In a racialized society such as the US, the racial signifiers in mainstream cultural products are generally evident and familiar, while the signifiers of racialization are less obvious. Where the former imply that race exists objectively (i.e. biologically), the latter, on the contrary, constitute the way race is constructed in the first place. They imply manifest the fact that racism and its discourses of white supremacy are the source of race.
Historically, racialization has been produced through the hierarchical imposition of a discourse of race by Europeans on others, for which body features, mainly color, have been made iconic in order to naturalize the signifiers of racialization as biological. Racial identity then reflects a reification of one's identification with that discourse (and the terms "white" and "black," for instance, name the racialized social categories thus iconized, to which people whose "color" is rarely white or black are said to belong). The process of racialization thus contains three dimensions: a semiotic structure generated by hegemonic discourses, through which whites racialize themselves by racializing others; a political structure of identity through identification with that semiotics; and a social structure of enforcement in the name of that identity. In the US, the structure of white identity was originally generated in the colonial period through juridical enactments such as slave codes and differential citizenship; it has always been inseparable from domination and hegemony. The subsequent act of defining the US as a nation (itself a discursive act), served primarily to universalize white society, and hid the semiotic structure of whiteness, the fact that the racialized other from which it had differentiated itself was its central meaning, from itself. Indeed, this meaning must remain hidden (discursively de-racialized) if white society is to apprehend itself as autonomous. In effect, self-universalization is what brings white society into existence as such.
Yet it cannot dispense with what Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, has called an Africanist presence "crucial to [white's] sense of Americanness." [1] Because white identity is produced by its production of a racialized "other" (Africans, the indigenous, etc.), the other poses a constant threat not only of rebellion, but of a de-universalizing reappropriation of an autonomous identity. White identity has continually defended its assumed autonomy against this threat through cultural productions that mythologize separation and control, exclusion and absorption; one can point to films such as Birth of a Nation and Home of the Brave, as well as Jim Crow laws and segregation itself.
Michael Rogin, in his new work on blackface minstrelsy, has described how the white performer in blackface (Jim Crow, which held sway officially in the South and unofficially everywhere else in the US until the passage of the various Civil Rights acts of the 1960s, barred African-Americans from playing in theater or film) fulfilled the dual purpose of stereotyping black people, while producing the site where white identity could consolidate itself as what is not black. [2] Blackface represented "a structure of exploitation produced [as] a culture of identification." (BWN,29) By focusing attention on blackness, it both protected whiteness as the unexamined given, (BWN,27) and metaphorically absorbed black people into the identity of whites. This is the structure Morrison calls an Africanism, which functions as "a way of talking about and a way policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability." (WD,7) It remains unspoken, implying that "the fabrication of an Africanist persona [by whites] is reflexive, an extraordinary [and often obsessive] meditation on the self." (WD,17) Rogin points out that these fabrications and their attendent stereotypes (disparaging by definition), are not only self-referential, but include the ability to re-stereotype all objection to them. (BWN,37ff) And Morrison concludes that what becomes transparent are "the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence." This would suggest that the semiotic structure of white racialization lurks covertly in all cultural productions in the US.
In the past decade, however, the film
industry has been intent on
producing films that recognize the racial and cultural diversity of the
US, and in particular, its cities; and by doing so, to attempt to
defuse the racial separation that is one of the legacies of
segregation. But hidden within this new "racial realism" is a continual
reconfirmation of white racialized identity, and the hegemony and
domination that lies at the foundation of it. In two recent films, Bad
Lieutenant and Pulp Fiction, which purport to reside within
the domain of diversity, two different dimensions of white
racialization, namely, the political structure of identity and the
discursive structure of race, can be seen to be at work. A
counterposing of these two films will reveal in allegorical form a
sense of what the new white racism that is emerging in the US now is.
Bad Lieutenant
Very little has been written about Bad Lieutenant. Though a "critically acclaimed art film" at Cannes, it was never a popular movie, nor one the mainstream critical establishment seemed to know how to deal with. [3] It is a portrait of the patriarchal persona in dissolution, and is rich in its interwoven symbolism. Written by a woman, it presents the patriarchal project failing at its own hands without dragging the rest of society down with it.
The film's central character (Mike, played by Harvey Keitel) is a New York City cop. Though the film has the aura of addressing police corruption, it de-stereotypes that corruption by focusing on an extreme case against a background of other cops who are just regular guys doing their job and trying to be empathetic. There is no police brutality, and references to ethnicity or police bigotry are minimal. The film is not about the police, but about this particular cop. The fact that Mike is a cop, however, is central to the film. He uses the power it gives him to steal, to procure drugs, to "be the boss," and to not do his job. He neither directs investigations, nor brings criminals to justice. Rather than representing corruption, Mike is just a bad egg who bets against himself continually. And nothing defines him beyond his addictions. He is addicted to drugs through his job, addicted to gambling through the drugs (to get money), and addicted to baseball through his gambling (on the games). It is an interlocking series of addictions that become the symbolic elements of his identity.
The film must be understood structurally, since its central plot element is minimalist: Mike reasonably advises his friends to bet on the Mets, who win in the Mets-Dodgers playoff games, while he consistently bets on the Dodgers, and loses. [4] The film is divided into four sections by Mike's four bets, on which a grid is super-imposed of ritualized cinematic and iconic images. While its plot element simply repeats four times, it is the grid that marks Mike's progression to his demise. Each section is characterized by a different imagistic motif -- drugs, voyeuristic sex, social institutions (bars and the church), and self-violation. The first two provide extensions or accoutrements of Mike's position of power and command, and the second two conduct him into the imagist underworld into which he sinks, still insisting on his power.
Each of the first two sections begins with an execution-style murder of someone in a car. After Mike looks in on the scene, he goes off with other cops to bet on the game. In the first, two women have been killed, and Mike scans their bodies; in the second, there is heroin in the back seat, which he attempts to take for himself. These are his primary concerns. After the bets, the scene shifts to his immersion in either drugs or female bodies. And each section ends with him losing his bet and going home to a family with whom he has no interaction. His domestic life seems simply to intrude like an old habit. Between the grids of the first and second sections, drugs and female bodies change places in terms of narrative location, importance and signification.
The murders he investigates are singular in their apparent senselessness. White middle class people have been shot in the head as they sit in their cars, for no apparent reason. It is Mike's execution at the end of the movie that suggests what the other murders had been, as well as its possible epidemic proportions in the film's world.
