Joshua Alston has a terrific piece at the AV Club about how white critics have treated Tyler Perry movies and television shows. He argues that there’s been a strong tendency to treat Perry with deference because white critics either feel a need to extent points to Perry given that he’s one of the primary filmmakers who is interested in serving African-American audiences in general, or feel that their whiteness disqualifies them from specifically discussing Perry’s treatment of race. And Alston suggests that the dam has broken on Perry in recent weeks in part because his treatment of HIV has given critics another way in to criticize Perry on content grounds:

Temptation has given white critics free rein to trash Perry with impunity, because it allows them to skirt the racial implications of the work, and instead go after his harmful messages about HIV and women’s bodies. Even that is kind of an accident; the reaction to Temptation doesn’t exist in a bubble. The movie was released less than two weeks after the verdict came down in the Steubenville rape case. Any other time, Temptation might have won the types of confused, perplexing mainstream reviews Perry’s movies usually get, but at a time when rape and the politics of women’s bodies were commanding the zeitgeist, Temptation’s implication that women are complicit in their victimization by men couldn’t have been a more unwelcome message. It was so unwelcome, it was enough to encourage white critics, who are generally all too happy to stay out of the knottier conversations about Perry’s work, to attack once the dialogue moved to a topic they felt more comfortable engaging.

I’ve written a great deal about white television and screenwriters’ reluctance either to create characters of color at all, or to design characters of color who have any personality elements or perspectives drawn from their experiences as people of color, out of grave—and not necessarily misguided—fears of giving offense, speaking for others, or getting wrong experiences that are not their own. And I’ve also argued that the best way to give over that fear is to recognize that whiteness is a race rather than a neutral default. In other words, it’s as easy and thoughtful to think about what a Southern African-American family might serve at a typical dinner as it is to consider whether your Jewish characters keep kosher, or about how an Irish-American family might handle their kid getting in trouble in ways that are different from a Chinese-American family.

I think this is an approach that might serve white critics well, too. This is not to say, of course, that white critics should be some sort of final arbiters on the handling of race in America—critic corps need to diversify as much as the writing staffs of the industries that we cover. But I think we’d do well to write more about how shows constitute various kinds of whiteness as well as they do any other race, and to be intersectional in our approach when we write about class, gender, and sexuality. The construction of cops as Irish in The Wire—even to the extent of Lester Freamon singing The Pogues at a wake—is as important and interesting as the many conceptions of blackness on that show. One of the reasons Max on Happy Endings is so striking is not just that he defies physical types and standards of behavior for gay men, but in the way he defies physical types and standards of behavior for Jewish men. Justified has made strong use of Boyd Crowder’s racism, as well as his stints as a miner and a preacher, to depict a man in search of an identity, and who treats his race as a potential source of it. I’m excited to catch up on Shameless at some point precisely to see how the Gallaghers are treated. One of the reasons I think Mad Men would be a better show if it was willing to bring the racial friction of its time period closer to the center of the show, or even to just once treat it as a significant plot point, is because I think it would be interesting to see it explore gains and losses of privilege not just along gender lines, but racial ones as well—what did it really mean for Paul Kinsey and Lane Pryce to be people who could pursue relationships with black women? Is Peggy mentoring her African-American secretary, or merely treating her well, something that was implied in the last episode and that I’d like to see explored in greater detail.

If white critics or film and television writers are afraid of writing about race because we’re afraid of speaking for or about other people, the simplest solution is to stop and realize that writing about race means writing about ourselves as well.

Over at Buzzfeed, Louis Peitzman has a damning piece about the way that Tyler Perry uses HIV as a moral weapon in his latest movie, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, which he situates within Perry’s injection of HIV into his adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. He explains that in Temptation, the main character Judith, played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell, contracts HIV through her affair with a man not her husband, and that her infection is deliberately related to both another character and to the movie as both the result of her straying, and as a cautionary tale to other women. Louis writes:

Whether or not one condones cheating on a spouse, the implication that a person deserves HIV is horrifying. What’s worse, however, is that Perry has written Temptation as a morality play, in which “Man begins in innocence, Man falls into temptation, Man repents and is saved.” As Madea would say, “Hallelujer.”

