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7. Investigating the “Other”: Race and the Detective
- State University of New York Press
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189 Investigating the “Other”: Race and the Detective The first detective film with a black protagonist was R. W. Phillips’s 1918 film A Black Sherlock Holmes (Langman and Finn, Silent xv). Although the black detective may have appeared early in the history of the detective genre, this single film is an anomaly, and the black detective as a prevalent character would not emerge for another fifty years, when Sidney Poitier played Mr. Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (Jewison 1967), and it was not a regular occurrence until the 1990s. The detective film is concerned with the hero triumphing over injustice and evil, but like the majority of mainstream American film, it has been predominantly concerned with the triumph of a hero firmly distinguished as white. “Otherness” in the form of racial and ethnic difference did exist in the detective genre before the 1990s, but usually in the form of the villain or the white detective’s sidekick and, until recently, was rarely given center stage.1 As discussed in relation to the cop action film of the 1980s, mainstream cinema is predominantly concerned with white experience; nevertheless , that experience is not identified as belonging to a specific race, class, or culture and instead masquerades as the norm—as American society as a whole. The “other”—the homosexual, the foreigner, and the nonwhite—is most often cast in the role of the villain in popular film to offer an opposition to the heroism and Americanness of the protagonist. C H A P T E R S E V E N Nevertheless, as I have demonstrated in regard to the Asian and Anglicized detective, “otherness” can also be used to construct different notions of heroism—ones that combine traditional notions of American action and toughness with notions of foreign intellectualism and potential transgression. Similarly, the contemporary African-American detective is marked as “other” in the white mainstream society within the detective film, and his otherness can function like that of the Asian detective to allow him an objectivity in regard to the society from which he is excluded but which he attempts to help. The notion of the outsider stems once again from the frontier tradition and the film Western, in which the hero enters the social space at the beginning of the film to resolve a conflict and then leaves at the end, remaining an outsider to the community he has assisted. So too does the black detective enter a predominantly white social space in which a white perpetrator kills white victims. In fact, it is often his status as an outsider, his objectivity, and his specialized knowledge that give him an insight into the mystery of the identity of the killer. Even though American culture would like to present itself as a melting pot of ethnic and racial difference, contemporary popular American film still gives little screen consideration to the nonwhite and/or the nonAmerican experience and, even when it does, the representations are often problematic.2 Manthia Diawara states that white people occupy the center in mainstream film and that blacks only exist in relation to whites: “Thus space is related to power and powerlessness, in so far as those who occupy the center of the screen are usually more powerful than those situated in the background or completely absent from the screen” (“American” 11). Nonwhite individuals, when absent from the screen, are then absent from the image of America constructed by Hollywood, and when present are less powerful and less “virtuous” than the white individuals occupying the center. Lola Young argues that in mainstream cinema race is used in a much more conscious way by Hollywood to construct an “otherness” to white in a set of binary oppositions. Black is then evil and alien; white is good, pure, and normal (39). Often positive images of racial “otherness” in mainstream cinema tend to be merely token representations as opposed to representations that truly address the specificity of the black experience. As David Molden states: African Americans are tired of the same types of films depicting us in a negative lifestyle. This is such a small picture of Black America. 190 DETECTING MEN [3.92.130.77] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:24 GMT) The Black middle and upper classes—educated and employed—have grown by leaps and bounds. [. . .] Furthermore, all other ethnic groups would be likely to support our work if we stopped always presenting African Americans as inept, ghetto-ridden, down-trodden and...