Week 1

Week 1 /Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Posted on by WendyWang

An idea that Perrin keeps returning to in her writing on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is the film’s simplification of racial politics (846). And I agree that the film takes its stance in a social vacuum. First of all, the film takes place almost entirely in the Draytons’ house; the audience is only offered some brief glimpse of the world outside. The film presents an extremely ideal environment to confront social racism, with the dilemma being whether the white patriarch or the elite black has of control over the white womanhood (although it is clear that the white patriarch has the ultimate power to resolve this conflict). As for the character Dr. Prentice, the film not only eliminates all traits of lower class characteristic, but also adds so many more “material markers of elite status” (852) to him compared to the white Draytons. Dr. Prentice is upper class from every perspective except race, thus the true conflict is the white patriarch’s confrontation of his own notions of race and class.

Besides reducing political conflict in the society to a personal, domestic confrontation, I agree with Perrin that the film’s pat resolution invites criticism. Dr. Prentice and Joey Drayton plan to be married and live in Europe. More importantly, they plan to leave the next morning, right after getting their parents’ approval. Although their rush to leave is justified as their excitement to embark on a new adventure with each other, it seemed more like an escape from reality to me. The film has been avoiding the complex issue of socio-economic status and the real-life struggle of lower class interracial couples. Thus seeing the couple running away from the consequences that their interracial marriage might bring at the end of the film was rather unsatisfying.

Week 1: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Posted on by rohan3277

I find certain parts of Anne Grey Perrin’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: The Web of Racial, Class, and Gender Constructions in late 1960s America” to be problematic. One of Perrin’s critiques of the film is its faux-progressive message; the film is hinged on the acceptance of an upper-class white male’s acceptance of an upper-class African American, marginalizing white womanhood. She says that the film fails as it claims to resolve racism within a short monologue at the end and its adherence to classism, not only in race, but in other social constructs, namely gender. However, I do not believe that the film claims to resolve racism at its denouement. For that matter, I do not believe that the film depicts a very common archetype for racism. In the film, Mr. Drayton is portrayed as a socially liberal man, even showing keen admiration for Sidney Poitier’s Dr. Prentice. However, the film conflict is informed by his pragmatism in knowing that an interracial marriage would be problematic in 1960’s society. Furthermore, I do not believe that the film attempts to marginalize white womanhood; attention is repeatedly called to the fact that the central love story is rushed and spontaneous and Dr. Prentice himself imposes the conflict upon the narrative. If he hadn’t, the two would have gotten married and the conflict would have been inconsequential. Rather, he installs the conflict in the narrative, further heightening the drama by introducing an impending deadline and his own equally uncertain parents. Perrin writes, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner argues that the white, elite male’s acceptance of a black male into the white family via the transfer of control of the white daughter is a sign of progress.” In such statements, I believe her to be simplifying certain aspects of the narrative and amplifying others to dramatize her argument. By using rhetoric such as “transfer of control,” the film sounds very much like a medieval tale with a woman used as property. However, my reading of the film showed that Mr. Drayton hadn’t fully comforted himself with the idea of their marriage, however realizing that no amount of pragmatism would be worth usurping their love.

-Rohan Chatterjee (rc3277)

Week 1: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Posted on by wt477

Anne Grey Perrin provides deeper insight in relation to the film in her book “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: The Web of Racial, Class, and Gender Constructions in Late 1960s America.” She states that “if the problem is whether or not the white liberal can put his beliefs into practice, and whether or not the class system can survive integration, then integration is shown to be in control of elite white men.” I feel like this is indicative of what we are shown in the movie. Despite Sidney Poitiers character already being a near-perfect human being with outstanding life achievements, and an almost completely chaste, non-sexual man, Matt Drayton is still hesitant towards the marriage. Furthermore, the fact that he’s the one who makes the final decision, above Dr. Prentice’s parents and Mrs. Drayton, clearly reflects the manipulation of gender and race within the old patriarchal class system. While this sexist and racist notion is still ever present today, comparing the situation of the 60’s to now, it’s clear that society is improving, even if slowly. While I understand the intent of the movie was to open up the idea of interracial marriage (I’d assume leaning more towards a White audience), the underlying message still reflects this idea of the White elite.

