Subject: Re: erasure
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Mon Jan 24 2000 - 00:38:54 EST
At 12:03 AM -0500 on 1/24/2000, you wrote:
> OSR--Where are the "people of colour" in JDS?
Not unlike where they are in Woody Allen movies: movers,
housekeepers, domestic help, and so on and, recently, prostitutes,
which have entered his movies as characters to a surprising degree.
I don't fault him for that; he writes of worlds he knows, and other
than his devotion to jazz, he doesn't seem to have a lot of overlap
with black people. (Nor with many poor white people, either.)
Speaking of Woody Allen (and this is the kind of congruence that
makes me feel as if I'm about to do a really long word in Scrabble),
in "Hannah and Her Sisters," the Mia Farrow character, Hannah, is an
actress who has just played Desdemona, and Hannah's mother comes in
the kitchen where the "domestic help" is working, and says how
wonderful it must be to do Othello. It's cringe-worthy to hear her
say, "Just think, you and that big black stud..." (or something to
that effect; my copy of the screenplay is in my other hotel room).
I'm the last person in the room to hew to PC norms, but whether it
was an oversight on the part of the director or an insight into the
mother's character, either makes me shrivel in shame, seeing them
talk like that in front of the (black) woman preparing the dinner.
--tim
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