When Green Book took out Best Picture at the Academy Awards last week, it upset plenty of people – from half the internet to director Spike Lee, who tried to walk out of the ceremony in frustration, still clutching his Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for BlacKkKlansman.
It started a conversation about how black people’s stories are told in Hollywood, and how the Oscars tend to reward the ones who frame history and racism in ways that are less confronting for white people.
I hate these … “I made friends with a white man so now racism doesn’t exist” movies.
— Are You Valet? (@ScottieBeam) March 3, 2019
Especially if a movie has a white character who’s not as racist as the real racists – so that audiences can reassure themselves that they’d be the nice white guy sticking up for his new black friend, and not the cross-burning redneck.
Right before the Oscars, Late Night With Seth Meyers produced this bang-on parody of the subgenre where the white guy learning to be a bit less racist is more important than the black person the story’s actually about.
Now that you’ve watched that pitch-perfect bit of satire, try and watch this trailer with a straight face.
Especially the bit where Sam Rockwell yells, “I’m the president of the Klan!”
So the premise of this movie is “Some Klansman are very fine people?” a
And the trailer incorporates Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.”pic.twitter.com/9P8KEJS9yn— Michael Arceneaux (@youngsinick) March 2, 2019
For so many people still shook by the triumph of Green Book over powerful films made by mostly black directors and creative teams, like BlacKkKlansman and Black Panther, this trailer hit a nerve.
This looks like every Green Book spoof skit over the past week as an actual film. https://t.co/7qMhRql1Ga
— Matt Ortega (@MattOrtega) March 4, 2019
Not to mention that Sam Rockwell’s role feels awfully similar to the character he played Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – for which he won his first Oscar.
Sam Rockwell stop playing racists challenge https://t.co/Lgp2F8g9mb
— Alejandro (@adounce) March 3, 2019
Yes, The Best Of Enemies is about two people from different worlds who learn they’re not so different! She’s an activist who wants her kids to be able to go to school without being spat on; he’s the head of his local Ku Klux Klan chapter who bravely learns not to be so racist!
It’s a true story, and a fascinating one: Ann Atwater and CP Ellis really did become friends during the talks she organised to try and break down community opposition to school segregation in their North Carolina city, and she really did break down his years of white supremacist indoctrination in such a brief period through the power of her advocacy and passion, to the point where he renounced the KKK.
Trailers aren’t the movie, of course, and the real story of Atwater’s activism and Ellis’s epiphany might actually be well told. And if it offers effective tips on how to get white supremacists to not be white supremacists any more, that could be pretty useful.
But the trailer’s all we’ve got for now, and it’s just another moment in 2019 where the line between serious and satirical may as well not be there at all.
No disrespect to Green Book at the #Oscars, but many of us in the black community would like to see greater recognition for movies about the black experience and not just for movies that make the black experience comfortable for white audiences.pic.twitter.com/vOdNEmx53X
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) February 25, 2019