So I saw The Blind Side. You know, the runaway hit in which Sandra Bullock plays Leigh Ann Tuohy, a real-life Tennessee woman whose family took Michael Oher, a homeless and traumatized teenager, into their home, nurtured him, and sent him on his way to becoming a first-round NFL draft pick.
You may remember that when I saw the trailer, I was immediately concerned that this film was going to reduce a complex, real-life story to cheap and offensive paternalism. And looking at the preview again, I still believe it does just that: It sells us an icky story about a White Angel Lady who blesses a Poor Black Kid with the healing, righteous powers of her whiteness.
The film itself, however, tries not to be so single-minded. Instead, writer-director John Lee Hancock is making a more sweeping moral statement about inclusion. The movie tries to tells us, “A real family is made of people who understand and love each other, and not necessarily of people who have the same skin color, political beliefs, or economic backgrounds.”
I can’t argue with that message, and I credit the movie for trying to make it. The way it delivers its moral, however, is often muddled and occasionally troubling.
Spoilers ahead
For one thing, no matter how loudly it proclaims that everyone can be in a family with everyone else, the movie still evinces a clear bias for rich, white, southern, Christian Republicans.
And before you leave an angry comment, please know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this bias per se. Frankly, there aren’t that many mainstream movies that present RWSCRs as heros—they’re usually vilified or mocked—yet there are plenty of RWSCRs in this country. Every group deserves a splashy Hollywood movie that treats it well, and The Blind Side fills a void.
But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell us that everyone can be family in one breath and then assert the superiority of RWSCRs in the next.
Here are two scenes that reveal the movie’s bias
- After it’s suggested that the Tuohys only took him in so that he could play football for Ole Miss, Michael runs away. Leigh Ann looks for him in the housing project where he used to live, and while she’s there, she’s accosted by a drug dealer. She tells the dealer to back off, because the D.A. is in her prayer group, she’s a member of the NRA, and she is always packing heat. It works, and the dealer shuts up. This scene is clearly intended to make the audience cheer. It casts the Black World as a scary place, filled with threats, drugs, and crime, but it says that if you are a RWSCR, then you have the tools you need to survive.
- When they’re looking for a tutor for Michael, the Tuohys interview “Miss Sue.” After the interview goes well, Miss Sue says she has to confess… that she’s a democrat. There’s an awkward pause, where the audience is clearly intended to laugh. Miss Sue does get the job, but later, we hear Mr. Tuohy say that he can’t believe there’s a democrat in his house. Again, we see RWSCRs as the dominant force in the film. Democrats are scared of them. They have to ask their permission to work and be invited into a home.
Whether Hancock intends them to or not, scenes like these alter the film’s ostensibly universal message. Under their influence, the message becomes, “A real family isn’t based on what we look like or what we believe or how much money we make, but the best and most successful families are rooted in Rich, White, Southern, Christian, Republican values.” For me, the fact that a black man and a Democrat are welcomed into the film’s central family doesn’t diminish the fact that the RWSCR spirit leads the charge.
Granted, some of Leigh Ann’s RWSCR friends are shockingly racist—they ask whether it’s a good idea to have a black man stay in the same house as the Tuohy’s teenage daughter—but they are quickly shunted out of the picture. I know that for some people, their racist presence will invalidate my argument that the film is biased toward RWSCRs, but for me, the scenes I listed above (and several others like them) have much more power than Leigh Ann’s luncheon with her tacky gal pals.
And so… while The Blind Side isn’t a disaster or anything—and Sandra Bullock continues to be as charming as Hermione’s wand—I can’t say I actually enjoyed it. It tries too hard to make too many arguments, and it ends up with mush in its mouth.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Laura Mc. // Dec 30, 2009 at 3:05 pm
So, I haven’t seen the movie, but I do have a question. Why does bullet #2 undercut a message of inclusion if, in the end, the character is included?
It would seem the whole plot is based on little snapshots like this in which RWSCRs question the outsider, remember their “tolerance,” then welcome the person into their inner circle.
