Hoodoo Economics: White Men's Work and Black Men's Magic in Contemporary American Film

Heather J. Hicks

Camera Obscura, 53 (Volume 18, Number 2), 2003, pp. 27-55 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/co/summary/v018/18.2hicks.html

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Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis in Unbreakable (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, US, 2000)

Hoodoo Economics: White Mens Work and Black Mens Magic in Contemporary American Film
Heather J. Hicks

In a November 2000 editorial in Time entitled That Old Black Magic, columnist Christopher John Farley notes that a spate of recent US lms, including The Legend of Bagger Vance (dir. Robert Redford, 2000), What Dreams May Come (dir. Vincent Ward, 1998), Family Man (dir. Brett Ratner, 2000), and The Green Mile (dir. Frank Darabont, 1999), have portrayed African Americans as magical gures. Nicknaming such gures Magical African American Friends (MAAFs), he reasons that blacks are represented in these terms out of a fundamental ignorance of African American life and culture. MAAFs exist, he suggests, because most Hollywood screenwriters dont know much about black people other than what they hear on records by white hip-hop star Eminem. So instead of getting life histories or love interests, black characters get magical powers.1 In this essay I would like to think further about the association of blackness with magic in contemporary mainstream lms a phenomenon which, as Farleys article suggests, has been pronounced enough to receive attention in the popular press. Specically, Id like to explore how black men are associated with supernatural forces and to suggest that this phe-

Copyright 2003 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 53, Volume 18, Number 2 Published by Duke University Press 27

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nomenon cannot be separated from certain contemporary crises surrounding white masculinity.2 An important similarity among most of the lms of what we can call the MAAF genre is that the black males are not simply magical but that their magic is ostensibly directed toward helping and enlightening a white male character. While not concerning himself with gender issues, Anthony Appiah has begun to explore such screen depictions of black benecence toward whites in his analysis of the Saint as a black movie type.3 Appiah offers several possible explanations for why saintly black gures, from Danny Glovers Simon in Grand Canyon (dir. Lawrence Kasdan, US, 1991) to the powerful psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost (dir. Jerry Zucker, US, 1990), are conceived by what he self-consciously terms white Hollywood.4 He suggests that perhaps black characters must be assigned saintlike goodness to counteract the racism white audiences automatically direct toward a black character on screen. That is, for white audiences, a saintly black character is the moral equivalent of a normal white character. Or, he speculates further, perhaps the Saint draw[s] on the tradition of the superior virtue of the oppressed:
Is there, in fact, somewhere in the Saints background a theodicy that draws on the Christian notion that suffering is ennobling? So that the black person who represents undeserved suffering in the American imagination can also, therefore, represent moral nobility? Does the Saint exist to address the guilt of white audiences, afraid that black people are angry at them, wanting to be forgiven, seeking a black person who is not only admirable and lovable, but who loves white people back? Or is it simply that Hollywood has decided, after decades of lobbying by the NAACPs Hollywood chapter that, outside crime movies, blacks had better project good images, characters who can win the NAACPs image awards? (83)

Appiah raises important questions here, but he defers answers, choosing instead to explore whether the questions themselves matter; the remainder of his essay focuses on whether lms have, in fact, any signicant impact on public consciousness.

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Rather than focusing on whether, ultimately, such lms are racist or not, and whether, in turn, that makes their audiences racist, I would like to think about how these lms reect contemporary upheavals at the nexus of masculinity and economics. What neither Farley nor Appiah address is the degree to which many of the lms made in the last decade and a half featuring magical black men specically concern white men whose lives as workers in some way require revision. Indeed, one of the realistic elements of the lms incorporating black magical men is their attention to the work lives of their white male characters. These work lives are represented sometimes directly, sometimes symbolically as diminished by trends within a service economy that critic Donna Haraway has characterized as the feminization of work:
Work is being redened as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.5

It is within this context that I would like to explore the black male characters magic, suggesting that in each lm economics and magic are intimately linked. Specically, the black mens magical powers become the means of recalibrating the relation between their white counterparts gendered identities and work roles. Yet the lms recurrent focus on the status of white men also underscores the central irony attached to the concept of magic in the lms: the magical power of black men in the lms actually serves as an expression of their economic vulnerability. Each of the three lms that I will exploreUnbreakable (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, US, 2000), The Green Mile, and Family Man express this economic weakness through the black mens reinscription as children. Viewing the lms through this lens in turn suggests that the supercial understanding of the black men as friends to their white coun-