In the second two sections, the crime scene is replaced by church or bar. He places his bet alone, now demanding the bet from his bookie rather than advising others how to bet. In place of his voyeurism, women speak to him, giving him eloquent (even poetic) wisdom that he can neither hear nor understand. [5] And church and bar change places; the third section begins in church and ends in a bar, the fourth begins in a bar and ends in a church. In the third section, he begins his symbolic descent into the underworld, in a crowded discotheque bar in which he stands beneath a naked woman dancing above him in a suspended cage. The fourth section ends with an epiphany, a hallucinatory paroxysm of total desparation in a church in which a nun had been raped, after which he further descends to the basement of a burned out tenement. There, he arrests the two neighborhood teenagers who had raped the nun, only to release them into exile by putting them on a bus to Florida because all is lost for him already. [6] Having let the boys go, he sits in his car, waiting to be shot by his bookie's banker.
In effect, the movie is about repetition; home, job, bets, drugs, and games are all ritualistically engendered, obtaining their meaning from their repetition (even the obligatory "chase scene" is ritualistic, even onanistic; Mike careens through New York traffic, siren blaring, chasing nothing). And Mike gets his "meaning" from them, from these repeating "things" that are not him. What gives each thing its meaning, as other and as icon, is not something he invents, but that invents him through repetition. Finally, each "thing" is brought to him through a certain technology (TV, needle, police structure), which then mediates the dimension of his identity that it serves to invent. As the site of repetition, technology is not only presentation of their possibility, but of their discursivity, transforming these things into signs whose meaning is addiction. Thus, each mode of technology presents and represents an addiction. This is highlighted by those moments of reduced technology; for instance, the final scene in which he takes the two kids to the bus station, a scene which cannot be repeated, is filmed with a hand-held camera. It is not his corruption that is the issue of the movie, but the cycle of his addictions by which he defines himself.
At the center of repetition in each section, the human body is posed in different symbolic guises. In the first section, Mike's own naked body stands alone after a failed sexual encounter with two women, his arms spread as if crucified, symbolizing a crucifix that, at a simultaneous moment in the narrative, appears in the cathedral rape scene; in the second, the posed bodies of women seen voyeuristically from a distance (first, the nun who was raped being treated in the hospital, and second, two teenage girls in a car, raped by his eyes as he jerks off). Third, there is the ritualistic (intoned in Communion) "body of Christ" on which is superimposed the threatened body of the bad debtor (Mike himself), losing his third bet. These two bodies again coalesce in the last section, the drug rape of Mike's own body by the needle, synthesizing the rape and the ritual, conjoining the visionary voyeurism of other sections with his epiphanic vision of a forgiving Christ for which his own death is the immediate future. Thus, all the stages of his progression to death are centered on the body: his own, others, the body of Christ as ritual, and the body of Christ as miraculous vision (epiphany); they represent his aloneness, distance, institutionalization, and final destitution. It is the body as social image that both accompanies and enacts the progression of cinematic icons -- cop, sex, bets, and drugs -- by which Mike's self becomes boss, the body becomes self, the other becomes body, and addiction becomes other.
But there is a transcendent body; it is the body, mediated by voyeuristic and ritualistic technology (radio and TV), of Darryl Strawberry, an African-American Dodgers player who Mike mythologizes as controlling the course of the series, and of Mike's bets. [7] Though it is Mike's body that gets addicted, it is ultimately to a body that he is addicted, namely, Strawberry's.
Strawberry's performance in each game is isomorphic to the body icon of each section. First, Strawberry gets the lone RBIs for the Dodgers, who lose, and his effort is useless (like failed sex); second, he is left on deck watching the preceding batter hit into a double play (Mike's voyeurism); third, he misjudges, checks his swing, but strikes out anyway (Mike loses his third bet); and fourth, he gets passively called out on strikes. It is a progression to ever greater passivity that parallels Mike's trajectory to death.
But in the context of the film's ritualisms, the question arises, why Strawberry? What is Mike's addiction to Strawberry? Strawberry is a technologically reified body that performs certain acts upon which Mike relies. Seen only in the distance, Strawberry becomes a non-person through the (TV) ritualism by which he is experienced. It is Strawberry's acts, as non-acts, by which Mike's social being progressively defines itself and disintegrates. Strawberry becomes his being, and when Strawberry loses, he loses. Every aspect of his life -- sex, drugs, betting, corruption, and power -- all revolve around this player on TV. The destructive logic of Mike's defining his identity addictively through things other than itself gets both conflated and lost in this transcendent thing named Darryl Strawberry. But in this sense, Strawberry couldn't be just any player. A white player could not be mythologized in the same way; Mike is operating in terms of a racial analogue of the pedestal-gutter paradigm that is so often imposed on women. In that paradigm, a black player is either a cipher or a superhero, submerged in or transcendent to the team, but not of it.
For an identity defined in this way, the world becomes a parody of itself, because its central substance is a simularcum, and its central relationship is an obsession with the emptiness of the simulacral. For Mike, the church is a parody because it is a racket. Forgiveness is parodic; when the nun forgives her attackers, Mike is violated because he needs the reward money offered for their capture to cover his bets. The nun herself is a parody because she forgives through a carnal body-consciousness that she poeticizes. [8] Sex is parodic because it is onanistic. His epiphany, in the midst of his despair, becomes parodic, a "technical" epiphany. The miraculous Christ he sees changes into a neighborhood African-American woman holding one of the Chalices stolen from the church during the rape. She is the answer to Mike's prayers because she knows where the rapists are. She becomes his Beatrice, and Christ becomes the real cop; but not to bring justice since justice has been dispensed with by the nun and forgotten by Mike in his corruption (neither law nor justice are issues for him in this movie). Though he tells the nun to turn over the boys who raped her in order to prevent them from doing the same thing to others, it is empty rhetoric, given his real motivation. The film even parodies this rhetoric; when he wakes up on the couch, at home, there is a song in a cartoon on TV that endlessly repeats the words, "we've done it before, and we'll do it again." Mike is a parody cop, appropriating police power to pursue his addictions; and his atonement and epiphany are parodies because they only resurrect him as a cop.
In this succession of parodies, each thing parodied represents an emptiness that is filled only through repetition. Police, sex, church, and forgiveness are all simulacra. Only drugs and Strawberry are real -- but real only as icons, not of Mike's identity, but of how identity makes itself, and makes itself other. It is other as body, body as addiction, addiction as obsession with Strawberry, and Strawberry as a discursive, ritualistic, and visionary image at the center of all the rituals that define him -- job, family, ethics, church. In the end, only his life is left to give for his unpayable debts, signifying that his life too was a ritual, a reification of an onanist investment in an other, elsewhere, as something other than it is.
