Ironically Producing Race and Gender

Sharon Willis responds energetically to an American cultural preoccupation with difference, examining recent Hollywood films with the double aim of analyzing traffic between racial and sexual differences and restoring political understanding to social dif ferences often seen as merely artistic variety. Willis’s extensive knowledge of cinematic and cultural practices informs her reading of the way in which films gather together certain expectations of gender, race, and sexuality while simultaneously rewrit ing and reshaping them. Enriched by her awareness of politics, these readings of the obvious and the banal analyze the interactions and meanings between multiple competing discourses such as: large budget studio and “independent” auteur productions, publ ic and private understandings, culturally reinforced fantasies and anxieties, gendered expectations and sexual difference, race and ethnicity possibilities, and the relations of identity, identifications, and subjectivity. In High Contrast: Race and G ender in Contemporary Hollywood Film, Willis explores complex rival images and mutual interdependencies in order to pursue her interest in “everyday representational moments of negotiation where one difference is made to stand in for, to do the job of, to trivialize or eclipse, the others” (6). This is important work and she does not come to it naively. Recognizing pitfalls that await any cultural critic, Willis is self-reflective. She raises concerns about her own engagement “in the impossible eff ort to stop time,” about her own idiosyncratic choices, and about her own anxieties over whether or not her writing reflects an unconscious borrowing of surprise and violence from that which it describes (8). Perhaps more importantly, she acknowledges he r worry over what escapes her—“even as and because” it captures her (9). In short, her self-reflective project explores race and gender difference as it is ambivalently and violently encountered and produced by both films and spectators. She tel ls us, her readers, “what we are working not to know” about cinematic and, therefore, cultural practices (24).

Following her introduction, which includes a discussion of The Crying Game and Falling Down, Willis pursues her analysis on two fronts, devoting three chapters to each. The first front, Part I: “Battles of the Sexes,” examines stable and fl uctuating hetero-normative expectations of masculinity and femininity in the culture, in the characters, and in the spectators of particular big budget Hollywood films and pursues them in relation to race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. The films discu ssed include: the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon films, Fatal Attraction, Someone to Watch Over Me, Sea of Love, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Basic Instinct, Thelma and Louise, and Terminator 2. In this section, gender conflict is isolated and used as a lens to refract other social differences. Notions produced by sexuality are discussed as embedded in a cultural dependence upon race for self-definitions. In an effort to “disrupt the ways th at whiteness appears as seamlessly bonded to gender and, therefore, to have no impact upon it,” Willis argues that the various elements of identity or identification can only be considered as co-constituative relations (21–22).

The second front, Part II: “Ethnographies of the ‘White’ Gaze,” confines itself to the oxymoron of the mass distribution “independent” films of David Lynch, Spike Lee, and Quentin Tarantino, while it examines authorial style and the factors of audience pr oduction. Here Willis explores the work done by the notion of race for both the directors and their audiences—especially as it relates to gender, sexuality, sensuality, myth, and fantasy—in an effort to “discern the social side of style” (22). Her con cern is with certain mutually informing and reciprocally shaping structures, in particular: the erratic and overlapping boundaries and intersections between fantasies wrongly presumed to belong only to either the public or the private sphere.

While readers who have not seen the films or who are unfamiliar with the directors are likely to feel left out of some discussions, Willis’s work on the intersection of race and gender in contemporary culture is, nevertheless, theoretically rich and compe lling. In her careful analysis, Willis knowledgeably deploys a diverse...