Like Perry’s other movies, there is nothing subtle about Temptation. It’s not just the sin of Lust that Perry condemns: Throughout Temptation, we’re also schooled on Greed (as Judith consumes more and more of what Harley buys for her), Pride (as she begins to show off her body in more revealing outfits), Wrath (Harley’s violent temper), and Envy (Harley covets another man’s wife). Judith’s God-fearing mother Sarah (Ella Joyce) even refers to Harley as the Devil. The traditional morality play presents Satan not as a symbol but as a literal being, battling with God for a person’s soul.

Viewed in this context, it’s not simply that Judith deserves HIV, but that it’s a “sinner’s disease.” HIV — at least, HIV the plot device — is Tyler Perry’s punishment for our sins.

It’s a reminder how depressing it is that Tyler Perry is one of the only black filmmakers in America who can make any movie he wants, at any time, and be assured of financing, and that he’s become perhaps the dominant figure making entertainment aimed at black audiences. If he wanted to, Perry, through his studio and the profits of his successful projects, could have built a generation of black filmmakers with diverse perspectives—For Colored Girls, in particular, would have been a tremendous project for a woman to direct. Instead, he’s consolidated his power, and is using his influence to both make deeply mediocre entertainment and to spread horrible messages about HIV to very large audiences. We’re at a point where it would be both a creative good and a public one for someone else to get treat African-American moviegoers like they’re an audience worth cultivating if only to cut down on Perry’s financial and intellectual market share.

“Can you stop talking about politics and be a cop, please?” Detective Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) snaps at his boss, high-ranking cop Richard Brookwell (John C. McGinley) near the end of Alex Cross, an adaptation of James Patterson’s novel Cross, about a brilliant, African-American detective. In the immediate context, Cross is asking his boss to be more aggressive in his efforts to protect Leon Mercier (Jean Reno), an industrialist who is heading up the Detroit Fund, a major effort to revitalize the failing city, from Picasso (Matthew Fox), a dedicated and unnervingly skilled assassin. But much of Alex Cross raises the question of what it means to be a pop cultural cop at a deeper level, and reaches some disturbing answers.

In movies and television, being a detective or beat cop has often meant that you can break rules, beat or threaten suspects, shoot people and almost always get away with it after a semblance of a review—and even if you don’t, you can retain the audience’s sympathies. In Alex Cross, it also means that you can beat your colleagues, steal evidence, drop a murderer off a roof rather than bring him to trial, and frame someone for a death penalty offense without regret or compunction. From a liberal perspective, it’s always made sense to be skeptical of glamorizations of this kind of power for reasons of both self-protection and principle. There’s no question that much of the popular appeal of tough cops lies in the fact that their violence and corruption is deployed against people who are coded as distasteful or decadent, be they people of color who are presented as gang-bangers or terrorists, or hippies who are harbingers of anarchy a la Dirty Harry. And while it’s easier to dismiss these violations of the order when these tactics are turned on people we’ve been taught to hate and fear by people movies and television tell us we can trust, if we bother to think clearly, it’s awful to imagine that brutality straying beyond what we’ve defined as acceptable targets—which should tell us how awful it no matter who is the subject of renegade police violence.

Alex Cross spends a great deal of time establishing its titular character as someone we can trust to deploy violence, and to transgress the rules that constrain him in his work as a police detective. He believes in rehabilitation and innocence, visiting a young prisoner who’s taken the rap for two murders committed by her uncle, who tells him “You can’t save everybody, Doctor Cross,” only to have him remind her that “I’m not trying to save everybody. I’m just trying to save you.” He is an intellectual, a man who plays chess in the prison yard by starlight, and who offers his daughter suggestions for how to improvise during her piano practice. He is a loving father, one who is delighted when he finds out his wife is unexpectedly pregnant, and plans to transfer to a desk job with the FBI so he’ll be able to earn a better living and stop risking his own safety on the streets. He is affectionate with his mother-in-law, Mama (Cicely Tyson), who appears to be channeling Ruby Dee’s performance as the mother of drug lord Frank Lucas in American Gangster, if with somewhat staticky reception. If nothing else, it’s a virtue that Alex Cross makes so transparent the process of cinematically signaling who is a legitimate employer of extreme violence and legal manipulation and who is a legitimate target of those abuses.

