Released July 1, 1992, the film grossed $70 million domestically and $131
million worldwide. Critically speaking, it was unevenly received. New York
Magazine’s David Denby said the “situations were so crassly obvious and
moralistic that the actors all seem like kids playing at being grown-ups,” and
he called Hudlin’s direction “amateurish.”51 Similarly, Los Angeles Times critic
Kenneth Turan criticized the film’s affirmative-action approach to casting.
Ironically, these reviews underscore Eddie Murphy’s point: the social sphere
of upper-middle-class blacks—albeit humorously depicted in Boomerang—is
a world unknown to most white critics, who have difficulty believing these
enclaves exist. Reviews notwithstanding, the film was a giant step in the right
direction for Halle Berry, since it enabled her to shift gears away from the
crack addict she had played earlier and expand her screen persona beyond
smaller roles in pictures like The Last Boy Scout.
More than a success for Berry, Boomerang is a Black Entertainment Tele-
vision (BET) cult classic. A companion picture or semi-sequel to Coming to
America, it is the pivotal picture that again proved the existence of a market
for black romantic comedies, thereby paving the way for The Inkwell (1994),
210 . diva s on screen
Booty Call (1997), Love Jones (1997), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998),
Woo (1998), The Wood (1999), The Best Man (1999), Love and Basketball
(2000), Brown Sugar (2002), and Deliver Us from Eva (2003), and nonro-
mantic ensemble comedies like Friday (1995), Next Friday (2000), Friday
After Next (2002), Barbershop (2002), Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2004),
Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), and Madea’s Family Reunion (2006).
Halle Berry’s next role was in not a theatrically released film but in the
made-for-TV miniseries Queen (John Erman, 1993), a grueling sequel to Alex
Haley’s Roots (Marvin Chomsky and John Erman, 1977) that required her to
age several decades and endure months of long days shooting on location.
After making Queen she would appear in Father Hood (Darrell Roodt, 1993)
as reporter Kathleen Mercer, in The Program (David S. Ward, 1993) as Au-
tumn Haley, in The Flintstones (Brian Levant, 1994) as Rosetta Stone, and in
the TV movie Solomon and Sheba (Robert M. Young, 1995) as Queen Sheba
before landing Losing Isaiah (1995), a serious, theatrically released drama
and a pivotal picture in her catalogue.
Losing Isaiah
Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, Losing Isaiah struggles to be a complex
portrait of the issues involved in transracial adoption. Squeezing crack ad-
diction, prostitution, homelessness, adoption, marital infidelity, twelve-step
recovery, and a custody battle into one 111–minute movie would be a chal-
lenge for any motion picture. Nonetheless, it marks another one of Berry’s
stronger, more evenhanded performances and a step away from comedies
and toward serious social-problem pictures. Throughout the film she sustains
dramatic shifts, changing emotional registers and believably develops four
years of maturation in the central character.
Costarring Jessica Lange and Samuel L. Jackson, Losing Isaiah tells the story
of the eponymous baby boy born addicted to crack cocaine and thereafter
accidentally abandoned by his homeless drug-addict mother Khaila Rich-
ards (Berry). Shortly after being admitted to the hospital, Isaiah is adopted
by white social worker Margaret Lewin (Jessica Lange) and her husband,
Charles (David Strathairn). As a family, the Lewins experience some growing
pains but ultimately adjust to Isaiah and his special needs. A few years later,
Khaila is released from prison and living in an overcrowded apartment in the
projects with another single mother, Marie (Joie Lee). When she discovers
the baby she never agreed to put up for adoption is still alive, she fights to
regain custody.
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 211
In The Rich Man’s Wife (1996), playing housewife Josie Potenza, Berry
had the rare opportunity to work with female director Amy Holden Jones.
Having written screenplays for Indecent Proposal and Mystic Pizza, Jones
was an established screenwriter. The casting decision came easily to Jones,
who, according to biographer Frank Sanello, is good friends with Stephen
Gyllenhaal. Jones screened Losing Isaiah and believed Berry could carry a
neo-noir like The Rich Man’s Wife. Narratively, the film combines the plot of
Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1953) with a Cinderella story. Halle’s
Josie is a destitute seventeen-year-old convenience-store clerk. She meets a
wealthy older TV executive named Tony Potenza (Christopher McDonald)
who sweeps her off her feet.
Seven years later, this Prince Charming has turned into a nasty, abusive
drunk who had the foresight to have his young bride sign a prenuptial agree-
ment that leaves her penniless if she divorces him. Having grown accustomed
to wealth, and her new boyfriend Jake Golden (Clive Owen), she is not will-
ing to walk away penniless. Over drinks with swarthy stranger Cole Wilson
(Peter Greene), Josie reveals her homicidal fantasy about her husband’s death,
which would free her from the prenuptial agreement and leave her a wealthy
widow. Cole agrees to commit the crime, but Josie double-crosses him into
also doing the time.
A commercial and critical failure, earning only $8.5 million in the United
States, The Rich Man’s Wife is a noteworthy part of Berry’s oeuvre because it
is one of the few pictures in which an African American actress plays a “race-
neutral” role. In the film, Josie’s husband, Tony, is white. Her lover, Jake, is also
white. And Cole, the murderer she dupes into killing her husband, is white.
Oddly, the narrative makes no mention of Berry’s race or of the racial identity
of any of its characters. It’s not the typical ill-fated interracial love story like
Jungle Fever (1991), Zebrahead (1992), One False Move (1992), or The Bodyguard
(1992), which sought to expose and exploit sexual stereotypes. Nor does it link
criminal intentions to any racial signifiers. Instead, it’s the kind of race-neutral
role ordinarily played by a white actress whose a priori humanity—rather
than ethnic identity—has been naturalized by dominant discourses uphold-
ing whiteness as normative. Problematically, however, the film’s colorblind-
ness actually naturalizes whiteness and the white male gaze by making white
people and Berry’s ability to blend the condition for neutrality.
Given the industry, it is understandable that Berry gleefully told the media,
“I got to be colorless for three months and feel what white leading ladies feel
every time out.” According to biographer Frank Sanello, “Appearing in a color-
blind movie may not seem like that big a deal until you learn how sensitized
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 213
Halle had become to being rejected for so many jobs just because of the color
of her skin.” Though Berry is biracial, and thus relatively privileged, she has
experienced the insidiousness of a milieu in which the erasure of one’s ethnic-
ity is considered a professional perk. The racial politics of The Rich Man’s Wife
would be less skewed if there were a context in which the racial roles could be
reversed: where a white woman could be surrounded by black male characters
without semiotic hint of their race. Just imagine Julia Roberts or Cameron
Diaz saying, “I got to experience what black actresses feel every time out.”
In 1997, Halle Berry appeared in Robert Townsend’s divas-in-the-hood
comedy B.A.P.S., which grossed only $7.2 million domestically. She also ap-
peared in the Charles Burnett–directed “Oprah Winfrey Presents” made-for-
TV movie The Wedding (1998), based on Dorothy West’s renowned novel. The
Wedding aired February 22 and 23 on ABC. However different The Wedding
(a prestigious literary adaptation for television) and B.A.P.S. (a theatrically
released comedy) were, both met with significant criticism. The Wedding
was criticized for its departure from source material and for not casting an
actress who can “pass” for white, since protagonist Shelby Coles does so in
the original story. B.A.P.S. was widely regarded as shallow, lowbrow comedy
that Berry herself disavows. On one occasion she told Roger Ebert she ap-
peared in B.A.P.S. because it diverted her attention from the depression over
her divorce from David Justice. In another context she described working
on the picture as a symptom of her workaholic addiction. Fortunately, Berry
would soon appear in a political satire that would have prominent African
American authors, literary scholars, and political analysts buzzing.
Bulworth
Released in 1998, Bulworth was written, directed, and produced by Oscar-
winner and director Warren Beatty. Set in 1996, it stars Beatty as the chroni-
cally depressed Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, a liberal California senator
forced to adapt to the right-wing politics of the day to retain his Senate seat.
Bulworth’s true political leanings are disclosed during the film’s opening
credit sequence, which rolls over photographs of Martin Luther King Jr.,
Bobby Kennedy, Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall hanging in the sena-
tor’s office). Depressed by the state of the union, Bulworth puts out a $10
million contract on his own life. In the meantime, he publicizes the ugly
backdoor deals struck by fellow politicians. But his fatal plan is complicated
when he meets and falls for Nina (Halle Berry), a stunning biracial beauty
and lollipop-sucking fly girl from South Central LA.
214 . diva s on screen
With a new lease on life, Bulworth leaves political decorum aside and turns
his campaign into a rapper’s Rabelaisian carnival. Donning a black Kangol
and tellin’ it like it is, Bulworth transforms himself into a rhyming political
pundit whose shtick can only be compared to the antics of comedian Sacha
Baron Cohen playing Ali G Indahouse.53 Bulworth snubs fellow politicians,
flouts legal authorities, and overturns established hierarchies, all while eating
and drinking insatiably. First he offends the African American congregation
of a prominent South Central church by openly admitting that the Demo-
cratic Party ignores black voters. “Come on!” he exclaims from the pulpit.
“If you don’t put down the malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind
somebody other than a runningback who stabbed his wife, you’re never go-
ing to get rid of someone like me!” At his second stop, he casually insults a
group of wealthy Jewish Hollywood executives. Along this campaign trail he
meets Nina (Halle Berry) and follows her to a nightclub, where he smokes
marijuana, fumbles through black vernacular, dances badly, and tries to rap,
all in an attempt to impress her. Eventually, it seems to work. He follows her
to the dance floor, where a mobile camera encircles Nina and Bulworth as
they find their groove. It isn’t until later that we learn she’s got an ulterior
motive for keeping him nearby.
What begins as pithy political satire deflates into a trite, racially essential-
ist fantasy about the liberating effects of hip-hop on stereotypically uptight
white folks. Newly minted rap lyrics are the wrecking ball Bulworth takes to
a posh campaign benefit at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he uses rap to
riff on the state of the union instead of delivering his scriptwriter’s speech.
At the podium he rhymes his critique of campaign finance reform, oil-driven
Middle East policy, mushrooming health-care costs, and the mistreatment
of women. But the rhymes ring hollow, sounding corny rather than catchy,
more like mockery and minstrelsy than hip-hop music. At times, Bulworth
seems embarrassingly puerile, reminiscent of teen pics like Zebrahead (An-
thony Drazen, 1992), kids (Larry Clark, 1995), or Thirteen (Catherine Hard-
wicke, 2003) and foreshadowing the wiggers-gone-wild movies Black and
White (James Toback, 1999) and Whiteboyz (Marc Levin, 1999),54 all of which
tackled white adolescent appropriation of hip-hop culture.
Worse yet, Beatty’s Bulworth evokes (whites-in-blackface) minstrelsy. One
hallmark of whites performing in blackface was that Caucasian performers
could suddenly behave more candidly, acting uninhibited, natural, unre-
served, and even sexually liberated. The minstrel overtones present in Bul-
worth might have been mitigated by Beatty’s genuine directorial attempts at
progressive political commentary. After all, he sprinkled civil-rights leaders
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 215
throughout the mise-en-scène of the film. Activist and poet laureate Amiri
Baraka (aka Leroi Jones) plays a clairvoyant vagabond who utters a near-
undecipherable analysis of the political climate. But Baraka’s small role in the
film (as a soothsayer who encourages Bulworth) adds little depth, dimension,
or clarity. His screen time is so limited as to have little or no impact when
compared with the narrative and screen time devoted to Bulworth’s inter-
racial antics. Apparently, this production hitch was obvious to some of its
collaborators. Contributing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin expressed concerned
the film would go this route, seeming like a trivialization of rap by a middle-
aged white man.55
However, there are moments when the film succeeds with a sincere political
critique. Berry’s Nina delivers a monologue with genuine political content.
Sitting in the back seat of a limousine next to Bulworth, she offers the movie’s
only half-substantive critique of African American disenfranchisement. The
senator asks Nina why there are no more black leaders. In a whisper that
suggests her intellectualism is also seductive foreplay, she says:
I think it has more to do with the decimation of the manufacturing base in
the urban centers . . . an optimistic energized population throws up optimistic
energized leaders. When you shift manufacturing to the Sun Belt and Third
World you destroy the blue-collar core of the black activist population. Some
people would say the problem is purely cultural. The power of the media is
continually controlled by fewer and fewer people. Add to that monopoly a
consumer culture based on self-gratification and you’re not likely to have a
population that wants leadership that calls for self-sacrifice. I’m a materialist
at heart. Look at the economic base. High domestic employment means jobs
for African Americans. World War II meant lots of jobs for black folks. That
is what energized the community for the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s
and 60s. An energized, hopeful community will not only produce leaders,
but—more importantly—it will produce leaders they’ll respond to.
who Nina is or—barring the moment she witnesses him rescue neighborhood
kids from racist white cops—why she falls in love with Bulworth. Moreover,
the Berry-Beatty/Nina-Bulworth relationship is implausible at best. They are
given too little time to develop a love connection or overcome what would
be the experiential gulf between them.
The facile way Nina and Jay Bulworth connect lends credence to the argu-
ment that Halle Berry is often cast as the easily acquired sexual object of older
white men (i.e., the hardboiled characters of The Rich Man’s Wife, Bulworth,
Swordfish, and Monster’s Ball). Some of her African American critics have
even called for a boycott of Berry’s films, finding them profoundly racially
offensive.56 Bulworth could be interpreted as confirming these interpretations,
particularly at the moment its genuine political commentary turns farcical.
During an on-camera interview, Senator Bulworth proposes interracial sex
as the umbrella solution to structured inequality. The answer to inequality,
he tells one woman interviewer, is “a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended
program of procreative racial deconstruction . . . everybody needs to fuck
everybody else.”
Herein is Bulworth’s Rabelaisian burlesque of demographic trends. The
notion of the “browning of America” emerges once again. According to Bul-
worth screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, “Warren spent many, many hours trying
to convince [him] that that’s what was actually happening, and even showing
[Sorkin] census data about it.”57 In real life, there is more intermarriage. But
by making Senator Bulworth’s minstrel moment the megaphone through
which this message is delivered in the film, the movie trivializes the discourse
around economic inequality and inadvertently offends its otherwise progres-
sive audience. Demographic changes may engender cultural changes in rep-
resentation and alter corporate sponsorship, but there is insufficient evidence
these shifts effect government spending on domestic infrastructure.
The disjuncture between nation and cinematic narration is what led Henry
Louis Gates Jr. to ask whether Bulworth is “a Hollywood film about politics
or a political film about Hollywood?” Politicians who pander are—in Beatty’s
words—“selling tickets.” His disenchantment with the Democratic Party mir-
rors his disenchantment with Hollywood. Beatty was clear about his relation-
ship to the material. “I finally realized,” he told Gates, “that if I made a film
it was going to be from the point of view of what I am: a depressed Kennedy
liberal . . . and a white man.” It seems conceivable Warren Beatty intended
Bulworth as a critique of Clinton’s second-term prioritization of popularity
(particularly in the black community) over public policy. After all, Clinton
was beloved enough for literary giant Toni Morrison to dub “Clinton as the
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 217
First Black President” in the pages of The New Yorker only a few months after
Gates’s May 11 review of Bulworth in the same publication.58
Political manifestos and Hollywood metaphors aside, the casting of Halle
Berry as Nina articulates the thesis of this chapter. Her extradiegetic ico-
nicity as a biracial woman who identifies as African American enables the
diegetic character to function as a polysemic sign. If polysemy is the capac-
ity for every sign to have multiple meanings, then the range of meanings is
narrowed down by the context. In the context of Bulworth, Berry’s Nina is
a multilayered signifier. She is a black political activist (she tells Bulworth,
“Huey Newton fed the kids on my block!”). She is a biracial woman (Uncle
Tyrone reminds Nina about her mother’s perilous involvement with white
men). She is a bridge between racially polarized constituencies represented
by the white political world of Bulworth and the black community of South
Central. She becomes the voice of black authenticity (hence her declaration
of affection for Bulworth—“You know you my nigga”).59 And she is the sexual
object and femme-fatale subject (Bulworth’s would-be assassin and girlfriend)
in a political satire turned inner-city noir. Unfortunately for Bulworth as a
film, no individual character can credibly shoulder this much narrative re-
sponsibility. Warren Beatty’s Jay Bulworth may walk off as Nina’s “nigga” (or
“wigga,” for that matter) by the denouement, but her statement is not enough
to make Bulworth’s black identification credible to movie audiences.
