The Poitier Effect by Sharon Willis (review)

Sharon Willis has written a taut and insightful book concerning race representation in cinema and a device she terms "the Poitier effect." Willis, a professor of art history at the University of Rochester, has written extensively on race and gender representation in cinema, including High Contrast: Race and Gender in Popular Film (Duke UP, 1997). She states that the origin of The Poitier Effect began in her childhood television viewing—in particular, news coverage of the 1960s civil rights movement.

Willis opens by defining the Poitier effect as "a defense, or a compensatory gesture, averting or deflecting the possibility of a kind of critical thinking that would involve a serious reciprocal interracial exchange, instead offering a fantasy of racial understanding and 'assimilation' that requires no effort on the part of white people" (5). Simply put, the Poitier effect averts reality and offers fantasy.

Willis partitions her book into four chapters, examining three films from the 1960s starring Sidney Poitier, three nostalgic films produced during the 1990s, Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven (2002), and finally, Kasi Lemmons's Talk to Me (2007).

In the first chapter, Willis draws on three films starring Sidney Poitier and discusses the historical context in which they occur. This chapter functions to directly observe the Poitier effect in action. For instance, in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967, dir. Stanley Kramer), Poitier plays a young black suitor who has come to ask for the hand of his white girlfriend. Poitier must convince both his parents and his girlfriend's parents that this is an ideal arrangement. By the end of the film, Poitier is successful, and all parties are satisfied, albeit reluctantly. Willis claims that Poitier performs the role of ambassador between whites and blacks, that he achieves a sort of racial reconciliation, and that by the end he passes through this white world. The audience leaves the film feeling that "we can all get along." For Willis, it is the melodramatic form (emphasis on feeling and emotion) that keeps the audience from thinking critically about the greater social context of the film. Willis extends her argument concerning an "obsessive sameness" that arises in Poitier's roles in large part due to the demands of the melodramatic form.

Chapter 2 concerns applying the Poitier effect to three films from the 1990s: The Long Walk Home (1990, dir. Richard Pearce), Love Field (1992, dir. Jonathan Kaplan), and Pleas-antville (1998, dir. Gary Ross). Here, Willis considers the ramifications of a wished-for history where a central protofeminist character bridges the gap between whites and blacks. Her reading of Love Field is particularly engaging in generating associations between televised events such as JFK's assassination and the central character, depicted by Michelle Pfeiffer. Willis also notes that racist behavior is displaced onto the uneducated, lower class in a manner that revises historical fact and helps alleviate any sense of guilt the audience might hold. This chapter is the strongest in the book in that it investigates the impulse toward retelling historical events through a contemporary perspective and the problems that arise from this impulse.

In chapter 3, Willis turns her gaze toward Haynes's Far from Heaven. The film is a reworking of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Willis notes, "Like Sirk's work, Far from Heaven exploits the layered texture of melodramatic form to elaborate both affect and irony" (153). Willis observes that despite telling stories of parallel taboo sexual relationships (homosexual and interracial), Far from Heaven makes use of irony and affect in articulating oppressed homosexual coupling but fails to employ irony regarding the interracial coupling of Cathy and Raymond. Instead, the film remains at the surface of black culture and lacks any contextualized understanding of what motivates Raymond. "Tellingly, because the film never clarifies Raymond's motives, it limits the story it can tell about him to the curiosity he provokes in Cathy and to the vague analogies through which she tries to imagine his world. Raymond's story, then, faithfully reproduces...