Chris Rock: Risky Insights or Flat Notes?

Even before last night’s Academy Award ceremony was over, online columnists were congratulating Chris Rock for his “thorny, meaty, and hilarious” and “brilliant and brave” opening monologue. While he certainly made points that took the Oscars in a better direction – and spared us the nearly revanchist embarrassment of Neil Patrick Harris as host – perhaps I am alone in finding it flat and oddly reassuring when it could have been risky and provocative.

I applaud the way Rock explained and exposed “sorority racism,” but it was also an opportunity to introduce America, using biting satire, to structural racism more broadly. Let’s recognize that Rock is now of a stature where he has little to lose.  So to say that the issues people are facing today are less serious or significant than those of fifty years ago may be, on some level, empirically true, but structural racism, economic and educational equality, mass incarceration, and police violence are still pretty significant manifestations of oppression that continues today.  It’s not just a question of “opportunity.”  It is a question of inequity when it comes to who produces pictures, who is hired in positions of power and decision-making, and who is actually purchasing most of the movie tickets in this country and this world.  Structural racism is perpetuated by those kinds of disproportionate imbalances between the producers, the artists getting work, and the people buying the tickets and buying into the dream.

So no, I don’t think his speech would qualify as “meaty” or as “brave.”  The past couple of weeks, I have been showing my students films about the Black Panthers, Nina Simone, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos – people who risked and sometimes lost everything and yet who are unknown by college students (even adult ones) today.  Compare them to Beyoncé, for example.  I found Rock last night to be not his usual edgy self, but safe, even at times reassuring that we will be able to get past today’s issues.  To me his message included a kind of subtext that said, Hollywood, we know once you provide more opportunity things will get better, without really digging in to why it’s more than just a Hollywood problem and more than just an opportunity deficit.  He had the stage and could have had a moment where the satire was as sharp as he has been in the past, but to me his message was blunted.

But one line really bothered me.  The joke, quoted as “When your grandmother’s swinging from a tree it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short” hit a sour note for me for several reasons.  First, lynching is one of those rare topics that to me doesn’t belong in any joke or any line that’s going to end with a laugh.  It’s beyond the pale, even if the satire is in the service of a larger, just point.  I know he wasn’t making light of it in any way, but even as a throwaway to an intro, the image is too horrible to even turn around and laugh, no matter the gallows of this particular humor.

But second, and more subtle, is that “best documentary foreign short” actually is very important for all of the same reasons why we struggle for diversity.  Those other categories at the Oscars, especially the documentaries but also foreign films from time to time, are exactly where the issues of racism, violence, injustice and so forth have been openly discussed when Hollywood and mainstream cinema has been way too timid to take risks.  People need to see those documentaries, precisely because they are not trivial, because they do cover lynching. In fact, this very year’s winner for Short Documentary is about honor killings in Pakistan, which are indeed lynchings – some irony there, no?  (Shout out to director Sharmeen Obaid, who generously agreed to meet with me and my students at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival showing of her radiant documentary Song of Lahore.)  Without documentaries like this one, how would we know or learn about killings like this around the world.  While I haven’t seen it yet, I am also eagerly awaiting 3 1/2 Minutes – 10 Bullets which was short-listed this year though not nominated.

To be brave you have to risk something.  To be meaty, brilliant, and thorny you have to provide insights that don’t just voice what most of the people in the room would like to say, but that takes them to a different level of understanding or provokes them to investigate further.  With great respect for Chris Rock’s career, I don’t think last night he achieved either.  Then again, I grew up in an era of Oscar telecasts with acceptance speeches that included congratulations from the Viet Cong, condemnations of fascism, McCarthyism, and anti-Semitism, parallels between U.S. intervention in Central America and Vietnam, the role of American corporations in the nuclear weapons industry and pollution, and more recently speeches by Michael Moore and Errol Morris two years in a row.  None of these Oscar speeches were so celebrated, and in fact most were derided as inappropriate.  Sad to say, but the Salon and Mother Jones commentators may be too young to remember when political protest wasn’t so safe and watered down as it is today.

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On a brighter note, lost in the discussion of the absence of people of color in the acting categories, was the fact that of the award-winning filmmakers themselves, the winners’ circle was actually quite diverse.  The Best Director award went to Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu for the second year in a row – and in fact the third consecutive year for a Mexican director.  As mentioned above, the winner for short documentary was Pakistani Sharmeen Obaid, winning her second Academy Award as well.  (She may be only the second woman to win two directing awards, after Barbara Kopple – I’ll have to check.)  The animated short film was directed and produced in Chile, and the director of the feature documentary, Amy, is British of South Asian descent.  Also, the producer of the full-length animated film is a U.S. American of Latino background.