As with other 1990s political satires—the comedy Bob Roberts (Tim Rob-
bins, 1992), the fake war film Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson, 1997), the real-life
parallel Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998), the campaign-trail documen-
tary The War Room (D. A. Pennabaker, 1993), and even the actual presidential
campaigns of Ross Perot (1992, 1996)—there are narrative fissures amid play-
ful parody. Critically, Bulworth met with success, scoring high marks with
the likes of Stuart Klawans at The Nation and Henry Louis Gates at The New
Yorker. Yet these reviews did little to bolster its box-office performance. Bul-
worth returned a paltry $26 million on a budget of $30 million domestically.
Unfortunately, the progressive political intentions of its director required
more nuance and sophistication than Warren Beatty anticipated.
For Halle Berry, the quiet dignity of Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999)
and the pyrotechnics of Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001) would soon follow.
With its Gone in 60 Seconds director, an $80 million budget, a seasoned cast
(including John Travolta, Don Cheadle, Sam Shepard, and Drea de Matteo),
and the commercial viability of a techno-thriller bank-heist plot, the film
was a recipe for box-office success. Earning only $69 million in theaters,
however, Swordfish turned out to be a financial failure. Perhaps this failure
218 . diva s on screen
proves that all the tricks of the trade (i.e., cinematic reflexivity, over-the-top
explosives, a flying bus full of hostages, and even a topless Halle Berry) do
not a successful movie make if—as one critic riffed—it is “a hodge-podge of
mixed parts . . . assembled with no real regard for emotional acuity, focusing
instead on maximum sensory impact.”60
Swordfish
“You know what the problem with Hollywood is?” asks John Travolta’s char-
acter Gabriel in Swordfish’s self-reflexive opening scene. “They make shit.”
Thus begins the film shot in moody close-up with shifting rack focus. Con-
tinuing, Gabriel delivers a derisive monologue on the state of modern movies,
culminating in a critique of Dog Day Afternoon and Al Pacino’s performance.
He then steps back into his own hostage drama. Gabriel Shear is not merely
an espresso-drinking, Versace-wearing cinephile. He is a maniacal counter-
terrorist in the middle of an elaborate bank robbery and hostage crisis. He’s
holding thirty hostages in a Los Angeles bank, each wrapped with plastic
explosives, ball bearings, and electronic detonator collars. When a trigger-
happy cop shoots one of the bad guys, a female hostage gets loose and is
blown to kingdom come. Filmed in super slow motion—what the makers
of The Matrix dubbed “bullet time,” capable of capturing a bullet in flight—
the explosion is stretched over forty-two seconds on screen. We see it as an
unbroken panorama of cars and bodies flying through the air, a storm of
ball bearings and shattering glass—as if the camera were moving through
the explosion, surfing the shock wave.
The footage serving as raw material for the explosion was shot in California
over a period of three days, with multiple arrays of more than 180 still cameras
firing in programmed sequences. But the task of plotting the sequences, and
weaving the bits and pieces into a computer simulated whole, was done by
a small Winnipeg-based visual effects company, Frantic Films. Fifteen em-
ployees took eight months to compose the shot for Warner Brothers, which
spent almost $5 million on the explosion.61 After opening with a bang, the
film then cuts to a flashback occurring four days earlier to establish its nar-
rative and characters.
One of the first characters we meet in Swordfish is Halle Berry’s Ginger
Knowles, Gabriel’s seductive and duplicitous girlfriend. Together Ginger
and Gabriel have learned that the DEA shut down its network of dummy
corporations for laundering drug money code-named Swordfish. In 1986,
when Operation Swordfish was terminated, these corporations had generated
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 219
$400 million. After fifteen years of compound interest the money swelled
to $9.5 billion. To access the money, Gabriel has organized under a covert
counterterrorist unit called Black Cell. But the money is locked away behind
super-encryption. Gabriel dispatches Ginger to Texas to persuade one of the
world’s leading computer hackers, Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman), to slice
into the government mainframes and access the money. Down on his luck,
Stanley’s motivation is also financial. He cannot afford the legal fees necessary
to regain custody of his preteen daughter Holly (Camryn Grimes), currently
living with her porn-star mother (Drea de Matteo).
From the outset, there’s sexual tension between Halle Berry’s Ginger and
Hugh Jackman’s Stanley. Outfitted in a short, tight red dress, she slinks into
his rundown trailer with ten thousand dollars of Gabriel’s money, requesting
a meeting. In the back room of a trendy nightclub, Stanley meets Gabriel, who
stands flanked by hired guns and beautiful women. Testing Stanley’s concentra-
tion, Gabriel orders Stanley to break the encrypted code. Stanley gains access,
proving his intellectual phallus supersedes both sexual arousal and physical
fear, and prompting Gabriel to make him an offer he can’t refuse. Once in resi-
dence at Gabriel’s Beverly Hills estate, Stanley learns that Ginger’s the ultimate
spice girl when she bares her breasts while tanning topless. The exposure takes
spectators by surprise, seeming somewhat unmotivated by the narrative.
Berry’s topless scene was dubbed “mundane” by critic Mark Olson, who
read it as “emblematic of the film’s conflicted nature,” since it took place “not
as part of a steamy love scene but when Stanley asks to borrow Ginger’s car
keys.”62 Conversely, Variety’s Todd McCarthy failed to mention the nudity,
probably because toplessness is commonplace in big-budget action features.
McClean’s Brian Johnson remarked on the scene, but only to say that Berry
and Hugh Jackman looked good with their shirts off. Berry’s topless view
was marketed as a selling point for the film through “leaked” rumors that she
was paid an extra $500,000 for the scene. As far as her critics are concerned,
the scene—along with her Monster’s Ball role—is yet another example of
Berry’s complicity with the oversexualization of black woman in popular
culture. While unmotivated, the scene hardly seems offensive, since it con-
stitutes less exposure than Sharon Stone gave viewers in Basic Instinct (Paul
Verhoeven, 1992) and less disclosure than myriad celebrities’ nude scenes
(i.e., Juliette Binoche in Rendez-vous, 1985; Uma Thurman in Dangerous
Liaisons, 1988; Julianne Moore in Shortcuts, 1993; Inés Sastre in Beyond the
Clouds, 1995; Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, 1997; Jennifer Lopez in U
Turn, 1997; Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, 1998; Angelina Jolie
in Gia, 1998; Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, 1999; Katie Holmes in The
220 . diva s on screen
Gift, 2000; Audrey Tautou in Le libertin, 2000; Peta Wilson in Mercy, 2000;
Monica Bellucci in Brotherhood of the Wolf, 2001; Kate Winslet in Iris, 2001;
Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, 2001; Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary,
2002; Frances McDormand in Laurel Canyon, 2002; Rosario Dawson in
Alexander, 2004; Anne Hathaway in Havoc, 2005; or Pam Grier in many
sexploitation and Blaxploitation films). Unfortunately, it has become com-
monplace for actresses to comply with the sexist conventions of Hollywood,
showing skin as a means of climbing the ladder or staying on top. It may not
be admirable, but it comes as no surprise. Berry’s complicity with industry
expectations may not be commendable, but it is understandable in an in-
dustrywide context.
Stanley and Ginger are given another intimate scene, but the second is not
as friendly as the first. Returning her car keys, he sneaks into her bedroom,
where he catches her off guard and quickly undressing. As she is stripped
down to her bra and panties, he notices she is wearing a wire. He asks, “Why
are you wearing a wire? Who are you, Ginger?” Under duress she confesses—
whether truthfully or not—to being a DEA agent planted to spy on Gabriel,
who, at that very moment, walks in on them. He carts Stanley away, taking
him off Ginger’s hands and into his confidence. In disclosing more about
Swordfish to Stanley, we learn of Gabriel’s ties to the U.S. government. He’s
working for Virginia state senator Reisman (Sam Shepard), who, having been
contacted by the FBI, wants to terminate their relationship and operation. As
chairman of the Joint Subcommittee on Crime, a good old boy like Reisman
cannot afford exposure. Defiantly, Gabriel informs the senator he’s moving
forward with or without him. He proceeds to execute his fascist plan to make
the world safe for democracy, bringing spectators to the film’s denouement.
Jokingly called a “Scientological superman” and a “high-tech Houdini” by
critics, John Travolta’s Gabriel is hard to take seriously. The role pushes the
limits of believability, but he also fails to regain the relaxed performance he
delivered in comeback pictures Pulp Fiction (1994) and Face/Off (1997).
More offensive than the gratuitous nudity is the high-tech lynching of
Berry’s Ginger near the end of the film. When Stanley double-crosses Ga-
briel, he strong-arms him by stringing her up by the neck. It is remarkable
so few critics commented on this element of the film, mentioning the nu-
dity instead. Perhaps the filmmakers erroneously felt no harm was done in
alluding to the history of racist violence. It is the only scene that provides
any indirect or visual reference to her racial otherness. For black spectators,
this scene—more than any other—requires resistance rather than identifica-
tion.63 In a final twist, Gabriel and Ginger are seen together in Monte Carlo,
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 221
collecting the proceeds from their cyber-heist. Like Pam Grier before her,
Berry is playing the phallic femme who walks away with the money and the
(maniacal) man in the final reel.
Monster’s Ball
Monster’s Ball was a critical and commercial success. The film grossed $38
million worldwide on a production budget of $4 million and a print adver-
tising budget of $8 million, tripling its overall budget. However, the film left
many members of the African American community—particularly black
women—disturbed by its highly implausible message: that an African Ameri-
can woman living in the South could fall in love with the white racist prison
guard who supervised her husband’s execution.
When Monster’s Ball begins, we are introduced to the restless Hank Gro-
towski. A middle-aged widower, he suffers from chronic insomnia, a con-
ditioned response to his duties as an emotionless supervisor of death row
detail in a Georgia penitentiary. Unable to sleep but emotionally numb, Hank
indulges in his nightly ritual: he settles his upset stomach by driving to the
local twenty-four-hour diner, where, greeted by his regular waitress, Lucille
(Taylor Simpson), he orders his usual meal of chocolate ice cream and black
coffee. Making polite conversation, Lucille asks about Sonny, for whom Hank
shows more apathy than concern. The tragedy of their father-son relationship
is that despite mutually felt alienation and melancholy, neither can bridge
the gulf between them.
The discrepancy between Hank’s perception (that Sonny’s okay) and the
actual pathos of Sonny’s life is demonstrated in the next scene, during which
Sonny meets the town prostitute, Vera (Amber Rules), in a cheap motel. Wait-
ing for her to arrive, he examines his face in the motel’s magnifying mirror.
His distorted countenance fills the mise-en-scène as he pauses in forlorn
self-reflection. Immediately following their sexual transaction, Sonny’s de-
spondent expression returns. He sinks back into his chair, provoking Vera to
ask: “What’s wrong, hon—you look so sad.” Sonny’s sadness is one of many
ironies in Monster’s Ball, and his moment of mirrored self-examination es-
tablishes reflection and introspection as motifs in the film. It is not simply
that characters (mis)recognize themselves in the mirror, seeing an alienated
self marked by a Lacanian lack. They are struggling with depression induced
by the difference between who they are and who they want to be. In this
reflection of a fragmented self, the very notion of a unified, unambiguously
gendered subject (i.e., a white heterosexual male) is rendered dubious. Both
222 . diva s on screen
Berry’s controversial role in the volatile Monster’s Ball (Marc Forester, 2001)
ignited debate over racial stereotypes of black sexuality. The film is the most
risqué of her career.
father and son are depicted as brooding, contemplative men for whom the
daily performance of masculinity has itself become burdensome.
Sonny’s inability to express emotion reveals itself as a patrilineal family
trait—a trait linked to their personal brand of masculinity and their pro-
fessional (multigenerational) commitment to vocation as correction offi-
cers. Hank’s stoic conduct as an unfeeling executioner mirrors his fatherly
demeanor as an indifferent parent. As Sonny’s boss and father, Hank has
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 223
therefore been set for the mass criminalization of African Americans, Native
Americans, and Latinos.68
One political corollary of the convict labor system in the South (and the
new criminal-justice system in relation to capital) was the preservation of
white supremacy.69 Whether Swiss film director Marc Forster intended it
or not, it is incumbent upon progressive spectators to place the racism and
sexism displayed by Hank and Buck (Peter Boyle) into this larger socioeco-
nomic, historical context. The political economy of the South has historically
conditioned white men to traffic black bodies through a penal system, thereby
creating jobs and stimulating a flailing economy. Signs of this depressed
economy are everywhere visualized in the film, including the presence of one
homeless demonstrator holding a plaque that reads: “It Must Be Somebody’s
Fault.” And signs of the racially disproportionate rate of the death sentence
are in evidence, as well. During a dry run for the execution, a black police
officer is obliged to stand in for the prisoner, a morosely ironic plot point that
doesn’t strike any of the characters as telling70 but that shouldn’t be missed
by politically conscious spectators.
The southern political economy, its patriarchal laws, and its concomitant
code of racial ethics are evident in the relationship Hank and Sonny establish
with inmate Lawrence Musgrove (Sean Puffy Combs), the death row pris-
oner to whom Leticia is married. Ultimately, the dissimilar ways Hank and
Sonny react to Lawrence’s sentence reflect the extent to which each man has
become inured to the racial and economic order as well as the brutality of
capital punishment. Whereas Hank maintains his equanimity, Sonny loses
his composure. Oddly enough, Hank is not the only character to withhold
emotion with respect to Lawrence’s impending sentence. Leticia also appears
to negate the finality of the circumstances.
Spectators first meet Leticia (and her son, Tyrell) en route to visit Lawrence
hours before his electrocution. For Leticia, visiting the state penitentiary
has become another burden, one indistinguishable from her financial and
provisional needs. A leaking car radiator, an unaffordable mortgage, and her
depressed son reflect Lawrence’s inability to be provider, partner, or father.
Leticia’s despair results from the financial and personal ramifications of her
broken relationship with Lawrence. For some black spectators—particularly
hip-hop generationers in their twenties and early thirties—Leticia’s movement
from Lawrence to Hank (chiefly her explicit sexual relations with the older
white man) is deeply problematic, primarily because the film too easily for-
gives his racism, but secondarily because Monster’s Ball exploits (without con-
textualizing) the growing gender divide between black men and women.
226 . diva s on screen
Author Bakari Kitwana discusses the gender divide among African Ameri-
can hip-hop generationers. The growing gender split is attributable to the
increased sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy of rap lyrics; the way some male
hip-hop devotees have adopted anti–black woman attitudes espoused on
countless rap songs; the unrealistic material expectations of black women;
and higher rates of black incarceration and socioeconomic antagonisms,
which lead to higher rates of divorce for blacks than whites.71 This is not to
mention that black women have watched successful black men (i.e., athletes,
movie stars, entertainers) choose white women as sexual partners, lovers, or
trophy wives for decades.72 Though set in the rural South and removed from
urban hip-hop culture, Monster’s Ball invokes the social dynamic Kitwana
identifies through the extracinematic celebrity personae of rap artist and
clothing mogul Sean P. Combs, as well as Mos Def. Combs and Def bring the
extrafilmic reality of their hip-hop stardom to the screen the same way Berry
brings her extratextual status as a former beauty queen. Neither fact has any
direct bearing on Monster’s story, but both impact spectators’ decision to see
the film. The movie frames the breakdown in Leticia and Lawrence’s relation-
ship as a gender divide (“I’m sorry for every time I hurt you,” he tells Leticia);
it’s part of the precondition for Leticia’s receptiveness to Hank’s advances.
