The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Race as a Proxy in Cultural Criticism

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Wes Anderson has been both praised and criticized for many things. In an apparent first, however, his “whiteness” was cited by Slate’s Jonah Weiner as Anderson’s chief artistic fault. In a recent piece (on the eve of the release of The Darjeeling Limited), Weiner makes the case that Wes Anderson is just too white to make great films. Say what you want about Anderson (a fair case can be made that his films are too bent on whimsy and immaculate set design to cut too deep) but this complaint is as unsturdy as it is problematic. A meta-reality is a myth and as such a film can, at best, hope to capture a subset of realities in the plural. Art achieves a “universal” if it maintains fidelity to the specificty of its subject.  (Example: if a Spike Lee film addresses a set of realities specific to a given cultural/economic situation it is not to his film’s detriment.) And this comes after Slate (rightly) praised Bergman and Antonioni as two of the greatest directors in the history of film. Public and media discourses on issues of race have an especially strong tendency towards the superfluous and are obscurantist enough that I hesitate to address them on the dialectical terrain they stake. But the prevailing ethical attitudes are disastrous for critical dialogue about the arts and are not challenged with great frequency.

This prevailing sentiment — which demands that art must reflect what is real for most people at most times — forgets what should be a central maxim in art appreciation (especially in the age of conceptual art): a work of art must always be judged by the terms established within that work, or at least contend with those terms in the open. Instead, driven by anxiety, privileged multiculturalists demand that culture reflect their hopes for a new social reality — some sort of global village. But this global fluidity of movement and transgression of geo-cultural lines is a reality for capital alone - not people. So the prevailing ethics seeks a consensus for the already realized logic of capital. Race is an unfortunate proxy.

Weiner’s criticism, in an astonishing irony, forgets that the majority of the people who appear onscreen in The Darjeeling Limited are non-white. The interaction between the films central characters (who are white) and the Indians is fairly crafted: a feeling of cultural alienation prevails but when it is subverted it is done so by compelling examples of genuine exchange and encounter.

Yeah, Anderson is pretty white – and a nerd. And Bergman was pretty Scandinavian, Scorsese pretty Italian-American, Hemingway pretty masculine, and Faulkner pretty Southern. The argument needs to be taken another step at minimum before it has substance.

I don’t mean to get caught up in a critique of one article. This attitude is no idiosyncrasy of Weiner’s. In a recent piece “A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost its Soul” for The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones makes a similar claim that white “indie rock” is too white. (Note: he is not arguing that it needs more diversity amongst its mostly white musicians, just that those whites sound too “white.”) While I may share a stylistic distaste for some of the music he cites as “soulless” (music with a tendency towards either the twee on one end or the melodramatic on the other), his implicit implication is that “soul” is located in Otherness.   Maybe a lot of music would benefit from an upped dose of “blackness.”  But in creative endeavor there are many ways to bake a cake and while Frere-Jones solution to his monolithic diagnosis gets us the MC5, the later Clash, or Justin Timberlake; it must gloss over the wonders of Black Dice or Panda Bear who are creating fascinating new  sonic idioms.

The arguments advanced by Weiner and Frere-Jones confirm Lacan’s maxim that “what one desires in the Other’s desire”. This mandate that art should be qualified by Otherness has two distinct and drastic ethical implications.  First, in a paradoxical attempt at “integration”, redrawn is the line between subject and Other, thus relegating the Other as perpetually separate. Second, the ethical edict that art should always represent the experience of the Other echoes the most morally unsavory aspects of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic: one wants to be recognized in the adoring gaze of the Other. Of course, this phenomena is the root of the repressive functions of class and racial distinctions.

Anderson’s protagonists are economically privileged – not always overtly so but certainly in the way that their various adventures and emotional breakdowns are never interrupted by financial struggle. While this characteristic should be acknowledged and is open to criticism, the notion that art has to do, be, or reflect any one thing should be rightly understood as the least sophisticated mode of criticism.

Weiner is getting at something, if a bit harshly, when he writes:

“In every film he’s made, even the best ones, there’s been something kind of obnoxious about Wes Anderson. By now, critics have enumerated several of his more irritating traits and shticks: There’s his pervasive preciousness, exemplified by the way he pins actors into the centers of fastidiously composed tableaux like so many dead butterflies. There’s his slump-shouldered parade of heroes who seem capable of just two emotions: dolorous and more dolorous (not that there haven’t been vibrant exceptions to this). And there’s the way he frequently couples songs—particularly rock songs recorded by shaggy Europeans between 1964 and 1972—with slow-motion effects, as though he’s sweeping a giant highlighter across the emotional content of a scene.”

But he reveals something when he, seemingly out of nowhere, praises Anderson-pal Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, a film which, though I liked, I remember to be equally “privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored.” The difference with that film is that the characters were all white. Seemingly coded in this sort of racially-based critique is the paradox that, rather than a lack of plurality in the racial makeup of characters, it is actually the simultaneous coexistence of subject and other in the same frame that is unsettling.

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