What I do remember extremely well, was what struck me as a relatively positive lesbian love scene involving Whoopi Goldberg and I am struck by Bobo's refusal to acknowledge that moment once in her essay. Within the context of mainstream cinema in the 1980s, a love scene between two black women strikes me as incredibly shocking and noteworthy. Taken on its own, outside of the context of the film, as a mere set-piece, it serves as a firm rebuke to most contemporary mainstream portrayals of homosexuals, male or female, or black women, gay or straight. After glancing at some of Bobo's analyses of the changes in dialogue between Walker's novel and Spielberg's film, it's unclear how much of Walker's original dialogue was "act-able." It may have read well on the page, but could it have been well-communicated by any actor?
Where I do think she may have hit her mark was in her descriptions of the rapes and near-rapes of the film. I've been frustrated for years by rape scenes thrown in almost lazily by screenwriters to move a story along. I've known rape victims who spend years in counseling, having suffered their own form of PTSD. The casual use of Danny Glover's sexual predatory nature doesn't so much excuse his behavior as minimize the horror of rape, though I wonder if Spielberg felt that a truly honest depiction would have turned the film into a piece of unwatchable porn.
yes, bobo backs off of the sexuality issue, and not surprising, as a major critique of the film by the gatekeepers of black propriety was its anger over the same sex connotations. a large part of the outrage, and walker herself has said this, was that it was a film of "negative" representations. i think an interesting paper would be one that looks at all three forms -- the musical, film, and book. in light of the richard dyer piece on car wash, i wonder how the musical "worked" as meaningful text -- if it was better or worse then the movie (since it likely goes without saying that it would not be better than the book).
ReplyDeletethank you so much for your engagement with the material!