Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (7 page)

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Authors: Bell Hooks

BOOK: Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics)
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MFA:
Camille Billops’s film Finding Christa addresses that. Talk about revolutionary. A woman—Billops herself—does something for the sake of her art very few of us would ever think of doing: give her young daughter up for adoption. And then, twenty years later, far from denying anything, instead celebrates it all over again through the making of the film. Finding Christa is a very troubling and interesting film.
bh
I think it was disturbing on a number of levels. It’s interesting that we can read about men who have turned their back on parenting to cultivate their creativity and their projects and no one ever thinks it’s horrific, but a lot of us, including myself, were troubled by what we saw in Camille Billops’s film. This woman went to such measures to ensure that she had the space to continue being who she wanted to be, and at the same time, it felt very violent and very violating of the daughter. I’ve always liked Camille Billops’s films. Suzanne Suzanne is one of my favorite films because more than any other films by independent black filmmakers, she really compels people to think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people. We’re not used to women artists of any race exerting that kind of relationship to art.
MFA:
Billops did what she thought she had to do. You know, “A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.”
bh:
It’s funny. I was reading this interview with Susan Sarandon about Thelma and Louise, another very powerful film that turns into a farce.
MFA:
Thelma and Louise is a reactionary film. The women might be feisty for a while but at the end they’ve got to off themselves. These women would have been heroic if they’d refused to disappear. Imagine the story of two male outlaws who, when the going gets tough decide to hold each other’s hand and dive into oblivion. How cool is that? But somehow it is cool to think of women disappearing, killing themselves. Maybe it’s a collective unconscious wish.
bh:
But there is this one scene at the beginning. When Susan Sarandon’s character says, “When a woman is crying, she’s not having a good time.” There is that sense that she doesn’t shoot him because of the attempted rape, she shoots him because of his complete and utter fucking indifference. In that moment, a lot of men saw how this indifference fucking hurts, but then, it’s all undermined by everything that happens after that scene. That’s the tragedy of Thelma and Louise: it doesn’t offer empowerment by the end, it’s made feminism a joke, it’s made rebellion a joke, and in the traditional patriarchal manner, it’s made death the punishment.
MFA:
Yet many feminists—lesbian and straight—stood up and cheered when the two protagonists decide to commit suicide.
bh:
Filmmaker Monika Treut said something similar to what I’m about to say, which is that if people are starving and you give them a cracker they’re not going to say, “Gee, this cracker is limited. It’s not what I deserve. I deserve a full meal.” As a feminist, I think it’s pathetic that people want to cheer Thelma and Louise, a film so narrow in its vision, so limited. But I hear that from black people about black films that I critique: This is all we have. So, we’ve got to celebrate something magical and transformative in a film and at the same time discuss it critically.
MFA:
Artist Lawrence Weiner calls that flirting with madness.
bh:
A lot of women have found themselves falling into madness when the world does not recognize them and they cannot recognize themselves in the world. This is exemplified in the lives of people like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston. That’s because there’s a lot that happens to women of all races—and black women in particular—who become stars. There’s envy. I was just home recently at a family reunion, and people said such mean and brutal things to me that I started to think, “What’s going on here?” And my brother said that a lot of what’s going on here is envy. There’s a part of me that says, “I don’t want to go further with my life, further with my creativity, because if people envy me, they’ll torture me.” It’s not so much a sense of not being able to handle anything; it’s a sense of not being able to handle torture. We hear all these statistics about how many women are raped and beaten every so many seconds yet when we talk about having fear in patriarchy, we’re made to feel that that’s crazy. What incredible women today—especially those who are feminists—aren’t talked about in many contexts as mad? We fall into periods of critical breakdown, because we often feel there is no world that will embrace us.
MFA:
When I think about madness, I am reminded of R. D. Laing who said that one’s self is an illusion; that we hallucinate the abyss, but that we can also make this leap of faith that the abyss is perfect freedom—that it won’t lead to self-annihilation or destruction but the exact opposite.
bh:
I think the reality is that the world exists only inasmuch as people like us make it. So, I don’t want to suggest that we can’t have it. We have to make it. However, if I am lured into thinking that because everyone’s bought my books and I’ve got these reviews, there’s already a place—that’s where I could get really screwed. You can go crazy looking for these people who bought your books, wrote reviews and said you were a great thinker, or da-da-da-da-da. I think that’s where envy comes in. That’s why the movie Amadeus was so fascinating because it says that sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist. That’s why Madonna, who is one of the most powerful, creative women in the United States today, has reinvented her public image to be that of the subordinate, victimized woman. In a sense, it allows her to exist without horror. What would really be going on for Madonna if she was putting forth an image that said: “I’m so powerful, I’m going to recover myself. I’m going to deal with the childhood abuse that happened in my life, and I’m going to continue to creatively imagine ways for women to be sexually free”? I think she would be a much more threatening image than she is in some little-girl pornographic shoot in Vanity Fair. Such images allow her to be bought and dismissed.
MFA:
Perhaps it’s a conscious strategy on her part: One soothing little girl photo session, then bam—she breaks or at least confronts a new taboo.
bh:
Sandra Bernhard is another creative woman who has struggled with questions of transgression and has broken new ground. I just finished reading her book, Love, Love, Love. There’s something particularly exciting in the way she toys with notion of difference, the way she problematizes black female and white female relations, and the way she talks about traditional seduction and gaslighting sexuality—capturing and conquest.
MFA:
Which is a concept—to seduce and betray—that comes back a lot in your own work.
bh:
