Just heard of Sidney Poitier’s death at the age of 94. What a man! What an actor! Below is an article I wrote in Ireland in 2009 in which, to conclude my argument, I duly referenced Poitier’s autobiography, The Measure of A Man
Good black actors in bad Hollywood roles
IT was in 1987 that I eventually got an admission into the then University of Ile-Ife, Nigeria (now Obafemi Awolowo University) to study Dramatic Arts. When I told one of my aunts the news, she offered her hearty congratulations and then in a-matter-fact way warned me never to play the part of a slave, the downtrodden or a villain in any play that I would be involved in, in my career as a thespian. She advised very strongly that I should always aim for the part of a king, the rich and the affluent in any play for which I audition.
Of course, my aunt was advising me on the basis of the Nigerian television drama with which she was familiar. More often than not these plays would have Kabiyesi in them, because they are either inspired by Yoruba culture or based on historical events. One-off television dramas such as Efunsetan Aniwura, Oba Koso and Ogbori Elemoso and the most successful Nigerian television series in the 1970s, Village Headmaster, nostalgically come to mind here. In all of these plays, like in most classical Hollywood narratives, ‘good’ would always overcome ‘evil’. So what my aunt was essentially trying to say to me then was that I should always avoid the part of the ‘baddy’.
Twenty odd years on, I cannot say how successfully I, as an actor, have heeded my aunt’s golden advice but as a dramatist and a theatre director, I do not believe in the concept of ‘arts for arts sake’. It is like saying: ‘advertisers advertise for the sake of advertising’; and not to influence you to consume the products they are advertising. Though I work in a so-called ‘entertainment’ industry I believe the role of any artist is not merely to entertain but also to inform and educate. That is why my favourite quote is: “art is not a mirror to be held up to a society but a hammer with which to shape it” by German drama theorist, Bertolt Brecht. So if you think you are escaping from reality by reading a fiction, seeing a play or watching a movie, think again. It is through these art forms that our attitudes are cultivated and our reality is fashioned.
Let us look at Lakeview Terrace, the movie I saw a couple of years ago as an example of how the entertainment industry of Hollywood influences how Americans, and by extension all of us in our ‘McDonalised’ world, perceive reality. Starring one of the most successful black Hollywood actors, Samuel L. Jackson, the movie is about Abel Turner, a widowed, racist cop who makes life hell for a newly married mixed-race couple who just move to the house next door to his. As a black man who is married to a white woman I am certain that it is not by sheer coincidence that the movie was released on the heels of Barack Obama’s historical election in November 2008.
What Hollywood is unequivocally saying through this movie is that: though Americans might have elected a President whose white mother married a black father, any such mixed marriage is still littered with problems of prejudice on both sides of the colour line. Essentially, the message of Lakeview Terrace for young unmarried Americans, in my opinion is: it might seem fashionable in the wake of Obama’s victory to cross the colour line in pursuit of love; it should not be done with reckless abandon. What a waste of money and good talent.
What I found most disappointing about Lakeview Terrace though is the fact that Samuel L Jackson actually agreed to play the role of the ‘evil’ bigot cop Abel Turner in the movie. In a sad way, it reminds me of the character of Alonzo, the rogue police detective that Denzel Washington played in the movie Training Day which unsurprisingly earned him his first Oscars in the best actor category in 2008. Now, I am not saying it is not important to do a movie about black policemen who are racist and corrupt in American society, but one would think that at this stage in their career, Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington should be in a position to influence things a little bit in order to correct the long-held erroneous notion that ‘if you are black you are bad and if you are white you are alright’.
Personally, and as a black dramatist, I find it highly uninspiring to see these iconic black actors in Hollywood movies ending with their characters being riddled with bullets and left on the streets like dogs in order for things to return to ‘normal’. I mean if the two respective characters played by Washington and Jackson in these movies must die at the end of the films; they deserve to be killed in a dignifying way if not for the characters but for the actors portraying them. As my people say, if we don’t eat yam for the sake of palm oil, why not eat palm oil for the sake of yam? I am yet to see Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis play a character whose life comes to an end in such a disgusting yeye manner in any movie. Remember the way Leonardo Di Caprio’s character dies in the movie, Titanic? Now that is what I call a meaningful and dignifying death in a Hollywood movie.
I know there are some other good Hollywood black actors that would not be caught dead in such demeaning roles. Sidney Poitier, whom I admire so much because he seems to be in agreement with me that ‘arts for arts sake’ is a fallacy, is one of them. In his spiritual autobiography The Measure of a Man, the Hollywood legend recounts when he once had to turn down a part in a movie that would have earned him $750 a week even though he was out of job, very broke and his wife was expecting their second child. “In my view, the character simply didn’t measure up.”
As Poitier puts it, “He didn’t fight for what mattered to him he didn’t behave with dignity”. In the same book, Poitier also writes about another episode in his life when he insisted that the character he was portraying in a screenplay needed to react to a situation in total contradiction to what was originally conceived for the character. The movie in question is In the Heat of the Night and Poitier played the part of police detective Tibbs from Philadelphia who, by chance was assigned to a murder investigation in a small town in the Deep South.
According to the script, a local businessman with enormous influence happened to be one of the murder suspects. So, detective Tibbs, who was accompanied by the local police chief, was driven to the local businessman’s mansion to question him. At a point, according to Poitier, “I had to ask the inevitable question –“where were you on the night of the murder?” – and he hauled off and slapped me”. At that instant, as the original script dictates, detective Tibbs was meant to look at the racist local influential businessman with great disdain, wrapped himself in his strong ideals and walked out.
“That could have happened with another actor playing that part”, writes Poitier, “but it couldn’t happen with me”. So Poitier told the director that the script needed to be changed. And when the director asked Poitier what he had in mind, his response was: “Shoot this scene so that without a nanosecond of hesitation, I whack him right back across the face with a backhand slap”. The director liked the idea and as Poitier puts it, “It turned out to be very, very dramatic moment in the film”.
Would it not have been more dramatic if the racist Abel Turner – the character Samuel L. Jackson’s played in Lakeview Terrace – having realised his evil ways, metamorphoses into a good man, a loving father, a friendly neighbour and someone who eventually falls in love with a white woman by the end of the movie? I doubt it very much though if Samuel L Jackson and Denzel Washington ever read The Measure of a Man. If they did, I am certain they would not have allowed the lives of the characters they portrayed so brilliantly in Lakeview Terrace and Training Day respectively to end in such a disgrace manner. I know it is only a movie but “while fiction may be a form of symbolic action”, as Ralph Ellison has written in his novel The Invisible Man, “a mere game of ‘as if’, therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change”.
What exists in the imagination of the artists goes a long way in shaping our reality therefore it is high time good black actors started playing influential roles by the virtue of the fact that if you act it you can be it and what is portrayed is what is perceived. In short, seeing is believing, is what I am thinking.
Dr. Adigun is a Senior Lecturer of Theatre Arts at Bowen University Iwo, Osun State Nigeria.
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