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A white man kills a black man and
shacks up with his victim’s black widow. That plotline, despite
valiant efforts to be a salvation story for a hopelessly racist
white southerner, is nevertheless the essential narrative arc of Monster’s
Ball. It’s a story that, like many Hollywood films, ends
up subconsciously transmitting the exact opposite of its purported
message.
The viewer is supposed to have her faith restored for the hopes
of a racially reconciled culture because, the film implies, if this dirty
white bastard can be redeemed, then anyone can. Instead, by the
film’s conclusion, the viewer comes to see just how stubborn,
virulent, and resistant to social antibiotics the strain of racism
really is in American culture—or at least how blind Hollywood
writers can be both about states they’ve never visited and
people they’ve only met in their imaginations. Monster
Balls is the white man’s sexual burden for black women,
a story so blatant and obvious you wouldn’t be surprised if
the ACLU makes a lawsuit out of it.
blindingly bad men
Ku klux kliché.
First, count the clichés. The three male characters are
Sonny, Buck, and Hank, three redneck names so trite, overused,
and clichéd (not to mention redundant) they practically
leap off the tongue of any do-good liberal concocting a story of
southern racial prejudice.
And where does the story take place? Supposedly all in the same
backwards town, which is never named. According to the film’s
cues, though, it just happens to be—simultaneously!—in
all three of the deep South’s most famously racist states.
License plates and restaurants say “Georgia” on them.
Leticia says her husband was executed in Jackson (a town in Mississippi),
yet when the actual execution takes place, the prison guards are
wearing Louisiana-shaped badges that say “Louisiana Department
of Corrections” on them. Like the clichéd names of
the main characters, these three states are easy whipping boys,
straw men in straw states that our enlightened screenwriter proceeds
to topple with seeming ease as the film progresses.
You may be wondering now why Alabama (“a Southern man don’t
need him around,” as they famously replied to Neil Young)
isn’t in the film, despite being as good a racist southern
state as any. After all, Alabama is the only southern state that
still uses the electric chair for executions (the only other state
still using the chair is Nebraska), although all four of Alabama’s
planned executions last year were halted by the higher courts.
Perhaps its omission will give illumination to the film’s
cultural, historic, and factual reliability, or lack thereof.
Two monsters eliminate the cultural restriction
on their balls.
As propaganda, it’s brilliant. But those who claim to see
the light are often most easily blinded by it, and Monster’s
Ball seems completely unaware of its own complicity in perpetuating
the racist status quo—not just in these states but across
the entire country. In truth, Monster’s Ball is to
race relations what Maxim magazine is to hardcore pornography:
far worse precisely because it pretends to be the exact opposite
of what it really is.
Second, consider what the phrase “monster’s ball” is
actually intended to refer to: the night-before-execution party
that jailers traditionally give to death row inmates. Not only
do we never get to see this scene in the film, by implication it
never even happens since Lawrence Musgrove is denied his final
phone call as he walks his black mile.
Musgrove, played beautifully by Puff Daddy/P Diddy/Sean John/Sean
Combs is, of course, guilty of nothing other than his blackness.
When asked by his son why he is going away, Musgrove replies, “Because
I’m a bad man,” just a typo away from the cultural claim
that is explicitly being made here, which is, “Because I’m
a black man.” By Puff Daddy’s brand extension, the entire
rap music genre, with its glorification of sex and violence against
the white man, is also an ersatz enemy that the film must eliminate.
alternative horrors
Third, consider an alternative version of the same story. Imagine
that Oscar-winner Denzel Washington plays Hank, a racist death
row prison guard, while Oscar-winner Julia Roberts plays Leticia,
the single mother. Imagine, other than a race-reversal of the characters,
the movie playing itself out exactly as scripted.
Pretty hard to picture, isn’t it? Such a film would horrify
you.
You would be horrified in general because it would offend every
sensibility you had. Specifically, you’d be horrified at how
unequal the supposed love story is, which comprises a dominant
male authority figure in full control over all the economic power
in the story. You’d be horrified at how submissive a doormat
the female lead is as she is forced, damsel-in-distress style,
out of her own house and into the bedroom of her new “patron
saint” with the line, “I really need someone to take
care of me.”
