Two short essays

Due Uploaded to Moodle Thursday, 10/20 at 4:20pm

Please choose TWO of the following essay question prompts to answer. Each question is worth 10pts—total 20pts.

Keep in mind that when answering these questions, you want to demonstrate an understanding of all of the concepts that we’ve been discussing these past 7 weeks. The class SLIDES and earlier reading assignments are available on Moodle for you to review.

An answer that is at least 400 words will be one that has sufficiently explored the answer to your chosen question. (That is that

Question Choice #1:

Issues of intersectionality: who gets to have relationships, according to Hollywood

Consider the preponderance of Hollywood films that pair black female actors with white male actors as love interests.

Here are some contemporary Hollywood titles to consider:

The Bodyguard (Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner)

Monster’s Ball (Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton)

Bullworth (Halle Berry and Warren Beatty)

Die Another Day (Halle Berry and Peirce Brosnan)

Jefferson in Paris (Thandie Newton and Nick Nolte)

Jackie Brown (Pam Grier and Robert Forster)

Mission Impossible II (Thandie Newton and Tom Cruise)

There are a few films that look at relationships involving white female actors and black male actors such as Jungle Fever and Guess Who, but these films focus on the complications of such a relationship. In the above films that have black female actors and white male actors, the relationships may touch on how friends and family react to the interracial relationship, but those complications are not what the story of the film is focused on.

Clearly, there are other kinds of interracial romance films (not just black and white relationships) and my lists above are not exhaustive, but for the purpose of this midterm, I’m asking you to think about why there are so many more black female/white male relationships depicted in films than in the reverse.

What kinds of long standing (and historically based) prejudices/stereotypes does this preponderance of black female/white male romance movies reinforce?

Likewise, why DON’T we see more white female/black male romances depicted in films?

What kinds of long standing (and historically based) prejudices/stereotypes does the paucity (the fact that there are fewer) of white female/black male romances in films reinforce?

Feel free to look up the synopsis or trailers of the above films (or watch them) if you think it will help you answer.

Be sure to explore both what you know understand about the representation of African Americans in Hollywood film as well as what you’ve come to understand about the depiction of whiteness in Hollywood films.

Question Choice #2:

Liberal Hollywood gets it wrong

As you leave this class, I hope that you understand that it is not “the point” to deem a film “good” or “bad” but rather to open up discussion about Hollywood’s problematic portrayal of race and ethnicity. As we have seen, some films are more problematic than others because some films do try to open up conversations about race relations, but at the same time rely on old Hollywood tropes to tell their story. Two such “problematic” films that we watched are Crash and The Help. Please talk about the ways in which these films are similar and different (from each other) in the way that they are “problematic” and have caused much debate about the value of their portrayal of race and ethnicity.

Some contexts you will want to address: white saviors; social problem film; isolating racism as an issue of some bad apples, rather than as a societal problem.

You’ll want to watch the films!

Question Choice #3:

Challenges or Changes to the “Code”

The last week of our class has been focused on non-white filmmakers, the burden of representation, and tactics these filmmakers have to challenge the codes of representation that have been advanced by mainstream films. For this essay question, I ask you to choose one of the following films to discuss the tactics taken by the filmmakers to “challenge the codes.”

A Day Without a Mexican

Real Women Have Curves

Do The Right Thing

Malcom X

Fruitvale Station

Dope

Smoke Signals

Some contexts you will want to address: Making films within the context of independent cinema vs. mainstream cinema, the use of irony or interrogative/disruptive images.

I also encourage you to do a little research about what the filmmakers themselves have to say about the choices they made about how to represent their stories, or their own thoughts on the burden of representation.