I used to have this friend, we always wrote about movies in our journals—discussions of different movies. One of the things we wrote about was a discussion about gaslighting and how in the great gaslighting films of Hitchcock there was always some attempt at reconciliation, whereas now we get gaslighting films like Jagged Edge where no order is restored by the end of the film. There is not restoration of harmony that involves a union of male and female—some reconciliation of the act of betrayal. In real life—with friends, with lovers, with parents—we’re always having to struggle to reconcile betrayal. We don’t just drop everyone who betrays us and move on to better love. We are called upon by life to work through certain forms of betrayal.
MFA:
To get to better love.
bh:
Absolutely. Grappling with betrayal leads to an understanding of compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance that makes for a certain kind of powerful love. People get annoyed at me for this, but I liked Streisand’s Prince of Tides. I thought that Prince of Tides was two films. One is about the issues of self-restoration in order to love, which is what the Nick Nolte character is all about. Then there’s the bullshit film of Barbra Streisand wanting to seduce the WSAP man. I recently looked at Prince of Tides fast-forwarding all the scenes of her sexual relationship with him and it became a very poignant film about male return to the possibility of love. The film does suggest to men the they’re not going to be able to love and experience any kind of mature relationship and sustain a relationship of joy without some self-interrogation. A lot of white male recovery films—The Fisher King and others— are trying to say just that: “White man, you’re going to have to look at yourself with some degree of critical thought, if you are to experience any love at all.” But there don’t seem to be any films that suggest to the black man that he needs to look at himself critically in order to know love.
MFA:
What about Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger?
bh:
Charles Burnett is a powerful filmmaker, yet here’s his weakest film and that’s the one that gets the most attention. The Danny Glover character is so powerful, yet we don’t know why. Is he a symbol of creativity gone amok?
MFA:
He’s like the rainmaker—you know, Burt Lancaster’s Rainmaker.
bh:
Oh, absolutely. When he lies down on that kitchen floor, there’s no capacity to utilize his magic and his creativity. He’s just gone in terms of images of black men, I would just say that John Sayles’s portrait of the black male character Brother from Another Planet is a transgressive moment. The love scene between that character and the women in City of Hope is an interesting representation of what allows males to enter the space of heterosexual intercourse in a way that is evocative of tenderness and mutual pleasure. However, I do think that John Sayles has a strange relationship with black women because he always portrays us with these weird wigs—like the woman in Brother from Another Planet and the black woman in Passion Fish.
MFA:
Let’s talk about love and fear.
bh:
Sleepless in Seattle is a very interesting movie about passion and love and fear. In both Truly, Madly, Deeply and Sleepless in Seattle, the fear is that you’ve lost a grand love and you’ll never be able to experience it again. Passion and desire about love do have the potential to destroy people. It’s like losing your sense of smell or taste. There is that intensity of passion in films like Red Sorghum and Ju Dou—that sense of being so deeply, spiritually, emotionally connected to another person. Tragically, there’s so much weird focus on codependency in this culture—especially where women are concerned—that it has become very hard for women to articulate what it means to have that kind of life-transforming passion. I think that our culture doesn’t recognize passion because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries. I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else.” That’s what domination is all about: that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you. Redemptive love is what’s hinted at in The Bodyguard and in The Crying Game. Then it goes away and we don’t know where it’s gone. Why did it go away?
MFA:
For the same reason Thelma and Louise have to die.
bh:
Absolutely. We have to go to films outside America to find any vision of redemptive love—whether it be heterosexual love or love in different sexual practices—because America is a culture of domination. Love mitigates against violation yet our construction of desire is the context of domination is always, always about violation. There must be a tremendous hunger for this kind of hopeful love in our culture right now because people are so drawn to films like Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum, and Like Water for Chocolate. Pedro Almodóvar almost always explores this tension between our desire for recognition and love and our complete fear of abandonment. In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! we don’t have this perfect middle-class vision of recovery. Many feminists hate it because the woman falls in love with her kidnapper yet the fact is that in our real lives there are always contradictory circumstances that confront us. Out of that mess, we create possibilities of transcendence. I do feel that a certain kind of feminist discourse came to a complete and utter halt around the question of sexuality and power because people cannot reconcile the way in which desire can intervene in our political belief structure, our value systems, our claims of racial, ethnic, or even sexual purity. I don’t think the average person in this culture knows what passion is, because daily TV and the mass media are saying, “It’s best to live your life in certain forms of estrangement and addiction.” We’re seeing too many films that don’t deliver the goods, that don’t give us any world that calls us to feel again, and if we can’t feel, then we don’t have any hope of knowing love.

4
SEDUCTION AND BETRAYAL

The Crying Game meets The Bodyguard

Hollywood’s traditional message about interracial sex has been that it is tragic, that it will not work. Until Spike Lee made Jungle Fever, that xenophobic, racist message had been primarily brought to us courtesy of white filmmakers. That message has not changed. When Hollywood sought to do its own version of Coline Serreau’s 1989 film, Mama, There’s a Man in Your Bed, a film about interracial desire where the relationship between a working-class black woman and a privileged white man works, no big white male stars wanted to play the leading role. Though this fact was presented in the news, the reasons were not. No doubt these white men were afraid that they would lose status, invite the wrath of white female moviegoers who do not want to see “their” heroes making it with black girls, or, God forbid, risk being seen as “nigger lovers” in real life. After all, white females constitute a viewing audience that could write thousands of
letters protesting love between a white man and a black woman on daytime soaps, letting the networks know that they do not want to see this on little or big screens.

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