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Hernan Vera & Andrew M. Gordon. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Rowan & Littlefield, 2003. 203 pages, $75.00.
A Huge Subject
Bizarre as it may seem, there is not that much difference between a creaky silent film like Birth of a Nation (1915) and a state of the art wonder like Black Hawk Down (2001). Both deal, in essence, with brave, upstanding, loyal white chaps fighting a savage and chaotic horde of people of African descent, and it is abundantly clear which group is the superior. The reason for this continuity is not just the baleful consistency of racism. Rather, it is the need for white maleness to define and assert itself against the idea of the proverbial "other." Nonwhites in films exist only to prop up the unstable identity of the dominant American group, to act as a mirror reflecting back the supremacy of whiteness.
This is, in a nutshell, the argument of Hernan Vera's and Andrew M. Gordon's provocative book. Each chapter takes a different aspect of what they term the "sincere fictions" of Caucasian superiority and shows how it operates in various films. Apart from old friends like Griffith's epic and Gone with the Wind, both of which are central to their idea of the "divided white self," the authors examine the film convention whereby non-white races always need to be led to freedom and fulfillment by a Persil-bright messiah (Stargate, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom); they analyze the role of Tahitians in the drama of male authority that exists...