Ultimately, it is this pompous notion of “tolerance” that turns me off to the film lock, stock, and barrel. I just can’t get behind it.. but how could you tell this story without hitting these corny, self-congratulatory notes when the Tuohys did indeed have to overcome suspicion and racism regarding the young man they were trying to help?
I can’t imagine an alternative version of this film in the style of some deconstructed, post-modern concoction told out of order dripping with irony and inter-textual references.
Ultimately this film has its audience for movie-goers who still enjoy the story of privileged whites extending helping hands.. but there is a big part of me (real big) that just wants my people to get over themselves.
2 Molly // Dec 30, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I live in Mississippi, and some friends and I were talking just the other day about how it makes viewing this movie a completely different experience than it would be if we lived elsewhere. First and foremost it should be said that Sandra Bullock NAILED that role. She completely inhabited it. She was brilliant. And not a caricature at all– that’s really how those women are.
Now then.
It might just be because I went in really wanting to enjoy the movie, having read the story in local newspapers when Oher was at Ole Miss, but I saw all the things that you point to as story flaws, particularly the Kathy Bates “I’m a Democrat” moment, as deliberate character flaws, establishing stuff, that we as the audience were supposed to note as indications of how much the family’s experience with Michael changed them. They used to be the sort of people who hated and dismissed Democrats, and black people, etc., but because of the events depicted in the film they’re not anymore. Those moments that for you make the message “A real family isn’t based on what we look like or what we believe or how much money we make, but the best and most successful families are rooted in Rich, White, Southern, Christian, Republican values” makes it for me a message of “Here are some people who thought this way and realized they were wrong about it.” Because, not that this will surprise you, but all those little details– the all-white faculty and student body at the private school, the family cars, the racist friends, every every everything– were so spot on. That’s really how that kind of family lives and thinks, and you couldn’t tell this story, as the commenter above said, without showing that– and the filmmakers weren’t exaggerating. I’m not a fan of RWSCRs, pretty much the exact opposite in fact, and I actually thought the movie did a pretty decent job of showing their flaws. They’d never met a Democrat before. Now they have, and they like her, and they’re realizing the error of their ways. I don’t know. It might just be that because that sort of behavior is in my eyes so definitely and obviously wrong I couldn’t conceive of it as being presented in any other light, and details like that hit my brain as “Oh, they’re WASPY and they don’t like Democrats. That means they suck. Wait, they’re doing nice things. That’s a surprise, because they’re WASPY and they don’t like Democrats. Intriguing.”
You say, “For me, the fact that a black man and a Democrat are welcomed into the film’s central family doesn’t diminish the fact that the RWSCR spirit leads the charge,” but I felt like the movie was acknowledging that for the fact of the story that it is, not promoting it as a positive thing. Totally just my opinion, though.
3 SR // Dec 30, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Well, Mark, you stuck to your guns, I suppose.
You still have not answered a primary question, though. Your argument is that the film conveys the message that RWSCRs have an inherent power and goodness. However, what if the film simply depicted real-life events, as Oher and the Tuohys have said it did? Then, your argument is false; it would be real life events conveying the message as opposed to the film conveying the message. You would, in essence, be shooting the messenger which, as you know, is futile. Further, although you state that the RWSCR bias is not bad, your two articles combine to certainly condemn the bias in a reader’s mind. Thus, you may be condemning the message conveyed by real-life events, and that is exactly what Oher said bothered him in his 20/20 interview about the film.
I think you should have addressed these possibilities, and I do wonder if you would have written a similar story if the racial roles were reversed. I think you only noticed the bias because it was, in some ways, black over white, and to only notice that bias is the real paternalism to me. What do you think?
4 Linda // Dec 30, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Last night’s “20/20″ about this story actually hit the nail on the head regarding why I think it’s perfectly possible for Mark to be right even if the movie is based on real events. (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the movie and do not have an independent opinion of it. My feelings about the telling of this story and the potential pitfalls thereof are based on the book, but would seem to apply equally to the movie.)
