Much more than ‘white privilege’

Following up on his critically acclaimed 2012 documentary and feature debut The Imposter, director Bart Layton made American Animals, an indie film in limited release this spring and summer, which tells the true story of four middle-class white Kentucky college students who pulled off a brazen robbery of valuable rare books from a campus library in 2004. These were kids with stable lives, skills, part-time jobs and scholarships. So, why’d they do it? Just because.

Well, there’s a little more to it than that. Though how much more — and exactly what — is up for debate. It’s clear from the film, which successfully integrates incredible acting performances (in this case, re-enacting performances) with commentary from the real-life participants, that the young men who committed this crime were disappointed and disaffected. What’s less clear-cut is what the story has to do with that buzz phrase of concepts, “white privilege.” Is white privilege the explanation for the heist? For the film? And if so, does that mean those of us who enjoyed the film, and felt sympathy and understanding for the criminals, are somehow morally culpable? Or at least displaying our blindness to the passive advantages of whiteness?

The website the Filtered Lens subtitled its review of American Animals “White Privilege, The Movie!” The review’s opening line: “White privilege is committing a serious, albeit ridiculous, crime and getting a movie made about you with charming actors chronicling your mad caper while you get to advance in your cool, trendy career.” Well, I’m not sure going back to school or becoming a personal trainer — as two of the four men have after their respective seven-months stints in federal prison — count as trendy careers, but OK.

The thing is, it’s also possible that “white privilege” is a red herring in the mystery of why these guys did what they did — and why they got a movie made about them. For as much as the unexpectedness of the crime stems from the young men’s comfortable situations and images as good kids, there’s a universality to their experience: firmly believing they are and should be considered special, then coming of age and realizing with a huge letdown that they aren’t. No one is.

Call it white fragility, but I felt the film and story captured a broadly applicable truth of growing up that transcends race, class and gender. This could be dismissed as a trite truth (one reviewer noted that film seems to have little to say beyond that “we should stop giving out trophies to everyone on the T-ball team”). Or it could be appreciated as a simple yet profound truth: transitioning to adulthood entails a degree of self-absorption and independenceseeking that ain’t always pretty to watch. And at some point, as adolescents, we’re all faced with the realization that no matter how awesome (at anything) and self-reliant we may become, it won’t be enough to fulfil us. Which is indeed a confusing and deflating disappointment.

The fact that we’re living in a social-media selfie culture is probably relevant. The pressure to imagine what attractive and superior individual image we’re projecting — and the assumption that everyone else will care — is strong. But again, some of this phenomenon also just goes with growing up. The American Animals guys may have fashioned themselves after white male Reservoir Dogs gangsters (“my least favourite Tarantino movie,” the brainiest of the four, Eric Borsuk, declares in one of the best lines of the film). Yet adolescents from other backgrounds in other circumstances

FINDING YOURSELF IS NOT AN EASY THING TO DO.

would simply have chosen other fictional antiheroes to emulate. Maybe the girls from Spring Breakers or Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas from American Gangster.

Finding yourself is not an easy thing to do. And while most kids attempt it without committing burglary, screwing it up is an almost ubiquitous experience that is hardly reserved for privileged white men. The clumsy and misguided grasping for notability and individualism on display in American Animals is not that different from what the financially struggling female title character goes through in Lady Bird, albeit she stays on the right side of the law.

It should not be surprising that “white privilege” comes up in so many reviews of American Animals, because “white privilege” comes up a lot in general these days. In some critics’ eyes, the film is a welcome condemnation of what they view as the special unspoken societal rights conferred on white men; in others’, the film’s very existence (and tone) is an example of the unearned advantage whites enjoy. This is understandable but unfortunate, as American Animals has a meaningful and enriching story to tell that deserves to be appreciated on terms much more subtle than how woke the film and its characters happen to be.