During the family’s last visit, Lawrence renounces his criminal legacy and
his relationship with Tyrell, telling him: “Remember, you ain’t me. You’re
everything that’s good about me. You’re the best of who I am.” Lawrence’s
compassionate disavowal of paternal influence inversely reflects Hank’s bru-
tal negation of Sonny later in the film when the Grotowski men brawl over
Sonny’s breakdown at Lawrence’s execution. Whereas Lawrence wants Tyrell
to escape his legacy of criminality, Hank demands that Sonny conform to an
inheritance of disciplinarity.
Guarding Lawrence before the sentence, Sonny sits calmly as the inmate
sketches his portrait. During the quietude of this brief exchange, the sur-
veilling gaze is momentarily reversed: Lawrence observes Sonny, capturing
his countenance on paper with the steady dexterity of a forensic detective.
They view each other not as inmate and guard, guilty versus innocent, black
or white, but as individuals. This scene encompasses the neoliberal, non-
conformist optimism of Monster’s Ball. It prefigures the film’s naive ethos
of “colorblind” interracial relationships that miraculously transcend history
without any on-screen discussion or negotiation of race relations. It also
prefigures the relationship between Hank and Leticia that will become the
center of the film. What makes the exchange between Sonny and Lawrence
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 227
more credible than the relationship between Hank and Leticia is that the
two men are of the same generation—a post–civil rights demographic less
emotionally encumbered by the legacy of segregation.
The fleeting exchange between Sonny and Lawrence contributes to Sonny’s
malaise, preventing him from stoically performing duties at Lawrence’s ex-
ecution. The film’s narrative implies that Sonny’s compassion for Lawrence
is related to his general attitude toward blacks. Unlike his father, Sonny is
not overtly racist. After all, Sonny’s only friends, Willie and Darryl (actors
Charles Cowan and Taylor LaGrange), are the two young sons of a black
neighbor. But the kids are frightened off Grotowski land shotgun style when
Hank executes Buck’s orders to get those “porch monkeys” off his property.
This crucial scene establishes the way borders and boundaries are an essen-
tial part of maintaining the fixity of identity—in this case white masculinity.
As Abby Ferber notes, “the re-establishment of racial boundaries” (in this
case the boundaries of the Grotowski homestead) “and the reassertion of a
white identity also require the reestablishment of gender boundaries and the
reassertion of traditional gender identities.”73 Here, the assertion of white
manhood is positioned in opposition to black boyhood, as male identity is
made the central project of white supremacist behavior. Mixing with these
racial “others” calls Sonny’s allegiance to white masculinity into question
much like his involuntary reaction to Lawrence’s execution.
Walking Lawrence to the electric chair, Sonny buckles and vomits, dis-
rupting Lawrence’s last walk and embarrassing his supervisor-father. This
loss of self-control is another moment when Sonny fails to maintain physical
and personal boundaries. If masculinity depends upon remaining calm and
reliable in a crisis (i.e., withholding emotions), then proving you’re a man
means never revealing involuntary emotions. The inability to maintain a
facade and safeguard these boundaries is taken as weakness. Hank knows
Sonny is under the scrutiny of other men. In society at large, but in prison
culture specifically, a particular brand of masculinity must be performed.
In his research on masculinity, Michael Kimmel has argued that “manhood
is demonstrated for other men’s approval” and that “masculinity is a homo-
social enactment.” He writes: “We test ourselves, perform heroic feats, take
enormous risks, all because we want other men to grant us our manhood.”74
Reading the narrative of Monster’s Ball in light of the literature on the social
construction of masculinity (Lehman, 1993 and 2001; Cohan and Hark, 1993;
Cohan 1997; Harper, 1998; Bordo, 2000; Deangelis, 2001) enables viewers
to access both the text and subtext of the film. Embedded in the subtext of
228 . diva s on screen
the leisure class, and visualizes the extravagant recreational activities that
fill their immense free time. Here the claustrophobic space of the prison is
played against the immensity of flying or sky surfing. As the film continues
to crosscut between Lawrence being handcuffed and the sky surfers diving,
spectators can hear the sound of wind blowing on the television. Director
Marc Forster uses the television to issue ironic comment. The commercial for
the RE/MAX Real Estate agency encourages TV viewers to sell their homes.
This message functions to remind the film’s spectators that Leticia is not only
incapable of selling her residence, she’s losing her home to creditors.
The closest we see Leticia come to the freeing sensations presented by the
sky surfers is the liberation she feels in her sexual relationship with Hank. As
cathartic as the narrative renders it, their sexual relationship still stands out
as a contrived plot point and one of the most implausible aspects of Monster’s
Ball. The notion that a black woman living in the Deep South would have no
extended family, community, or network upon which to rely for support is
implausible. Even more improbable is the notion that in the absence of such
a network she would find solace in the arms of an older white man whose
paternal guilt has expediently overturned his racist conditioning. Many black
spectators were appalled by this portrayal of black sexuality.
If Leticia is a problematic cinematic character, it is not only because of her
facile intimacy with the bigoted Hank. Rather, it is because the narrative of
Monster’s Ball places Leticia (and her son Tyrell) in a socioeconomic vacuum.
They exist outside the context of any black institutions: churches, schools,
civic groups, or extended family network. This storyline provides no frame-
work for the financial conditions of black underclass life and/or the racial
division of labor. It consequently fails to explicate the economic structure of
racism and the relationship between slavery and mass incarceration. In the
absence of such an explanation, it inadvertently reinforces the stereotype of
pathological blackness. Even a conservative sociologist like William Julius
Wilson would argue that “when figures of black crime, teenage pregnancy,
female-headed families and welfare dependency are released to the public
without sufficient explanation, racial stereotypes are reinforced.”76 And, as
Wahneema Lubiano suggests, such images surface as manifestations of narra-
tive ideological battle. They present, she writes, “a particular nuanced ‘black-
ness’ constructed and strengthened by narratives preexisting in the national
historical memory around the ‘black lady’ and the ‘welfare mother.’ ”77
That the film relies on these racial stereotypes is ironic because—to its
credit—Monster’s Ball reveals the relationship between race, gender, and
class. The overdetermining economic forces bringing Hank and Leticia into
berry: charismatic be aut y in a multicultur al age · 231
reparations Hank makes in Leticia’s name (i.e., the gas station). This superfi-
cial redemption (which makes sexual partnership its reward) is what angered
so many African American viewers. The tumultuous events preceding and
following the Academy Awards made the polemics of the film evident.78
After Monster’s Ball, Berry became the first woman to secure successive
contracts to play a Bond girl after Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002).
She also starred in the gothic ghost story Gothika (2003). She has appeared
in campy comic book features like Catwoman (Mathieu Kassovitz and Thom
Oliphant, 2004), for which she received a Razzie (a worst actress prize) at the
Golden Raspberry Awards. Since then, she has pursued various films. Despite
working in mainstream features, she continues to support smaller TV pro-
ductions like the African American–directed Their Eyes Were Watching God
(Darnell Martin, 2005). While a reading of all these films is beyond the scope
of this chapter, they all constitute part of her post-Oscar celebrity. Halle Berry
is a diva of the silver screen because she successfully negotiates the minefield
of an industry that has historically closed its doors to people of color. In the
multicultural new millennium, she is a celebrity for a multiracial era.
Notes
Introduction
1. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (London: Pan Michael Joseph, 1976).
2. Elaine K. Ginsberg, Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996).
3. James Goodwin, Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
4. The term culture industry was coined by Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Max
Horkheimer (1895–1973). They argued that popular culture is like a factory produc-
ing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy
pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile
and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and
Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high
arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs—that is, needs created and satisfied by
capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.
Marcuse was the first to demarcate true needs from false needs.
5. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Dimin-
ishing Expectations (London: Norton, 1979), 218–21. He writes, “Although it continues
to administer American institutions in the interests of private property (corporate
property as opposed to entrepreneurial property), it has replaced character building
with permissiveness, the cure of souls with the cure of the psyche, blind justice with
therapeutic justice.”
6. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen asserted that “the upper classes
are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations and are reserved for
certain employments to which a degree of honor attaches.”
7. The ironies of this commercial were reiterated in Kissling’s essay. See Elizabeth
234 . notes to pages 4–15
Arveda Kissling, “I Don’t Have a Great Body, but I Play One on TV: The Celebrity
Guide to Fitness and Weight Loss in the United States,” Women’s Studies in Com-
munication 18, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 209–16.
8. Other examples include Deal or No Deal, The Amazing Race, Eco-Challenge,
Pussycat Dolls: The Search, Top Model, Little People, Big World, and Are You Smarter
Than a 5th Grader?
9. Examples include Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse “The Body”
Ventura, Clint Eastwood.
10. Lance Armstrong, David Beckham, Larry Bird, Mia Hamm, Anna Kournikova,
Yao Ming, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Pelé, Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters.
11. Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Billie Holliday, John Lennon, Princess Diana, Aaliyah,
Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, and Anna Nicole Smith are examples.
12. In this case the following programs come to mind: The Osbournes, Growing
Up Gotti, Sons of Hollywood, Gene Simmons Family Jewels, Driving Force, The Real
Housewives of Orange County, Playboy’s Girls Next Door.
13. These are the perpetrators of the Long Island Railroad Massacre (1993), the
Columbine High School massacre (1999), and the Virginia Tech massacre (2007).
14. Timothy Lenoir, “All But War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Com-
plex,” Configurations 8, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 289–335. In the 1990s, with the end of the
Cold War, came an emphasis on a fiscally efficient military built on sound business
practices, with military procurement interfacing seamlessly with industrial manu-
facturing processes.
15. Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood’s Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment
Complex (2002), http://www.stanford.edu/class/sts145/Library/Lenoir-Lowood_
TheatersOfWar.pdf.
16. Karen Grigsby Bates, “Angela Bassett Is NOT a Diva,” Essence 26, no. 8 (De-
cember 1995): 78.
17. Hilton Als, “A Crossover Star,” The New Yorker (April 29, 1996): 132–36.
18. Ibid., 132.
19. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resis-
tance,” reprinted in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 892–900.
20. For example, there are three full-blown biographies of Dandridge (Earl Mills’s
Dorothy Dandridge, Dandridge’s autobiography Everything and Nothing, and Donald
Bogle’s previously mentioned tome).
Monroe (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992); and S. Paige Baty’s American Monroe:
The Making of the Body Politic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
14. A. S. “Doc” Young, “The Life and Death of Dorothy Dandridge,” Sepia (De-
cember 1965): 8–12.
15. Ibid., 8–10.
16. Robert Lightning, “Dorothy Dandridge: Ruminations on Black Stardom,” Cine-
ACTION 44 (July 1997): 32–39.
17. Elizabeth Hadley-Freydberg, “Prostitutes, Concubines, Whores and Bitches:
Black and Hispanic Women in Contemporary American Film,” in Audrey McCluskey,
ed., Women of Color: Perspectives on Feminism and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana
University Women’s Studies Program, 1985), 46–65.
18. This comment comes from one of many interviews I conducted with the spec-
tators who saw Dandridge’s movies theaters during the 1950s.
19. Ibid.
20. Joan Nestle, “I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told by
a White Woman,” in Martin Duberman, ed., Queer Representations: Reading Lives,
Reading Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 258–75.
21. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resis-
tance,” in Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 211.
22. Bogle, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, 288.
23. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957),
51–54. These figures are based on U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1950, Volume IV. Special
Reports, Part 3, Chapter B, Non-white Population by Race. Government printing
office, Washington, D.C., 1953, Table 9.
24. Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), 79.
25. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dial Press, 1976).
26. James Baldwin, “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” in Lindsay Pat-
terson, ed., Black Films and Filmmakers: A Comprehensive Anthology from Stereotype
to Superhero (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 93.
27. Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 100–102.
28. Marguerite H. Rippy, “Commodity, Tragedy, Desire: Female Sexuality and
Blackness in the Iconography of Dorothy Dandridge,” in Daniel Bernardi, ed., Classic
Hollywood, Classic Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
179.
29. My use of this term is informed by Barry King’s widely anthologized essay
“Articulating Stardom.” King discusses the way a star’s persona is in and of itself a
character, one that transcends placement or containment in a particular narrative.
He writes: “The persona, buttressed by discursive practices of publicity, hagiogra-
phy and by regimes of cosmetic alteration and treatment, is relatively durable and if
sedimented in public awareness will tend to survive discrepant casting and perfor-
mance.”
notes to pages 29 –34 · 237
47. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning
(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993). Goldberg’s discussion of race and modernity put into
perspective the vast philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural depths of racist domination.
His discussion offers an explanation of racist ideology informing the philosophical
discourses of the Enlightenment. I am not implying Goldberg is first, or chief, among
such critical scholars. His predecessors include W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Al-
bert Memmi, and Frantz Fanon, to name a few.
48. Frantz Fanon was one of the first psychiatrists to articulate a theory (albeit
flawed) for the internalization of white beauty standards as a “corporeal schema”
among persons of color. See his chapter titled “The Fact of Blackness.” He discusses
how blacks develop an awareness of the body. He describes black consciousness of
the self and body as a negating activity.
49. Russell, Wilson, and Hall, The Color Complex, 41.
50. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and
the New World Border (New York: Routledge, 1994), 322.
51. Ibid.
52. “Can Dandridge Outshine Lena Horne?” Our World (June 1952): 28–32.
53. Robyn Wiegman, “Black Bodies/American Commodities: Gender, Race and
the Bourgeois Ideal in Contemporary Film,” in Lester Friedman, ed., Unspeakable
Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1991), 311.
54. Evelyn Higginbotham’s “The Politics of Respectability,” in Righteous Discontent:
The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1994). “The black Baptist women condemned what they
perceived to be negative practices and attitudes among their own people. Their as-
similationist leanings led to their insistence upon blacks’ conformity to the domi-
nant society’s norms of manners and morals. Thus, the discourse of respectability
disclosed class and status differentiation. The Woman’s Convention identified with
the black working poor and opposed lower-class idleness and vice on the one hand
and opposed high society’s hedonism and materialism on the other.”
55. Robert Lightning writes: “The political dilemma of the black star acquires a
specifically sexual aspect for the female star, the problem being how to remain a vi-
able Hollywood commodity while not reinforcing dominant cultural sexual myths
(i.e., the moral laxity and sexual availability of non-white women). The star’s com-
modity status as sex goddess multiplies the opportunity not only for criticism from
the various interest groups she serves but potentially provides a unique personal
crisis, for she is just as likely to be burdened not only with her own sense of political
responsibility and deeply ingrained sense of bourgeois propriety but a specifically
black bourgeois ideology which dictates its own proprieties for the sexual behavior
of black women, particularly in relation to non-black men,” p. 35.
56. Arthur Marwick, Beauty in History: Society, Politics and Personal Appearance:
1500 to the Present (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 349–50.
240 . notes to pages 39 –47
and even dancing, all in one artistic package, for the Negro has expressed whatever
creative originality he can lay claim to, in each of the aspects of art. However, Ne-
groes had no part in writing, directing, producing, or staging this folk-opera about
Negroes . . . As a symbol of that deeply-ingrained, American cultural paternalism
practiced on Negroes ever since the first Southern white man blacked his face, the
folk-opera Porgy and Bess should be forever banned by all Negro performers in the
United States. No Negro singer, actor, or performer should ever submit to a role in
this vehicle again.”
81. Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from
World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),
263.
82. Donald Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography, 381. The film was to be shot
mainly in French. To prepare for the role, Dandridge studied French in Los Angeles
and worked on the Riviera with French coach Michel Thomas. Her voice was later
dubbed.
7. Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (New
York: Routledge, 1998), 91.
8. Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films,
1919–1959 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 17.
9. Rob Latham, “Art, Trash, and Sexploitation: The Aesthetics of ‘Le Bad Cin-
ema,’ ” Vanishing Point: Studies in Comparative Literature 1 (1994): 89–99. Published
by graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford Uni-
versity.
10. Cult film has been defined in various ways. By cult I mean movies that were not
part of the mainstream during their initial releases or remained fairly anonymous for
a significant period of time. The cult reputation is built by word of mouth, enabling
the picture to enter popular culture. They are often genre pictures that are too dark,
too sexually explicit, or too bizarre for mainstream consumption. Many works gain
a cult aura because of anticanonical and extra-industrial forces.
11. In 1971 he took up a position as the first professor of semiotics at Europe’s oldest
university, the University of Bologna. Here, his theories would really begin to fall in
place, and throughout the 1970s he published several books on semiotics. In 1974,
Eco organized the first congress of the International Association for Semiotic Stud-
ies, and during the closing speech, he summarized the field with the now famous
statement that semiotics is “a scientific attitude, a critical way of looking at the objects
of other sciences.” In 1979 Eco edited A Semiotic Landscape, a collection of essays
that had their origins in the conference. See http://www.themodernword.com/eco/
eco_biography.html for additional information.
12. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” Substance
47 (1985): 11.
13. J. P. Telotte, “Beyond All Reason: The Nature of the Cult,” in The Cult Film
Experience: Beyond All Reason (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 9.
14. Pam Cook writes: “The positive-heroine figure as developed here is based on
the idea of putting the woman in the man’s place. The woman takes on male charac-
teristics, uses male language, male weapons. In their film Penthesilea (1974), Laura
Mulvey and Peter Wollen show how this image rests on the age-old myth of woman
as Amazon queen, a warlike and destructive figure created in man’s image, set apart
from ordinary women and desirable only in death. Penthesilea’s death symbolizes
the suppression of female desires at the moment of the institution of patriarchy: the
erotic force of the image lies in the threat inherent in it; that those desires will once
again rise to the surface, and the female will take the place of the male. Thus while the
positive-heroine stereotype rests on the possibility of woman becoming the subject
rather than the object of desire, that desire is totally in terms of male phantasies and
obsessions.”
15. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” Partisan Review 31, no, 4 (Fall 1964): 515–30.
Reprinted in Fabio Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A
Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
244 . notes to pages 65– 69
16. One way of reading her biographical anecdotes is to view them as part of the
manufactured discourse of the celebrity’s ordinariness. They align the celebrity with
the average citizenry, convincing spectators s/he’s a person with whom most Ameri-
cans can identify. A second way of reading the orchestrated release of these personal
stories is as a continual retelling of the “rags-to-riches” Horatio Alger success narra-
tive. Here Grier’s anecdote—whether true or not—literally and figuratively narrates
her shift from a modest childhood spent in used clothing (read: rags) to a moment
of material comfort in adulthood (read: riches) in which she’s capable of reflecting
on her “modest” beginnings from the vantage point of fairy-tale-like success.
17. “Pam Grier Biography,” www.inetworld.net-piranha.bio-hio, accessed May 31,
2000.
18. Production notes and press kit information obtained at the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.
19. Roger Corman was known for his low-budget, highly profitably films, but also
for having trained many young filmmakers. In 1955 he made his directorial debut. The
formula was simple: quirky characters; offbeat plots; slight social commentary; clever
but inexpensive special effects, sets, and cinematography; hungry talent; very small
budgets; and breakneck shooting schedules. Once dissatisfied with increasing studio
interference in both the content and budgets of his films, Corman decided to start his
own company in order to exert total control over his product. Corman demonstrated
his Midas touch with New World, which became the largest independent production
and distribution company in the United States, and in January 1983 he reportedly sold
it for $16.5 million. In addition to successful business ventures, Corman sponsored
new directorial talent, producing an impressive roster of directors, including Francis
Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese, to name a few.
20. Gary Morris, “An Introduction to New World Pictures,” Bright Lights 1, no. 1
(Fall 1979): 22.
21. Baadass Cinema interview transcript provided by Isaac Julien.
22. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,”
Screen 24, no. 4 (1983): 30.
23. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 184. See also Lorraine Gamman and Marja Makinen,
Female Fetishism (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 14–50.
24. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by
Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 312–13.
25. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press,
second edition, 2000). See also Michele Wallace, Black Macho and Myth of the Super-
woman (New York: Verso Classics, second edition, 1999) and Patricia Hill Collins,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment
(New York: Routledge, second edition, 2000).
26. For Michel Foucault, a “discursive formation” is a group of statements belong-
ing to a single system formation. These statements circulate or exist in a system of
notes to pages 69 –7 3 · 245
dispersion where there is regularity among elements such as objects, types of state-
ment, concepts, or thematic choices.
27. Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 13.
See also Linda Williams’s essay “Erotic Thrillers and Rude Women,” Sight and Sound
(July 1993): 12–14.
28. Hazel V. Carby, “White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries
of Sisterhood,” in Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg,
eds., Black British Cultural Studies, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),
64.
29. Patrick Salvo, “Pam Grier: The Movie Super-sex Goddess Who’s Fed Up with
Sex and Violence,” Sepia (February, 1976): 56.
30. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 62. Sontag distinguished between naive and de-
liberate camp. The former is unintentional, serious in its presentation. The latter is
intentional, unserious, parodic and may be referred to as “camping.”
31. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1999), 29. The continuum includes traditional
romantic images at one end of the cinematic spectrum (i.e., Love Story, 1970; Endless
Love, 1981; Sex, Lies, and Videotape, 1989), explicit sexual activity at the midpoint (i.e.,
9½ Weeks, 1986; Basic Instinct, 1992; Lost Highway, 1997), and hardcore pornography
(i.e., Deep Throat, 1972; Debbie Does Dallas, 1978; the Afrocentric Baby Got Back
porn series) at the other end.
32. Suzanna Danuta Walters, “Caged Heat: The (R)evolution of Women-in-Prison
Films,” in Martha McCaughey and Neal King, eds., Reel Knockouts: Violent Women
in the Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 106.
33. Ibid., 108.
34. Mary Anne Doane, Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory and Psychoanalysis
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 1–17.
35. Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 57–84.
36. In an interview Bram Dijkstra said: “In the earlier book, I dealt with the aca-
demic art of the late nineteenth century, what was considered high art before the
arrival of modernism, and I showed how an increasingly anti-feminine concept of
women became popular after the introduction of theories of evolution, and created
what I called an ‘iconography of misogyny.’ That iconography became the basis for
a lot of the twentieth century’s popular culture.”
37. Elaine Shefer, Birds, Cages and Women in Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Art
(New York: Peter Lang, 1990), xxiii.
The term pre-Raphaelite, which refers to both art and literature, is confusing be-
cause there were essentially two different and almost opposed movements, the sec-
ond of which grew out of the first. The term itself originated in relation to the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood, an influential group of mid-nineteenth-century avant-garde
painters associated with Ruskin who had great effect upon British, American, and
246 . notes to pages 7 3–86
European art. Those poets who had some connection with these artists and whose
work presumably shares the characteristics of their art include Dante Gabriel Ros-
setti, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, William Morris, and Algernon Charles
Swinburne.
38. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 65–67.
39. For example, Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837; Columbia College was
founded in 1854; Vassar College in 1861; Wilson College in 1869; Wellesley College
in 1870; Smith College in 1871; Spelman College in 1881; Bryn Mawr College in 1885;
and Barnard College in 1889. By 1870, an estimated one-fifth of resident college and
university students were women. By 1900, the proportion had increased to more
than one-third.
40. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 65–67.
41. Ibid., 100–101.
42. See press kit for The Big Bird Cage, courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Re-
search in Black Culture.
43. Governor George Wallace’s first administration was marked by social ten-
sion. Among the major incidents of the administration were racial demonstrations
in Birmingham and Montgomery, desegregation of schools in Macon County, his
dramatic “stand in the school house door,” and the nationally publicized fire hose
and police dog incidents of Birmingham.
44. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1989). Reprinted in Fabio Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing
Subject, a Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 324.
45. In the 1920s, films about women in prison began to emerge. The earliest film
in this subgenre came in 1922 with Manslaughter (Cecil B. DeMille), which looked
at the reformation while in prison of a “society-girl thrill-seeker.”
46. See press kit courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
for additional cast and crew information.
47. Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 12.
48. Suzanne Pharr, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (Inverness, Calif.: Chardon
Press, 1988), 27–43.
49. Pam Cook, “‘Exploitation’ Films and Feminism,” Screen 17, no. 2 (1976): 124.
50. See the press kit for Black Mama, White Mama, courtesy of the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture.
51. Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 57, 160.
52. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 49. Clover writes: “But the ‘certain link’
that put killer and Final Girl on terms . . . is more than ‘sexual repression.’ It is also
a shared masculinity, materialized in ‘all those phallic symbols’—and it is also a
shared femininity materialized in what comes next (and what Carpenter, perhaps
notes to pages 87– 92 · 247
significantly, fails to mention): the castration, literal or symbolic, of the killer at her
hands. The Final Girl has not just manned herself; she specifically unmans an op-
pressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with.”
53. In 1966, movie theater teasers heralded the release of the bizarrely titled Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It was a black-and-white independent picture that proved to be
one of the most popular sexploitation B-films in history, largely due to the memorable
character of Varla, the trash classic’s reckless lady of sexual abandonment played by
stripper Tura Satana. Her character Varla had a pale “Oriental” face and a revved-up
engine, and she steamed the scorching California landscape with her uncontrolled
antics. Her look was combination of voluptuous boobs and hardbody sinews encased
in tight black jeans, a tight black top, black boots, and black racing gloves, and the
psychotic murderess’s all-consuming passions embroiled her in a win-or-nothing
struggle with life. Like Grier after her, she was considered “the baddest bitch of all
time!” The Varla who chewed up men for breakfast was not far removed from the
Amazonian actress who portrayed her. Tura, her name derived from the Indian word
meaning “white flower,” was born of Japanese, Filipino, American Indian, and Scots-
Irish blood, the second child in a family of one son and four daughters. Growing up
in 1940s Chicago, she learned how to deal with bullies in school skirmishes. Tura’s
father taught her martial arts techniques such as karate and aikido.
54. James Robert Parish and George Hill, Black Action Films: Plots, Critiques, Casts
and Credits for 235 Theatrical and Made-for-Television Releases (Jefferson, N.C.: Mc-
Farland, 1989), 15.
55. See the press kit for The Arena, courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture.
56. See the press kit for Coffy, courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture.
57. Salvo, “Pam Grier,” 48–56.
58. Ibid., 52.
59. William L. Van Deburg, Black Camelot: African-American Culture Heroes in
Their Times, 1960–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 135.
60. Paul Kerr, “Out of What Past? Notes on the B Film Noir,” Screen Education
32–33 (Autumn/Winter 1979). See also Linda Williams, “Erotic Thrillers and Rude
Women,” Sight and Sound (July 1993): 12–14; and Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gen-
der and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998).
61. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws,” 20.
62. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics (Thousand Oaks, Calif.:
Sage, 2001), 154.
63. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). See also Homi Bhabha, Nation and
Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), and Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature
in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88.
64. Baadass Cinema interview transcript provided by Issac Julien.
248 . notes to pages 93– 96
65. Black pride refers to feelings among African Americans toward their African
heritage, accomplishments, culture, and contributions as Americans. Black Power as
a slogan and philosophy grew out of the U.S. civil rights movement. Made famous by
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) in 1966, it was employed by various groups who
attached different meanings, ranging from violent revolution and black separatism
to maximization of independent political and economic power for black Americans
within a community. Black nationalist theory holds that blacks must unite, gain
power, and liberate themselves from an oppressive white supremacist society.
66. Manifestations of the esthétique du cool in Coffy and Shaft were a result of a
larger cultural movement, which took flight in the 1960s and gained expression in
literature, theater, cinema, and fashion. This movement gained formal expression in
the notion of a black aesthetic. The black aesthetic, as a central component of black
political and cultural empowerment, emerged in the 1960s as the Black Arts Move-
ment came to prominence. Everywhere, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, racial and
ethnic communities were in revolt against old authorities and staid conventions. This
revolt included jettisoning European beauty conventions. African hairstyles, kente
cloth, dashikis, and black vernacular were concomitants of the broader countercul-
tural movement proclaiming Black is Beautiful! The black aesthetic is a way of per-
ceiving the world through the unique experiences of a self-aware African American.
It is a way of perceiving form as more than aesthetic beauty. It is also a set of criteria
by which readers judge whether a particular work or art is truly “black.” According
to Hoyt Fuller, the black aesthetic is the realization that after hundreds of years of
being told they are not beautiful, black Americans reclaimed their beauty through
art. See Addison Gayle’s The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971).
Film scholars Thomas Cripps, Ed Guerrero, Manthia Diawara, and William Van
Deburg observed the esthétique in Blaxploitation films.
Arthur Marwick, Beauty in History: Society, Politics, and Personal Appearance,
1500 to the Present (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 349–50.
67. Baadass Cinema interview transcript provided by Issac Julien.
68. Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (1973), Magnum Force (1973), Dirty Harry
(1971), Play Misty for Me (1971), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Hang
’Em High (1968), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967), For a Few Dollars More
(1965), and A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974) and its
sequels. Chuck Norris in Enter the Dragon (1973), Slaughter in San Francisco (1974),
Breaker! Breaker! (1977), and Game of Death (1978).
69. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” Substance
47 (1985): 5. This is the argument Eco makes for Casablanca.
70. Peter Brown was well known as Dr. Greg Peter in the NBC-TV daytime series
Days of Our Lives. Earlier in his career he also starred in the Lawman and Laredo
television series.
71. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 98–99.
notes to pages 97–109 · 249
72. The basic story is as follows: Jenny, a New Yorker who goes to a secluded
country retreat to finish work on her novel, is one day assaulted, raped, and left for
dead by four men. But she survives to take revenge. She seduces each of her rapists
separately and she personally performs their painful executions.
73. Parish and Hill, Black Action Films, 259.
74. “I’d been jogging that morning and I was almost to the driveway of my house
when a couple of cops stopped me and started harassing me. They wondered what
a black person was doing in that neighborhood, claiming that I fit the description
of someone who’d been reported to be prowling in the area, and nothing I could say
would make them believe that this was my house, that I lived here,” remembers Pam.
“I’d never felt so threatened in my life. They had me put my hands on the garage
door and told me to spread my legs, and I’ll never forget the sensation of this little
bead of sweat rolling down the middle of my back, and how petrified I was that, if
I moved or tried to wipe it away with my hand, they’d probably have shot me right
then and there. It was only when a neighbor came out to vouch for me that they
finally decided to leave me alone. They never apologized for their behavior, though,
and the whole experience was enough to open my eyes to the fact that I really didn’t
want to be there anymore.”
75. Brian Lowry, “Showtime Skeds Sex in the Company of Women,” Variety (Janu-
ary 12–18, 2004): 52.
8. My use of this term is informed by Barry King’s widely anthologized essay “Ar-
ticulating Stardom.” King discusses the way a star’s “persona” is in itself a character,
one that transcends placement or containment in a particular narrative. He writes:
“The persona, buttressed by discursive practices of publicity, hagiography and by
regimes of cosmetic alteration and treatment, is relatively durable and if sedimented
in public awareness will tend to survive discrepant casting and performance.”