The targets, in this case, are a constellation of decadent white men, and two Asian women the movie treats with astonishingly callous disregard. The first of these men is Picasso, who enters the movie by putting himself on a card for a cage fight that’s being held in an abandoned church, and betting heavily on his own performance. If that weren’t enough of a signifier that Picasso has deviated from commonly-held sensibilities and morality, he’s swiftly revealed to be a sexual sadist. Picasso takes home an attractive Asian woman he met at the fight, but when they’re in bed, he asks her “Do you like it?” When she says yes, he tells her “Well, I can’t have that,” and proceeds to paralyze her and cut off her fingers one by one to torture information out of her. “There is no way it takes all ten fingers,” Cross’s partner and boyhood friend Tommy (Edward Burns) declares at the crime scene the next day. “The other nine were for fun,” Cross tells him. That they later make a macabre joke out of using her severed fingers to open her safe apparently isn’t meant to sully our respect or affection for Tommy and Alex, though we are, of course, supposed to be revolted at the man who committed the initial violence against her.
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Since my readers introduced me to Issa Rae’s web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, I’ve wished someone would give Rae, whose biting, original, low-budget show has earned her a well-deserved following, a deal and the resources to take her show national. Now, Shonda Rhimes, one of the few women and few African-Americans who can basically get a network to greenlight anything she wants, has found a way to do precisely that. Through her Shondaland production company, Rhimes has helped Rae sell a new series, I Hate La Dudes, about the sole woman on an internet radio talk show, to ABC.

This is good, and illuminating, news for two reasons. First, it’s a sign that production companies and networks are finally starting to look to web-based content the way they should, as a source of genuinely new voices and of fresh storylines. In an ideal world, the internet and the distribution platforms native to it, Hulu in particular, should function as a kind of minor leagues for television, allowing artists to test ideas, improve their tool kits as low budgets require many of them to write, direct, edit and score as well as act, and build followings. Not all projects will succeed, but web shows, which are free from the pressures of network scheduling, can take time to develop audiences by word of mouth. If a show becomes a hit online without the benefit of a major publicity campaign, as Awkward Black Girl did, it’s fantastic proof of concept. That Rhimes and ABC recognized Rae’s talent and her audience is a testament to them, as well as to Rae’s work and vision.

The question will be how much leeway Rae has at ABC. Because it’s a network, it’s hard to imagine she’ll have as much freedom when it comes to content or to ratings as Louis C.K. has at FX or Lena Dunham has had at HBO. ABC picked up the show because the network thinks it can make money from Rae, not merely to pick up awards nominations or critical praise, and no matter how original Rae is, she’ll be getting network notes. But in a sense, there’s something invigorating about that proposition: ABC must think it’s possible to do well with a show from the perspective of a nerdy African-American woman whose prior selling point has been the social awkwardness of the character she portrayed, not precisely a demographic that gets heavy representation on network television.

And it’s also exciting to see Rhimes use her capital in Hollywood this way. Tyler Perry, the other person of color who can get almost any television or film project he wants into development, has never seemed particularly interested in using his shingle to help other writers and directors get projects moving (though he produced Lee Daniels’ Precious). And today he signed an exclusive development deal with the Oprah Winfrey Network, locking in profits but limiting his influence. There’s nothing wrong with Perry making that money. But it’s more exciting to see Rhimes single-handedly use her influence to make television a place that’s not just more diverse but more interesting, even in a way that goes beyond her own shows. I’ll be crossing my fingers for Rae to succeed not just because I can’t wait to watch whatever she creates, but because if she does well, that can only rebound to Shondaland’s credit, and if this is any indication, to our benefit as well.

The bridge is yours.