Bad Lieutenant is about the logic of defining one's identity through something which is not oneself. If this movie had been about white supremacy, it would have exemplified the 1970s black adage in which the "white mind" was understood to need race as a drug, and for which racism was an addiction. Addiction, like whiteness, is a mode of self-definition through the definition of something other than itself. In Bad Lieutenant, the racial relation is only iconized by the televideo clips of a baseball player whose play allegorizes what Mike enacts, leaving Mike to live out the structure of his identity as real addiction rather than as whiteness. But the racism by which whites define themselves through a non-white other functions in the same way as an addiction, and reveals all the obsessiveness of the addict. Because race obsesses through what it defines as what is to be noticed (as physiognomy) about another, it places voyeurism at the center of white race consciousness. The two structures become congruent in the film.
But, in fact, the movie actually hints
that the structure of
white identity lies behind its iconized scenes of addiction and
corruption. The meaning of the murders that Mike does not investigate,
and their apparent senselessness, is revealed by Mike's execution. He
exemplifies the (filmic) society that is addicted (to betting) and gets
in over its head, incurring bad debts. But his corruption is not simply
his failure to investigate these murders; he is himself involved in the
rackets that produce them. In a seemingly gratuitous touch, however,
when Mike is killed, there is a voice that shouts an imprecation at him
from the executioner's car; and the voice is obviously black. A hidden
racialized dimension is given to the entire social structure of the
movie. The rackets are black, while those who become addicted to play,
to betting on that game, are white middle class. If, through Mike, we
see how white social identity is defined, as a hidden social structure,
it becomes metaphoric for the identity of white society as a whole. The
racketeer underworld becomes the secret meaning of that white identity,
and its executions only allegorize the brutality of the act of
definition by which racism obsessively structured its (racialized)
society for itself, and became addicted to that structure.
Pulp Fiction
The social configuration of a black underworld is the central dimension of Tarantino's movie, Pulp Fiction, in which it becomes an abbreviated and inverted class structure. A lot has been written about Pulp Fiction, to the point of its bordering on being a cult film. It has swept the Internet, for instance, with more web sites and bulletin board activity than any other film. [9] And admittedly, Pulp Fiction is brilliantly complex in its plot structure and narrativity.
What is of interest here, however, is a certain utopian construction of the film's racial signifiers, which seem to have been carefully simplified. The casting is racially balanced. Racial rhetoric appears wholly argotized and emptied of racializing content. The two pairs of central male characters (the hit-men Jules and Vincent, and the gangster boss and the boxer) are mixed black and white respectively. Even their ultimate respective fates in the film are balanced racially. But in that very balance, something is out of balance. Something irks about it.
The film is a series of vignettes, each serious and lighthearted at the same time, that are woven together around a central power figure who pulls the strings of the film's world. In the dominant vignette, which serves as a matrix for the others, Jules and Vincent, two hitmen working for a rackets boss named Marsellus, kill three preppy college-types who had renegged on an undisclosed deal with him, in order to retrieve a briefcase for Marsellus containing an unseen glowing thing. In the course of this hit, Jules undergoes an epiphany, and the two gunmen find themselves in a diner in the middle of a holdup by a young British couple. The other vignettes attach tangentially and gratuitously to this story. In the first, Vincent takes Marsellus's wife Mia out to dinner, after which she OD's on Vincent's heroin. In the second, Marsellus buys a boxer named Butch to throw a fight, who then doesn't do it. Third, after Vincent accidentally shoots one of the college-types in the back of the car while leaving the hit-scene apartment, they go to the house of a friend named Jimmie to clean up the car. Each of these vignettes takes a critical turn (which occurs in each case when a character emerges from the bathroom) which weaves it in with the others. In the first, there is an improbable slapstick scene of reviving Mia. In the second, Butch risks all to retrieve his watch from his apartment, during which he kills Vincent and settles the score with Marsellus. And the third involves Jules' epiphany, which indirectly takes them to Jimmie's house, and from there to the Diner where Jules conceptualizes it and quits "the life."
For the enveloping story (the hit and the relation between Jules and Vincent) to lie at the center of the film, the plot must be turned inside out. The movie begins in the middle, and shifts to the beginning. The end occurs in the middle, and the plot's middle constitutes the ending. By thus knotting the plot, and scrambling "real time", the movie sets the characters in structural rather than temporal relation. The movie and the plot turn out to have different punchlines. At the end of the movie, as the two main characters walk out of the scene, we already know that one will die.
If Pulp Fiction has this minimal degree of structural homology to Bad Lieutenant, it also shares a number of common narrative elements. Both films contain a black gangster group that forms an essential aspect of its class structure. Both deploy a Christian spirituality that is overlaid on the plot as a secondary symbolism, and in terms of which each main character undergoes an epiphany. In both movies, the central character lets two small-time criminals get away, giving them money, as a way of buying atonement (in Pulp Fiction, that atonement leads to life, and in Bad Lieutenant, to death). And there is a masculinist cast(e) to both films. If Mike's obsessive focus on female body parts exemplifies this in Bad Lieutenant, its counterpart in Pulp Fiction is exemplified by a discussion; Vincent wins an argument with Jules on intramale etiquette with respect to giving foot massages to women, by asking Jules if he would give one to a man. Heterosexuality (like whiteness) defines itself only through and in differentiation from its other, homosexuality.
This distinction extends to other aspects of the film. Where Mike's epiphany occurs from within his own obsessive addictiveness, as a moment of identity dissolution in which it reveals the structure of identity production itself, Jules epiphany comes from without. Another college-type in the hit scene apartment emerges from the bathroom and shoots at him and Vincent, missing them both with all 6 shots. That Jules feels God's touch at the moment serves as a fracturing of an identity already disjointed by the gratuitousness of the film's vignettes. In Bad Lieutenant, the icons through which Mike defines himself are very much in the world, and he himself actually loses himself there. In Pulp Fiction, the external world is palpably absent. [10] There are no cars on the streets. The other driver in a traffic accident doesn't stop. There are no cops, no people in apartment complexes, no traffic on the roads to hinder speeding (the boss's trouble-shooter makes a 30 minute drive to Jimmie's house in 10 minutes), no one to hear gunshots. People get killed for a payoff that remains unseen in a briefcase, glowing and fantastic. This is more than the mere insularity of a theatrical scene. Society, street life, rules, a justice system, are all glaringly absent. The showdown scene between Butch and Marsellus occurs in an LA neighborhood on totally empty streets. There are people in the diner during the holdup, but they freeze into woodwork during Jules's long dissertation on his epiphany; and no one new comes in to interrupt him. There is nothing "out there" to intervene in what the characters are about. Farce, crime, personal war, all proceed only in their own terms, as if no one were watching.
