Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book.jpg)
Green Book was an OK movie, not a great movie or even a good one. It’s in good company on the list of Oscar Best Picture nominees. You could make an awards case for Roma, but any of the others would’ve been a weak choice. Bohemian Rhapsody and Vice were the worst of the bunch. Neither of the two best movies I saw in 2018 (Sorry to Bother You and A Quiet Place, respectively) made the list.
Grumble, grumble.
I’ve got an upcoming post on the concept of the ‘liberal bubble,’ and what I’ll say here will preview that a bit. A lot of the criticism of Green Book from a particular set, namely highly educated, wealthier, white, ‘woke’ liberals, runs into a sort of bubble issue.
Green Book
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, Green Book is the story of a working class white guy named Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) who learns how to set aside his racial prejudices through an intense road trip with a black musician named Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali).
There’s an immediate issue here. In the ads for the film, they presented it as based on Shirley’s life story. Vallelonga was supposed to be some kind of side character, or co-lead at best. He was the comic relief guy, and the driver for the road trip.
Anyone who’s watched the film knows that’s not how they played it. Vallelonga is the star of the show. This is why, for example, Mortensen was on the Best Actor list and Ali was on the Best Supporting Actor list. They gave us a bit of false advertising on this one.
Over the course of the road trip, Vallelonga sees how Ali is treated just for being black. Particularly noteworthy are scenes where they’re stopped by the police, a scene in a Louisville bar where some guys attack Shirley, and various scenes where restaurant owners turn down Shirley for service.
While Teen Vogue plays up this component, that’s not the main reason Vallelonga changes his attitudes. They work together to accomplish things. Shirley helps Vallelonga write letters to his partner. Vallelonga fights off the guys in the bar. Shirley gets them out of jail with a phone call to Robert F. Kennedy. Vallelonga explains working class cultural phenomena. And so on. The film presents their relationship as genuinely collaborative, albeit in multiple problematic ways.
Teen Vogue
And so, Teen Vogue. A magazine I’ve found to be both perplexingly good and sometimes bad at being perplexingly good. It runs features on anarchism, Karl Marx, and communists, though these features don’t generally filter down to its analysis of political issues. At that level, the magazine seems to embrace some form of intersectional-identitarianism.
A Teen Vogue news editor wrote a review, and she did not like the movie. She presents Green Book as a white savior film with a stereotypical ‘magical negro’ character. And it is those things. But mostly she focuses on the audience. The film is set up, so the review goes, to “trick white people into thinking they themselves aren’t racist.” And they’re supposed to be watching the film while “fetishizing the suffering of people of color.” The headline of the review, of course, asserts that it “made white people [i.e., the intended audience] feel good about themselves.”
That’s basically the entire review. The rest is details. She does highlight the fact that some members of the Shirley family objected to his portrayal. And that Ali apologized to the family for inaccuracies.
I’ll mostly set aside the issues of fidelity to the true story. I think they’re important questions, but that’s not really my focus here. Whether and how much Hollywood should stretch the truth in the pursuit of a moral lesson is complicated. Not consulting Shirley’s family, if they didn’t consult anyone, was probably a bad move.
‘Woke’ Whites and Anti-Racist Education
Criticism comes in various form. The hashtag movement #OscarsSoWhite has had some success at criticizing the film industry. And Teen Vogue itself has covered the hashtag movement at some length.
Compared to the Teen Vogue review, there are better criticisms of Green Book and the racial politics of the Oscar-nominated films. The Esquire article, in particular, effectively discusses those issues together.
But Teen Vogue’s criticism is an example of a particular sort of bad criticism: highly educated, relatively wealthy, ‘woke’ whites turning up their nose at anyone or anything purporting to speak to whites who are less ‘woke’ than they are. While their review of Green Book purports to be about the film, it’s mostly about the audience. In particular, it reeks of a certain contempt for the audience.
Considering the source, the proper term for this style of criticism is probably ‘vogueing’. It’s a carefully-framed, public stance that distances oneself from the target of the critique. The style is long on trendy words like ‘trope’ and short on actual ideas for raising awareness of racism among fellow white people. But the fact of the matter is that ‘woke’ whites weren’t born into their wokeness. They learned the same ways anyone else learned.
I think people who write criticism in this style live in enough of a liberal bubble that they have a decent-sized audience for their material. But they’re aware enough of the people outside that bubble that they want to push those people away.
The Failure of Green Book
Note again that the criticisms of Green Book aren’t exactly off the mark. The Esquire article I linked above raises broadly similar issues in a more effective way. Green Book really does miss opportunities.
What, though, would a more effective anti-racist education look like?
One component is surely working across racial lines on projects of common concern. Organizing your workplace (or your fellow tenants)?
More explicitly educational groups like SURJ attempt to do this in their own way. Whether they’re successful is another story, and SURJ has a variety of problems. Redneck Revolt is a group that does this work from a more cross-racial, working-class perspective. Again, there are issues of effectiveness.
Doing it through movies? Eh, perhaps. I guess it’s possible.
The point is that there are options out there. And my short list is far from exhaustive. We can point people to those options, try those options ourselves, or suggest new ones. It’s easy to belittle audiences less ‘woke’ than you. It’s much harder, though far more useful, to work with them to overcome it together.