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terparts must be rethought; instead, the relations between white and black men emerge as far more complex and equivocal.6

To Know Your Place

Given the otherworldly feel of M. Night Shyamalans second major lm, Unbreakable, it is easy to miss its preoccupation with the role of white men in a contemporary economy characterized by lowpaying service jobs that bear little resemblance to the forms of public work that once served as the foundation of modern masculinity. In dramatizing the efforts of a mystical black man to help a depressed and alienated white man nd his place in the world, however, the lm ultimately creates a narrative about the relation of both white women and black men to white mens perceived economic disempowerment. Indeed, the main character in the lm, David Dunn, played by Bruce Willis, is dened economically rst by his wife, who requires that he abandon his career in order to act in accord with her values, and then by the mysterious black man, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who reasserts Davids difference from his wife in order to conrm a connection between himself and David. Equally important to the logic of the lm is the role of Davids young son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark). Aligned as he is with Elijah in reimagining his father, Joseph becomes Elijahs double, signaling the implicit status of Elijah himself as a child. The two opening scenes in the lm immediately communicate its preoccupation with gender, labor, and economics. In the rst scene, set in 1961, we see a black woman who has just completed literal labor, having given birth not in a hospital, but in a department store. As the mother recovers from the delivery under the gaze of anxious store employees, a doctor arrives. The mothers joy and relief quickly turn to horror as the doctor inspects the infant with an expression of shock and disbelief. He demands to know whether the baby was dropped, then announces that the infant boys arms and legs are broken. This preliminary image of a boy broken by having been contained in a womans body is perhaps the most graphic motif of a recurrent theme within the lm:

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men must struggle free of the inuence of women, who threaten to break them. The next scene, set in the present day, again foregrounds the relationship of gender to power, this time in more overtly economic terms. David sits aboard a train from New York to Philadelphia after an unsuccessful job search. As subsequent scenes will reveal, David has long worked at a college football stadium as a security guard one of the most notoriously feminized positions in the service economy.7 The staging of this second scene establishes the economic and gender dynamics that have left David a hollow and profoundly depressed man. In the rst minutes of the scene, a young, attractive woman selects a seat next to David. He quickly hides his wedding ring and attempts to arrange a liaison with her once they arrive in Philadelphia. Davids simultaneously mechanical and desperate affect during this failed seduction provides our rst window into his melancholy psyche. A young girl who watches the scene with visible dismay from a nearby seat enforces the audiences sense of Davids moral bankruptcy. Yet more telling is the brief conversation David has with the woman, who proves to be a sports agent en route to meet a football star at Temple University. The womans youth underscores her extraordinary success in what was once a male-dominated profession. Moreover, her intention to manage the young athletes career pregures the way that Davids own life was managed, at least tacitly, by his wife, who, we later learn, would only agree to marry him if he cast aside his dreams of being a professional football player. The accident that concludes this opening scene proves especially telling: the train derails, just as David himself has been derailed from the course his life should have taken. The extent of that derailment becomes evident in subsequent scenes. David is displaced even within his own home, sleeping in a separate room from his wife, Audrey (Robin Wright), from whom he has grown increasingly estranged. David struggles with a nameless sense of unhappiness that has left his marriage on the brink of ruin. The apparent disarray of their personal relationship signals the nostalgic and conservative gender politics of the lm. We learn that Audrey is a physical therapist and that she

