About forty years ago I saw the movie Conrack (1974). It was a heart-warming story based on Pat Conroy’s experiences teaching a bunch of poorly educated African American children that lived on an island just off the coast of South Carolina. In the movie, we see that their ignorance is profound, not only in the three R’s, but also about life in general, and Conroy does a great job of educating and inspiring them. Then I found out that there were African American critics who disparaged this movie as being another white savior story, in which a white man proves to be indispensable in enabling people of color to improve their lot.
In movies set in the ante-bellum South, such as 12 Years a Slave (2013), or during the Civil War, such as Lincoln (2012), the presence of a white savior is hard to avoid. But as we get further away from the days of slavery, the presence of a white savior in a movie about African Americans making a better life for themselves becomes increasingly troublesome. The white savior is still tolerable if the movie is set in the Jim Crow South, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) or Mississippi Burning (1988), but not so much once the worst abuses of segregation have been eliminated, unless it is in a foreign country, as in Cry Freedom (1987).
It is understandable that African Americans would prefer to minimize the role of white saviors in their struggle for freedom and equal rights, to see themselves as primarily responsible for the progress they have made. And so we have to wonder if this is what is at the basis of the controversy surrounding the movie Selma (2014), in which President Lyndon Johnson is portrayed as being more of a hindrance than a help to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggle for equal voting rights. That is, some critics have argued that the film is historically inaccurate, that Johnson was actually a major force in the promotion of racial equality.
As a powerful white man, President Johnson would certainly qualify as a white savior if too much credit is given to him in the civil rights movement. Did director Ava DuVernay deliberately distort history in this regard, denying Johnson credit so that all the glory would redound to King and other African Americans? DuVernay says she is not going to argue history, but the history that underlies that movie will be argued about, with her or without her.
After all, she cannot have it both ways. She cannot present her movie as an authentic depiction of how things were back then, and then deny the importance of historical facts. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), a reporter says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” and we smile at the idea that people less sophisticated than ourselves need legends to believe in. But DuVernay comes very close to saying something like that in defense of her movie. She wants to dismiss the issue as a “talking point,” but when the issue is the existence of the dreaded white savior, that is no mere talking point, especially if it appears that she has been deliberately revisionist in this regard.
In addition to the question of whether Lyndon Johnson was indeed a white savior in the civil rights movement and should have been portrayed as such in the movie, there is the equally disturbing question of white saviors outside the movie, the ones who hand out awards. Regarding the movie Gandhi, Stephen Schiff makes the following remarks:
When audiences come, they come dutifully, and when the Oscars come, they are greeted the way Richard Attenborough greeted his 1982 Best Picture accolade for Gandhi: “It’s not me…you truly honor,” he told the yawning zillions. “You honor Mahatma Gandhi and his plea to all of us to live in peace.”
The nauseating truth is he was right. Five years later, no one is reviving Gandhi; no one rents the videotape; no critic calls a new movie the best goldarn such and such since Gandhi. Gandhi is remembered, if at all, as a good cause, not a good film.
Those who hand out awards want us to think well of them, and the lure of a movie about “justice and dignity,” as DuVernay puts it, can be irresistible. Of course, it is not always a good cause that wins the day. Sometimes it is just a question of being respectable. That is why in 1933, it would have been unthinkable for movies like
Duck Soup or
King Kong to get the award for Best Picture, for that would have made the Academy appear to be lowbrow. So
Cavalcade got the award instead, a picture you have never even heard of, let alone seen.
Now, 1933 was a long time ago, but a more recent example might be 12 Years a Slave (2013). Was that really the best movie of 2013, or did the voting members of the Academy simply want us to think of them as progressive and sensitive about racial oppression? Did the movie really deserve an Oscar, or did the Academy pick up the white man’s burden and bestow the Best Picture Award on that movie as a way of showing support for the cause of racial equality, and as a way of making themselves look good at the same time?
Maybe Selma will get such an award and maybe it won’t. But if it does, the taint of the white savior may hang over that award just as a similar taint threatens the story told in the movie itself.