Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (review)

Movies appeal to and help construct our imagination, including the ways we imagine ourselves and others. And where people have few or no face-to-face encounters with people who occupy radically different social locations than themselves, the media stand in for that encounter. Because movies are profit-making enterprises, directors and producers will seek to create films with wide appeal that, thus, present viewers with stories and images they will identify with, enjoy, learn from, and find solace in. We "love" the movies in which we see our values, aesthetics, and selves reflected.

So imagine what we might learn about "white" racial desires, values, and concepts of themselves and others through examining nearly all the most highly acclaimed and popular films of the twentieth century that were directed by whites, intended for a large (white) audience, and featured white protagonists who interact with people from different racial and ethnic groups. That examination is what Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon do in Screen Saviors. Vera and Gordon's analytical foci are (1) representations of white people in film, seeking to deconstruct the "sincere fictions" of white self-concepts, and (2) representations of whites' relations with people of "another color," seeking insights into how race relations, inequalities, and solutions to such are culturally presented, produced, and reproduced. They argue that films teach whites how to be "white" while also providing "social-therapeutic devices" for coping with racial inequality without changing the status quo.

The result of collaboration between a sociologist (Vera) and a film critic (Gordon), the book combines the best of media criticism with sociological inquiry. I can often feel a little uncomfortable with research that too confidently asserts the influence of popular culture on people's mindsets, as though perception were unmediated by the experiences, insights, mental formations, and interpretive contexts of individuals. However, once I got into the substantive argument of this work, I put aside my concerns. The authors' well-designed and comprehensive methodology makes this book quite persuasive and sets it apart from other film studies of whiteness.

Vera and Gordon discuss upwards of forty-six popular films, organized by genre, including Glory,To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Mutiny on the Bounty, Amistad, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Gentleman's Agreement, Bulworth, Blazing Saddles, Men in Black, and Matrix. Each film is examined in its social-historical context, and movies based on real events are compared to the historical record. Vera and Gordon find that white people are always primary characters in these films and people of color secondary, present to love and serve whites. This is true even in films, such as Amistad, that are principally about an oppressed group and attempt to represent its members as complicated (i.e., human) characters. Furthermore, white people are consistently represented as more principled, enterprising, brave, kind, cultured, and good-looking than other peoples — in other words, racially superior. Showing us that notions of white racial superiority, if unconscious, are alive and well in U.S. culture is, in my opinion, one of the most important aspects of this text. Within sociology the tendency to emphasize white privilege as if it were material privilege alone overlooks what Cornel West calls the "existential capital" that whites gain from an inherently elevated self-concept.

Through their examinations of white fictionalizations of whiteness and race relations in popular films, the authors illustrate mainstream movies as part of the "project of racism" to shape racial consciousness and imaginaries in ways that will make a "non-racist world impossible in the future." Even as representations of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other people of color "improve" in films, they still serve the propped-up ways whites are represented and bolster imaginary solutions to inequalities that do not challenge the racial (or gender/sexual) status quo and fail to present color-blindness or cross-racial homosocial bonding...