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deterred David from pursuing a career in football because it is, as she explains, the opposite of what I do. As Susan Faludis recent study Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man reminds us, football has long been considered a quintessential expression of American masculinity.8 In the lms schematic treatment of the places that those of different races and genders should occupy, Audrey is in her proper place as a caretaker, but Davids role as a man and a protector has been stymied by her insistence that he be like her. True to the current trend in Hollywood screenwriting, it is the black male character in the lm who becomes committed to restoring Davids life to its proper course. Although Elijah Price diverges from the prole slightly in that he is not precisely magical, he is, as David remarks late in the lm, kind of a miracle. We soon learn that it was Elijahs birth that we witnessed in the lms opening scene and that he suffers from a rare disease, osteogensis imperfecta, leaving his bones so fragile that he has suffered scores of fractures. As the narrative unfolds, this apparent disability begins to take on a supernatural cast because of the larger narrative with which it becomes associated. That larger narrative, the central one of the lm, is Davids discovery that he possesses superhuman strength. After David walks away from the deadly train wreck unscathed, he is quickly contacted by Elijah, who introduces him to a theory he has developed from his dedicated reading of comic books. Elijah believes that comic books communicate profound truths: namely the presence of both exceptional weakness and exceptional strength in the world. He reasons that if someone can be as fragile as he, then there must be those who are, as he puts it, the opposite of me, at the other end [of the spectrum].9 As a consequence of Davids miraculous survival, Elijah believes he is such a person. Although David at rst resists Elijahs theory, he gradually discovers that, like his biblical namesake, he does in fact possess superhuman strength, as well as psychic ability. At this point the economic discourse of the lm again resurfaces. When David nally fully concedes his abilities, he consults with Elijah, who directs him to go to where people are. Attired in his hooded Security rain slicker, which sufces as his superhero costume, David wanders through the Philadelphia train

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station, experiencing clairvoyant responses to those with whom he comes into contact. After registering the crimes of several bypassers, David encounters a man who he senses has committed a particularly violent crime.10 In his psychic vision of this man, a custodian at the station, David sees the man invading an afuent home. David then follows the custodian to a house where he has indeed killed a man and woman and is terrorizing their children. David kills the home invader and rescues the children, and when we next see him, he is carrying his own wife to bed superhero style, his sense of masculinity restored. The next morning, the newspaper before him on his kitchen table touts the bravery of an unknown hero who performed a seless rescue. I would suggest that this image of David, the service worker, rising up to become a protector of the rest of us, to use Elijahs phrase, must be understood in relation to Davids disturbing vision of the crime. In it, the custodian, also a service worker, approaches the house, rings the doorbell, announces to the business executive who answers the door that he likes his house, and proceeds to kill the man and abduct his family. In presenting this event, the lm concretizes the issue of place with which it is centrally concerned. That is, the scene depicts a man consigned to the lowest rung of the economic ladder who steps out of his place literally to occupy the place enjoyed by a man at the opposite socioeconomic extreme. In its staging as a violent usurpation, such a redistribution of wealth is clearly condemned within the lms narrative. The custodian is represented as purely sinister, and it is Davids rst heroic act to kill him for transgressing his place. Indeed, instead of the direct demand for more wealth and status of which the custodians home invasion is a grotesque parody, what the lm embraces as an answer for men who nd themselves in a place of disempowerment and vulnerability within the service economy, men such as David himself, is a leap into the imaginary. Rather than conceiving of a solution to his alienated condition in materialist terms, the lm embraces a fantasy in which the downtrodden and dispirited worker discovers a magical capacity that will compensate for his poor wages and unfullled life without changing his work situation in the least: security

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guard by day, superhero by night. The degree to which his new status as a superman will not prove especially remunerative is emphasized when, early in his process of self-discovery, David asks his supervisor how many sick days he has taken while working for the university. Misinterpreting this query as a tacit request for a raise, his supervisor concedes that he has never called in sick and offers him an extra forty dollars per week, hardly a life-changing sum. In celebrating Davids transformation while disavowing the custodians, then, the lm privileges the placebo of childish fantasy over the sort of material transformation the custodians actions, while extreme, symbolize. It is in these terms that we must read Elijahs role in the lm as the architect of Davids dubious transformation. Certainly, in his function of freeing David from the control of his wife, from whom David keeps his superhero identity secret, Elijahs role can be thought of in terms of the buddy lm tradition. Cynthia J. Fuchs has described how the interracial buddy lm has emerged as a visual space for the assertion of hypermasculinity, a reaction against perceived incursions of the feminine.11 Yet, ultimately, I believe that Elijahs association with the medium of the comic book provides our best way of understanding his complex relation to David in the lm. On the one hand, Elijah is apparently the most thriving gure in the economic organization of the lm. He runs an elegant gallery specializing in collectible comic book art, drives a distinguished car, and wears expensive clothing. His escape from the lower reaches of the service economy to which so many black men are consigned is made explicit early in the lm when he points out to a potential buyer of one of his expensive illustrations that they are not in a toy store, and he is not wearing a slender plastic tag clipped to [his] shirt with [his] name printed on it an allusion to the standardized attire of service workers in retail chain stores. Yet Elijahs very need to defend his merchandise against this sort of misunderstanding also signals his strangely marginalized relation to the adult world of economics. The price (to reference his surname) or value he assigns things (and people) is highly unconventional. In this scene, for instance, Elijah does not sell the print to the prospective buyer