9. Gloria-Jean Masciarotte, “C’mon, Girl: Oprah Winfrey and the Discourse of
Feminine Talk,” Genders 11 (Fall 1991): 100. Masciarotte quotes Henry Louis Gates
Jr.’s application of Bakhtin’s double voice.
10. Ibid. Masciarotte acknowledges this as an application of Julia Kristeva’s no-
tion of abjection as explained in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Kristeva
acknowledged her theoretic debt to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis
of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Masciarotte maintains that “Oprah Winfrey
produces the spectacle of abjection by refusing the essentialist algebra of hegemonic
acceptance: black + woman = Mammy = M(o)ther = the absolutely Othered = the
Other of us all . . . [ ] . . . one can see Oprah Winfrey’s double-voiced sign in that while
she does not fulfill the hegemonic sign of the ‘mammy’ in that she is silent mirror of
the dominant order, she fills hegemonic sign of the ‘mammy’ by exposing the labor
of M/Othering that upholds the economic, racial, and gender oppression.”
11. Ibid.
12. Used here, this term refers to the explanation of declining working-class support
for radical political movements, as the result of increased affluence. This increased
affluence causes workers to adopt middle-class (bourgeois) values and lifestyles.
Embourgeoisement was a popular argument in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. It was
criticized in the Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behavior research. The notion
of proletarianization holds, conversely, that some of the middle class are becoming
like the working class.
13. See Jane Shattuc’s The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women (New York:
Routledge, 1997) for an explanation of how talk shows have appropriated therapeutic
discourse.
14. According to the New York Times, the Disney Company is estimated to have
spent as much as $75 to $80 million to produce and market the film. See Bernard
Weinraub’s article “Despite Hope, ‘Beloved’ Generates Little Heat among Moviego-
ers,” in the New York Times, Monday 9, 1998.
15. Pearl Cleage, “The courage to Dream,” Essence (December 1998): 80–81, 145,
149.
16. Jeff MacGregor, “Inner Peace, Empowerment and Host Worship,” New York
Times, Sunday, October 25, 1998.
17. Ibid.
18. There are several clear signs of America’s heightened concern with its moral
character. The Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal, controversy over the Microsort method
of genetically engineered procreation, the violent assaults on abortion providers, the
notes to pages 147–51 · 255
RU-486 pill debate, the rise of New Age religion are all indicators of the rising tide
of concern with our national moral character.
19. Dana Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics, Rhetoric
and Therapy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998), 26.
20. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gut-
man, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Technologies of the
self are specific techniques or practices through which subject positions are inhab-
ited by individuals. Foucault, in his comments on these techniques, emphasized his
interest in forms of writing such as private diaries or other “narratives of the self.”
These represented, for him, characteristically modern forms of “practices of the self.”
Coincidentally, Winfrey advocates that her viewers follow her lead by writing diary
entries in a “gratitude journal.” This is a daily practice whereby one records all the
events, persons, achievements, and objects for which the subject is grateful.
21. T. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Ther-
apeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in R. W. Fox and T. J. Lears, eds.,
The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New
York: Pantheon, 1983), 28.
22. George Mair, Oprah Winfrey: The Real Story (New York: Birch Lane Press,
1994), 2–15.
23. David Aberbach, Charisma in Politics, Religion, and the Media: Private Trauma,
Public Ideals (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 87–88. Aberbach asserts
that the entertainment-charismatic (Monroe, Presley, Lennon) retains “more than
a veneer of religion” in the celebrity sign. Even the “language” of religion is used to
describe these figures. Also see Jib Fowles’s Star Struck: Celebrity Performers and the
American Public (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).
24. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 34–35.
25. P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
26. Janice Peck, “Talk about Racism: Framing a Popular Discourse of Race on
Oprah Winfrey,” Cultural Critique (Spring 1994). The show often provides a format
for discussing social and political issues. Also see Dana Cloud’s account of the thera-
peutic in history. She discusses the way therapeutic discourse has been employed to
elide the political and the social throughout history.
27. See also Rosario Champagne’s essay titled “Oprah Winfrey’s Sacred Silent and
the Spectatorship of Incest,” Discourse 17, no. 2 (Winter 1994–95): 123–38, and Doris
Witt’s “What (N)ever Happened to Aunt Jemima: Eating Disorders, Fetal Rights, and
Black Female Appetite in Contemporary American Culture,” Discourse: Journal for
Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 17, no. 2 (Winter 1994–95): 98–122.
28. Arthur Schweitzer, The Age of Charisma (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984). This
term is borrowed from Schweitzer and is understood here as mass enthusiasm for an
individual that tends toward their glorification and generates a sense of loyalty and
256 . notes to pages 151–56
readiness to follow the leader in her cause. In Winfrey’s case, “the cause” is usually
whatever popular self-help technique she’s promoting or whatever media attention
she brings to a social issue, be it rape, incest, eating disorders, racism, sexism, ho-
mophobia, or body image.
29. John Langer, “Television’s Personality System,” Media, Culture and Society 4
(1981): 351–65.
30. Ibid.
31. John Ellis, “Stars as Cinematic Phenomenon,” Visible Fiction: Cinema, Televi-
sion, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 93. Ellis has written one of the
seminal essays on the incomplete and paradoxical nature of the star phenomenon.
32. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 166.
33. Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (New
York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000).
34. Cornel West, “Nihilism in Black America,” in Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular
Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 42.
35. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Di-
minishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979), 50. Elsewhere Lasch writes: “Af-
ter the political turmoil of the sixties, Americans have retreated to purely personal
preoccupations. Having no hope of improving their lives in ways that matter, people
have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in
touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing,
immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to ‘relate,’
overcoming the ‘fear of pleasure.’ Harmless in themselves, these pursuits . . . signify
a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past. . . . Contemporary man,
tortured by self-consciousness, turns to new cults and therapies not to free himself
from obsession but to find meaning and purpose in life, to find something to live for,
precisely to embrace an obsession, if only the passion maîtresse of therapy itself.”
36. Review transcripts from The Oprah Winfrey Show, January 11, 1999. The epi-
sode was titled “Suze Orman.” My transcript was produced by Burrelle’s Information
Services. I have edited together three statements made by Orman throughout the
program.
37. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, the cathartic method is a mode of psycho-
therapy in which the therapeutic effect sought is “purgative”: an adequate discharge
of pathogenic affects. The treatment allows the patient to evoke and even relive the
traumatic events to which these affects are bound. Cathexis refers to the fact that a
certain amount of psychical energy is attached to an idea, or to a group of ideas, to a
part of the body, to an object. The word cathect, a derivative of cathetic and cathexis,
is a transitive verb that means “to invest with mental energy or emotional energy.” I
use the phrase “cathartic cathexis” ironically.
38. Stewart M. Hoover’s Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic
Church (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988), 19. Hoover provides one of many histori-
notes to pages 156– 60 · 257
Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” and Irene
Guenther’s essay “Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar
Republic,” both in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community.
53. Brian Finney, “Temporal Defamiliarization in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Bar-
bara Solomon, ed., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York: G. K. Hall,
1998). Finney writes: “The novel was received with adulation (it topped the best-seller
lists and was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize) and reserve (she was passed over for
both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, leading
to a protest in the New York Times Book Review by forty-eight Black writers).”
54. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 9.
55. David Danow’s The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque (Lex-
ington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 64 . Danow traverses from the carni-
valesque to the grotesque, defining the latter as a contradiction in terms that sug-
gests a range of ideas in expression. It is an irresolvable paradox that is universal and
archetypal, that subverts an established value system in order to institute one of its
own. It creates language and behavior codes in the work of creating new ones and
superimposes one paradox upon another.
56. See Variety data, March 1, 1999. Also, according to the New York Times, the
Disney Company is estimated to have spent as much as $75 to $80 million to produce
and market the film. See Bernard Weinraub’s “Despite Hope, ‘Beloved’ Generates
Little Heat among Moviegoers,” New York Times, Monday November 9, 1998.
57. George Bluestone, Novels into Films: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 34.
58. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans-
lated by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991). One of the most celebrated
texts of the Frankfurt School, this text endeavors to answer why modernity, instead
of fulfilling the promises of the Enlightenment has sunk into a new barbarism. Draw-
ing on their work on the “culture industry,” as well as the ideas of key thinkers of the
Enlightenment project (Descartes, Newton, Kant) Horkheimer and Adorno explain
how the Enlightenment’s orientation toward rational calculability and man’s domina-
tion of a disenchanted nature evinces a reversion to myth and is responsible for the
reified structures of modern administered society, which has grown to resemble a
new enslavement.
59. D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in
Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
60. Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993).
61. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 108.
62. Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in James Nare-
more, ed., Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000),
54–76.
260 . notes to pages 166–75
63. Ibid., 64.
64. Bernard W. Bell, “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal
Remembrances of Things Past,” in Barbara Solomon, ed., Critical Essays on Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 173.
65. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature (New York: Norton, 1997), 2097.
66. Davis, Slaves on Screen, 95.
67. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 53.
68. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the literary Imagination
(New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1992), 9.
69. Marc C. Conner, “From the Sublime to the Beautiful: The Aesthetic Progression
of Toni Morrison,” in Marc Conner, ed., The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking
the Unspeakable (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 64.
70. Ibid.
71. For instance, this is allegedly why Alfred Hitchcock avoided using an actress’s
image for the eponymous character of Rebecca (1940). Hitchcock surmised each
spectator would visualize (in his/her mind’s eye) a more enigmatically beautiful
woman than any real actress could render.
72. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 3.
73. Deborah Horvitz, “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved,”
in Barbara Solomon, ed., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York: G.
K. Hall, 1998), 93.
74. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 21–27.
75. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Bal-
timore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 160.
76. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nine-
teenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 23. See also Da-
vid Danow’s The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 50.
77. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture
and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992), 66. Kaplan also cites Janet Staiger’s essay
“Mass-Produced Photoplays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years
of Hollywood,” Wide Angle 4 (3): 12–27.
78. Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” 61.
79. Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Con-
vict Labor in the New South (London: Verso: 1996), 1–17.
80. Ibid., 3.
81. Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race
Question’ in the US,” New Left Review 13 (January–February 2002): 41–60.
notes to pages 176–89 · 261
archy. We have long felt affection for—and had a fascination with—a range of celebrity
families whom we honor and display much like royalty. This illusion or fantasy of
compatibility between monarchy and celebrity achieved its fullest expression in the
fairytale marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. In the United States
we have constructed aura around the Baldwins, the Barrymores, the Cassidys, the
Coppolas, the Fondas, the Hudlin Brothers, the Hughes Brothers, the Hustons, the
Jacksons, the Kennedys, the Marshalls, the Osmonds, the Rockefellers, the Rossellinis,
the Sheens/Estevezes, the Sutherlands, the Vanderbilts, the Wayans, and the Winans,
to name but a few. This is not to mention those families in professional sports. The
widely held belief is that talent “runs in the family,” thereby bestowing the aura of
charisma upon members of a given tribe or clan.
6. Examples include Katherine Hepburn in Mary of Scotland (1936), Henry Fonda
in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941), Marlon Brando
in Julius Caesar (1953), Richard Burton in Alexander the Great (1956), Bette Davis in
The Virgin Queen (1955), Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956), and
Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
7. Pamela Lambert, “Hollywood Blackout: The Film Industry Says All the Right
Things but Its Continued Exclusion of African Americans Is a National Disgrace,”
People (March 18, 1996).
8. Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, “From Selma, Alabama, to Hollywood, California:
A Thirty-One Year Struggle for Fairness and Inclusion in the American Dream,”
Motion Magazine (April 10, 1996).
9. “Movie Box Office Data, Film Stars, Idle Speculation,” retrieved from http://
www.the-numbers.com/index.php, March 7, 2006. See also the site Box Office Mojo,”
at http://www.boxofficemojo.com/, accessed March 24–26, 2006.
10. Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge: 1992, 2002), 2.
11. Ramón Grosfoguel, “Cultural Racism and Colonial Caribbean Migrants in
Core Zones of the Capitalist World Economy,” Review Binghampton 22 (Part 4, 1999):
409–34.
12. Elizabeth Guider, “White Bread,” Variety (April 17–23): 1. President Jacques
Chirac convened broadcasters in March 2006 and instructed them to put more black
faces on the box. Two weeks later, TF1 unveiled a lead role for a North African in an
upcoming primetime cop show.
13. The root of the word mulatto is Spanish according to Webster’s English Dic-
tionary, from mulo, a mule. The word refers to (1) a person, one of whose parents are
Negro and the other Caucasian, or white; and (2) popularly, any person with mixed
Negro and Caucasian ancestry. A mule is defined as (1) the offspring of a donkey and
a horse, especially the offspring of a jackass and a mare—mules are usually sterile.
And in biology mules are defined as hybrid, especially a sterile hybrid. Given its rac-
ist etymology, mulatto is construed here as a pejorative, offensive term with various
literary and cultural associations in American society. It has positive connotations
in Latin American cultures due to its linguistic relationship to the word mestizo,
meaning a person of European and American Indian ancestry.
notes to pages 194– 99 · 263
14. Ira Robbins, “Basic Berry,” New York Newsday (March 15, 1995).
15. Mary Turner, ed. From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour
Bargaining in the Americas (London: James Carrey, 1995). See also Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1987), and Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” translated
Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 2(1): 70–88, originally published in Journal de
psychologie normal et pathologique (Paris: Année, 1935): 271–93.
16. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John Richardson, ed., Handbook
of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press,
1986), 241–58.
17. Jennifer González, “Morphologies: Race as a Visual Technology,” Coco Fusco
and Brian Wallis, eds., Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 380.
18. Colorism is a global form of discrimination and occurs where lighter skin
tones are preferred and darker skin tones are considered to be less desirable. There
seems to be an implicit calculus behind this belief that makes the goodness of the
individual inversely related to the darkness (or sometimes lightness) of his/her skin.
An example of this occurs in African American communities and throughout India
as a result of the caste system. In American society, lighter, whiter complexions have
historically been associated with the bourgeoisie, colonial authority, domesticity,
wealth, ownership, education, and leisure. Brown bodies and complexions signify
proletarianization, colonial dependency, externality, poverty, slavery, illiteracy, and
labor.
19. Adrienne L. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood
Stardom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
20. See The Bronze Screen: 100 Years of the Latino Image in American Cinema
(2002), directed by Nancy De Los Santos and Albert Domínguez.
21. Merry Elkins, “The Westmores: Sculpting the Faces of the World,” American
Cinematographer 65 (July 1984): 34–40.
22. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 127.
23. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, “The Color of Sex: Postwar Photographic
Histories of Race and Gender,” in Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993): 155–85.
24. Mary C. Beltrán, “The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle: Media
Constructions of Stardom and Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Cross-Over Butt,’ ” Quarterly Review
of Film and Video 19: 71–86, 2002.
25. James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990).
26. P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 65.
27. Mary Beltrán, “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious (and
Multiracial) Will Survive,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 50–67.
28. Ordinarily, the term Creole means (1) a person of European descent born in the
264 . notes to pages 199 –202
West Indies or Spanish America; (2) a person descended from, or culturally related
to, the original French settlers of the southern United States, especially Louisiana;
(3) the French dialect spoken by the people; (4) a person descended from, or cultur-
ally related to, the Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the Gulf states; (5) a person
of mixed black and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language, especially
one based on French or Spanish; (6) a black slave born in the Americas as opposed
to one brought from Africa. The term is also commonly applied to things native to
the New World.
29. Mary-Frances Winters, “Majority Shifts, Problems Remain,” USA Today, August
10, 2001.