And finally, you’d be horrified by the fact that Leticia’s
self-esteem as a woman, and especially as a black woman (as the
film actually shows it), is so incredibly low that on discovering
the news that Hank is her husband’s executioner, she does
not kill Hank, but continues to sublimate his psychosexual fantasies,
which started with chocolate ice cream, then black coffee, and
now, finally, a presumably unending feast of her own American chocolate
pie.
The message the movie sends is clear: “Hey white men! If
you’re going to sleep with black girls, then at least be decent
enough to pay their rent, buy them a car, and name your businesses
after them.” Listen to the background noise underlying this
motif: Can you hear thirty years’ worth of white men whining
about welfare mothers? Because the message is equally clear if
you read it in reverse: “Hey white men! You’ve been subsidizing
the rent on single black moms for a while. Now’s the time
you saw some action in return for your favor. Think of it as the
cultural return on your default black tax.”
digging the hole deeper
Talk about monster balls! This is easily the most racist movie
to come out of Hollywood since Birth of a Nation. It’s
almost as though the film is trying to offer the only possible
justification for the welfare system that would appease the (shortsighted)
angry white man: Kill the husbands, kill the male children, but
leave the black female flesh for white men to consume.
In truth, the film is a sort of reverse fulfillment of all the
white man’s fears after the emancipation proclamation. In Birth
of a Nation, secret white societies like the KKK were organized
allegedly to protect the white women of the South from being ravaged
by the sexually insatiable black man. Little did whitey know then
that the three brothers Ku, Klux, and Klan were simply doing what
psychologists call “projecting” their worst fears about
their own devious desires onto their darker-skinned cousins.
In recorded historical fact and observable truth, it is the white
man who has had “monster balls” for the black woman ever
since the earliest days of colonialism, slavery, and the founding
of the country—from Thomas Jefferson on down. And it is this
same sordid history of white sexual oppression of blacks that gave
rise to the mulatto “problem” in American history, only
considered a problem in the first place because in a racially segregated
culture it revealed the white man’s guilt when biracial couplings
produced a visibly darker offspring.
It is ironic that Ms. Berry, who is herself mulatto, would have
no problem making such a film. Vanessa Williams, also a mulatto,
turned down the lead role because of the full frontal nudity. For
Ms. Berry—who said of her previous nudity, “Swordfish was
exploitive, but so what?”—the double-whammy-mammy of
blaxsexploitation has spelled only Oscar gold, so her “So
what?” becomes largely rhetorical in her individual case.
It is blacks and women at large who will be paying for years to
come for the regressive steps she’s taken in this one film.
failing women
But the film isn’t simply bad for blacks. Like TV’s The
Bachelor, Monster’s Ball sets progress for women
back another fifty years.
On one hand, it says that these three southern states are terribly
racist and all the police are just like Nazis, especially their
uniforms and jackboots. On the other hand, it says that “nigger
juice” is pretty sweet and that “splitting the dark oak” is
what makes you a man. This message is articulated in the character
of Buck, father of Hank and grandfather of Sonny, three good old
bubbas whose desire to rut indifferently and anonymously is made
clear through the shared white hooker and the fact of the grandmother’s
suicide—justified by grandpa with the line that “that
woman failed me,” a reference, we subsequently learn, to her
unwillingness to rut as frequently as the appropriately named Buck
would have desired.
But the two real lynchpins of the film come in the character of
the white prostitute played by Amber Rules and the flashed image
of the caged bird during the Oscar-winning sex scene.
Rules plays a no-nonsense white hooker who provides her clients
with exactly what they want: “a little late-night pussy.” An
absolute model of unrestrained capitalism’s chief requirement—efficiency—she
wastes no time on small talk but simply walks in, removes her clothing,
and bends over on the desk. She knows why she’s there and
she knows what she’s worth, so she makes no bones about taking
their money even if they can’t perform.
Her initial scene with Sonny is perhaps one of Hollywood’s
most honest sex scenes because it reveals just how unsatisfying
sex can be when stripped down to its raw mechanics. Both characters
and audience experience the scene as more existentially painful
than lemon juice in a raw wound, yet it is at least completely
honest about its purposes. Poor Sonny, who kills himself in front
of his father and grandfather, is quite aware of his life’s
hypocrisy and his soul’s numbness. His suicide is almost a
noble effort to put an end to the sins of his forefathers—while
we in the audience are forced to watch Hank indulge his desires
for the rest of the movie.