 

Winter Ting

Week 1, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Gabriela Assunção

Posted on by gabrielaassuncao

In the 1960s, American Cinema found itself at a crossroads. Internally, Hollywood began its downfall. With the formation of worker’s unions, the cost of labor went up; subsequently, studios exported the production of movies to post-war Europe, where costs were cheaper, leading to unemployment in America. With the introduction of television, movies in general became less popular. Banks became more hesitant to back movies, betting primarily on pre-established movies stars and formulaic stories, which made Hollywood more conventional and boring. Art in the form of film was perceived to come only from Europe. Art houses, which displayed exclusively non-American films, rose in popularity, further taking away audiences from American films. To compensate for the increased selectivity of audiences (and thus narrower profitability margin for movies), ticket prices went up. Now, the movies who made it, made it big; but the vast majority tanked. Big-budget movies like Cleopatra nearly bankrupted studios. As Robert Sklar explained in the seventeenth chapter of “Movie Made America,” “It was as if the rules of baseball had been changed so that the only hit that mattered was a home run.” The men who led Hollywood into its Golden Age started out young, but were now aging. A new generation took over as the heads of production and distribution companies. With this new generation and the ones that followed, came changes like the end of the production code and the introduction of a rating system similar to that of the British. Soon executives realized that sex and violence sell. With this sexploitation, former art houses became adult film houses, and Hollywood was rejuvenated. A new so-called “film generation” was arising, and movies were popular once again.

 

Parallel to the gradual demise of Hollywood’s golden age, a series of external cultural phenomena, namely the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, dramatically changed the face of American cinema. After World War II and with the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, a period of Blaxploitation, when studios began to realize that they could profit largely from getting black audiences to watch their movies, began. With this, came integration. In result, there was less talent available for black independent film production, and thus less black independent films. Positive portrayals of black people began to promote unity, reflect the civil rights movement, and recognize the contribution of black people and African countries in WW2. Two movies chosen by Alex Lykidis in “American Film History” to represent the evolution of black representation and the socio-political climate of time are Nothing but a Man and the Spook Who Sat by the Door. In sum, there was a move from restrained, non-violent defiance to active, violent participation in the revolutionary struggle; tactics went from self-defensive to offensive. Moreover, integration into a white-dominated society was no longer desirable, but rather equality and hegemony free from white-surveillance became the new goals.

 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, featuring Sidney Portier, was an attempt at a positive representation of black integration and interracial marriage. However, the movie fell short in many ways. First of all, Portier’s character was too perfect to accurately reflect the acceptance of all blacks. He was sexually castrated, bourgeois, and submissive. As Anne Perrin wrote, “The movie implies through Poitier’s character that to breach class lines and to command the white man’s attention, the black man must achieve superhuman, academic feats.” Moreover, the white male is portrayed as the supreme authority, and women are objectified. This hierarchy of white male, black male, white female, black female is a very disconcerting one. In many ways, today’s society is still similarly retrograde, but merely in more insidious ways. Black men are paid less than white men, and women are paid less than men. Scandalously, not a single black actor has been nominated for an academy award for the second consecutive year. What measures need to be taken to actively fight discrimination and achieve true equality?

 

By: Gabriela Assunção

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Posted on by Mizuki Toriya

Mizuki Toriya

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) is a film that illustrates the white community’s and Hollywood’s unconscious desire to hold onto traditional values in its attempt to accept liberal notions of the 1960s regarding the issue of race and modernization of the film industry.

In her article, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: The Web of Racial, Class, and Gender Constructions in late 1960s America”, Anne Gray Perrin states that despite the film’s integrationist narrative, its “depiction of the class and gender hierarchy is the mean by which the social category of race is preserved” (846). In the film, this is evident in the scene leading up to Mr. Drayton’s acceptance of Dr. Prentice and his daughter’s interracial marriage, when he recites each characters’ position on the issue, almost in the manner of a detective exposing the culprit in the climactic moment of a murder mystery. This reinforces Perrin’s idea that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinneris “blatantly set up as a problem film” in which the solution and the fate of the black man is at the mercy of the white man. Although Hollywood tried to create a film with an innovative narrative, it is ultimately a movie for the white population, for it implies that the issue of racial inequality will be solved when white people learn to disregard race when judging a person. For the black population, this film subjects them to the white race and “implies that the burden to achieve class equality and prove the black man’s humanity is left to the African-American himself”, that they must first obtain a perfect reputation – Dr. Prentice is highly educated and accomplished – to be considered for acceptance by the white community.