Instead, the film peoples itself with a series of allusive quotes from other movies (Zorba, Bonnie and Clyde, Amos and Andy, Repo Man, Sanjuro, Jules and Jim, Fat City, etc.). Movie scenes and stars are the motifs of the decor and staff of the restaurant Mia and Vincent eat in. When Jules ends a discussion with Vincent in order to do the hit, he says, "let's get in character." That is, the iconizing and dehistoricizing productions of the cinematic industry itself become the backdrop for the film's world. There are even technological intrusions (a sub-title gives the Wolf's driving time to Jimmie's house; a video-added dotted line appears in the air to accentuate a point Mia is making in the diner) to make that cinematic world Brechtian. Though the vignettes should at least combine to present a world to be about (as a kind of meta-world), what that world would be is absorbed in the self-referentiality of the film's cinematics. Hollywood, as a de-historicizing history, is already the meta-discourse for these vignettes.
As a spatial supplement to the cinematic world, the film deploys the presence and narrative use of the bathroom. [11] It sits in juxtaposition to recurring banal conversation on food. But more importantly, in this film without an outside world, it is the bathroom, that innermost private place that provides an exterior space. For each vignette, the bathroom functions as an "elsewhere" outside the action from which each scene is transformed. [12] In other words, the exterior to the movie is interior to it, reflecting the interiority of its (cinematic) exterior, as well as its inversion of plot temporality.
In the context of these inversions, the utopian construction of the film's racial signifiers comes apart. Racial balance to deracialize "color" should render race unnoticeable. But the moment this sense of balance itself becomes noticeable, it gives notice that what it intends to render unnoticeable is what is to be noticed. The de-racialized becomes re-racialized. What throws off the film's "balance" is a particularly noticeable overuse and misplacement of racialized rhetoric.
It occurs during the essentially gratuitous clean-up scene at Jimmie's house. The scene's object is a dead young black man named Marvin whom we know nothing about. He had opened the door of the hit-scene apartment, and suffered a certain familiar contempt at Jules's hands. The script suggests that Marvin is Jules's plant. In any event, Jules (who is black) takes him with them, and he is shot accidently by Vincent (who is white) in the car, at a moment when Vincent is scorning Jules' encounter with God. At Jimmie's house, to clean up the car, the driving force of the scene is Jimmie's fear that his wife Bonnie (who is black; Jimmie is white) will come home and find them still cleaning up the mess, in which case she will divorce Jimmie.
What occurs in this gratuitous scene is an "extra" ordinary use of that gratuitous yet central aspect of racism, the term "nigger." This is not a word, but a derogatory term. A derogatory term is not a sign because it has no signified in a semiotic sense. It is a term used to denigrate, to disparage, and to inferiorize. Its use constitutes an act of generalization that cancels individual being. Its meaning lies in this enactment. That is, the derogatory term is an act that generalizes through denigration, and denigrates through generalization. Rather than a signifier, it is an assault, and has no meaning other than that of assault. To use it is to assault a group through an individual, and to assault an individual through the group that is invented, generalized, and derogated through the use of the term. [13] The process of invention is central to it; all generalizations about people are inventions, since people present themselves only as individuals. Thus, any generalizations about them must occur before the fact, and remain without experiential ground, since no individual can be experienced as a generality. If some people find their stereotypes confirmed in an individual, it is because the stereotype is already self-confirming, before the fact, as a generalization. In that sense, the derogatory term brings into existence what it generalizes disparagingly by pointing out what it then indexes for special notice. Ultimately, the meaning of the term is that it can do this.
Though it remains a speech act, it is one authorized only by others who valorize what it enacts, namely, white supremacy. And this necessity for group authorization is integral to the fact that racism is a relation between groups, rather than between individuals. It can only be a relation to a group, since it is based upon a generalization of others, and it is performed by a group, since a group has to valorize the terms by which it hierarchizes that relation to the other. In effect, racism is not founded on whites' personal feelings of antipathy; rather, it is the feelings of antipathy that are produced by racism -- that is, by the dominant group's identification (a feeling of identity) with a rhetoric and a structure of power that invents those feelings by inventing what those feelings are about. In effect, whites continually reinvent themselves as white through their use of derogation toward others as an act of assault that then constitutes their identification with each other.
Though derogatory speech pretends to be about the one it generalizes, it is really about a conjunction of those who agree that such denigration is proper; it is a membership card for that group. It performs this service even when used in conversation between whites, as part of a language by which whites recognize each other as members of their group. As a gratuitous non-sign, whose meaning lies elsewhere than its use, it has no adequate response in discourse. That is its power.
Derogatory terms reside at the heart of all domination, not because they signify domination, but because they participate in constituting it. The term's use by whites is always gratuitous because its purpose is to confirm the identity and hierarchical status of its user. But if gratuitous, and thus by definition always over-used, the term represents an obsession with the other, in the name of an obsession with oneself as the need to be different from that other. The derogatory term is the signifier for the fact that white racialized identity, as an identification with a certain process of racialization (viz. whiteness), finds its indispensible center elsewhere, in the non-white other.
One possible response is to reappropriate, or expropriate it as language. In the US, African-Americans have done this. By appropriating the term for their own use, black people have transformed it into a different kind of act. The seizure of this icon of racialization is first and foremost an act of rebellion or resistence against the structure of white society. It participates in a form of self-valorization, at times a flaunting of self-presentation that is often bigger than life. In this sense, in black speech, the term becomes other than derogatory, referring both to the racial hierarchy that brought it into existence and to resistence against that, a tacit rejection of white society. But even in black speech, it comes from a place of hate, even within a sense of black commonality or connection. In appropriating the term, black speech does not de-racialize it, but only re-racializes it (de-racialization is not an option in white supremacist society). Thus, it preserves a sense of hostility and opprobrium, while also existentially neutralizing that. It is an audacity stance that conjoins a sense of self and of history with the fatalism of being beset by that history. It is only permissible in the absence of real hierarchy, and never gratuitous because of what it brings with it.
This of course does not extend to whites. In the mouth of a white person, the term is always an assault against non-whites. And in black speech, when directed toward a white person, the term becomes meaningless.
In Pulp Fiction, the term is used a lot, to the point of incoherence. 14] Though the film gives the appearance of deracializing the term, in the context of balancing color, and deploying the black appropriation of the term in the context of its essentially black class structure, this appearance crumbles.