Marvin Gaye, call your office
Hank’s sexual desires, which we are supposed to believe change
depending upon the race of the girl he’s with, go from anonymous
and indifferent for cash to personal and caring—for cash.
Maya Angelou knows why the caged bird sings. In her autobiography,
she says Monster Balls made her do it too. According to the USA
Weekend interview, Halle Berry understood her sex scene to
be “about so much more than sex. It’s ‘without this
I’m gonna die,’ not just, ‘I wanna feel good tonight’.”
This, which we can call the Marvin Gaye “Sexual Healing” rubric,
is a favorite Hollywood scene-solving technique that says when
two characters become inexplicably and unavoidably involved in
each other’s life, the only way to justify it is to have them
suddenly make the beast with two backs, thereby guaranteeing audience
involvement just at the moment one would otherwise start thinking
about leaving the theater and demanding a refund. Did you get hot
and bothered? Did you then forget why these two were together in
the first place? Good—the technique still works!
Interestingly, however, the cinematographer seems to have gotten
a few quarter-second flashes of meaning into the scene. The caged
bird isn’t singing here, she’s flapping, trying for all
the world to get out. Is the black woman caged by the white man
and trying to escape but incapable of doing so for economic and
historic reasons? Only these few quarter seconds give the viewer
any reason to imagine that someone on set might have been aware
of the deeper implications of the overall story, and how sex was
being used here to cement the traditional relationship of black
women to white men. Then again, it could simply have been that
the actual bird on set got hot and bothered watching the black
Berry get Thorntoned by Billy Bob, and simply couldn’t sit
still.
bad news of the world
But even if you take the movie with a bucket of salty popcorn
and give it the benefit of its numerous self-produced doubts, Monster’s
Ball is still pretty bleak news for race relations in America.
The movie portrays the near-impossibility of blacks and whites
having a successful relationship in contemporary culture. While
attempting to show how true love conquers all, the script is nevertheless
filled with so many contrived coincidences to bring these two unlikely
and race-crossed lovers together that you can only walk away with
the unintended but opposite message: In real life, not even a miracle
could make this work.
As such, Monster’s Ball is a film that asks and answers
only one question:
Question: When will blacks and whites get along together
in America?
Answer: Never. Or rather, only when the white man can screw
the black woman without any consequences whatsoever. And when will
that happen, according to the film? Only when all the black men
are dead and the black women are already half white, already measure
up to the white beauty standard, and are so economically dependent
(i.e., enslaved) that they have no real choice in the matter.
What’s that again? That the film unintentionally paints a
more virulent picture of racism than the one it is intending to
overcome. Only if the white man kills the black woman’s spouse,
helps dispose of her dead black son’s body, and basically
ensures that there are no other threatening black males around,
such as the kids on his property that can only be frightened away
with a shotgun blast, is he then free to “love” her.
The love story works only if her spouse is killed by him (whose
former spouse is already dead), only if his kid commits suicide
while her kid gets hit by a car and dies, only if she gets evicted
while he evicts his father, only if the state requests that he
take her home, only if they get drunk together, only if he buys
her a car, only if he already has a pre-existing predilection for
chocolate ice cream and black coffee (not to mention a genetically
inherited trait for “splitting dark oak”), only if she
enslaves herself sexually to him by becoming completely economically
dependent on his spiritual and physical welfare, confessing her
helplessness both as black and as female by pleading that she “really
needs someone to take care of me,” only if he pays substitutionary
atonement by renaming his used car company after her—then,
and only then, will these two truly be able to say, “I think
we’re going to be all right.”
And of course, they won’t be all right. They’ll be anything
but. She’ll wake up one day to the true nature of her plight
and hopefully put a shotgun between his eyes, pull the trigger
and say, “Did you feel that?”
In other words, it's a pretty terrifying time to be a black man
or woman in either the Deep South or the Shallow North, but perhaps
especially in the Vapid West where erotic fantasies are made to
look like redemption and where racism, with just enough white light,
can be made to look like reconciliation.
Further reading
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