Beyond the pale: where are all the films about ‘whiteness’?
Surveying the cinematic landscape this awards season, one question keeps coming to mind: where are all the white films for white people? That might seem an odd concern to have in 2024, when white people are well represented at every major awards ceremony and the cultural event of the last 12 months was Barbenheimer, a setto between the greatest of the Great White Man biopics and a jubilant celebration of the archetypal blonde. Or it might just seem a misdirection of energies when, at long last, we also now have some serious east Asian, Black and Indigenous-centring contenders to cheer on, in the form of Past Lives, American Fiction, The Color Purple and Killers of the Flower Moon. Yet even in our racially diverse times, whiteness on screen is everywhere – and nowhere.
White people still make up the vast majority of lead characters, as well as writers, directors and execs with green-lighting power. And yet, a film or show about white people is rarely ever also aboutwhite people. Whereas a film or show that centres Black Britons or Korean Americans or Indigenous Australians is almost always about the experience of being a Black Briton or a Korean American or an Indigenous Australian. Whiteness derives its power as much from its invisibility as it does from its ubiquity, because white humans are depicted as just human – no “white” descriptor necessary – while every other race belongs to some subcategory. This allows white artists a special privilege, as film studies professor Richard Dyer pointed out in White, his 1997 text. They can “claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people can’t do that … they can only speak for their race”.
That’s why the final step towards true racial equality on screen is for whiteness to be cinematically named, described and dethroned from its “just human” position of cultural power. It’s time for white people to develop a cinema culture all of their own. Who then are the most important and influential white film-makers working today? Who speaks for the white community? Two names spring instantly to mind: Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola.
The auteurs have a lot in common beside their minimal melanin, Taurus star sign and numerous Oscar nominations. Both are admired for fussy, detail-rich aesthetics that overlap stylistically with the worlds of high fashion and magazine journalism – as in their most recent releases, Anderson’s Asteroid City and Coppola’s Priscilla. They also share many of the same favourite actors, including Asteroid City co-stars Scarlett Johansson (who starred in Coppola’s 2003 breakthrough Lost in Translation) and Jason Schwartzman (who is Coppola’s cousin, and debuted in Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore, at her suggestion). They both also make work that is often described as “white”.
For some, this quality of whiteness is defined by an exoticising, fetishistic fascination with other cultures, particularly Asian ones. For others it’s about the lack of racial diversity in their casting. This was the gag in 2015, when Whoopi Goldberg handed Schwartzman her résumé during daytime talkshow The View, saying: “I noticed there’s not a lot of folks of colour … just let [Anderson] know I’m available.”
But that’s not quite it. For one thing, there arepeople of colour in most Anderson films, such as Danny Glover, Tony Revolori, Jeffrey Wright and Steve Park. And while Coppola’s creative preoccupation with willowy white women is undeniable, she did make 2020’s On the Rocks with the biracial Rashida Jones and White Chicks’s Marlon Wayans. For another thing, choosing to tell stories mostly or exclusively about white people is hardly a distinguishing feature. Other white film-makers who do the same are too numerous to mention.
These days, smart white directors who want to avoid accidentally making a film about whiteness and getting embroiled in a race row, know to include a measure of racial diversity in their casts. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is an elegant example, featuring well-judged performances from Egyptian-American actor Ramy Youssef and Black standup Jerrod Carmichael, and thus managing to be about white people – leads Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo – but not about white people.
Emerald Fennell’s much-discussed class comedy-horror Saltburn attempts the same, through snooty cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), the film’s only significant character of colour. In one scene, Farleigh implies that racism is the real reason family patriarch Sir Catton won’t top up his trust fund, much to the horror of Catton’s heartthrob heir Felix (Jacob Elordi): “Jesus Christ, Farleigh! Seriously? Is that where you want to take this? Make it a race thing? Fuck!” His defensiveness is pretty pathetic, but we still side with the aristo-Adonis, since people this beautiful can never be blamed, and, like Felix, we didn’t know the names of the Black footmen either. How could we? They barely feature in the film! Racism is thus dismissed as a spurious sideissue, another money-grubbing grift of the grasping lower orders, all the better to focus on the film’s real concern: class.
Conversely, what makes Coppola and Anderson’s films such exemplars of white cinema has nothing to do with how they handle or mishandle race, and everything to do with how they politely sidestep the topic entirely. This might mean assiduously whitewashing the source material (Coppola’s The Bling Ring and The Beguiled). Or relocating from a racially fraught period setting to a whimsically white nostalgia-world (Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums or The Darjeeling Limited). Or inviting us to luxuriate in a specifically white form of soft femininity – that latter-day southern belle lifestyle – made possible only by the off-screen labours of Black people (Priscilla’s rarely glimpsed Graceland servants and rock’n’roll’s musical innovators). Or overlooking how the Jewish heritage of white actors such as Schwartzman and Johansson might nuance their racial identities. This is the defining irony of white film-making. The more oblivious your film is to matters of race, the whiter it plays. Because whiteness is often exactly that: the freedom not to see race, even when it’s right there in front of you.
So what are required are not just white films by white film-makers – there are, of course, already plenty – but more films capable of usefully and insightfully reflecting on whiteness.The good news is there is one such film in awards contention this year. The bad news is it took a director with the singular talent, skill and experience of Martin Scorsese to pull it off.
Killers of the Flower Moon may be Hollywood’s first truly “revisionist” western. Instead of grudgingly admitting the “Injuns” weren’t so bad after all, it actually explores the conflicted culpability of individual white Americans. This dramatisation of the real historical relationship between Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and white first world war veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) functions simultaneously as a twisted love story,acompelling crime thriller and a sophisticated allegory of settlercolonialism. What’s most radical about Killers of the Flower Moon as a piece of white film-making, though, is how it acknowledges the limitations of Scorsese’s storytelling perspective. No more claiming to speak “for the commonality of humanity”. Instead, in the way that it silences its Osage characters – literally in the case of Mollie – Scorsese’s film recognises that it is not in a position to tell their story, leaving space for Indigenous film-makers to do so instead. This is already happening, in the TV series Reservation Dogs and Gladstone’s other film of the year, the reservation drama Fancy Dance.
Ultimately, our expectation shouldn’t be that white film-makers “do better” at representation and put more people of colour in their films. Coppola, Anderson and every other independent film-maker should continue to make their films however they want to make their films and cast whomever they want. Anything else would be artistic failure.
Instead, our twofold expectation should be this: 1) The industry affords more film-makers of colour the same creative freedoms and commercial opportunities that are now afforded white film-makers, and 2) That the film culture – including the film-makers themselves – develop the confidence, insight and language to discuss and dethrone white cinema. In the meantime, I’m still holding out hope for that Whoopi-Wes collab.
Screen Deep by Ellen E Jones (Faber & Faber, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. You can hear more from Ellen E Jones as she discusses her book and the upcoming awards season in a Guardian Live event on 15 February. Tickets available here.
It is the freedom not to see race, even when it’s right in front of you