First of all, in the film, though blacks use it to refer to blacks and to whites, and whites use it to refer to blacks, whites never use it to refer to whites. This differential use reflects the purity condition of white racialization. The purity condition is exemplified by the fact that one black foreparent makes one black, while one white foreparent does not make one white; "white" and "black" do not stand in parity across any natural form of divide (skin shade actually forms a continuous spectrum), but are artificially separated through a special definition that establishes whiteness over against all non-whiteness. In its reiteration of that purity condition, the movie represents a white reappropriation of the black appropriation of the white derogatory term.
Second, in the clean-up scene at Jimmie's house, the term is misappropriated by Jimmie in a tirade about his situation. He objects to what is happening in his house, because he knows his wife will divorce him if she finds this situation when she comes home from work. When he becomes racially derogatory about Marvin's corpse, his speech has racial significance because color has been re-invoked in the scene as a signifier. The cinematic technique of an imaginary flash-forward, used nowhere else in the film, shows Jimmie's wife coming home and finding them all there. The sole purpose of this flash-forward is to inform the audience that Jimmie's wife is black and a nurse (continuing the racial balance of the film, since Jimmie is white). She is not shown reacting, nor given any immediate role. She is made black without personhood. If this is to give de-racialized authorization for Jimmie's derogatory tirade about the corpse, it instead renders it doubly misplaced. If there is trouble between him and his wife, he would have to be careful with respect to her; she is, on his account, a forceful woman, with serious objections to Jimmie's connections. For Jimmie to speak as he does contradicts the personal relations he wishes to preserve. It might work if Jimmie were really black. But because he isn't, his derogatory tirade re-appropriates nothing. But secondly, though he uses this language to put Jules off, who is black, in the process he cements relations with Vincent, who is white. This cemented relation emerges as a sense of white unity precisely because color had been invoked in the scene as a signifier. The effect of Jimmie's language is to reracialize the film's deracialized racial language. [15]
But here, the absence of a world beyond the action of the characters takes on a different significance. It begs the question of the film's deracializations, and its racialized language. One might ask, if there is no outside world, then to what do racial identifications refer? These are not biological but social designations. Without that world, there is no history to have produced them. Tarantino is careful to specify who is white or black in the script; but in the absence of history and a real racialized US (Los Angeles, actually), what does Marsellus's bartender mean when he refers to the boxer as a "white guy"? In a world in which there is no separate black community, and no white supremacist history, with its colonial settlements, western expansions, and enslavements of kidnapped Africans, where do the derogatory terms come from? Without that, this derogatory word would not exist. If it exists in the film, it brings its history with it. Against the dehistoricizations of Hollywood's cinematic world, and the film's attempt to render the derogatory term non-derogatory, the term's history brings the outside world back in, fully racialized. Derogatory language undoes Tarantino's attempted deconstruction of racialization because it cannot escape its history.
Thus, Jimmie's racialized tirade rips open the fabric of the movie. But if the movie is really reasserting the structure of racialization (as white identity and hegemony) interior to its deconstruction of it, then something else must be happening on the surface. Though Jimmie is white, in compatriotic relation to Vincent, his appropriation of the derogatory term also implies he is acting like a black man with Jules. That is, he can be seen both ways, as a white man and as a black man in whiteface. Similarly, Vincent, the white hitman in solidarity with Jimmie, is referred to by Marsellus, the boss, as "my nigger," and Jules is not. Marsellus and Jules, in fact, conversantly refer to Vincent and Jimmie as "those niggers." In the re-racialized language of the film, Vincent too becomes a black in whiteface. But then Jules and Marsellus, who play the dominant roles in the class structure they inhabit, become in turn whites in blackface who "get in character" by acting black.
In other words, the film's language achieves coherence if the colors of the four major characters are reversed. Under such a reversal, the black characters simply become stereotypic white gangsters as Hollywood has traditionally portrayed them, while the main white characters, who are minions and factotums, obey the stereotypes that Hollywood has traditionally painted black. It suggests that Tarantino simply wrote stereotypic characters, and then problematized them by changing their colors. [16]
All this comes together in the character of Jules, symbolized by a supposed quote from Ezekiel, which he uses at the moment of shooting his mark. [17] This quote operates on three levels. First, he is "in character" as the avenger against those who would "poison his brothers" (his boss, Marsellus). Thus, he adopts a stance of solidarity borrowed from a black community and language beyond the world of the film. But second, the quote is an invention, marking an invented solidarity that only highlights the erasure of black community itself from the film. Jules is inventing his blackness through this quoted spirituality and solidarity. And third, if he thus reinvents his blackness in a vacuum, he throws it off in abandoning the quote (and his gangster guise) when he adopts the stance of a holy man ("I'm trying to be the shepard"). Before his epiphany, he clothed his violent self-identity ("Bad Motherfucker") in vengeful spirituality; after it, he becomes the itinerant spirit, "walking the earth," whose model is Caine in Kung Fu, a white man playing a non-white martial artist. In short, for Jules, there is 1) an erased history which provides his language, 2) a self-embellished role that invents him in his color, and 3) a deconstruction of color producing a foundational whiteness that lurks behind blackface, and which reasserts itself through his other changes of guise and disguise. That is, his epiphany only reverses his disguises, as the film reverses colors.
Ultimately, Jules has no community to which to relate. When he walks out of the diner to his ascetic destiny, he is a man with no cultural context for himself, neither white nor black. The absence of a black community renders all that would depend upon it in the film meaningless. If one function of the black community is to reappropriate and redeploy blackness for its members in order to counteract the white deployment of blackness as the means by which it defines itself as white, that function has been cancelled. After erasure of the black world, as the primary defense and resistence against white supremacy and its power structures, only the world of white racialization remains. The movie is reduced, through its historical amnesia, to presenting a white world whose racialized dominations and subjugations are clouded behind a cinematic reversal of color. And this only reconfirms the purity condition of whiteness, universalizing it in a re-racialized world.
This historical amnesia deconstructs the character of Marsellus. Marsellus is the elite, the top of a black class structure, at the bottom of which are the white degenerate Neo-Confederates who rape him in the pawn shop. If it is against them that Marsellus actually needs an avenging angel (a brother), the two who play that role for him are white (Butch and the Wolf). In which world did Marsellus fight his way to the top, and what were the conditions of that world? For whom does his language function as a form of power? If, in Marsellus's speech, it functions the same way as it does for whites buttressing their white identity, connoting power or scorn, than that power does indeed depend on a white world. Again, the racialized world the movie pretends to efface returns through Marsellus, not in the form of belonging, but of domination. Ultimately, if blacks control the class structure in the movie, it is not even as carnaval, in which the minion sits as king for a day. It is the king who plays his minion by putting on blackface, and then reascends his re-racialized throne. This carnavalesque blackface, metaphorizing the signifiers of racialization, both disguises and preserves the reality of white supremacy that creates and is created by it.
