The Green Book and BlacKkKlansman – Dreaming about Race

We recently went to see The Green Book at a Saturday matinee at a “sort of” alternate movie house in one of the close in suburbs to our city.  The crowd was mostly older – the place was nearly sold out – and it was almost all white.  The crowd seemed to enjoy the movie – and I certainly did.  It was a feel good film that felt genuinely good.  I was willing to overlook a couple of minor continuity problems to just plain enjoy it.  Which shouldn’t have surprised me.  One of the reasons that we went to see it was that Wesley Morris reviewed it for the New York Times and he, like others, was decrying it for being too “feel good”.   Peter Farrelly’s Direction (he of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary fame) is up against Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman) for the directorial Oscar.  Morris is convinced that Farrelly with win because he has made a film that makes us feel good about race (the way Driving Miss Daisy did – a film that won four Oscars in 1989 – while Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing that was nominated for two in the same year, won none).  Morris’s thesis is that history will repeat itself with the Oscar’s as Farrelly’s film is a feel good film about race while BlacKkKlansman does not leave you feeling so good.

What leads to the difference between the two films?  This time, Spike Lee has tried to make a feel good film – spoiler alert – the bad guys blow themselves up and the most racist guy on the police force gets set up in the ending to the film and is headed to the pokey with no parole – but the film does not have a feel good vibe.  I think that this is because the films are both dreams – dreams about race – but they are dreamt by very different people.  The dream of BlacKkKlansman is the dream of a black man – the script is adopted from the memoir of the first black police officer on a particular police force – Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington).  The story begins with him and it is largely told through his eyes.  It is also directed by Spike Lee who wants us to know that racism is not dead.  More centrally, he wants to communicate what it feels like to live in a racist country, and he dips into a(nother) period of blatant racism (his final montage is of the Charlottesville Unite the Right march and Trump’s pronouncements about it) in order to help us feel what it feels like to be a black man living in a racist era.

Not so in the Green Book.  We start here with the prejudiced white guy.  While the story is largely centered on  Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a classically trained and effete jazz pianist, we start by being introduced to Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) a New York Italian muscle head who works as a bouncer at the Copa Cabana.  Laid off for eight weeks while the club is remodeled, he is hired by Shirley to be his body guard as Shirley and his trio go on a tour of the segregated Deep South.  Tony Lip is a bullshitter (thus his nickname) and he is deeply connected with his family – he is devoted to his wife and two boys and he is connected with his in-laws, talking to them on a daily basis.  His family connections are contrasted with the isolation of Shirley, who is portrayed as living in a strange nether world, estranged from his living brother, cut off from black culture by virtue of having been raised in Russia after he was discovered to be a piano prodigy when he was four, then cut off from classical playing when he returned to the states as he was told that whites would not believe a black could play classical music.  This film, like BlacKkKlansman, dips into a clearly racist time and starkly racist part of the country to help us feel something very different than what Lee would have us feel – to feel hopeful about the possibility of warm and close relationships across racial lines.

Both of these films, ironically then, are buddy films.  BlacKkKlansman jolts along with the two buddies at the center of it – two cops – one black and one Jewish (Ron Stallworth's partner, Philip "Flip" Zimmerman is played by Adam Driver) figuring out how to confront each other but also how to connect with each other.  But their relationship is far from smooth – the black cop is the first black cop on the force and the Jewish guy is conflicted about, surprise surprise, Doing the Right Thing.  It has been some time since I saw BlackKklansman, but my memory of it is that the leader in this pair is Stallworth.  He confronts Zimmerman about his Jewishness in order to help him realize that bringing in the Klan would be a good thing.  Both he and Zimmerman are “passing” – Zimmerman as a goy both at the department and then with the Klan – Stallworth as a non-cop with his girlfriend who is advocating for black overthrow of the power establishment.  In this film about identity, the two main protagonist’s are pretending to be someone they are not.  Then, in the center of the film, they together impersonate Ron Stallworth who interacts on the phone with the voice of the “real” Ron Stallworth and, in person, in the form of Zimmerman.