30. Clarence Page, “Unspoken Conflicts: America’s Blacks and Latinos Are Strug-
gling with a New Racial Paradigm for the New Century,” Chicago Tribune, February
8, 2004.
31. Noy Thrupkaew, “The Multicultural Mysteries of Vin Diesel,” retrieved August
16, 2002, from Alter Net, at www.alternet.org/story/13863/.
32. The Pussycat Dolls, for example, are also known for their range of ethnic back-
grounds, which include Filipino, Hawaiian, African American, Mexican, English,
French, Chinese, Israeli, Indonesian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Japanese, and Irish
heritages.
33. These are figures through which people in a given social environment organize
and give meaning and direction to their lives. Representative characters are not only
icons or symbols, they can be products or commodities that consumers purchase
when they buy a magazine, watch a movie, or listen to music.
34. Jack E. White, “I’m Just Who I Am,” Time 149, no. 18 (May 5, 1997): 32–36.
35. Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Penguin,
2003), 130. See also Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies: Hispanics and the American
Future (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2006).
36. Kathy McCabe, “Brazilians Add a Touch of Home,” Boston Globe, January 5,
2006.
37. Bob Moser, “White Heat,” The Nation (August 28, 2006): 11.
38. Anna Marie De La Fuente, “Truth and Consequences: As NALIP Confabs, Lati-
nos’ Struggle for Representation Continues,” Daily Variety, Thursday, March 9, 2006.
39. Marcel Cajueiro, “Brazil Begins to Break Down TV Color Bar,” Variety (Feb-
ruary 20–26, 2006): 22. This is one reason Brazil serves as an appropriate point of
comparison. When the Portuguese invaded Brazil in the sixteenth century, they
established a color hierarchy remarkably similar to our own. Lighter-skinned Por-
tuguese subdued the brown-skinned Indian natives and the Africans imported as
slaves. Today, while the vast majority of Brazilians (80 percent) are of African or
Indian descent, Brazil remains predominantly controlled by whites. Despite centu-
ries of racial mixing in both countries, there’s still a demand for greater inclusion in
commercial cinema and television.
40. Larry Rohter, “Drawing Lines Across the Sand, Between Classes,” New York
Times, February 6, 2007.
notes to pages 202–16 · 265
41. Sam Roberts, Who We Are Now: The Changing Face of America in the Twenty-
first Century (New York: Times Books 2004), 158. Sam Roberts noted that Michael
Lind revised Rodriguez’s thesis. In New York Times Magazine, Lind wrote, “There
is not going to be a non-white [brown] majority in the 21st century. Rather, there is
going to be a mostly white mixed-raced majority. We are more likely to see some-
thing more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting pot majority—a hard to
differentiate group of beige Americans—offset by a minority consisting of blacks who
have been left out of the melting pot once again.” Michael Lind, “The Beige and the
Black,” New York Times Magazine, August 16, 1998.
42. Allison Samuels, “Why Can’t a Black Actress Play the Girlfriend?” Newsweek
(March 14, 2005): 52.
43. Rosario Dawson is of Puerto Rican, Cuban, African American, Irish, and Na-
tive American descent.
44. Samuels, “Why Can’t a Black Actress Play the Girlfriend?” 52.
45. Frank Sanello, Halle Berry: A Stormy Life: The Unauthorized Biography (Lon-
don: Virgin Books, 2003), 19.
46. On August 23, 1989, Yusef Hawkins, who was sixteen at the time, went to look
for a used car in Bensonhurst with three of his friends. A mob of about thirty white
youths soon approached them. Most of them were carrying bats; however, one was
carrying a gun. This mob of mostly white Italians was angry because one of their
girlfriends invited a black boy to her eighteenth birthday party. The mob thought
that Hawkins and his friends were there for the party, so the mob beat Hawkins and
his friends with the bats and shot Hawkins dead.
47. Farley, Introducing Halle Berry, 65.
48. Ibid., 62.
49. Sanello, Halle Berry: A Stormy Life, 40.
50. Ibid.
51. David Denby, “Bad-News Girls,” New York Magazine (July 20, 1992): 52.
52. Peter Rainer, “Lange, Berry, Passionately Claim Isaiah,” Los Angeles Times,
March 17, 1995.
53. Cohen’s character Ali G made his U.S. television debut one year later in 1999
on Da Ali G Show.
54. A wigger (or wigga) is a stereotype of a Caucasian person who emulates phrases,
mannerisms, and fashion commonly and stereotypically associated with black, Ca-
ribbean, or hip-hop cultures. The stereotype of the wigger usually involves a young
Caucasian person who generally knows little about the culture they are appropriat-
ing, with the exception of the music, style, and slang associated with that culture.
The term is a portmanteau combining the words white and nigger or wannabe and
nigger and is thus generally considered offensive.
55. Henry Louis Gates, “The White Negro: With Bulworth Warren Beatty Puts His
Career on the Color Line,” The New Yorker (May 11, 1998): 63.
56. Tyrone R. Simpson, “Hollywood Bait and Switch: The 2002 Oscars, Black Com-
modification, and Black Political Silence (Part One),” Black Camera 17, no. 2 (Fall/
266 . notes to pages 216–27
Winter 2002): 6–11. See also “Hollywood Bait and Switch: The 2002 Oscars, Black
Commodification, and Black Political Silence (Part Two),” Black Camera 18, no. 1
(Spring/Summer 2003).
57. Gates, “The White Negro,” 65.
58. Toni Morrison, “Clinton as the First Black President,” The New Yorker (October
1998). “Clinton,” Morrison wrote in the 1998 New Yorker essay, “displays almost every
trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-
playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” See also Suzy Han-
sen, “Why Blacks Love Bill Clinton,” Salon.com, February 20, 2002.
59. “To proclaim oneself a nigger is to identify oneself as real, authentic, uncut,
unassimilated and unassimilable—the opposite of someone whose rejection of nigger
is seen as part of an effort to blend into the white mainstream.” Berry’s declaration in
this context authenticates Bulworth’s black identification. See Randall Kennedy’s Nig-
ger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
60. Mark Olsen, “Swordfish,” Sight & Sound 11, no 9: 54–55.
61. Brian D. Johnson, “Swordfish,” Maclean’s.
62. Olson, “Swordfish,” 55.
63. See Manthia Diawara’s “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and
Resistance,” in Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1992).
64. Michael Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in
the Construction of Gender Identity,” in Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman, eds.,
Theorizing Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage), 127.
65. Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, John B. Foster, and Robert McChesney, “Prisons
and Executions—the U.S. Model: A Historical Introduction,” Monthly Review 53, no.
3 (July–August, 2001): 1–18. There is a long tradition of protest against convict leas-
ing and the evolution of prison culture in the United States. Scholars from Booker
T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Angela Davis have written extensively on the
subject.
66. Joy James, ed., “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick
Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 75.
67. Julia Sudbury, “Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global Prison In-
dustrial Complex,” Feminist Review 70 (2002): 57–74.
68. Ibid., 60.
69. Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of
Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996), 4.
70. Clifford Thompson, “Monster’s Ball” in Cineaste (Summer 2002).
71. Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African
American Culture (New York: Perseus, 2002), 85–174.
72. Crystal L. Keels, “Monster’s Ball: Hollywood’s Grotesque History and/or Some-
thing Else Besides?” Black Camera 17, no 2 (Fall/Winter 2002), 4–5.
73. Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lan-
ham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield), 135.
notes to pages 227–30 · 267
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Index
Pages references in italics refer to aesthetics: black, 248n65; camp, 11, 63, 69,
illustrations 70; queer, 70; as substitute for religion,
257n42; of transcription, 166
Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 65 African Americans: activism of, 16, 17, 23,
Aberbach, David, 34, 255n23 38; bourgeois identity of, 15, 30, 38, 57;
Abernathy, Ralph D., 39–40 cinematic representation of, 7, 24, 26–27,
Above the Law (1988), 99 190–91; colorism among, 50, 196, 197–98,
activism, African American, 38; women’s, 263n18; competition with Latinos, 202; as
16, 17, 23. See also Black Nationalism; consumers, 14, 19, 29, 39–41, 153; crimi-
Black Power nalization of, 225; cultural citizenship
actors, African American: awards of, 2, 189– of, 41; divorce rate among, 226; gender
90; leading ladies of, 203–4; on television, divide among, 225–26; incarceration of,
192; transcendental humanity of, 44–45; 174–75; as other, 137; in popular culture,
underutilization of, 2, 27, 105, 191, 192. See 9; postwar income of, 25; professionals,
also celebrities, African American; stars, 25; self-fashioning options of, 153; sig-
African American nifying by, 122. See also actors, African
actresses: commodification of, 240n67; His- American; celebrities, African American;
panic, 203–4; nude scenes by, 219; radi- stars, African American; women, African
cal, 62 American
actresses, African American: awards of, African American studies, class condition-
189–90; in Blaxploitation, 62; casting with ing in, 35
black actors, 203–4; cinematic pioneers Afro-kitsch, 61
among, 2, 45; crossover, 14, 22, 187, 193; in Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 142
Ebony, 45–46; skin tone among, 195–96; Alger, Horatio, 145, 161, 244n16
success of, 186 Da Ali G Show, 70
Adams, Joe, 32 Als, Hilton, 8
adaptation, dialogics of, 166 American International Pictures (AIP), 10,
adoption, transracial, 210 66–67, 88–90, 98, 99; camp in, 69, 70–72;
Adorno, Theodor, 5, 165; on culture indus- Grier on, 89–90; production strategy of,
try, 233n4 67
adversity, role in charisma, 148 Anderson, Benedict, 92
advertising, role in consumer culture, 156 antiwar movement, 59
292 . inde x
Arbus, Allan, 93 beauty, African American: signifiers of, 114;
Ardolino, Emile, 131 standards for, 35, 36, 42, 45, 56, 152–53
The Arena (1973), 85, 87–88; misogyny in, 89 Beavers, Louise, 35
Aristophanes, 250n19; Lysistrata, 253n7 Belafonte, Harry, 49; in Carmen Jones, 51; in
Arkoff, Samuel Z., 10, 66–67, 69; Coffy imi- Island in the Sun, 54, 55
tations of, 89 Bell, Daniel, 257n42
art: marginal, 252n37; misogyny in, 80–81; Beloved (1998), 32, 144; abused body in, 172,
nineteenth-century, 245n35 174; African American press on, 178, 183–
The Associate: comedy of transformation in, 84; African American reception of, 179,
134; transvestism in, 139 181; black modernity in, 184; blackness in,
audiences: negotiation of consumer culture, 169; box office performance of, 145, 164–
11; subjectivity of, 198. See also spectator- 65, 178, 184; concrete signifiers in, 170;
ship criticism of, 165–66, 178–84; female audi-
audiences, African American, 44, 260n89; ence of, 176; grotesque body in, 171–73;
of Beloved, 179, 181; black stars’ relation- impact of Winfrey’s charisma on, 177–78,
ship to, 41–42; consumption practices of, 180–81; innovation in, 167; internment in,
45; Dandridge’s, 22, 23–25, 57; identifica- 174–75; magic realism in, 170; mainstream
tion with films, 24–25; identification with press on, 179–80, 182; maternal themes of,
narrative agents, 91; of Monster’s Ball, 225, 173–74; and melodrama, 173; Oscar nomi-
230, 231, 232; of 1950s, 24–26; passivity of, nation of, 165; perceptual subjectivity in,
53; women, 30, 42, 176 176–77; postmodernism in, 177; promo-
autonomy, personal: loss of, 157–58; through tion of, 163, 165, 166, 178, 179, 254n14,
fashion, 258n49 259n56; as reconstructive text, 184; self
Ayer, Harriet, 258n49 and other in, 171; slavery in, 170, 181; the
unrepresentable in, 170; Winfrey in, 145,
Bailey, G. W., 107 164, 179; women’s films and, 173–74. See
Bakhtin, Mikhail: on the carnivalesque, 114, also Morrison, Toni: Beloved
115, 128; on the grotesque, 171; on inter- Beltrán, Mary, 198–99, 204
textuality, 2; Rabalais and His World, 115 Berger, Peter, 257n41
Baldwin, James: on black actors, 2, 105; on Bergman, Peter, 3
Blaxploitation films, 58, 62; on Carmen Berry, Halle, 190; AFI award of, 186; Afri-
Jones, 26, 50; film criticism of, 26–27; on can American characters of, 186, 199; in
Porgy and Bess, 51 beauty pageants, 205; Berlin Silver Bear
Ball, Lucille, 141 award of, 186; biraciality of, 194–95, 198,
banlieues, Parisian: riots in, 193 213, 217; celebrity of, 186, 189; complexion
Baptist Church, black: women’s movement of, 37; crossover appeal of, 193; and Dan-
of, 38, 239n54 dridge, 11, 30, 185, 187, 188–89; as diva, 187;
Baraka, Amiri, 215 divorce from Justice, 213; Golden Globe
Barr, Roseanne, 110, 111 award of, 186; modeling career of, 205;
Barthes, Roland, 3 Oscar of, 186, 187, 189, 192; as phenom-
Basinger, Jeanine, 86 enon of consumption, 204; race-neutral
Bass, Margaret, 228 roles of, 212; racism against, 198; as rep-
Bassett, Angela: public persona of, 8–9 resentative character, 200; screen debut
Bates, Karen Grigsby, 8 of, 205; screen persona of, 186; sexual ob-
Baty, S. Paige, 29, 237n31 jectification of, 216, 219; star persona of,
Baumgarten, Dave, 65–66 198; topless scenes of, 219. Films: B.A.P.S.,
Beatty, Warren, 213, 214, 216, 217 213; Boomerang, 207–10; Bulworth, 213–17,
beauty: bodily signifiers of, 112–13; Brazilian, 266n58; Catwoman, 232; Die Another Day,
36–37, 200–201; changing norms of, 200; 232; Father Hood, 210; The Flintstones,