While much can still be written about American cultural and cinematic hegemony – after all, there are thriving and major popular film industries coming out of India, Hong Kong, Mexico and many other countries, yet only the American Oscars are seen worldwide and American films exported with more force behind them than other countries’ films – the Oscars are changing with more foreign films and directors getting some recognition, or even work.  Who would have thought that the directors of Amores Perros or Y Tu Mamá También would come to Hollywood and win Oscars?  There is much here in the hidden diversity of Hollywood to be written about later, such as why, for example, no one ever seems to acknowledge that since 1980, there have been 33 women directors who have won Oscars for documentary films, including Barbara Kopple and Laura Poitras. That doesn’t excuse structural sexism – why women get to direct documentaries, and usually shorts, but not feature films – but it does complicate it.  But more on this another day.

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Finally, very happy for Mark Rylance.  (Again, time was when the Academy would have given it to Stallone for sentimental and commercial reasons.)  Though I haven’t yet seen Bridge of Spies, he is one of the great actors of our time.  I’ve been privileged to see him onstage three times: in Cymbeline in New York playing multiple roles, where I first took notice (especially when he played multiple characters in the same scene) and when, as he told Leonard Lopate this week, he was a complete unknown, then in one of his Tony-winning performances in Jerusalem, also a great play, and in London, as Richard III at the Globe.  I missed two or three of his great performances in New York, but the last few years have been tough for me to see a lot of theater.  It’s great that more of his work is being recorded on the big and small screen and he’ll be recognized by a larger public.  Hope he gets some leading roles in film now.

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Addendum (six days later): On the night of the Oscars, when I wrote this, I missed the middle third of the program while driving home.  For that reason, I didn’t get to see the appearance of the three young “accountants” – an Asian joke by Chris Rock that also included a Jewish stereotype.   Had I seen that I would have had lots to say about that too, another example of how Oscar broadcast writers never get it right, even when they have an opportunity for redemption.  I don’t know if Rock wrote that himself, or if they were writers he hired, or if he had veto power not to deliver such a joke, only that apparently the kids’ parents were not in on how their children would be used as the butts of the joke.  I also don’t know why the Oscar telecasts have lately been so badly written (not to mention inappropriate unfunny ad libs like Sean Penn’s gratuitous “who gave this guy a green card” before announcing a winner last year). Also glad to see that much of the press since last week has been more critical of Rock than the first reports I wrote about, especially this response in Colorlines. Strangely enough, back in the day when the choices were much more artistically conservative, I don’t remember this kind of controversy ever from the monologues of Johnny Carson or Billy Crystal.  So given that we like to think we have made so much progress when it comes to racial justice and equality, why have we become more insecure and more threatened about the topic of race and seem unable to find humor that doesn’t reinforce old forms of domination?

bell hooks to the rescue

I know that doubt can be one of the hallmarks of good teaching.  We want students to feel encouraged to challenge and reconsider their beliefs, especially those prejudices they have adopted without much thought and certainly, by definition, without considering the evidence.  But there’s another kind of existential doubt, when we’re so hammered by all the problems facing us in the world that we end up questioning the centrality of aspects of human life that we enjoy.  Can we make art, let alone study it, at a time when it is becoming more clear that without concerted action, climate change could kill us all?  And, given that citizens (and voters) are making choices about future leadership at a time when they are woefully uninformed about politics, current events, and science, what is the importance of studying the arts?

I know.  I’m not so doctrinaire that I believe we can have a society without art or education without art. Actually the opposite: I have always had a knee-jerk sense that arts and music and literature education have benefits that go beyond critical thinking and the wonderful list devised by Elliot Eisner.  But one place where I have gotten stuck is on the politics of the arts and arts education.

Doing my class reading for this week, I came across the following in bell hooks’s book of essays, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics:

“There must be a revolution in the way we see, the way we look.  Such a revolution would necessarily begin with diverse programs of critical education that would stimulate collective awareness that the creation and public sharing of art is essential to any practice of freedom.  If black folks are collectively to affirm our subjectivity in resistance, as we struggle against forces of domination and move toward the invention of the decolonized self, we must set our imaginations free.  Acknowledging that we have been and are colonized both in our minds and in our imaginations, we begin to understand the need for promoting and celebrating creative expression.”  (p. 4)

And this:

“Recently, at the end of a lecture on art and aesthetics at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, I was asked whether I thought art mattered, if it really made a difference in our lives.  From my own experience, I could testify to the transformative power of art.  I asked my audience to consider why in so many instances of global imperialist conquest by the West, art has been other [sic?] appropriated or destroyed… It occurred to me then that if one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonization, is complete.” (p. xv)

I know with these words I am in the right course, I am following the right course, and that this conversation is vital, even/especially in the context of sociology.

Believe me, it is so easy not to practice, even when there is such urgency to practice, to create, to push ourselves to make work that transforms, or even just questions, the status quo. Every school district, every budget cut that reduces arts and music in schools is performing, in doing so, that work of subjugation.  And if you can’t imagine you can’t be free, you can’t envision anything better or different, or you are simply a prisoner of what the state wants and needs you to be for them.