You’ve probably seen the arty Levi’s jeans commercial on TV: black and white images of fireworks and people running and jumping, and random words scribbled on the bottom of the screen. One of the last images is of an interracial couple smooching. And then we see a banner: “Go forth.”
We have indeed gone forth. A few decades ago no American company would have risked alienating potential customers by showing a white girl kissing a black guy. Now racism is simply uncool. We may congratulate ourselves.
But let’s not overdo it. “The Blind Side” overdoes it. The movie tells the story of Michael Oher, an offensive lineman on the Baltimore Ravens. Oher grew up in Memphis, a super-sized black kid with no father and a mother who was too wasted to take care of him. He bounced from house to house and sofa to sofa and school to school, missing more classes than he attended.
Then he caught a couple of breaks. First, a private school took a chance on him because the football coach liked his size. Then, a white family took a chance on him, inviting him into their family simply because he had no other place to go. With a lot of love, coaching and tutoring, Oher gets his academic and football skills together, gets into a big-time football school and gets taken in the first round of the NFL draft.
It’s an irresistible tale, but also a disturbing one. Just about every black person we meet is poor and doing drugs. Michael’s mother is a mess. The implication seems to be that the only way for a black kid not to wind up poor, drug-addled and dead is to get adopted by a white family.
Then there’s Michael himself. The movie bends over backwards to make the point that Michael isn’t stupid, just uneducated. But then it humiliates him by showing his much younger “brother” whipping him into physical shape and teaching him the rudiments of football. So clueless is he about the game that will bring him fame and fortune that he doesn’t understand that an offensive lineman is supposed to protect the quarterback until his “mom,” played Sandra Bullock, instructs him to pretend the QB is her. Stardom immediately follows.
Many of these enculturation scenes are funny and tender. Taken together, though, they create a portrait of young Michael Oher as a cross between King Kong, Frankenstein, Lenny in “Of Mice and Men” and the Noble Savage. He’s the wild man who needs only to be tamed, the gentle giant who wants only to be loved. Call it the white man’s burden redux.
Those who loved the movie will object: It’s a true story. Michael Oher’s mother was a crackhead. He was taken in by a white family. He was uneducated. There are poor blacks in Memphis.
Doesn’t matter. This is storytelling. Storytellers highlight certain aspects of situations and ignore others. The movie deviates in small ways from the book by Michael Lewis on which it is based. (I haven’t read the book, but I read an excerpt that was published in The New York Times Magazine.) The book surely deviates from the reality in small ways.
When I watched the recent Ravens-Steelers game on TV, the commentators mentioned that the only thing Oher didn’t like about the movie is that he knew a lot more about football than the movie suggests. And are we to believe that Michael experienced no hostility from his white schoolmates at the private school? We don’t see any.
Stories send messages that transcend the specifics of plot. Movies, in particular, with their on-location scenes, have this hyper-real quality. When we see the housing project where Michael had been staying before he goes home with the Tuohy family, we don’t see it as a stage set or even as the place where Michael was living. We see it as a statement about reality: This is how blacks live in Memphis. The particulars get universalized. And every long-standing stereotype of African-American life gets reinforced.
The interesting thing is, I kind of liked this movie. (There were schizoid moments when I was dabbing my eyes and rolling them at the same time.) Everyone likes it. Box office-wise, “The Blind Side” is something of a surprise blockbuster.
We love that the white family sees Big Mike as a needy kid rather than as a potential thug. We love the way his white “mom” stands up to her racist friends who thinks she’s crazy, to the black guys in the ‘hood who resent Michael’s good fortune and to the rednecks who haven’t gotten the memo that racism is now uncool. We love ourselves for rooting for this once-unthinkable arrangement to work out so splendidly for all concerned.
And there’s the rub. You’ve got to be wary of any movie that leaves you feeling smug. Sorry, America, but having benevolent feelings about blacks is not the same as seeing them as equals.
Loved it? Hated it? Russell Frank wants to know. Write to rfrank@psu.edu.