In Pulp Fiction, two worlds are thus superimposed. First, there is the world of the film, in which the use of the derogatory term is incoherent, the characters' colors are inconsequential and balanced, and a stereotyped entertainment industry provides a background that de-historicizes and de-socializes, as the way it "gets in character". Second, there is the world beneath that one in which the characters' colors are reversed, the derogatory term's use becomes coherent, but the characters are stereotypes who "get in character" by stepping into the other world.
In this lamination, while black becomes white, white does not become black because the stereotypes for black people are generated by whites. What would have been a black character seeps into the interstice between filmic whiteness and social whiteness. That is, black people as people become an "elsewhere" between two worlds in neither of which black people simply as people have ever been possible. If Taratino had sought to deconstruct racialization (the social discourses of race iconized by real bodies) by reversing the hierarchy of the color binary, he succeeds only in a symbolic and allegorical erasure of black people as a whole. The hegemony of the white, which is what needs to be deconstructed, remains unaddressed. Instead, Tarantino covers up the inner structure of white identity, revealed in its addictive terms in Bad Lieutenant, by changing the colors of his characters. [18]
In this sense, all the characters in the movie become iconographically white: 1) those that are black are white in blackface, playing to the entertainment world which itself produced the stereotypes of blacks; 2) those that are white, as blacks in whiteface, are produced by the re-racialization of the de-racialized signifiers of white racialization; and 3) the entertainment industry is white. In the absence of a black community or black cultural base, the black characters remain products of a white (supremacist) world defining itself as white precisely by defining them as black. To erase blackness and still maintain the technology of whiteness is to make all the characters white, and not to deconstruct the hierarchy upon which whiteness depends. Those racialized as black have nothing to be but white, while the non-whiteness invented for them by whites remains inescapable.
Rogin has pointed this out about an
early, ostensibly anti-racist
film, "Home of the Brave." (BWN,232ff) In it, Moss, a lone black
soldier in a white army, is harassed by some of the whites. In the face
of his multiple complaints and resistences to this harassment, he is
told he is imagining or exaggerating things. With only whites to talk
to or to turn to, with no black confreres to corroborate his
experience, or confirm the derogation he knows to be true, and which we
see happen to him, he is led to give up his own experience of what this
harassment and his being black means, and instead accept the white
account of his psyche. As an act of pure authority, his army
psychoanalyst demands that Moss repeat what he has told Moss, to show
he has learned it. Under the weight of this multi-layered authority,
all Moss's attempts to regain his own experience are thwarted. And we
too, as the audience, are ourselves brought to abandon our experience
of his racialization under the weight of that white account.
Conclusion
What is at question, in the production of cultural images and discourses such as these, is cultural identity. A sense of cultural identity must accompany any narrative in order for a character's actions to be empathically intelligible rather than simply there. For the members of a cultural group, that intelligibility bridges the gap between singularity of narrative and the generality of cultural connection, while imparting a sense of universality to that intelligibility as such. What a character identifies and is identified with in the social environment precedes the question of who a character is. If the "who" of identity ("who am I?") presents a vast problematic question (addressed mainly in psychoanalytic discourses), it loses itself in the regressive question, "who is asking?" In a racialized society, who one is is already racialized through a biologization of race that precedes identity. But the source of the biologization of race, and of the racialization upon which an identification with race is predicated (racial signifiers), is the same. What we are looking at, in these movies (as well as most other cultural productions in the US), is the structure of that source (the signifiers of racialization).
For psychoanalytic theory, however, every attempt at an answer falls into the space between the individual as such and the individual constructed by the psychoanalytic theory. Ensconced in its theoretic interior, psychoanalytics renders many cultural questions unintelligible for itself. Sharon Willis' psychoanalytic perspective exemplifies this point (see note 9). She understands that the film is attempting to decenter or deracialize color and racial rhetoric. "The film aims to place racist epithets at the same level as obscenities." (p.57) She also sees that what this deracialization leaves revealed is the film's continued iconization of black men. "Part of what Bonnie authorizes is white male posturing in imitation of images of black men." (p.60) And finally, she apprehends a similar structure in Tarantino's movie "True Romance," in which the white pimp Drexel, who talks black as a form of "blackface," "permits the film to attribute a generalized iconicity to black men." But if this is as far as she goes, then she reaffirms race, seen from a "white" point of view, and the continued substitution of black people as racial icons (signifiers) for the erased historical process of racialization. She recognizes that the term "nigger" brings its history and sociality with it; that is, the term constitutes the "unconscious" of the film, the inescapability of racist history and social structure. But as soon as she establishes this, she falls into the psychoanalytic interior. That is, she must shift her focus to Tarantino (the "real" inescapability as the "real" psyche in question) and Tarantino's own psychic project, his desire to be an "outsider", and hence an "insider" in the cultural realm that is outside white culture.
But if this project represents in some sense an oedipal transgression on Tarantino's (and Willis's own) part, it thus immediately loses sight of the discursive, and hence semiotic structure of whiteness as a signifier, which does not just see race or race relations as social hierarchy, let alone as an "oedipal" family dysfunction. What gets ignored is precisely the historical process of construction of identities and social categories that already contains hierarchy in it, and is in turn productive of those very categories which must still be biologized in order to be seen as in an oedipal, or any other metaphorized relation. The film's stereotypes and iconicities of black people become, for Willis, its own embedding in "popular culture," which itself takes the form of an oedipalized transgression as a cultism. But this absorbs race into the psychoanalytic account of culture, where the latter had set out to explain precisely that culture's role in racialization. Immersion of her central arguments in psychoanalytic discourse renders unintelligible both the structure of race and the historicity of racialization that produces it; that is, psychoanalysis renders the structure of racialization unintelligible.
In Bad Lieutenant, the icons of cop, woman's body, drugs, and Strawberry index the moments and dimensions of which Mike's identity as white, racialized, and masculine is constructed. [19] They become the signifiers for a structure of self-racialization as white, as an on-going and ever reiterated process, ever dependent upon them as exterior, an identity that then finds itself outside, in those icons as other. It is a wholly familiar structure, hiding its core of racialization behind silence, an intentional non-mention that leaves hierarchy unsaid in a multicultural, "racially realist" portrayal of the city streets.