-Mo Ryan talks Game of Thrones changes with D.B. Weiss.

-Kim Cattrall approves of Girls.

-Can it be Vamps-o-clock already?

-Drama in the Archie Comics family!

-Tyler Perry is an evil genius for passing this off:

The bridge is yours.

-It’s nice to know that Tyler Perry can get charges he was racially profiled investigated.

-I cannot fathom why a veteran producer would think it was okay to edit George Zimmerman’s 911 call selectively.

-Jimmy Smits will mentor Jax Teller.

-The fact that Jason Antoon is going to be in Downwardly Mobile makes me much more excited for it.

-Are there people left who don’t think Felicia Day is cool?

The bridge is yours (and apologies for yesterday, it has been busy!).

-The hats of Downton Abbey.

-Todd VanDerWeff defends slow television.

-Honest posters for Oscar movies.

-I adore this Hunger Games movie tie-in.

-This is so true, and so good, and so sad:

Tyler Perry Expands His Fan Base With New Films About Sassy, Chinese Grandmother

The Times Magazine’s profile of George Lucas is very interesting, particularly in its description of how his long-term girlfriend, Mellody Hobson, or as Al Sharpton calls her, “black America’s business princess,” has transmitted Lucas’s dedication to racial equality and channeled it more directly into politics, whether calling Obama a Jedi or showing up for the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. And it captures his determination to make Red Tails a truly black movie (he’s joked about Spike Lee making a prequel to it):

“They say, Now, who are you making this for?”

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”…

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.” [...]

To execute his popcorn vision of “Red Tails,” Lucas turned to Anthony Hemingway, a 36-year-old director who made his name on TV shows like “The Wire.” Hemingway, who had never directed a feature film, comes from the church of David Simon, which values moral murkiness over naïveté, documentary detail about East Baltimore over an ethnography of the Ewok village. It was like hiring a “Hill Street Blues” veteran to direct “Return of the Jedi.”

But from the beginning, Lucas wanted “Red Tails” to have a black director. “I thought, This is the proper way to do this,” he said. Indeed, to scan the credits in “Red Tails” is to see Lucas’s fidelity to African-American filmmakers. There are two black writers and a black executive producer. Terence Blanchard, a Spike Lee collaborator (“Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X”), wrote the score, and Art Sims, another Lee veteran, designed the one-sheet.

I really hope Red Tails does well not simply to disprove the idea that black leads can’t open blockbusters or that black history is a niche genre. Lucas has said that this will be his last blockbuster. So if the movie makes bank, maybe Lucas could do for black artists what Tyler Perry hasn’t entirely done yet, and what Queen Latifah still might do: spread the wealth and give a financial springboard to projects that could be commercially viable if only they could find financing and support, and an imprimatur that would reassure distributors. The battle might be to get individual non-white (or for that matter, female) writers and directors credentialed and established. But the war is about getting a lot of them in the game.

In the course of a long discussion about how to get to a place where Hollywood and mass audiences recognize that stories with minority leads, and that contain references to minority culture and concerns, can also be vehicles for universal stories, commenter Paulie made, over the course of two comments, a valuable point that leads to a question with no easy answer. He wrote:

Can we agree, for example, that the work of Tyler Perry is simply not very good? It has no universal appeal. It’s created solely to pander to the lowest-common-denominator in black audiences. If white people like me dislike Tyler Perry, it’s not because his work is “too black.” It’s because it sucks.

I’m sure you can come up with counter-examples of stuff that actually was artistically good, and should have had universal appeal, but was rejected for being too black. (Jazz certainly comes to mind, along with many other forms of black music that were eventually embraced by white audiences, but were initially written off as being solely black.)…My point in the post before that was that quality storytelling is inherently universal. Of course this means that the concept should be defined in concert with minority populations. My point applies in reverse as well: if something only appeals to white audiences but nobody else, then maybe that’s a sign it’s not actually very good.

