PASSING: A FETISH OF REEL LIFE (pt. 1) - a response to Rebecca Hall’s directorial feature film debut
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
White Little Girl: Mother what is a Negro?
White Mother: You must think of a Negro as something very, very beautiful that God gave white people to enjoy.
- From the dramatic playlet “Adaptation” by Elaine May
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“Mr. Kangalee – I suggest you read the book and bear in mind Ms. Hall’s remarks about her ancestry…Your criticism is unfair. You would benefit from Ms. Hall’s film.”
– anonymous defender of Rebecca Hall’s film “Passing”
Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star in “PASSING”
I despise stupidity masquerading as criticism, and worse when writers attempt to make meanings where there are none, forming mountains out of mole hills, destroying the mole and his simplicity. Constructive criticism for the artist is only worthwhile when the critic understands what the artist’s intention is.
We can presume, speculate - even surprise ourselves at how in tune we may be with an artist’s vision, despite not necessarily being an admirer of the work. I understand Rebecca Hall’s intention with her directorial debut, Passing. All the more reason why I was appalled when I saw it.
Recently, I was threatened to be put on a “list” because of my intellectual response to or contrarianism towards Passing. I replied “I was on so many lists - and to not waste their time -- the Koch Brothers had already beaten them to it when they heard me complaining about the renovation of Lincoln Center.” The self-proclaimed guardian of Passing replied, “Surely, that can’t be true.” I said, “Regardless of the truth, it’s a fact…And don’t call me Shirley.” (They missed the joke)
As for the ridiculously defiant defense of Passing – I wish the same passion could be used for something more worthwhile, like campaigning to make Audrey King Lewis’ 1991 coup, The Gifted available to everyone. What is clear to me is that in the second year of the pandemic, the plague rears its head in more places than our respiratory or digestive systems. It has corroded our very idea of government and it has hijacked all sense of reason culturally, politically, philosophically, and creatively. The response to Passing proves it.
First films by competent directors are sometimes minor gems because their introductory brilliance is so startling. Other times they may just be decent first dates. Often, we forget them as we do a throwaway pop song or worse, a debut novel that had no insights to share.
That’s certainly not the case here – however it’s the defenders and financiers of this film I have to challenge. Hollywood filmmaking - establishment filmmaking - are capitalist enterprises (if not more). The rare occasion that a mainstream movie is art is usually in spite of the tangled web of commerce that can enable or impede a movie. More so than actual children – it seems that new millennium passion projects come into this world with a fiscal budget attached and handlers in place. They are prepared offerings. Often, almost righteously, they take as much time to make as an average woman’s pregnancy cycle maintains. But what separates art from entertainment or that aloof and tainted offspring of advertising and propaganda, exploitation, is intention.
What’s most endearing about first films or albums is not what’s technically polished, sparkling in its production value. It’s in the spaces between all these elements, the performances, new ways of writing, the director’s proclivities for time and rhythm – the editing, the stress, their smudged fingerprints…where the silences fall or blur.
They can be seductive like first dates; they can be ensnared in style and rapture – but the same question remains: could you wake up next to this person in the morning?
And if you did, what did you learn from them?
Ask yourself this very question when you watch a film. That’s how you can determine either how to proceed with your constructive criticism (if that should be your goal) or if this is a director who is even worth your time…
Everyone has an opinion on what the media anoints as important. This does not make us philosophers or merit importance as “artists.” It just reinforces our awareness of what the newspapers say. It is fashion, to put it mildly. And one thing the world doesn’t need is more fashion.