One of Oher’s coaches said, in an interview, essentially, “Yes, the Tuohys are wonderful people, and they did a great thing. But you have to understand that the X factor is Michael Oher. You could give a hundred kids all the resources and all the help and all the opportunities that he got, and only one of them would get as far as he did, and that’s because of him, and it’s about who he is, because in the end, he’s the one who had to get it done.”
The trick with Oher (this is in the book, and it was fairly obviously true in the “20/20″ special, too) is that he doesn’t like to talk about himself. He’s very, very quiet, and he always has been. Not as much as he used to be, and maybe not with family, but he isn’t a kid who sits down and pours his heart out. So getting at what it was about *him* that made his story possible is pragmatically very difficult. This plagued the book as well, and Michael Lewis was pretty up-front about it. The Tuohys, especially Leigh Anne, are talkers. They are extremely social, outgoing people, so getting them to open up about the experience is easy. You wind up telling their story because getting their story is easier. Leigh Anne is a great chatter; she makes a great narrator. There are things about Michael’s life and his perspective, on the other hand, that he’s simply never going to tell anyone. His complete story is something he is going to keep to himself, probably permanently.
Thus does it have the potential to become a story about them and not a story about him. It’s nothing anybody does on purpose. It’s nothing anybody does because they’re racist. It’s just that his story subtly moves its emphasis away from what he accomplished to what was given to him.
The story can be true, but the movie still selects a point of view and shapes a narrative — this was true in the book, too. If you make the story of Michael Oher a story about the Tuohys, then you’re shifting the focus considerably, and it becomes disproportionately a story of benevolently bestowed rescue and not a story of his hard work.
5 Rachel // Jan 6, 2010 at 4:32 am
I’m not entirely sure that the argument that “the movie still evinces a clear bias for rich, white, southern, Christian Republicans” quite holds up when one of your two examples is precisely that a Democrat occupies a central place in the emotional and structural composition of the movie. Would Michael Oher have gotten into (and THROUGH) Ole Miss without the help of Miss Sue? The movie doesn’t present it as such. The fact that Miss Sue “confesses” her political affiliation isn’t a sign that the MOVIE lives in a Republican world, but that the character shows an awareness that she as an individual is surrounded by a larger community dominated by Republicans. There’s the director-constructed world of the art object that is the movie itself, and then within that there’s the world being depicted BY the movie. I think you’re conflating the two, and I don’t think they actually map onto one another so completely.
I also don’t think that you can treat “a splashy Hollywood movie that treats [a group] well” as evidence that the group is being presented as being SUPERIOR. What makes that leap from a positive depiction to a superior one? OK, Leanne is presented as being superior to drug dealers, but lots of people would benefit from that comparison. Leanne gets out of the situation by saying she’s packing heat because that rhetoric is what that particular character has at her disposal. Another character could deal with it another way (and still be sassy and tough and lovable) even when taking a different tack. I don’t think there’s anything to suggest that the movie presents this as the only way the nasty drug dealers could have been vanquished. It’s not like you see someone else go into the same situation an try and fail (Miss Sue’s voter registration drive goes horribly wrong!!) Leanne acts in the way that a nice Republican would act — yes, like a nice person and like a Republican at the same time. If the character weren’t free to be a second amendment fan, that would be a somewhat disingenuous depiction, and I don’t see why the character should be scrubbed of traits that would be natural to her.
All in all, my main qualm with the argument is the equating of a positive portrayal with a biased portrayal. And if it isn’t biased, then its not hypocritical.
The family’s treatment of Michael ultimately didn’t have any thing to do with their Republicanism, though certainly it must have had much to do with their Christianity. But Republicanism and Christianity aren’t equals either. It likely that a wealthy Christian in the South would be a Republican, but there’s not really any CAUSATION. Their religious faith probably contributed to their inclination to help; their wealth certainly contributed to their ability to do so; but their political beliefs don’t seem (to me) to have had a direct effect on their decisions or behavior towards Oher. So I take their Republicanism as detail appropriate to the characters’ environment, but not as a foundational principle of the movie.
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