Read Online Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Bell Hooks - Free Book Online

rights of approval. Obviously, she didn’t. Otherwise how could it have become cinematically Ike’s story? And why do we have to hear about Larry Fishburne not wanting to do this film unless there can be changes in Ike’s character; unless that character can be softened, made to feel more human? I mean, Fuck Ike! That’s how I feel. You know, all these black people—particularly black men—have been saying to me, “Ike couldn’t have treated her that bad.” Why don’t they say, “Isn’t it tragic that he did treat her so bad?” This just goes to show you how we, as black people in this country, remain sexist in our thinking of men and women. The farcical element of this film has to do not just with the producers thinking that white people won’t take seriously a film about a black woman who’s battered and abused but that black people won’t either. So you have to make it funny. I was very frightened by the extent to which laughter circulated in that theater over stuff that wasn’t funny. That scene with her hair is so utterly farcical. The fact is that no fucking woman—including Tina Turner—is beautiful in her body when she’s being battered. The real Tina Turner was sick a lot. She had all kinds of health problems during her life with Ike. Yet the film shows us this person who is so incredibly beautiful and incredibly sexual. We don’t see the kind of contrast Tina Turner actually sets up in her autobiography between, “I looked like a wreck one minute, and then, I went on that stage and projected all this energy.” The film should have given us the pathos of that, but it did not at all because farce can’t give you the pathos of that.
MFA:
When you talk about Tina Turner going from a victimized, overworked woman, who is always sick, to an entertainer who jumps to the stage—that’s consistent with a conception of black life that goes from the cotton field to tap dancing.
bh:
Absolutely.
MFA:
Maybe we can’t imagine anything about black lives beyond that.
bh:
We can’t imagine anything else as long as Hollywood and the structures of filmmaking keep these very “either/or” categories. The Bodyguard makes a significant break with Hollywood construction of black female characters—not because Whitney Houston has sex with this white man, but because the white man, Frank Farmer, says that her life is valuable, that her life is worth saving. Traditionally, Hollywood has said, “Black women are backdrops; they’re dixie cups. You can use them and dispense them.” Now, here’s a whole film that’s saying just the opposite. Whether it’s a bad film is beside the point. The fact is, millions and millions of people around the world are looking at this film which, at its core, challenges all our perceptions of the value of not only black life but of black female life. To say that a black, single mother’s life is valuable, is really a very revolutionary thing in a society where black women who are single parents are always constructed in the public imagination as unbeautiful, unsexy, unintelligent, deranged, what have you. At the same time, the film’s overall message is paternalistic. I found it fascinating that we see Kevin Costner’s character related to God, Nation, and country.
MFA:
The same thing happened in Dances with Wolves.
bh:
And in The Crying Game, where you have white men struggling with their identity. In The Bodyguard, we’re dealing with a white boy who is the right, for God, for country but who somehow finds himself at a moment of crisis in his life—having sex, falling in love with this black woman. That’s what he needs to get himself together but once he’s together, he has to go back. So, we have the final shots in the film where he’s back with God and Nation. It’s all white. It’s all male, and of course, the film makes us feel that he’s made the right choice. He didn’t allow himself to be swept away by otherness and difference, yet the very reason this film