It’s a really tough situation: when all you’ve got isn’t very good, do you champion it? Ask people to turn out, spend money on it, ignore its flaws in the hopes that it’ll create space for something better? I was profoundly relieved when Bridesmaids turned out to be genuinely excellent so I didn’t have to feign enthusiasm or to write a very qualified endorsement as I’ve done in the past. I could recommend it unreservedly, and be pleased that it did so well because it’s not the thing that needs to succeed to let us get the good thing. It is the good thing.

But I do hit my limits sometimes. And it was interesting that after we finished that discussion yesterday, commenter Kyessa L. Moore wrote a long critique of my piece explaining why I find the way Alan Ball (I would note, a white man with an extremely spotty record on race) has framed Tara Thornton as a perpetual victim exhausting:

Are you really beyond the ability to understand or see the desire of a child of an alcoholic single mother (with no other family) to take advantage of the shelter and care being offered by a woman with so much to give and other people in need under her care? Can you truly be faulting Tara for being bewitched? Do you fault everyone else for their bewitchment as well? And are You Really asking Tara to have been psychic and discerned that the nice lady was really a maenad intent on destroying her life? Because I refuse to believe that someone who went to college would expect precognition of a Black female character as the grounds for the character to be considered ‘dynamic.’..Clearly, the reasons you present for why Tara is “static” are really reasons rooted in a desire for her character to be superhuman, infallable, maternal, and rooted in a quasi-behavioral Whiteness which you point out as being necessary for this to be possible…Now, if you list wonderful things and add, “–and she’s white.”, then follow by saying, “he made her black and an object of perpetual humiliation”, what you are doing, even if inadvertently, is setting up the similarity between the wonderful world of possibility that is White Tara in the book and how awful Black Tara is in the show. You are linking the characteristics to color not for the purpose of clarity, but to further establish why Black Tara is so faulty for this indistinct, intangible but seemingly preferential list of vague plot details.

I don’t think this is a particularly accurate description of my piece, and I’ve said as much to Ms. Moore in comments. Because, look, at the end of the day, I don’t need Tara to have any particular set of characteristics for me to like her more. All I need to see is that she gets as much of a shot as anyone else on the show to win.

My dislike is aimed at Alan Ball’s choices, not at Tara herself. As a white writer, it makes me viscerally uncomfortable to see another white writer take a character, make the conscious decision to turn her from white to black, and then make her the perpetual and most persistent object of abuse on his television show. Maybe, in the process, he’s turned her into a profound and moving portrait of an abuse victim that resonates deeply with some people. I don’t have the lived experience to speak to that. And even if some folks think Ball’s gotten it right, I just can’t tell people to embrace the character and the show when they come out of a process that seems to me like it could lead not to the next good thing, but to something disastrous.

Given Tyler’s post last week arguing that “The conversation we need to have is one in which minorities think about what kinds of economic models will make it possible for them to make cultural products for themselves and about the way we’d have to redefine what success means in order to do that,” and our debates about what Tyler Perry’s done with the power he’s assumed in Hollywood, I’ve been particularly curious about what Queen Latifah’s going to do with her Flavor Union studio. Turns out her first project is going to be a crime drama that involves Cam’ron and Deadwood veteran Omar Gooding committing credit card fraud. As much as that’s not a project that interests me, this sort of conventional-sounding and economically un-risky thing probably makes sense for a fledgling, black-owned studio. The more you prove you’re economically viable, the more leeway you have to do something boundary-pushing or downright weird without pressure to make bank on that, too.

Of course, it would also be nice to demonstrate to white studio heads and white investors that so-called risks on features with black stars will pay off, and handsomely. One of the reasons Red Tails is such a key test movie for black blockbusters is that George Lucas has spent so much money on it. I honestly thought I’d misheard the numbers the first time I heard them, but Lucas has spent $58 million making the movie and $35 million on promotion. That’s not insane in a world where $100 million-plus budgets for movies are no longer shocking, but it’s a lot of cheddar for even a very rich man to splash out on a project. It would be really nice to have a world where black — and minority, period — Hollywood power brokers’ successes weren’t always seen as flukes or the result of extremely rigid formulas. And to have a world where white dudes were interested and invested in backing minority projects for fun and profit.