Note: A few weeks ago, the backlash against the Oscars—the scourging of Patricia Arquette for her post-Oscars speech in favor of pay equality, the wailing over Graham Moore's failure to be gay while considering suicide as a teen, and so much more—broke my brain. I started seeing problems. Problems were everywhere. So many problems! Too many to recount here, in fact. So I set up a tumblr! I'll still continue writing this post once a week or so here. But if you want to keep on things that are problematic—such as The Dress and Back to the Future and White Dudes Trying to Write—then you should keep your eye on EverythingsAProblem.tumblr.com.
The "white savior trope" is one of the most confounding elements of modern cinema. It takes many forms—Kevin Costner trying to save a black child from being raised by inferior black guardians, Kevin Costner teaching a team of Hispanic kids how to run, Kevin Costner educating American Indians about how to defend themselves, etc.—but the idea is always the same. An enlightened, amazing white person sees something wrong with a minority and tries to fix said minority.
This is, needless to say, very problematic.
As a result, it was somewhat surprising to see Richard Linklater's Boyhood receive so much Oscar buzz in the run up to this year's Academy Awards. It was, for the longest time, the best picture frontrunner. The irony here was simply too delicious: Here we had the whitest Oscars in living memory and the award was going to go to ... a picture that reveled in the white savior trope? SMDH.
Perhaps you don't remember the scene I'm talking about. It comes toward the end of the movie, when a hispanic manager at a restaurant approaches Patricia Arquette's character—the dismissively named "Mom," as if she's nothing more than a reproductive sac—and tells her that, thanks to some advice she gave him while he was fixing her septic tank, he went back to school and is now on the right track in life.
Fortunately, some are starting to wake up to this rank injustice. Here's the AV Club's Mike D'Angelo:
About halfway through the movie—around 2009 in the timeline, I think—Mason’s mother (Patricia Arquette) casually tells Ernesto (Roland Ruiz), the young guy who’s working on the septic line in her backyard, that he’s smart and should be in school. This interaction is brief—24 seconds, to be exact—but it pays off, for better or worse, about an hour later, when Ernesto unexpectedly returns as the manager of a restaurant where Mason (Ellar Coltrane), his mom, and his sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), are eating, just before Mason heads off to college at the end of the movie. Even Boyhood’s staunchest defenders tend to concede that these two scenes are kind of gross, flirting with the notion of the Great White Savior who helps minorities realize their full potential.
Now, if we're being honest, it's a bit problematic that D'Angelo, a white man, does not give any credit to Grisel Y. Acosta or any of the other activists who highlighted the problematic nature of Boyhood. It's even more problematic that he believes this may have been a forgivable oversight on director Richard Linklater's part. But I'll let all that slide for now. I can only focus on one problem at a time.*
I give Boyhood's transgression of engaging in the white savior trope two problematics.
*This is probably a problematic violation of intersectionality. I apologize in advance if I triggered you.