In Pulp Fiction, the silence accorded the structure of racialization is enforced as historical amnesia. The icon-structure of white identity is no longer out in the world; one enters into that icon-structure itself; and from it one looks out at a world that is empty and non-reflecting. This movie's focus on crime and rackets is not coincidental. It represents first, the stereotypic criminalization of black people that today constitutes one of the dimensions of white re-racialization (nothing less is at stake in contemporary prison statistics). Second, it represents the inversion of the narratives of class domination that today are being substituted for the discredited but more effective discourses that biologized race (and which are being substituted for the concept of race under the guise of "ethnicity," a disguise for a disguise). Third, it represents the erasure of the natural concomitance of crime to poverty and oppression, as a form of resistence and rebellion; in that sense, it becomes an erasure of the oppression which produced that poverty while generalizing criminal resistence and the crime of resistence to an entire group in the guise of stereotyped criminalization (something the Italians in the US have faced). In effect, it disguises resistence as an already accomplished mode of domination itself. But fourth, all of this, linked to the silencing of the question of race (whether through pretended balance or erasure), has the effect of transforming the charge against white society of racism and racist oppression into something to be held against those making the charge. To accomplish all this from within the stereotypes of racialized class domination of the US, one simply has to change the colors.
In Bad Lieutenant, according to Mike, all social institutions are rackets. Thus, criminalization is inverted and generalized. But whether one sees Mike as a failed guardian, part of the problem, or the police ethic carried to its logical conclusion, he nevertheless functions in the space between multicultural crime and the white middle class, preying on both and praying to both. In revealing the structure of white identity within this racialization of social relations, and through it, Bad Lieutenant reveals what has always constituted the foundation of class relations in the US, from the early colonies to the present, the mode of their racialization.
What is being portrayed in these films is a new racism whose job is to reconstitute the hegemony of whiteness that it is in the process of redefining. Bell hooks characterizes the new racism as that which reassures whites that they are not racist if they simply divorce themselves from traditional segregation through the acceptance and assumption of racial diversity, or "racial realism," while legitimizing racist white people by providing "a public space where suppressed racist slurs and verbal insults can be voiced and heard." [20] As if to directly confirm bell hooks's prognosis, Sarah Kerr, in a long review of Pulp Fiction, [21] ends her discussion with the following words: Tarantino "[slips] in a titillating reminder that some people call black people "niggers" without asking us to think about what that means." If Pulp Fiction does indeed reassure whites on both scores (that they are not racist, and that their racism is okay), it is not only because it operates between the regions of crudeness and subtlety, but because, in deconstructing itself, it shows "racial realism" to be racist in confirming rather than threatening white identity.
As such, the new racism (in the real world) amounts to the subtle dissolution of black communities through hidden processes like redlining and land speculation, as well as their cultural erasure through "racial realism" and stereotyped criminalization. It is the quiet destruction of what the spectrum of movements (from integrationist and civil rights to black power and cultural nationalist) built as community and consciousness so essential to surviving white supremacy. And now, we can understand "racial realism" as the ability to distort white supremacy and racial hierarchy through the mere empiricism of street-level cultural diversity, to appear as racial parity, so that the mention of race and racial hierarchy can be suppressed as itself racist. As bell hooks says:
Black and white in some circles are becoming definite no-nos, perpetuating what some folks see as stale and meaningless binary oppositions. ... There would be no need ... for any unruly radical black folks to raise critical objections to the phenomenon [she is speaking about the substitution of "ethnicity" for race] if all this passionate focus on race were not so neatly divorced from a recognition of racism, of the continuing domination of blacks by whites, and (to use some of those out-of-date, uncool terms) of the continued suffering and pain in black life. (Yearning,52)
To the extent that a recognition of race is "divorced from a recognition of racism," it "disappears" black culture as such behind certain mythifications and mystifications (superhero or stereotype, proxy white or criminalized black), and reduces race back to a semiotic moment of white culture by which whites can re-universalize themselves.
Ultimately, in each of these movies,
race is inseparable from an
epiphany -- in one, this is an epiphany of identity that signifies a
death ethic; and in the other, it is an epiphany of death that
signifies subsuming all in white identity. Both are discursive
transformations, resident in an only-white world, by which the
substance of addiction (drugs, blackness) is absorbed as white while
excluded as other, and by which a multicultural world is rendered white
through the disrecognition of the black world that whiteness depends
upon for its existence. Both occur, in the white world, through a
mythification of the black persona, which is again how whites
racialized and universalized themselves in the first place. Both movies
reaffirm the white world, and hence white supremacy, by reritualizing
its origins, and hiding the fact that as white cultural productions,
they are themselves signifiers of racialization.
1- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), p.6. Hereafter cited in the text as WD.
2- Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1996), p. 24ff. Hereafter cited in text as BWN.
3- Besides the movie reviews, in which it was either hailed as an art movie (Variety compared it to Bergson's Virgin Spring and Kazan's On the Waterfront), or decried as sleaze, only two article have appeared about the movie, neither of great interest for this present discussion. Peter Lehman writes of the male body in an article in The Velvet-Light-Trap (vol. 32:23-29, 1993), and in 1992, Sight and Sound did an interview with director Abel Ferrara (vol 3(2):20-23). Of interest is Ferrara's own tendency to pursue a certain deconstruction of power (mostly white and male), as in his previous movie, King of New York. The screenplay of "Bad Lieutenant" was written by Zoe Lund (Tamerlis), who is known for her revenge-against-rape films (for instance, Ms .45).
4- It is a ficticious playoff series.
The Mets did play the
Dodgers in the 1988 playoffs, which went to seven games. But the
Dodgers won it.
5- In the last section, when collecting for the last time all the money he can, the woman who gives him drugs, and who now shoots him up in a real violation of the body, speaks reflectively about how vampires eat others, but people, through sex and drugs, have only themselves to eat. Throughout the movie, Mike's self-awareness is reduced to a half-moan-half-cry keening sound, that is perhaps a version of Kurtz's invocation of "the horror, the horror" in "The Heart of Darkness." Indeed, Kurtz's words, in Conrad's novel, are no more articulate.
6- In a literary sense, the first and last scenes offer a symmetrical prologue and epilogue. At the beginning, he drives his two kids to school, and in a homologous ending, he drives the two teenagers to the bus station.
7- Darryl Strawberry was with the Mets in 1988. He signed with the Dodgers in 1991. The movie was released in 1992. Though he had his own bout with drugs and addiction, this did not emerge until 1994. His presence in the movie is one of two signposts that refer to the real world; the other is the rape of the nun, which is based on an event that occurred in the Bronx in 1982 (Cf. Sight and Sound interview with Ferrara, 1992). The reward, in that case, was $50,000.