role of face in, 113–14; social construction 210; Gothika, 232; Introducing Dorothy
of, 112; white, 250n13 Dandridge, 30–31, 187, 188, 188–89, 217;
inde x · 293
Jungle Fever, 205–6, 212; The Last Boy 146, 151, 240n67; cult of, 144, 146, 153; dis-
Scout, 206, 207; Living Dolls, 205; Los- ciplinary discourses of, 73; grotesque, 171,
ing Isaiah, 210–13; Monster’s Ball, 185–86, 172–73; racial categorization of, 195
221–32; The Program, 210; Queen, 210; The body, black: in Beloved, 174; consciousness
Rich Man’s Wife, 199, 212–13; Solomon and of, 111; enslaved, 172; in Euro-American
Sheba, 210; Strictly Business, 206; Sword- culture, 68; signifiers of, 153
fish, 217–21; Their Eyes Were Watching body, female: as abject, 114; commodifica-
God, 162, 232; The Wedding, 213 tion of, 45; victimization of, 27
Berry, Jerome, 194 body, female black: desexualization of, 136;
Berry, John, 56 under white patriarchy, 39
Berry, Judith, 194 Bogdanovich, Peter, 244n19
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), 66, 67 Bogle, Donald, 112; on Berry, 187; on black
The Big Bird Cage, 81–84, 85; lesbianism in, stardom, 25; on Bright Road, 49; Dorothy
71; publicity for, 75 Dandridge, 7, 237n32; on Goldberg, 107;
The Big Doll House, 66, 79–81; lesbianism on Island in the Sun, 54; on Tamango, 56;
in, 71 Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and
Biggart, Nicole Woolsey, 160, 257n47 Bucks, 7
“Big Lie” (marital myth), 105–6 Bonet, Lisa, 194
birth control, 59 Boomerang, 207–10; entertainment value of,
Bizet, Georges: Carmen, 241n73 208; as political film, 209
Black Arts Movement, 248n65 Borden, Lynn, 85
The Black Book, 166 Bordo, Susan, 66
blackface, 251n24; in cinema, 190–91; Lysis- Bourdieu, Pierre, 195; on cultural capital,
trata in, 253n7 240n68
Black Mama, White Mama (1972), 84–87; fi- bourgeoisie: need for therapeutic ethos, 157;
nancial success of, 84; misogyny in, 89 proletarianization of, 251n30; stresses on,
Black Nationalism, 61, 63, 93–94, 248n65; 156–57
in Blaxpoitation films, 93; Grier’s depic- bourgeoisie, African American: Dandridge
tion of, 92 as ideal for, 30, 37, 46–47, 48; identity of,
blackness: in Beloved, 169; in cinema, 1; es- 15, 30, 38; ideology of, 239n55; self-deter-
sentialist notions of, 117; Fanon on, 111; mination of, 14; self-fashioning by, 153;
Morrison on, 153, 168–69; pathological, womanhood in, 30, 38, 42–43, 47
230; semiotics of, 77; social construction Bowser, Pearl, 94
of, 168; Winfrey’s commitment to, 153 Boyd, Stephen, 54
Black Panther Party, 59, 93, 242n1 Boyer, Horace, 127
Black Power, 93, 248n65 Boyle, Peter, 225
Black Pride movement, 93, 194, 248n65 Boys on the Side (1995), 252n43; lesbianism
Blaustein, Barry, 207 in, 138
Blaxploitation films, 10; actresses of, 62; Bracci, Teda, 75, 82
Baldwin on, 10, 62; black sacrifice in, 86; Branton, Geraldine, 30–31, 36
character actors in, 78–79; critics of, 94; Brazil, color discrimination in, 202, 264n38
cultural study of, 62–63; fantasy in, 60; The Bright Road (1953), 49, 49–50
Grier’s, 60, 61–62; intertextuality of, 79; Brown, Juanita, 96
male authority in, 61; political dialogue Brown, Peter, 96, 248n70
in, 93; profitability of, 192; revenge motifs Brown, Wren T., 140
of, 94–95; sociological value of, 94 Brown Sun Productions, 90
Bloom, Allan: The Closing of the American Buchanan, Morris, 92
Mind, 182–83 buddy films, female, 85
boarding schools, female, 73 Bulworth (1998), 213–17, 266n58; polysemic
body: in American culture, 111, 144; bour- characters of, 217; Rabelaisian elements
geois techniques of, 152; in consumption, of, 214, 216; racial essentialism in, 214
294 . inde x
Burglar (1987), 107; racism in, 108–9 198; rationalized forms of, 148, 159; and
Burley, Dan, 35, 238n42 royalty, 261n5
Burns, Christy, 119 celebrity, African American: Dandridge’s
Bush, George W.: malapropisms of, 140 role in, 46–47; negative stereotypes of, 4;
Busia, Akosua, 172, 173 propagation of, 184
business: American spirit of, 159, 161; rela- census, U.S.: identity categories of, 201
tionship to religion, 160 Centenera, Andy, 81
Butler, Judith, 122–23 Charcot, Jean Martin, 223
charisma: cathartic, 145, 156, 158–59, 160,
Cahill, Barry, 93 163; cultural manufacturing of, 198; in
Cambridge, Godfrey, 98 culture industries, 163–64; devotional, 151,
camp: aesthetics of, 11, 63, 69, 70; in AIP 255n28; of divas, 9; hereditary, 47; manu-
productions, 69, 70–72; in exploitation facturing of, 6; modern quest for, 158;
films, 62, 70; in sexploitation films, 77; nature of, 141; phallic, 64, 67–69, 71; and
sexuality in, 70, 71; types of, 245n30 political power, 150; power of, 237n37;
Campbell, Bebe Moore, 249n1 role in leadership, 148; role of childhood
Campbell, Tisha, 207, 208 trauma in, 149; sources of, 148; Weberian,
Canby, Vincent, 56 6, 7, 147, 148, 151
capital: black use of, 39, 41; cultural, 183, charismatics, entertainment, 149, 158, 255n23
240n68 Chernin, Kim, 66
capitalism: charismatic, 160; culture indus- Chirac, Jacques, 262n12
tries under, 233n4; therapeutic ethos in, Christianity, racial hierarchy of, 125
147 chromatisms, 37
Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001), 32 cinema: adaptations from novels, 166; Af-
Carmen Jones (1954), 23, 48, 50–51; Baldwin rican American audience of, 24, 25–26,
on, 26, 50; influence of, 32 41–42, 44, 53, 260n89; biographical, 189,
Carmichael, Stokely, 93, 248n65 262n6; black diaspora in, 183; blackface
the carnivalesque, 259n55; Bakhtin on, in, 190–91; black stereotypes in, 23, 27,
114, 115, 128; in Beloved, 164; in Gold- 253n7; the carnivalesque in, 115; colorism
berg’s films, 114–23, 126, 128–129, 130, in, 197; comic, 18, 106, 109, 209–10; escap-
133, 252n43; in Goldberg’s name, 116–17; ism in, 60; Euro-American hegemony in,
hybridity in, 117, 128–29; unruly women 182; gender signifiers in, 111; grotesque
in, 115–16 body in, 173; horror, 63–64, 86, 246n52;
Carpenter, John: Escape from L.A., 100 impact of television on, 235n7; lighting
Carter, Terry, 96 techniques in, 196–97; liminality in, 48;
cathexis, 256n37; narcissistic, 155 market demand in, 186; melodramas of
Catholic Church: gospel music in, 127; racial 1950s, 54; miscegenation taboo in, 193–94,
hierarchy of, 125 196; nudity in, 219–20; “outsider,” 63; pa-
Catwoman (2004), 232 triarchy in, 173, 174; phallocentric gaze
celebrities: beauty standards for, 66; eth- in, 91; political satire in, 217; race-neutral,
nically ambiguous, 199; as intertextual 212; racial hierarchy in, 196; representa-
signifiers, 6; Latino, 204; as models for tion of African Americans in, 1, 7, 24,
self-improvement, 258n49; ordinariness 26–27, 190–91; sexuality in, 17–18, 29, 96,
of, 244n16; physical appearance of, 197; as 101, 245n31; sexual liberation of, 58; silent,
representative characters, 29; subject po- 190; skin tone in, 48; slasher, 83, 86; tech-
sitions of, 198. See also stars nology in, 5–6; “Third,” 165; transvestism
celebrities, African American, 7; Ebony on, in, 134–35; vigilante, 95; white femininity
187–88 in, 196; whiteness in, 196–97; women’s,
celebrity: in American culture, 4–6; cha- 173–74
risma in, 6, 158, 159, 160, 161; hybrid na- cinema, African American: audience sup-
ture of, 185; manufacturing of, 4; racial, port for, 260n89; early, 186; independent,
inde x · 295
35, 191; profitability of, 192; romantic religion in, 161; therapeutic ethos in, 158;
comedies, 209–10; sexuality in, 17–18. See transracial, 198; and womanhood, 152
also Blaxploitation films convict leasing, 175, 224, 266n65
cinema, cult, 243n10; intertextuality of, Cook, Pam, 91, 243n14
63–64, 95 Cooke, Nicholas Francis: Satan in Society,
cinema, postwar: comedies, 18, 109, 209–10; 73–74
of 1950s, 17, 19–20, 54; of 1970s, 58–63; Cool Breeze (1972), 84
sexuality in, 17–18; themes of, 17; wom- Coppola, Francis Ford, 244n19
en’s, 18 Corman, Roger, 66–67, 79, 244n19; female
citizenship, role of consumption in, 41, 45 characters of, 67
civil rights movement, 58, 93 Corrina, Corrina (1994), 106; mammy figure
Cleage, Pearl, 145, 183 in, 107
Cleto, Fabio, 70 costume: narrative function of, 133; perfor-
Clinton, Bill: as first black president, 217, mative use of, 134
266n58; Lewinsky scandal, 254n18 Courtney, Susan: Hollywood Fantasies of
Clinton, Hillary, 163 Miscegenation, 193
Clover, Carol, 7, 86, 91, 246n52 Cowan, Charles, 227
Cocteau, Jean: La voix humaine, 118 creole, etymology of, 263n28
coffle (enforced dancing), 171, 174 creolization, multiethnic, 199–200
Coffy (1973), 89, 92–93, 95; inspiration for, Cressan, Alex, 55
60; narrative of, 94 Cripps, Thomas, 54, 55
Cohen, Sacha Baron, 70, 214 Cronkite, Walter, 141
Collins, Joan, 54, 197 crossover actresses, 187; Berry, 193; Dan-
colorblindness, ideology of, 44 dridge, 14, 22; Grier, 61
The Color Complex (1993), 195 Crothers, Scatman, 98
colorism, 50, 196, 197, 263n18; racism and, Cruse, Harold, 51, 52–53, 241n80
197–98. See also skin tone culture: discursive practices of, 166; pater-
Columbine High School Massacre (1999), nalism in, 242n80; rationalization of, 157
234n13 culture, American: black assimilation of, 93;
Combs, Sean Puffy, 225, 226 black body in, 68; body in, 111, 144; celeb-
comediennes, gender roles of, 110–11, 112 rity in, 4–5; conformity in, 15; feminine
comedies: postwar, 18, 109, 209–10; race re- treachery in, 72; narcissistic, 3, 4, 154,
lations in, 109 233n5; of 1970s, 59; notoriety in, 4; obesity
comedy: of gender masquerade, 135; as in, 228–29; performative, 3, 4; personality
genre, 109; Goldberg’s, 106–7, 109–11, 114, in, 159; therapeutic ethos in, 147
115, 117; physical, 110; pre-Oedipal, 115, culture industries, 3, 233n4, 259n58; cash in-
250n19; transgressive, 117. See also the car- vestment in, 165; charisma in, 163–64
nivalesque Curtis, Tony, 86
Coming to America (1988), 192, 206, 209
communication, semiotic models of, 148 da Matta, Roberto, 202
communities: imagined, 185; re-imagining Dandridge, Dorothy, 1, 31; African American
of, 15 audience of, 22, 23–25, 57; audience per-
communities, black: separation from, 169; ception of, 9–10, 33; and Berry, 11, 30, 185,
skin tone in, 50, 195, 197, 238n44; work- 187, 188–89; biographies of, 22, 234n20; as
ing-class, 93 bourgeois ideal, 30, 37, 46–47, 48; celebrity
consumption: by African Americans, 14, 19, of, 9, 29, 34, 39; charisma of, 29, 32–39, 57;
29, 39–41, 153; in American culture, 3; au- childhood of, 33; complexion of, 35–38,
dience negotiation of, 11; body in, 146, 151, 48, 50, 196, 240n67; in consumer society,
240n67; and class aspiration, 14; idols of, 19; crossover stardom of, 14, 22; death of,
151; versus protest, 41; role in citizenship, 21; depiction of primitivism, 27–28; depic-
41, 45; role of advertising in, 156; role of tion of sexuality, 20, 21, 22, 29; exploita-
296 . inde x
tion of, 14; female identification with, 42; Disney Company, marketing of Beloved,
films of, 47–57; interracial relations of, 22; 254n14, 259n56
legacy of, 14; liminal characters of, 47–48, divas, 209; Berry as, 187, 232; charisma of,
51; and Monroe, 13, 20–21; objectification 9; etymology of, 7; negative connotations
of, 27; Oscar nomination of, 22; in Our of, 8
World, 46–47; personal life of, 19, 20–21; Dixon, Ivan, 50
physicality of, 34–36, 38, 42; portrayal of Doane, Mary Ann, 135
victims, 27, 28, 50; as representative char- Doe v. Bolton (1973), 242n2
acter, 29–32, 33, 36, 42, 47, 56, 200; screen domesticity, cult of, 13, 15–17, 235n4
persona of, 9, 14, 26, 27–30, 38–39; sexual Doqui, Robert, 93
abuse of, 33, 237n39; as symbolic mulatto, Douglas, Kirk, 87
48, 50; white male costars of, 22; Winfrey Douglas, Mary, 254n10
and, 31–32. Films: The Bright Road, 49, Drum (1976), 90
49–50; Carmen Jones, 23, 26, 48, 50–51; Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 183; on black body, 68;
Ebony, 42, 43; Island in the Sun, 53–55; on blackface, 190–91; Black Reconstruc-
Porgy and Bess, 36, 50, 51–52; Tamango, tion, 224
48, 55–56, 242n82; Tarzan’s Peril, 21, 27, 28 Duel in the Sun (1946), 17, 18
Dandridge, Ruby, 46, 47 Duke, Bill, 131
Dandridge, Vivian, 20, 33, 36 Dyer, Richard, 150, 192; Heavenly Bodies, 7;
Danow, David, 259n55 on musicals, 130; Stars, 7, 148; on white-
Dash, Julie, 167–68 ness, 196–97
Davis, Angela, 59, 93, 224
Davis, Jack, 80 Eagan, Daisy, 211
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 165 Ebert, Roger, 180, 213
Davis, Sammy, Jr., 52 Ebony: advertisements in, 40–41; on Afri-
Dawson, Rosario, 203, 205, 265n43 can American celebrities, 187–88; black
Debord, Guy, 119, 120–21 beauty in, 45–46; black stars in, 42,
Decker, Jeffrey Louis, 258n49 43–44; Dandridge in, 42, 43; readership
Dee, Sandra, 235n8 of, 39–40
Degeneres, Ellen, 110, 111 Eco, Umberto, 63; on semiotics, 243n11
DeLaria, Lea, 110, 112 ego-ideals, 64
de Matteo, Drea, 219 Eisenstadt, on charisma, 237n37
Demme, Jonathan, 91, 164, 167–68, 173; con- Elise, Kimberly, 169, 174, 179
crete signifiers of, 170; reviewers on, 181; Elliot, William, 93
use of eruptive memory, 176 Elliott, Sam, 107, 108
Denby, David, 29; on Beloved, 179–80, 181; Ellis, John, 256n31
on multiculturalism, 182 embourgeoisement, technologies of, 144
devotion, charismatic, 151, 255n28 Enlightenment: racist ideology of, 239n47;
The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative rational calculability in, 259n58
Dialectics (Adorno and Horkheimer), 5 entertainers: charismatic, 149, 158, 255n23;
Diawara, Manthia, 24, 53 minstrel, 251n24
Diaz, Vic, 83, 85, 98 entertainers, African American: feminist
Dickerson, Ernest R.: Bones, 100–101 study of, 7; light-skinned, 35–36. See also
Die Another Day (2002), 232 actors, African American; celebrities, Af-
Diesel, Vin, 199 rican American; stars, African American
Dijkstra, Bram, 78, 80, 245n35; Evil Sisters, essentialism, racial, 181
72; Idols of Perversity, 72; on misogyny, 74, esthétique du cool, 93, 94, 101, 248n66
75; on women’s social gains, 73 evangelicalism, re-commitment in, 160–61.