Likewise, the film attempts to stray from tradition in its stylistic elements. In the scene where the Drayton’s maid, Tilly, confronts Dr. Prentice, the camera tilts sideways and frames the characters with a canted angle. This technique differs from the traditional straight framing used throughout the rest of the film and is jarring. This innovative stylistic technique, however, is used to heighten the discomfort in a conversation where the female black maid makes demands on the male black doctor. Here, Hollywood experiments with cinematic elements at the expense of its seemingly modern narrative, for it implies that strong claims made by a character of supposedly lower class, gender, and race disturb the traditions of society.

moral of the story: think about it, and move on

Posted on by michaelng

The film presents the paradigm shift regarding the relationship between the whites and the blacks as simply a reassessment of personal opinion in response to the changing times, in contrast to the drama and violence that this issue was associated with in reality (such as assassinations and black uprisings against police brutality). It puts the issue of white supremacy up for negotiation through presenting the premise of its own plot as a balancing act – putting both the white and the black family on even terms, neither being the clear ‘villain’. Dr. Prentice is lauded with accomplishments and displays of morality/fidelity so as to ‘make the conditions as ideal as they could be’ in Stanley Kubrick’s words. Mr. and Mrs. Drayton are similarly portrayed as both well-to-do in status and liberal in mindset, instilling the perspective of racial equality in their daughter. In so doing the audience is cordoned off any possible moralistic, subjective explanations and is forced to confront, in distilled clarity, the ‘question of different pigmentation’. 

The answer to this question manifests as the audience realises that what exists in the way of a loving couple’s marriage is not either family or race, but rather the dated, yet normative, belief of white class superiority. The film reinforces this idea of ‘datedness’, implying that as this opinion gets reassessed, it would naturally dissolve and make way for the perspectives of the new generation. This is shown when comparing how Joey adamantly declares to her parents her unwavering expectation of their blessing with how her parents themselves are wrapped in indecision throughout the movie, debating the social and personal consequences of the marriage. 

Ironic Portrayal of White Liberal Hipocrisy

Posted on by emilyjampel

In what seems like a strategic attempt to “win over” white mainstream audiences, and spread a perhaps well-intended message, the creators of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” attempt to create what they feel is the most perfect and like-able black person imaginable, which is to do nothing other than make him exactly like a white person. In every way imaginable, other than his physical appearance, it feels as though Poitier was told to act as white as possible for his role as Dr. Prentice. As Perrin points out in her essay “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: The Web of Racial, Class, and Gender Constructions in late 1960s America,” Dr. Prentice’s idealized cookie-cutter character is not only unrealistically “superhuman” in his academic accomplishments in addition to his upper-class social status, but he is additionally stripped entirely of any actual life experience, memory or context that would have belonged to any black individual actually living during this time, and would have made his character into a (more) complete and believable human being. It is not Dr. Prentice’s blackness but rather his complete lack of a personality, complexity or whole-ness that made his character (at least for me) seem so strange and unable to empathize with emotionally. Throughout the film, Dr. Prentice is not so much a real person as he is a hypothetical idea of a situation that is disconnected from reality entirely (which is ultimately what the entire movie is.)

It is interesting that Dr. Prentice’s excessively superhuman qualities as well as his completely white-washed demeanor and overall character, is both what is necessary for Dr. Prentice to win over Mr. and Mrs. Drayton in the first place, as well as, it seems, what the filmmakers feel is necessary to win over white audiences, and “sell” them the idea of Dr. Prentice and interracial marriage. It is ironic that in their desperate attempts to show to everyone how racist they aren’t, that both the characters and the filmmakers end up revealing how racist they (or at least their tendencies) actually are, though it is a less overt form of it. Through this film, a perhaps well-intended attempt to spread a liberal message of integration, the (white liberal) filmmakers attempt to critique the film’s white liberal characters for hypocrisy, but in doing so through, actually reveal their own.