The history of representation of Black characters on film has gone through a number of stages, as follows:
1) No representation. At least none featuring actual Black actors. You wanted a Black character, you put a white actor in blackface. Think Birth of a Nation.
2) Careless representation featuring many stereotypes. Black actors could appear in movies, but they were maids, butlers, criminals, or any other member of society considered lowly by the white ruling class. Sadly this goes all the way from around Gone With the Wind through the 1970s, with some notable exceptions.
3) Overly generous representation that bends over backwards to apologize for previous negligence. This is the phase where if a Black character appeared on screen, he or she was upstanding or saintly or a nuclear physicist or in some other way defied the cruel stereotypes of the past. This was a step in the right direction but was problematic in its own ways.
4) The current phase. In this phase, a Black actor can play anybody: a character previously conceived of as white (like a comic book hero), a character in a historical setting in which there were only white people around, or -- and I think this is the crucial one -- a villain.
I think most people can confirm the general accuracy of this arc and can appreciate that each stage is a step forward from the previous one. But that's not to say that even our current, most enlightened phase doesn't come with its own challenges. And even as I talk about these challenges, I expect to stumble over them and am wary of my chances of getting out exactly what I want to say.
It's the villain part I'm worried about.
In a way, it is a sign of ultimate progress that a Black character can go back to being a villain -- as long as it is not the sort of villain that screenwriters wrote carelessly back in Stage 2. The sort of villain I think of as dying out around the time of the 1987 Christopher Reeve movie Street Smart, which I wrote about here.
No, we don't want some villainous pimp played by a Black actor, or if we are going to go that way, it has to be one villainous Black pimp in a movie with six heroic Black pimps.
But what kind of Black villain do we want?
It's something I intend to explore over the course of three movies I've seen during the last month, though in each instance, you could argue whether this character is actually the villain, merely villain-adjacent, or the end product of greater villainy. And it's been inspired by hearing the Slate Culture Gabfest do a spoiler discussion of the first movie I'm going to discuss, Men -- a discussion I avoided months ago since I hadn't seen the movie, and to which I have now circled back.
1. Men
Since I've already given the spoiler warning, I can tell you something you probably already know, you discerning cinephile who has probably already seen Men: It's basically a two-hander between Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear, with Buckley playing the main character and Kinnear playing almost every other character. There are two other female actors who have smaller roles, and there's one other male actor, seen only in flashback: Buckley's character's dead husband, played by Paapa Esiedu. He's the actor of color, as you might have guessed.
It's unclear whether the film sees him as the villain in the end, which was one of the issues the Culture Gabfesters had with Garland's strangled, possibly misogynistic message. But using all available traditional signifiers, he's shit. He's clearly unstable, as the arguments we see with her show. She wants to leave him, and his response is to threaten suicide. In another argument immediately preceding his death, he hits her -- an action he immediately regrets, but she goes off on him and kicks him out of their apartment. It's moments later that he dies, though the movie leaves it ambiguous whether he jumped off the roof or fell while trying to climb down into their apartment from the floor above. Neither reflects particularly well on him -- either it's the culmination of the threat he used to manipulate her into not leaving him, or he's making a dangerous assault on the privacy she justifiably requested after he hit her.
2. Sissy
In this movie, the title character is a woman played by Aishee Dee, the grown-up version of a girl nicknamed Sissy as an abbreviation of her given name, Cecilia. She's become a successful social media influencer, but she's never gotten over the betrayal of her best friend Emma when she was younger. The younger Sissy was already showing psychopathic tendencies, which manifested themselves in other 12-year-olds not relating to her, and her clinging too dearly to Emma. When Emma found a different best friend, a best friend who also bullied Sissy, Sissy ended up stabbing the bully in the cheek with a gardening trowel.
When they are both adults, after years of not seeing each other, Emma runs into Cecilia in a pharmacy and invites her to her bachelorette party weekend, where Cecilia is responsible for the deaths of multiple others at the party -- each sort of by accident, but each in a way that might have been avoided if she weren't, you know, crazy.
3. Enola Holmes 2
This one is kind of the ultimate realization of Stage 4, where actress Sharon Duncan-Brewster is revealed -- remember my spoiler warning -- as Moriarty, the rival to Sherlock Holmes, with her name (Mira Troy) being an anagram of that name. Moriarty was, of course, never envisioned as a Black woman by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but that's kind of the point of this newest phase of representation, to question our assumptions and to expand the limitations of literature as it was conceived more than a century ago.
Points for the fact that Moriarty is the smartest person in the room -- even outwitting Holmes, who is like the smartest person ever -- but detract points for the fact that Moriarty is basically the personification of evil. At least as envisioned here, she does wicked and cruel things for sport. She orchestrates deaths and deceptions and might actually cackle if that weren't deemed a too on-the-nose depiction of villainy.
