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High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film by Sharon Willis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. 266. $16.95.
It is always a challenge to write about contemporary mass culture, in part because it is difficult to claim expertise, but even more because it renders problematic questions about archive, about inclusion and exclusion. However, critical interrogations of the present moment, like Sharon Willis's High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film, are crucial if you believe, as she does, that Hollywood film functions as a playing field for constructions of, and contestations over, race and gender. She takes as her starting point the idea that "our culture continues to be preoccupied with difference" (1), and yet, she argues, such differences, as they appear in Hollywood film, get eroticized or aestheticized, rather than examined or explored. This "fetishization of difference," in other words, which functions through an oscillation between recognition and disavowal, tends to block the kind of analysis that such films require in order to restore their "social context." Furthermore, she argues that there is a fundamental connection between gender and racial identities, such that, "in constructing gendered identifications, films and spectators are always more or less unconsciously engaging with racial identifications as well" (2). What she sets out to do, therefore, is to "restore a political content to the social differences that many films exhibit as mere aesthetic contrast" (2).
Part One of the book, entitled "Battles of the Sexes," uses three cases to explore the dialectic she has identified between gender and racial identity: in the first, she considers the popularity of the white male action figure, in the second, those films that rework the melodramatic tradition with police and detective thrillers, and in the third, films like Thelma and Louise, which depict the "thrilling and menacing figure of the murderous female hardbody" (21). In each of these cases she seeks to identify "those complex everyday representational moments of negotiation where one difference is made to stand in for, to do the job of, to trivialize or eclipse, the others" (6). The specific way that race and gender intersect, or interarticulate, in the texts she reads cannot be reduced to any simple formula, and this is both a strength...