Directors Guild, African American mem- See also New Age religion; televangelism
bers of, 191 exploitation films: camp in, 62, 70; Cor-
direct selling industry, 257n47 man’s, 67; cult status of, 63; heroines of,
discursive formations, 69, 244n26 86; neo-noir, 91; production values of, 63;
inde x · 297
sexual racism in, 96; social narratives in, Gaines, Archibald, 167
93; successors to, 91; types of, 63; women Garcia, Eddie, 86
in, 69. See also Blaxploitation films; sex- Garner, Margaret, 166–67
ploitation films Garner, Robert, 167
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 44, 122; on Bul-
Fakin’ da Funk (1997), 100 worth, 216–17
Faludi, Susan: Backlash, 72 gaze, phallocentric, 91
Fanon, Frantz, 195; on black consciousness, gender: binaries of, 111, 117, 139, 140; disguise
239n48; Black Skin, White Masks, 111 of, 133; and masquerade, 110, 133, 135–36,
fantasy: in Blaxploitation films, 60; phal- 137, 138; performance of, 78, 138; relation
lic, 68 to sex, 111, 113; signifiers of, 111; social con-
fanzines, black, 39–47; Dandridge in, 9; struction of, 133
stardom in, 57 gender relations, of 1950s, 13, 16
Farley, Christopher, 187, 205, 206 gender roles: comediennes,’ 110–11; in Gold-
Farnham, 235n4 berg’s films, 107–8, 134; in sexploitation
fashion industry, African American women films, 82
in, 41–42 Gershwin, George: Porgy and Bess, 241n75,
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), 247n53 241n80. See also Porgy and Bess (1959)
Father Hood (1993), 210 Gershwin, Ira, 241n75
FBI Counter-Intelligence Program Ghost (1990), 121–23, 135, 137–38; comedy of
(COINTELPRO), 59, 242n1 transformation in, 134; gender slippage
femininity: as gender masquerade, 135–36; in, 138–39; masquerade in, 136, 138
mass-marketed, 19; racial conventions of, Gibson, Mel, 207
80; white, 80, 196, 197 Giorgio, Tony, 96
feminism: cultural backlash against, 10; Girl, Interrupted (1999), 107
film theory, 50, 135; nineteenth-century, Givens, Robin, 207, 208
73; of 1970s, 59, 74; second-wave, 16, 78; Glover, Danny, 164, 169, 174, 207
women-in-prison films and, 75 Goffman, Erving: The Presentation of Self in
Ferber, Abby, 227 Everyday Life, 3–4
fetishes: cinematic, 135; lesbian, 71; phallic, Gold, Lee, 55
68; racial, 68, 77; of skin tone, 68, 240n67 Goldberg, David Theo, 195, 239n47
fiction, of 1970s, 60 Goldberg, Whoopi, 1, 123; Academy Award
film stars. See stars of, 122; the carnivalesque in films of,
film theory, feminist, 50, 135 114–23, 126, 128–29, 130, 133, 252n43; ce-
Finney, Brian, 259n53 lebrity name of, 116–17; celebrity persona
The Flintstones (1994), 210 of, 139; charisma of, 107, 114, 115–16, 118;
Fontaine, Joan, 54 comedic idiolect of, 106–7, 109–11, 114,
Ford, Anitra, 81 140; comedy of transformation, 114, 115,
Forster, Mark, 225, 230 117, 119, 126, 132, 134; corporeal style of,
Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), 99 137–38; desexualized image of, 136; dis-
Foucault, Michel, 244n26; on narratives of cursive subjectivity of, 106; early career
self, 255n20 of, 106; flatulence of, 119–20; gender iden-
Fowles, Job, 149 tification of, 110, 111, 112; Golden Globe
Foxy Brown (1974), 89, 95–98; castration in, nomination of, 124; liminality of, 111–12,
96–97; intertextuality of, 98; racist sex- 113, 133, 134; People’s Choice award, 124;
ism in, 96 performances with performances of, 119,
Frankfurt School, 5, 6, 7, 165, 259n58 122, 132, 134; racial identity of, 112; rebel-
Freud, Sigmund: on comedy, 109; on hys- liousness of, 105, 116, 119, 120, 121, 123,
teria, 223 140, 252n43; as romantic lead, 107; screen
Freydberg, Elizabeth Hadley, 23, 26 persona of, 105, 106, 123; semiotics of per-
Friday Foster (1975), 89, 90, 98 sona, 106; signifying techniques of, 118,
Fuller, Hoyt, 248n65 122–23; stage routines of, 111, 118, 119, 139,
298 . inde x
251n25; subversion of audience expecta- Foster, 89, 90, 98; Greased Lightning, 90,
tions by, 107; transgressive characters of, 99; Hit Man, 84; Jackie Brown, 100; The L
106, 117; unruly characters of, 10; use of Word, 100, 101–3, 103; Mars Attacks! 100;
costume, 133. Films: Boys on the Side, 138, Original Gangstas, 100; Scream, Blacula,
252n43; Burglar, 107, 108–9; The Color Scream, 89; Sheba Baby, 89, 98; Something
Purple, 118; Corrina, Corrina, 106, 107; Wicked this Way Comes, 99; Twilight Peo-
Eddie, 252n43; Fatal Beauty, 107, 108, 118; ple, 84; Women in Cages, 75–78, 76
Ghost, 121–23, 135, 136, 137–38; Girl, Inter- Grier, Rosy, 66
rupted, 107; Jumpin’ Jack Flash, 118; Sister Griffith, David Wark: The Birth of a Nation,
Act, 123–31; Sister Act 2, 131–33, 132; Soap- 190–91
dish, 133; The Telephone, 118–21 Grimes, Camryn, 219
The Goldberg Variations, 118, 251n25 the grotesque, 259n55; female, 171–73; real-
good and evil, semiotics of, 196 ism and, 115, 116–17, 171; in slavery, 172
gospel music: cultural origins of, 128; semi- Grotowski, Jerzy, 223
otic function of, 129, 130; in Sister Act, 127, Guerrero, Ed, 96
128–30 Gyllenhall, Stephen, 210, 211, 212
Gothika (2003), 232
Gould, Elliot, 119 Haig, Sid, 81, 85, 98
Gray, John, 142 Hailey, Leisha, 101
Greased Lightning (1977), 90; NAACP Image hair-straightening processes, 154
Award of, 99 Halsman, Philipe, 45–46
Grier, Pam, 1; audience response to, 94; au- Hamilton, Lisa Gay, 172
tonomous characters of, 88; blackness of, Hampton, Mabel, 24
77; Blaxploitation films of, 60, 61–62, 81, Hansbury, Lorraine, 52–53
88, 92, 94; cancer of, 99–100; charisma of, Harris, Cheryl, 195
64; on cinemas of 1970s, 60, 61; cult status Hartman, Saidiya, 172
of, 64; depiction of black nationalism, Haskell, Molly, 105
92; discrimination against, 65, 66; early Hawkins, Yusef: murder of, 205, 265n46
life of, 64–65, 244n16; fan mail of, 94; fe- Hays Production Code, 17, 59, 196
tishization of body, 68; later films of, 100– Hayworth, Rita, 14, 43, 196; in consumer
104; liminality of, 80; perverse characters society, 19
of, 74, 75, 81, 92; phallic charisma of, 71, Heard, John, 120
86, 92; as phenomena of production/con- hedonism, in American culture, 3
sumption, 64; pop-culture legacy of, 103; heroines: action, 61, 63, 67; of exploitation
prison movies of, 70, 73, 74–81; produc- films, 86; phallic, 68–69; positive, 243n14
tion company of, 90; racial identity of, 69; Heyward, Dorothy, 241n75
racist surveillance of, 99, 249n74; screen Heyward, DuBose: Porgy, 241n75
persona of, 10, 58, 60, 63, 69, 74, 100, 101, Higginbotham, Evelyn, 38
102, 104; as semiotic sign, 104; sexploita- Hill, Jack, 89, 93
tion films of, 60, 72, 88; television career Hill, Lauryn, 131, 179
of, 62; theater work of, 99; transitional hip-hop, 32, 61, 103; white appropriation
films of, 88–90; work at AIP, 10, 66–67, of, 214
88–90, 98, 99; work with Corman, 66–67, Hispanicity, cultural syncretism in, 201. See
87. Films: Above the Law, 99; The Arena, also Latinos
85, 87–88, 88, 89; Beyond the Valley of the history, relationship to literature, 167, 168
Dolls, 66, 67; The Big Bird Cage, 81–84, 85; Hitchcock, Alfred: Rebecca, 260n71
The Big Doll House, 79–81; Black Mama, Hit Man (1972), 84
White Mama, 84–87; Bones, 100–101; Hoberman, Jim, 258n50
Coffy, 89, 92–93, 94–95; Cool Breeze, 84; Holland, Tom: Fatal Beauty, 107, 118
Drum, 90; Escape from L.A., 100; Fakin’ Holloman, Laurel, 101
da Funk, 100; Fort Apache, The Bronx, Hollywood: blacklisting in, 56; Hays Code
99; Foxy Brown, 89, 95–98, 97; Friday of, 17, 59, 196; racial exclusion in, 191; Rat-
inde x · 299
charisma in, 154. See also neoevangelical- Vogue: makeovers in, 163; Winfrey in, 32, 163
ism; New Age religion Vonnegut, Kurt, 60
television: African Americans on, 192; im-
pact on film industry, 17, 235n7; personal- Wacquant, Loïc, 175
ity system of, 151; violence in, 6 Walker, Madame C. J., 154, 258n49
texts, multidimensionality of, 3 Wallace, George, 246n43
TFi (French broadcaster), black presence Wallace, Michele, 121
on, 193, 262n12 Walters, Suzanna D., 70, 147, 155, 255n20
Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005), 162, Warren, Lesley Ann, 109
232 Washington, Denzel, 190
therapeutic ethos: bourgeois need for, 157; Washington, Fredi, 35, 196
in consumer culture, 158; emergence of, Waters, Ethel, 17
147; Winfrey’s promotion of, 155–56 Waugh, Alec: Island in the Sun, 53, 54
therapy: in history, 255n26; New Age, Waynans, Damon, 207
258n50; types of, 158 Weber, Max, 161; on charisma, 6, 7, 147, 148,
Thomas, Michel, 242n82 151; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Thomas, Richard, 141 Capitalism, 160; on rationality, 157
Tienda, Marta, 201 The Wedding (1998), 213
Tomlin, Lily, 110 Weiss, Michael T., 101
Torn, Rip, 118 West, Cornel, 182
Townsend, Robert, 32; B.A.P.S., 213 Wheeler, Elizbeth, 120
transformation: carnivalesuqe, 117; in Gold- White, Armond, 181–82, 183
berg’s comedy, 114, 115, 117, 119, 126, 132, White, Hayden, 167, 175–76
134 whiteness: association with purity, 114; in
transvestism: in cinema, 134–35; in min- cinema, 196–97; creation through min-
strelsy, 136–37, 139; temporary, 138, 139; strelsy, 251n24; literary, 168–69; and mas-
transracial, 139 culinity, 228; Morrison on, 183. See also
Travolta, John, 217, 220 women, white
Turan, Kenneth, 209 whoopee cushions, 116
Turner, Victor, 47 whoopi, sexual connotations of, 116
Tuttle, William, 49 Whoopi (sitcom), 139–40
Twilight People (1972), 84 wiggers, 214, 265n54
Williams, Eric: Capitalism and Slavery, 195
Ullman, Tracy, 110 Williams, Geneva, 33, 237n39
United States: demographic changes in, Williams, Karen, 92
199–202; ethnicity in, 265n41; moral char- Williams, Linda, 137
acter of, 254n18; multiracial population Willis, Bruce, 207
of, 199–200; penal system of, 175, 224–25, Wilson, William Julius, 230
266n65 Windus, William Lindsay, 73
Updike, John, 60 Winfrey, Oprah, 1; as arbiter of taste, 144;
utopianism, semiotic codes of, 130 in Beloved, 145, 164, 179; book club of,
144, 145–46; bourgeois techniques of,
Vance, Danitra, 110 154; capitalist persona of, 10; celebrity of,
Van Deburg, William L., 90–91 7, 147; celebrity sign of, 143, 144, 150, 151,
Van Sant, Iyanla, 142 155, 158–59, 161, 163, 164; charisma of, 144,
Veal, Dorothy, 24 145, 148–51, 154, 156, 158, 160, 177–78, 180;
Veblen, Thorstein, 3, 4, 233n6 cosmetic surgery of, 152; cultural power
Vicks cough syrup commercial, 3, 233n7 of, 150; and Dandridge, 31–32; on di-
Vietnam, U. W. role in, 59 ary keeping, 255n20; fans of, 160; fitness
violence: against black men, 4; in televi- practices of, 152; as idol of consumption,
sion, 6 151–52; mammy image of, 142–43, 144,
Virginia Tech massacre (2007), 234n13 148, 254n10; media empire of, 253n3; and
306 . inde x
Morrison, 177; multivalent celebrity of, dridge, 23–24; in popular culture, 142;
143–44; personality cult of, 159; popular- sexual commodification of, 7; slaves, 136;
ity with audiences of, 152; promotion of standards of beauty for, 35, 36, 42, 45, 56,
New Age religion, 145, 147, 154, 156; schol- 152–53; stereotypes of, 203
arship on, 142; self-fashioning of, 31–32; women, white: femininity of, 80, 196, 197;
self-promotion of, 145; star persona of, passivity of, 74
143, 144; Time cover of, 179, 180; under- Women in Cages (1971), 75–78
standing of slavery, 184; in Vogue, 32, 163; women-in-prison films, 70–71, 73, 74–87;
wealth of, 141–42; weight-maintenance antagonism to women’s movement, 75;
program of, 144. See also The Oprah Win- destabilized meaning in, 83; early, 246n45;
frey Show femininity in, 80; financial success of, 84;
Wollen, Peter, 243n14 homophobia in, 83; lesbianism in, 76, 79–
Womack, Bobby, 66 81, 88; publicity for, 75; race in, 82; rape
womanhood: in consumer culture, 152; scenes in, 83; spectatorial positions of, 84.
pathologizing of, 73; white beauty in, See also sexploitation films
250n13; working-class, 137–38, 231 women’s colleges, 73, 246n39
womanhood, African American: bourgeois, Women’s Convention (National Baptist
30, 38, 42–43, 47; in cinema, 1 Convention), 38, 239n54
women: as Amazons, 243n14; biracial, 203; Wright, Amy, 119
bird-in-cage symbolism of, 73; cult of do- Writers Guild, African American members
mesticity for, 13, 15–17; cultural backlash of, 191
against, 72–75; education of, 73, 74; nine- Wylie, Philip: Generation of Vipers, 16
teenth-century view of, 73–74, 78; per-
verse, 78; phallic, 67, 68–69, 100; social Young, A. S. “Doc,” 21
gains by, 73; transgressive, 106; unruly, 10,
106, 115–16 Zanuck, Darryl F., 54
women, African American: activism of, Zapata, Emiliano, 82
16, 17, 23; career success of, 1; in fashion Zarchi, Meir: I Spit on Your Grave, 97, 98,
industry, 41–42; invisibility of, 121; as 249n72
matriarchs, 69, 136; perception of Dan- Zshomack, Zaldy, 85
mia mask is an associate professor of film at
Vassar College. She has been a contributing author
to Cineaste, The Village Voice, Film Quarterly,
and the Poughkeepsie Journal.
The University of Illinois Press
is a founding member of the
Association of American University Presses.
___________________________________
divas on screen
v
“An original and imaginative work that is full of intellectual energy,
i s
insight, and engaged writing.”
creen
• • • hazel v. carby
author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America
on
“Mia Mask deftly weaves the lines of inquiry, theory, popular cul-
d
ture, and history while making the complex lives of these amazing,
charismatic black women accessible and understandable in fresh
conceptual ways.”
• • • ed guerrero
author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film
This insightful study places African American women’s stardom in historical and industrial
contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge,
Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman’s ce-
lebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask shows how these female
stars have deftly negotiated the uneven terrain of racial, gender, and class stereotypes. As
international celebrities, these women have ultimately complicated the conventional discur-
sive and industrial practices through which blackness and womanhood have been repre-
sented in commercial cinema, independent film, and network television.
Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers
Dandridge’s status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradic-
tory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier’s fem-
inist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House
Mask
and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension black women in
between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful,
self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg’s transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associ- american film
ate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey’s daily television per-
formance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger’s narratives of success. Finally,
Mask analyzes Berry’s meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge’s
career made Berry’s possible.