Each portrayal is worth lauding in some respect, but each is also problematic. And each gives ammunition to a racist in the audience who is inclined to believe the worst about a person whose skin is darker than his. (Or hers. Women can be racists too.)
In Men, we have a person who embodies weakness of character. Hitting a domestic partner is pretty much the ultimate sign of weakness, but the mind games this man plays are even worse. He's basically blackmailing his wife into staying with him, telling her that if he kills himself, it will be her fault. He's gambling that having such a tragedy on her conscience will keep her from leaving. Whether he was bluffing or not, we don't know, because he might have actually fallen. But the impact of his rash action -- whether that action is killing himself or trying to climb down the side of a building -- is the same. He's basically decided that if his life is ruined, he'll do his damnedest to ensure hers will be too.
Sissy thinks it's getting away with something here I think, because in the immortal words of Chris Rock in one of his earliest comedy albums, "Blacks aren't crazy." Because mental illness is not traditionally one of the negative character traits a racist might ascribe to a Black person, the depiction here of a mentally unstable Black central character is, in its way, defying stereotypes. But it's also exceptionally cruel from a filmmaking perspective, in part because it doesn't seem like a natural outgrowth of the young Sissy, whom we meet on old video tapes she watches. Played by actress April Blasdall, the young Sissy is sweet and adorable and doesn't seem in the least like a person who could generate, and then hold onto, psychopathic rage. This portrayal then has a credibility problem, and as with the character in Men, we ask: Why did the filmmakers choose to make the Black girl crazy? Was it something more than race blind casting?
Enola Holmes 2 might be the least offender, but it also gives us the only character who has complete agency over her villainy. She's not the product of bullying or a possible immigrant in an interracial marriage who might have cracked under the strictures of white patriarchy. This is a puppetmaster whose machinations are utterly premeditated, making her actually malicious. The filmmakers hope that by crediting her with genius-level intelligence, they are also avoiding the pitfalls of racial stereotyping. But anyone who is inclined to think that Blacks are scheming and conniving and hiding behind a shield of fraudulent victimhood need look no further than Moriarty to find support of their toxic thought processes.
Now it should be said that a racist is going to use whatever evidence that suits him (or her) to reinforce his (or her) worldview. If we try to make Black villains beyond reproach, we are moving back to Stage 3, where they aren't really even villains anymore. And even then we aren't really helping change the mind of a racist.
But I still insist that something doesn't sit as comfortably as it should about any of these portrayals.
Of course this whole discussion is a product of excessive thinking -- some might say over-thinking. The excessive thinking that governs our entire discourse about race today is, itself, a reaction to the failure to do so before now. The whole idea of being woke is to analyze representation in such a way as to find its shortcomings and to improve upon them. In the past, no one would have given these characters a second thought -- but then again, they likely wouldn't have had these undeniably complicated characters to consider in the first place.
So it goes back to the question:
What kind of Black villain do we want?
I don't know that I have the answer for this.
It should be said that in each of these cases, there is a potentially worse villain. In Men, most of the most malevolent behavior is given to Kinnear's character, even if he might ultimately be imaginary, some sort of manifestation of the main character's trauma over the death of her husband. In Sissy, we're supposed to end up hating the white bully the most, because not only did she trigger Sissy when she was younger, but it's her failure to bury the hatchet that causes the bachelorette party to go off the rails. In EH2, a white factory owner is ultimately arrested for his nefarious role in knowingly using phosphorous that was fatally poisoning the girls who worked in his match factory.
But I'd be lying if I didn't say that I lingered on the three portrayals of the Black villains -- that should be an obvious statement given how much I've just written about them.
I think there is a Stage 5 in this trajectory toward greater enlightenment, though it's a pie-in-the-sky stage that will take a lot longer to arrive:
5) Forgetting about race entirely when watching movie characters.
And this one will be truly hard to attain, but it's out there, somewhere, as a potential endpoint to this whole discussion. If we can one day slough off all our preconceived baggage about skin color and how to justly portray characters who have that skin color, it might one day truly not matter who plays what role, and what the filmmakers may be saying -- even if accidentally -- by making such choices.
I'd like to get this stage because I don't want to have to think about this stuff each time a casting director makes choices like they made in Men, Sissy and Enola Holmes 2. These were commendable choices with excellent intentions, choices made with the aim of getting us to Stage 5 sooner. If no one makes these choices, we truly won't ever get there.
Until then, though, there'll be a fine line to walk between putting characters of color on a pedestal, and making them guilty of craven things that remind bad people of their oldest and deepest prejudices.
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