Cross to bear
Passing revolves around the relationship between two African American women who are light enough to be mistaken for - and pass as - Caucasian women. Tessa Thompson as Irene chooses not to and Ruth Negga as Clare, decides to submit to this pathological perversion not out of any political extremity (she is not pretending to be white to escape chattel slavery or a hanging) but simply because she can. Of course, the reasons should be more complex (and within the context of the original source material, are) but to find justifications for such a sad existential affair defeats the purpose: we are presented with a situation and I as an audience am willing to accept it. The actors themselves would have a difficult time even attempting to pass for white in actual life, but in “reel” life I accept it. I can appreciate directors’ choices or aesthetic inclinations: remember, like a novel, you are in their world. What I don’t accept is how the film is rendered and, at a deeper level, the weakness of the complexities themselves - which is not on the screen.
Although competent, the performances are simply not justified and the actors’ choices do not maintain gravity or pathos. The movie is an example of “fugazi films” that pretend to be one thing -- are presented as deep, political artsy sociological acts -- when in reality they are something else. This is of particular concern and something we will come back to. Performative movies - narrative films that rely on actors - are the most dangerous and tenuous movies because the success of those films relies on the collusion between the actor and director.
Written and directed by actress Rebecca Hall, Passing is a troubling movie that irritated my blood instead of chilling it. It’s ersatz, dreamy Black & White nostalgia, and self-conscious artiness (It annoyingly imbued the awkwardness of the 1990’s attempting to look like the 1920’s) was overwhelming and quite simply disappointing but only because the actors were staged in an unjustifiable problematic script by a director more interested in the sudsy ambiance of how she imagines the roaring twenties to have been and the surface rituals of how these two Black women, and the era of the Harlem Renaissance’s underbelly, communicated.
Nella Larsen’s competent novella is spare and evocative, opening the imagination at times, and yet the book’s implicit casualness about the notion of passing comes off as a hipster exercise in Hall’s movie. Larsen is gently critical of her characters (too gentle), Hall is simply besotted with them (or with her cast, but is there a difference?) Neither Thompson nor Negga are able to endow the film with the tragedy it deserves. And that is unfortunate because both are capable actors. Thompson's sober, almost innocent wide-eyed demeanor could have been an interesting counter to Negga’s ethereal malignant self-hatred and air of knowingness, but it comes off as smug. After the first 45 minutes you are simply waiting for a darker-skinned Black woman getting off the train at 125th Street to walk up to her and give her a piece of her mind, if not strangle her. It would at least give the film the jolt it needs. The world of Clare and Irene exists in their own universe, on the fringes of an unreliable society but Thompson and Negga are not performing a duet to illuminate the human condition, they are doing a tap dance to escape it. And that is where I draw the line with these ridiculous movies that white Neo-Liberals have convinced themselves are a contribution to culture and the “woke” era. And many of us accept these cons. You can’t con an honest audience. I was looking for performances but ended up watching a lot of posing and framing as opposed to behavior. Hall may be in love with her actors, but I have no clue what she sees in them. There has to be something more than Clare’s occasional mischievous inebriated look. Negga’s perfunctory pouting and eyelash acting, while entrancing - as the movie camera absolutely loves her – hits dead-ends and lapses into an annoying preen. She - or her directors - never make it past first base with the cinematographer. Negga’s teasing of the camera has been in full effect since I first saw her in Loving (another curious movie about race/color, racism and love set in America…by a non-American director. Hmm.)
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Watching the movie, I instantly thought of Julie Dash’s harrowing film Illusions (1982) and how it might have served us all better if Illusions had just been re-released somehow or made available for streaming instead of this insulting film. Passing is a movie made for white people who champion the book and these Black pathological stories; the same audience who gushed over Precious and can only accept Blacks on the screen who are warped and live a perverted or broken form of life.
