April 6–13, 2000

movie shorts

Black and White

"I’m a kid in America. I can do whatever I want." Jutting her chin at the camera, New York City high schooler Charlie (Bijou Phillips) mouths off to her dad, who’s been pestering her about where she goes after school. All attitude, Charlie mumbles she’s been at the "li-bary." But you know better. Just minutes earlier, you’ve seen Charlie, looking decidedly less pert, with her plaid skirt hiked up to her waist, while she and classmate Raven (Gaby Hoffmann) make out with each other and Rich (Wu-Tang producer Oli "Power" Grant) up against a tree in the park. The camera comes upon this trio while emulating the gazes of three titillated kids who just happen along. But when Rich’s bodyguard/friend chases them off, the camera takes a more direct view, without intermediaries: white on black skins, the girls so eager to please, Rich so assured and in love with himself.

In its first five minutes, James Toback’s Black and White sets up its central tensions, contrived and voyeuristic. See privileged white girls cavort with ambitious black men, and thrill in their differences: soft and hard, naive and worldly. "What happens," asks the film’s tagline, "when you mix it up?" This could be an intriguing question, but Black and White never gets much below surfaces, offering schematic characters, easy-titillating situations, and a telling preoccupation with black men and white women (and girls).

Working hard to be chic, the movie takes hip-hop as its crossover ground. Rich is an impossibly seductive drug dealer who wants to go legit (that is, make the megabucks that producing hip-hop offers), Cigar (Raekwon) is his artist, and white kids like Charlie and Raven are his source of "information." Rich wants to know how this moneyed class operates, what it wants and what it can offer him. The film suggests that his interest is predatory — occasionally, he’s advised by old friend Jesse (who appears to be his "conscience") to "stay black" and steer clear of white girls. (That Jesse’s played by Kidada Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton, makes this advice slightly more complicated than it sounds).

But Rich won’t take advice from anyone. He’s paranoid and violent, this being the film’s unimaginative take on "hip-hop" artists and entrepreneurs. On one level, the film is aware of this prejudice: Studio owner Arnie Tishman (Toback), who signs a deal with Rich, is so fearful of finding "a corpse in the elevator" that he won’t deal with Rich or Cigar, only with their white lawyer. This stereotyping is funny for a minute, and then the movie justifies Tishman’s trepidation: Rich and his boys haul out the heavy weaponry to threaten a group of white boys who have the temerity to open a club in his neighborhood.

Black and White fancies itself difficult and probing, outrageous and insightful. Consider the moment that’s been attracting media attention: Mike Tyson (playing himself) assaults Terry (Robert Downey Jr.), following Terry’s quite insane pass at the boxer. Surely, this "extemporized" moment felt dangerous for Downey, but honestly, is there anything surprising about Mike Tyson acting out when goaded? He fulfills the conservative white culture’s fantasy that black men are dangerous and wild: Terry/Downey’s overtures just happen to be the predictable and apparently "comic" stimulus.

In fact, the moment after this one says more about Black and White’s rather unoriginal preoccupation with white women and black men. Terry’s wife, Sam, (Brooke Shields, with ridiculous dreads), tries to smooth things over with Tyson: "You are definitely beautiful to look at." Sam’s a professional smoother-over, a wannabe filmmaker who, in the course of videotaping the white kids — including Charlie, Raven and Wren (Elijah Wood) — has followed them to Rich’s crib, asking questions about their crossover interests in music, sex, rebellion and aggression. Tyson, looking completely alarmed at Sam’s come-on, tells her flat-out that he’s on parole and doesn’t need any white bitch messing with him.

Using Sam’s videotaping as its point of entry, Black and White pretends to consider hip-hop’s border-crossing and power-poaching. But the film’s anxieties about interracial and, perhaps more to the point, intergenerational mixing seem almost quaint. While, as Toback has noted in interviews, hip-hop culture — in all its commercial, political and social forms — has delivered on the promise imagined by Norman Mailer’s infamous "White Negro" essay (in that crossing over is typical rather than not), his film never gets over the spectacle of the black man/white girl pairing, especially in the machinations that have everything to do with money and power. As Raekwon’s American Cream Team puts it in their "It’s Not a Game," "We plan our dreams, shit ain’t a game / We don’t run games, we run businesses."

Where Charlie and company are into the hip-hop moment ("These are my niggas," she says, introducing Sam to her white classmates), Rich and his crew — which also includes Method Man and college basketball star Dean (Allan Houston of the Knicks) — have longer-term goals. Nice guy Dean’s on his way to professional stardom, living with his frightening girlfriend Greta (Claudia Schiffer, in an almost unbearably awkward performance). She’s an anthropology grad student writing her thesis on ancient goddesses (read: ballbusters), quite willing to sell him out for research or other, apparently arbitrary, reasons.

Dean’s bad end — for he must suffer one, according to pseudo-anthropologist Toback’s vision of hip-hop as an "underworld" where violence is predetermined — begins with his encounter with a desperately insecure white undercover cop Mark Clear (Ben Stiller). The cop gone wrong is an apt metaphor these days, of course, but Clear turns especially offensive in his selfish, self-loathing, conniving short-sightedness. He certainly makes the film’s moral dynamics more convoluted in his desires to fit into a white hierarchy that rejects him. But in the end, these moral dynamics aren’t really so complicated, but instead reduced to who wants to get in whose pants. Surely, there’s a recognizable logic to this reduction, but it’s trite and disappointing, in a film that, on its surface, appears to have so much on its mind.