Step Up (2006)

[oyceter]

Before writing this out, I feel I must note that I adore Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance, and all those rather predictable, step-by-step, learning to dance movies.

So, the dancing was awesome. The characters... were not as bad as they might have been, and were even believable sometimes.

What I thought was interesting was how multi-racial the background was. Tyler, the main character, has been in and out of foster homes for forever. His best friend is black, and they both steal cars together and etc. Tyler's white. Tyler also has a younger white foster sister, and a younger black foster brother. I wasn't sure what race Nora, the heroine, was -- she's clearly upper-class and very wealthy. I thought she might have been Hispanic, but her mother didn't seem like it, so I'm not sure. If she was, I liked the flip-around of the white guy being the poor, uneducated, in trouble one, and the person of color being the wealthy one.

The art school isn't just a haven of upper-middle-class kids; the director tells us early in the movie that many of the students are there on scholarships. I loved the initial shots of the school, of the black kids playing classical music on violins in the hallway, of random Asian, Hispanic, and black faces everywhere.

I wasn't sure why they decided to make Tyler white though. It reminds me a great deal of the Eminem phenomenom described in Everything But the Burden; how white artists are the ones most recognized and respected for black cultural achievements (in this case, hip hop). There were many black secondary characters; actually, the majority of the non-main-characters were black. Nora's best friend is black, as is her best friend's romantic interest, as is Tyler's best friend.

Again, I can't tell if Nora was meant to be seen as Hispanic or as white. If it is as white, then there's the standard problem in which there's a very, very multi-cultural, multi-racial background, as shown in all the scenes (or a black background), but the main characters are still white. You have obvious POC as secondary characters, but not as the main characters. If she is meant to be read as Hispanic, I keep wondering why the other multi-racial dance movies I've seen (Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, Save the Last Dance) perpetually have a mixed-race couple in which one of them is always white. It's particularly interesting because all three of these movies have a sort of integration of classic dance (be it ballroom or ballet) with a more "ethnic" dance, in which the hybrid gains mainstream acceptance. (I think... It's been a while since I've seen the other two.)

And the thing is, I'm sure there are all-black or all-POC dancing movies out there, but I haven't seen them because I subconsciously thought they were too black, the way I used to habitually pass over the African-American Literature section at Borders (their label, not mine).

So, no real conclusion from me, just musing.

Comments

[delux-vivens.livejournal.com]

Joe Morton (the mechanic) also starred in "Brother from Another Planet."

I think 'the mainstream' still has this idea that lead characters have to match the perceived majority of their consumers. Hence generally white male protagonists, unless they're going for the female audience and want a white female protagonist. I'm pretty sure they're wrong.

Julie Dash said this in an interview about 15 years ago:

"When I present my ideas, pitch my stories, send my screenplays out, they [the powers that be in Hollywood] say there is no audience for this. They come up with every excuse in the world. I think the reason for that is that my films center around black women. If it is not a white male story, they are just not interested ...What is interesting is that every film that has come out with black women in it has done well. We have proved them wrong. Eve’s Bayou proves them wrong. What are they going to say now?" Julie Dash (interview with Moikgantsi Kgama)

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

And yet I don't identify with characters that are physically like me in terms of skin colour or anything else. I identify with the character that looks like someone I knew in real life that I thought was cool (hence the geeky mechanics (I just remembered Kaylee who is white and female, and so broadened the group) and my thing for characters of South Asian descent with strong Midlands, Northern or Scottish accents -- and Naveen Andrews' characters because something about him reminds me of my Brummie sort-of-ex).

Does your average straight, white guy really have problems identifying with someone not like him? Asking especially because of the two nearest example I know personally one cites My Beautiful Laundrette as a good film he ought to rewatch soon, and the other is writing some very odd literature about gay rock stars. So no decent basis for proving a point there, I don't think.

[oyceter]

Does your average straight, white guy really have problems identifying with someone not like him?

I don't know... but I guess my thing is that even if they don't have problems identifying with people not like them, it's still so much less of an issue for them because there are so many more portrayals of people like them (in terms of race and gender and sexuality, since I am egregriously skipping over class).

Like, I don't have problems identifying with people not like me, but I am just angry that there is so much need for me to, just because there are so few fictional representations of people who look like me.

Uh, got a little side-tracked, sorry.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

No need to apologise, I was just trying to look at the problem from a different angle. Like if we can't instantly bludgeon *whoever* into making films for and about someone other than this mythical straight white male target audience, then how about convincing them that their mythical target audience might want to watch films about people different to themselves?

Not that I know how to get them to make that leap, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

[oyceter]

Ugh, yes. rachelmanija's posts on casting in Hollywood and pitching scripts seem to bear this out as well, which is highly disappointing. And I wonder what the audience statistics are for movies with all POC in them, if they tend to be more POC, and if that's because of the marketing or what.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I can answer this one a bit: it seems to depend largely on marketing. The audience for something like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which was marketed as, basically, a crossover mainstream/art house film, are much more racially mixed (ie, including but not exclusively POC) than the audience for something like Barbershop which, IIRC, was heavily marketed to African-American audiences but not much elsewhere.

To respond to the comment above, I agree that white men in general are probably more willing to see protagonists of color than executives think they will be, but they are unlikely to go if the marketing makes them think they'll be the only white person in the theatre. There are a whole host of other issues going on in addition to that, of course, one of which is the ever-frustrating one of why no one's money is any good if they're not a white man.

That is, movies are often successful without getting a lot of men in the audience due to enthusiastic reception among women, and the same goes for movies that don't get a large white audience-- especially if the latter are lower-budget, so don't need as many butts in the seats to be profitable. (Total numbers of any given racial minority being less than total numbers of all women.)

This, however, is not popular as a selling point, for reasons that would require a post the length of my casting posts, but would come to the exact same conclusion: there are a lot of complex factors, but they all boil down to racism and sexism, with a dash of xenophobia and homophobia for flavoring.