(l to r) Rosanne Katon and Lonette McKee in Julie Dash’s African-American passing short film drama ILLUSIONS (1982)
John Powers, writing for NPR, shortly after the film’s November Netflix premiere had the audacity to liken Passing to Illusions, but in a different way. Powers assumes, for some ungodly reason, that Passing is of the same cloth as Illusions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dash’s remarkable movie shows a Black woman passing as white amidst a Hollywood world that exists to demean the African American image by additionally providing illusory images of white people (a white singer is dubbed with the voice of a Black woman, instantly creating a myth about these White vocalists that Hollywood wants to preserve). Dash’s lead character, Mignon Dupree (played remarkably by Lonette McKee), knows full well what she is doing: by passing for white – she wants to affect change in a 1942 Hollywood that impacts the visual, psychological, and political health of the Black race. She is aware of the power of images and illusions as all who dare to pass or simply render different masks in everyday life. Dash’s film was a radical cinematic dagger, the future is at stake in her film. Passing is an empty Vanity Fair flick and has neither the wit, insight nor angst that Illusions has. Not to mention that Julie Dash is a very specific artist who has melded liberation politics, feminism, sex, anthropology, and philosophy seamlessly throughout her films. Holding up Passing against Illusions is like comparing The Osmonds to the Jackson 5. Hall’s film exploits and tries to make passing almost attractive in a way - or negate its deep corrosive effect. Dash’s film is simmering with something imminent “for the conscious.” Like a spy, Dash’s covert operator has a specific agenda. (The film would be a fascinating complement to a screening of Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door. A double-feature extraordinaire!)
Black agent provocateurs: Pretending, Becoming, Passing in different contexts & worlds as they reap different seeds that were sown…I look forward to the day when all the people who gush over Passing will read The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
Hollywood’s enchantment with the caste system, the color line, the light skinned vs dark skinned Negro, the existential terror of wanting to pass – these are salacious and intoxicating ideas for white people who obsess over the psychology of the bruised, downtrodden Black person trying to just make their way in this society.
Rebecca Hall came to make Passing with a haversack of demons: she discovered her maternal grandfather was a Black man in America, living as a White man. Hall, a comfortably bourgeois movie actress and daughter of renowned British theater director Peter Hall, discovered that she is, essentially, a Black woman. Oomph.
I come bearing personal trauma, seeking an outlet for my burden as well.
As a middle-aged Black man – who is the result of Arawak, African, Asian, and European blood - I understand the controversy or frustration this may give to some, but I never accepted or thought of myself as anything other than Black. “Bi-racial,” (which sounds like genetic aberration if not a psychological complex) is just as innocuous and insulting as “mulatta” is offensive. Black innately - as a color or concept - is the combination of all colors! That is profound any way you slice it. "Bi-racial" is a way of negating Blackness, distancing oneself from African ancestry in any way shape or form and this ability to “pass” by declaring oneself any numerous one of the new wave euphemisms for Black - “person of color” (as opposed to colored?) or “multi-racial” (hilarious, again, of course cause ALL colors can never get away from finding their way to Black!) – is offensive and dangerous. The millennials seem to not be bothered. Well, the world is theirs now anyway. And we see where that is headed.
If we take race seriously (and I don’t see how, unfortunately, we can’t – for we are all, as radical poet Charles Frederick brilliantly declaims “Black” - cause all our “ancestors are in the bones of the antebellum Black slaves”) - then we have to question who or what is passing - because it ain’t just the images of the movie sliding by.
Based on this publicly made acknowledgment about her grandfather, Hall is Black according to the laws of the United States’ 1705 One Drop Rule, which states that merely a single drop of "Black blood'' defines a person as Black. In fact, The United States of America’s outlandish blood-fraction law, using the one-eighth rule, claims a person is Black if one great-grandparent was entirely of African ancestry. Everyone now, accepting the imposed notion of race, has complicated an already troubling notion by deciding how or what and when they want to be, which club they want to join, which because they choose to abandon or pick up. Privilege is not home ownership or avoiding conviction. It is choosing what race you are and how you are going to acknowledge it. Rebecca Hall would have struck a tragic dimension had she simply recalled the troubling early years of Tiger Woods’ declaration that he was ‘Cablinasian’ instead of Black. Or got into the psychology of Rachel Anne Dolezal. Instead, she pretends to want to give us a soap opera about the fraught relationship between two Black women who reflect the insanity of American racism. Wouldn’t a film about her own actual life been a better choice? I could respect that. Especially if it was set in Britain.