Green Book is also a buddy film; one of the road trip variety.  Is there any better place to get to know someone than on a long road trip?  There is nothing to do but talk.  That said, the hierarchy in this film, with Shirley as the employer, does contribute a bit of tension at the beginning.  In part because of Tony Lip’s comfort with who he is, which is largely based on his being a member of a close knit and very white, if not a completely assimilated American family (Italian is still spoken among the family members), Tony reaches across the aisle to push Shirley – to get Shirley, whom Tony does not see as being black enough, to try fried chicken – for instance.  But the emphasis in this film is not on the differences – when Tony Lip runs into some mob friends who want to hire him away from Shirley when they are in Atlanta – Shirley who, unbeknownst to Vallelonga is fluent in Italian peeps him out – and when Shirley himself is caught – again spoiler alert – in an anonymous YMCA tryst – Tony Lip finesses what could have been a game changer by referring to his knowledge of the complications he has seen in show business – these men are portrayed as working primarily to understand and help each other.  I think the basis for the difference in the "feel" of the two films is that each of these men is working from a sense of comfort with who it is that he is, while those in BlackKklansman are essentially anxious about their identities.

Both movies are nominally based on actual events.  Both movies take significant liberties with those events.  Lee heightens the drama of the resolution to the KKK case considerably and makes up the bad cop being sent away out of whole cloth.  Stallworth's character has never gone public for fear of KKK retribution, so he is made Jewish by Lee for effect.  Meanwhile, Farrelly embroiders Shirley’s isolation – setting up his being embraced not just by Vallelonga but by Vallelonga’s family.  Both films, then, are visions, dreams, fantasies of what a particular cross racial resolution could look like.  Both include comfort on the part of whites.  The white police force and the white David Duke led KKK are quite comfortable in Klansman, and the Italians – Tony Lip, but the whole clan – are quite comfortable in Green Book (not to mention all the whites that the pair come across in the south – while the blacks are seen hoeing bedraggled soil).  The blacks are uncomfortable in both films.  Stallworth needs to be constantly on his guard – and Shirley is portrayed as isolated and needing support (even as he teaches Tony Lip how to write a proper love letter and is working from a position of cultural superiority).

In both films the discomfort – the thing that the dream needs to address and to process – is experienced by the black protagonist.  In both films the transformative move needs to be made by the black man.  They need to move into the white world in order to be right.  When that move is portrayed from the perspective of the black man, it is an uncomfortable dream – I have to alter the world or the way that I see it in order to live successfully in it.  This is an unpleasant experience – whether I have to incite a riot – as Lee did in Do the Right Thing – or whether Stallworth has to make the white establishment uncomfortable by bringing down the KKK and making his black girlfriend uncomfortable by being an agent of the establishment.  This dream (Lee's/Stallworth's/the viewer's) is a transformative dreams.  These are the kind of dreams we look for in psychoanalysis.  They lay the ground work for our becoming different people.  In analysis, we are looking for someone to give up an immature attachment and become more mature.  But these are not comfortable dreams to have - they involve turmoil and loss as well as promise of something new.  When the dream is the dream of the white man, the discomfort is minor – the black will make the changes in the world or in themselves that will allow them to come into my world.  This will shake me up a bit – I will have to manage my prejudice in new ways – but the vast majority of my world will be unchanged.  That dream feels much better.  It is a dream of reassurance – including that this person whom I thought was my enemy can be my friend – and whether in the guise of Driving Miss Daisy or the Green Book it is a much more comfortable perspective – a wish fulfilling perspective rather than a paradigm threatening one.  We don’t have to wake – as we do with a Lee film – we can stay comfortably asleep.

I was at a panel yesterday at the American Psychoanalytic Association where three black women and a black man were presenting on the subjectivity of being black.  They talked about many things and, at the end of the talk, the first response was from a white man.  I frankly did not understand all that took place, but in his attempt to welcome the panel into his world, the panelists took offense.  When he asked to clarify what he intended, the moderator would not let him do that until after all of the other questions were addressed.  The issue as they described it – I think – was something like who gets to stand where as what.  And they were asserting their ability to stand as black men and women at the podium and to determine what and how the world would be understood.  This was an uncomfortable moment for all – and one that the moderator – a psychoanalyst – was encouraging us to sit with.  It brought into the moment – in the way that happens in the best psychoanalytic moments – an alive moment of affect – of emotion.  And it was therefore pregnant with the discomfort that might lead to changing not just a thought - but something deeper - something in the gut.

Ultimately I think that the question of whom the Academy graces the Oscar to hinges largely on the willingness of the largely white academy to sit with the discomfort of a dream that is asking us to wake up – to realize what it means to live in discomfort and to realize the cost of change – to realize how difficult it will be to live in a multicultural world – versus supporting a dream that allows us to stay asleep - comfortable in the knowledge that this will always be a white man's world and those who want to enter it will have to do the changing. 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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