Venting White Frustrations Through the Mouths of Black Characters – The Backlash of Malcolm and Marie and How it Diminishes the Black Experience
Released on Netflix on the 5th of February, Malcolm and Marie is about an African-American film director and his girlfriend who’ve just returned from a screening of his latest film. As they discuss the evening’s events, we quickly realise these are two people who have ‘issues’. From Marie’s past addiction and fragility to Malcolm’s narcissistic self-absorption, the lovers vacillate between passion and recriminations, playfulness and caustic truth-telling.
Almost bookending the piece is a commentary on the inability of White critics to watch a ‘Black’ film without reducing it to an exposition on what it is to be black. Why, wonders Malcolm, can he not just make a film about the struggles of a woman (who happens to be black) with a drug problem? In particular, he rails against ‘a white lady from the Los Angeles Times’, who, after watching the film, clumsily calls him the next Spike Lee or Barry Jenkins. Why could he not be the next Willie Wyler, a White director?
Later in the film, a stressed Malcolm reads aloud a review of the film written by the same critic, as a faint smile plays on Marie’s lips. Exhausted from his rant, he lies down on the floor beside her and begins to see the funny side of the piece – and his reaction.
The film ends on what seemed – to me at least – a positive note, with two people who love each other but struggle to reconcile their respective past relationship experiences and expectations of one another.
On its release, accusations began to fly that Levinson had used the voice of Malcolm, played by John David Washington (Zendaya plays the role of Marie), to vent his frustration at Katie Walsh’s Los Angeles Times review of his 2018 film, Assassination Nation.
In his Guardian review of the film, Robert Daniels argues that Levinson co-opts a Black man’s voice because it allows him (Malcolm) to take aim at the ‘white lady’ critic who applauds his exposure of the ‘white saviour trope’. With Malcolm as his ‘shield’, Levinson – Daniels asserts – gives expression to his resentment towards critics, and this is problematic: a legitimate message is obscured if the audience suspects the director of being more concerned about past negative reviews than ‘the weight of systematic oppression’.
Those who criticise Malcolm and Marie for being the vehicle via which a White man has got his own back on critics of his work may well have a point: White directors telling stories in their own image through Black characters is nothing new. In 2011, The Help was panned for perpetuating the classic White saviour trope, with its Black protagonists serving as mere ‘props’ in a piece designed to leave its White audience with a cosy, unchallenged feeling.
But that does not mean we shouldn’t interrogate criticism of Malcolm and Marie that accuses Levinson of having self-serving motives. Is it a case of tit-for-tat, with the likes Justin Chang picking up and running with the ‘White frustration’ baton? If I have one issue with the venting argument, it is that if too many critics jump on that bandwagon, a valid point that is made in the film can be (conveniently) lost and the Black experience diminished. The question I pose is this: has the film’s message about the reality of being a Black director in Hollywood been drowned out by the critics’ preoccupation with so-called White frustration?
Malcolm and Marie is first and foremost a film about a relationship. Depictions of Black love on screen like The Best Man and How Stella Got Her Groove Back are still few and far between. Hollywood has done an ace job portraying us as pimps and prostitutes, struggling single mums and ne’er-do-well hustlers, because Black suffering sells. With so much media attention on Levinson, an opportunity to enjoy (or not) a movie about love is lost.
This is when the accusation of venting White frustration becomes suspect: what was the motivation for it? Who was the first to make the claim? Did other critics play ‘follow my lead’, or had they been thinking the same thing, but didn’t want to say it? It’s as important to challenge the critics’ rationale for calling Levinson out on his veiled rant as it is to challenge the director himself for including it.
Why? Because focusing on the perceived dig at Katie Walsh takes the focus away from the point of the film, and this is a strategy that has often been used as a way of ignoring a more important issue, one which would force critics to revise long-held beliefs about Black people. In the conversations and verbal altercations that followed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer, we saw how Black people’s ‘tone’, the way we articulated our frustration at decades of not being listened to, became the focus of attention. ‘Tone policing’ allowed White people to ignore the uncomfortable reality of racial injustice.
Reflecting on the potential harm this focus does to the Black experience, I am also compelled to explore the habit of invoking Black people to justify racist hypotheses in a ‘Well if a Black person said it, it’s okay for me to say it’ kind of way. A Black person like, say, Robert Daniels, may well assert that Levinson hired a Black actor to speak his words, and I may or may not agree with them, but I’d give credence to their assessment, because it would come from years of reflecting on the multi-faceted nature of racism. A White critic declaring that Levinson exploited Washington safe in the knowledge that a Black critic said it first runs the risk of not being able to back up their conclusion with an understanding of how racism works that is deeper than a children’s paddling pool.
In 2013, the late John Singleton praised the White director, Norman Jewison, the ‘socially conscious renegade’ who crafted stories about the Black experience with ‘great care and sensitivity’. In any event, White directors who aspire to tell the stories of Black people can learn a lot from the Levinson backlash.
Written by Laurie O’Garro
Laurie has recently come out as a writer of poetry, flash fiction, including her hilarious 'God Monologues', and articles. She has lived in London for twenty-seven years, having moved to the capital to take up her first teaching job.
Laurie's hobby is string art which she discovered off the back of a childhood art from the 70s. The craft is best compared to embroidery, except it's done on card. And it's funkier. Her plan is to go global with string art and turn her creations into clothing and other accessories that people will fall in love with.