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The psychosis and implementation of passing is the result of colonialism and slavery as much as the word “Nigger” is, as terrifying and alien as the shores of what is now North America were to the Original Peoples who witnessed the frightening Dutch ships and to the Africans who arrived in bondage. An action and identity born out of both psychosis and the need to be free of this new imprisoning life, it is torn from both Franz Fanon and Franz Kafka (I have no doubt Kafka would have written a supreme horror story about passing). The movie however is much too nonchalant about it. There is a revolting laissez-faire approach to it in Larsen’s book, which does work to some degree on the page – there is something haunting about how mundane it almost appears in the book. The movie, however, posits, essentially, that since we are all passing for one thing or another, this -while sad – is just some kind of macabre web that these two women are weaving…or woven into.
There’s an uncomfortable admission the film makes although not consciously. Hall’s own zealous culture-vulturism is here on full display – like the jittery middle-class slummer Mr. Jones in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” – she is pursuing and clutching at the “weirdness” of an aspect of Black life – because her “white world” is so far less interesting. If this is the film Hall wanted to tell after discovering her mother’s father was a Black man living as a white man – could you imagine what she would have done if both her grandparents had been secretly Black? (She’d probably have cut right to the chase and did an Al Jolson number!)
We never wrestle with the torture of wanting to pass, of what that really does to the soul; we never clutch at the despicableness of Ruth, her fierce collaboration with the oppressor…and her soul, which is damned to hell as soon as we meet her. What about the atrocity that started this warped social game to begin with (in the movie it comes off as a game)? Hall drools over images of Negga and Thompson, in genteel pauses and poses – as if selling “Passing” perfume for a Calvin Klein ad.
Rebecca Hall should have made a decision about the tragedy of passing. Tell us what you think, spare nothing, hold nothing back. Fey, opaque movies that choose to be evasive under the banner of nuance and “art” are just middle-class gestures to their holy ghost: Nancy Nuance, the ghost…that was never even a person to begin with.
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Whites have always been aware of passing because they created the conditions that gave birth to it. They used to have tea parties in Chappaqua, NY and bet on which White people were actually Black (Lord knows what they do today. I received this insight from personal references of middle-class Black friends during my years at Julliard as well as from Lawrence Otis Graham’s phenomenal 1998 book “Our Kind of People,” an in-depth examinations of the Black bourgeoisie). In the film, we ultimately see passing as a metaphysical state that the White ruling class look on with glee. The white gaze is what we are peering through, there’s an irony the film supports and a smirk it hopes you wear, after feeling slightly good about feeling bad (the White Liberal’s refrain); sad that Black people, with all their super-human strength (Whites easily admit they could never have ploughed and built as much as the African slave did for the White man) had this much self-hatred just a hundred years ago - as Ulysses was being published - and could be so…rotten and ridiculous at the same time. One white woman who saw the film praised it as being a “first-time Black Lesbian love story” and that the race transgression was not the problem, it was just an additional “metaphor.” Either Black people are amusements or metaphors for White America and therefore all the more unreal to our own selves.
These films are bamboozling us. The movie tries to lure one into accepting that passing is not repugnant but ultimately just benignly pathetic. There is nothing benign about colonized minds vying for the fruits of the oppressor. Black Skin, White Masks is not a harmless book about a harmless problem. (The New York Times review references the title of this very book as their headline – without once stating author Frantz Fanon’s name!) Rebecca Hall herself is obviously trying to work things out but can’t figure out how to express it. But just because one has personal experiences with a theme or subject doesn't grant them power as an artist. Mike Nichols' family had first-hand experience running from the Nazis, yet he always maintained he was unequipped to do a movie about the holocaust. We have to be very careful and more discriminatory and ask more from our artists. I am mortified that such a heavy theme could be treated so...waspishly.
END OF PART ONE