8- He overhears the nun in confession (a
form of auditory
voyeurism) refusing to give their names to the priest because she has
"taken the boys in," turned their sadness and bitterness into
fertility.
9- Besides the reviews, a number of interesting analyses of the film have appeared. Most commentary has contented itself with describing how Tarantino has broken molds, mixed and matched genres and paradigms in new ways, etc. In an article called "Pulp Instincts" (in Sight and Sound, vol 4(5), May 1994: 6-9), Manohla Dargis gives an interesting discussion of the notion of "pulp." Sharon Willis, in "The Father's Watch the Boys' Room" (in Camera Obscura, vol 32, Sept. 1993:41-74), gives a Lacanian discussion of several of Tarantino's films. In Internet commentary, much time is spent attempting to decipher the minutia of the movie (such as the glow from the briefcase), or to identify the other films that appear in it as cinematic quotes. There are two other articles of interest. bell hooks, "Cool Tool," in Artforum, March 1995:63-66. And Henry Giroux, "Pulp Fiction and the Culture of Violence"; The Harvard Educational Review; vol 65(2):299-314, Summer 1995. Like Willis, he deals with the violence of racist "epithets", objecting to their use on that basis alone without analyzing the nature of that use, or what it constitutes as an event beyond language and beyond simple violence.
10- Most reviews have noticed this
absence and interpreted it as
a theatrical insularity, the isolation of the film set, to create a
sense of dream sequence or ideological hermetics -- in general, a
Disneyland quality.
11- Predictably, Sharon Willis' Camera Obscura article focuses on the centrality of the bathroom, as the site of anality that "links affective release with getting caught with your pants down." And Tarantino's script lends itself to (or even petitions for) a psychoanalytic interpretation in its gangster talk, the continual juxtaposition of the bathroom and eating, the anal preservation of Butch's father's watch, the rape of Marsellus, the bathroom as the place of the body separated from the place of the word. Willis asks "why obscenity and aggression continually accumulate at the borders of racial difference." (p.60) She thus assumes, however, that racial difference is simply difference, and not a racialization of difference by one of the parties to it.
12- In Mia's bathroom, Vincent talks to
himself about not making
a play for her long enough for her to find his heroin and OD on it. In
Butch's apartment, Vincent is killed because he is in the bathroom,
unarmed, at the moment Butch arrives. In Jimmie's bathroom, while
washing their hands, both Jules and Vincent are feminized with respect
to housework, preparatory to cleaning up the car (under another man's
direction, but in a scene in which the "superego" has likewise been
feminized as the absent wife Bonnie).
13- If a derogatory term is really a form of assault, then one would think its use should be covered and punished under various criminal statues on assault. That is, it should not be covered by the First Amendment, which guarentees only freedom of speech (since it is not "speech" in the sense of signification or expression, though it is spoken). Furthermore, the use of a derogatory term is already a violation of the First Amendment, since its role is to silence the one it assaults, by removing him/her from the realm of discourse. However, it functions centrally to socially constitute a dominant group identity by its reference to the other through whom that dominant group identity is constructed. For white identity, it is the most necessary of white "speech," and remains the most essential icon of the language by which whiteness constitutes itself. In effect, its relation of the First Amendment is undecidable, through an undecidability given it by racism itself.
14- Tarantino claims that his intention
is to defuse the power of
the term. In an interview with Lisa Kennedy in The Village Voice
(Oct. 25, 1994: 32), he recognizes the violence in the term, and says
"no word should have so much power." But Sharon Willis also suggests
that this project fails in Tarantino's film. For her, it fails because
it marks a fetishism on Tarantino's part. And she quotes Todd Boyd, of
the Chicago Tribune, who says, "Tarantino sees his use of the N-word as
proof that he is conversant in the nuances of black culture" which in
turn permits one to own "one's whiteness without fear of compromise."
(p.61)
15- Tarantino knows the power of the derogatory term; he plays on that power in True Romance, when the father (Dennis Hopper) uses it to escape torture by racially taunting the gangster to kill him outright. This scene (in True Romance) is an allegory of how racism and racist derogation of black people are used to regulate power relations between whites. The act of disparagement constitutes a hegemonic interaction for which the stereotyped black becomes the language of hierarchy. It reveals that language is the source of whiteness, the source through which white identity is constructed, and given primacy over white peoples' other possible interests and desires, such as class. Whiteness becomes one's membership in a club used to hold whites hostage to hegemonic relations. This is not "divide and rule," but the supplanting of hierarchy by an invented communality. The derogatory term is a strategy, a weapon of power. And Hopper's strategy works because racialization is a the primary consideration.
16- The film actually sets up this exchangeability in the symbolism of the milkshakes: in the Diner, Mia has a choice between "Martin-and-Lewis or "Amos-and-Andy." And the farce scene of Mia's resuscitation could be read either way, as white Martin-and-Lewis, or as an Amos-and-Andy routine in whiteface.
This is not
a fanciful reading in the
sense that there are a
number of other Hollywood stereotypes that are also reversed. One such
"formula" is, for instance, that if one of a white and black pair of
supporting characters gets killed, it is the black one (Diehard II,
Eastwood's Unforgiven, Enter the Dragon). Another is the portrayal of a
black character who, like Vincent, in trying harder to affirm his being
and character, lacks imagination, leadership, or survivability in
threatening situations (Extremities).
17 - The quote goes:
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.
18- An interesting sociological aspect
of this is that with the
colors reversed, though the stereotypes become unrecognizable as such,
the film still appeals primarily to white audiences. The implication is
that, in leaving the external world out, the film induces the audience
to put it back in. That is, however deracialized the film may present
itself, the audience will reracialize it in terms of their real world.
A film could only deracialize by confronting directly the real
relationships and oppressions of racialization in the US.
19- The question of the female characters, and the structure by which masculinism defines itself through its definition of women, could be analyzed in this movie in a similar way. But it would be the subject of a different article. However, there is a sense in which the treatment of the women characters is relevant to the present discussion. On the level of social motivation, women play no role; they are most often adjuncts or props (wives, presences, furniture that moves, talks, and has to be taken care of). If Yolanda is given more than a one-dimensional character, in the Diner holdup, it is as an up-and-coming Vincent, with the factotum aspect that implies. In general, gender is an adjunct to relations between men, in which women are pre-narrativized and given exaggerated (false) deference; that is, women constitute the objects of male relations in homology to the way black people constitute the objects (and given exaggerated disrespect) that mediate relations between whites as whites.
20- bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 177
21- Sarah Kerr, "Pulp Fiction; a film by
Quentin Tarantino," in The
New York Review of Books, April 6, 1995: 22-23.
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