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because he determines that the customer does not fully appreciate the comic book as an art form; his own boyish love for comics is more compelling than the adult economic imperative to make the sale. Through the course of the lm, Elijahs actions increasingly align him with the world of childhood rather than an adult economy. This infantilization of Elijah becomes particularly evident in his implicit afnity with Joseph, Davids young son. Joseph immediately embraces Elijahs theory that David is a superhero. In scene after scene, Joseph attempts to conrm his fathers superhuman status, wanting desperately for David to be the great man Elijah describes. Yet the parallel between man and boy becomes most apparent when, at a point at which David briey rejects Elijahs theory, Shyamalan crosscuts from a scene in which Elijah throws a tantrum in a comic book store to a scene in which Joseph sulks while playing with two superhero gures. At this point, the two characters levels of emotional maturity, as well as their relation to the imaginary, are explicitly equated. The lm, then, presents a twist on the sort of buddy dynamic Fuchs has described. Elijahs function as a child, a gure detached from the demands of adult economic logic, is to usher David into a similar zone of the imaginary. Yet the economic discourse of the lm ultimately proves even more conservative. In the movies nal moments, we learn that Elijahs relation to David is far from one of loyalty or love. In the lms surprise ending, Elijah reveals to David that he has perpetrated several acts of sabotage, including the train wreck, in order to discover a person with Davids abilities. Elijah explains that he needed to nd his place in the world, to be sure that he wasnt a mistake. The scariest thing, he explains to David, is to not know your place in this world. Elijah cannot be the archvillain Mr. Glass, as he styles himself, without a superhero antagonist against whom to scheme. In abstract racial terms, the ramications of this plot twist are quite disturbing. It suggests that, as a permanently broken being, the black man needs a white man to be a hero so he has someone against whom to perpetrate evil. Elijahs place is to do evil, and he needs David to regain his unequivocal status as a (super)pow-

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erful white man so that his own raison dtre is not left in doubt. In economic and material terms, too, there are repercussions: up until the nal moments of the lm, Elijah has in fact enjoyed considerable economic prosperity and freedom. Yet the nal sequence of the lm reveals that as a result of the crimes he committed in his quest for David, Elijah is committed to an institution for the criminally insane. He sacrices his own economic and social position to nd his place, a place of exile from the superior material status he had been enjoying. Ultimately, Unbreakable imagines a set of revisions to the social order, in which white men feminized by the service economy regain power from the women and blacks who have implicitly seized it. Specically, the lm invites the fantasy that black men exist in a childlike relation to economic matters and would gladly cede their own rare material gains in order to be in a more certain and nostalgic set of social relations, one in which white men are always already heroes who have merely misplaced their capes, temporarily forgotten their innate power. Yet the lm cannot imagine such a transformation in real terms; David has no more economic power as a superhero than he did before, and he keeps his new status as hero a secret from his wife, suggesting that his reassertion of power can only happen furtively, or even invisibly. Moreover, as Elijahs last name foretells, David pays a very high emotional price for the discovery of this new power. At the conclusion, David is left with the horric discovery that his superhuman strength was only disclosed to him at the expense of countless lives lives for whom he must now assume a permanent burden of guilt.

Death Row As Dream Job

Of all of the recent Hollywood lms that feature the magical black man, certainly the most commercially successful and controversial was the 1999 adaptation of Stephen Kings novel The Green Mile. The lm tells the story of the interactions between a collection of death row prison guards and a black inmate who possesses supernatural powers of healing and clairvoyance. Many

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viewers understandably found the movie deeply disturbing because its portrait of the black protagonist, John Coffey, played by Michael Clarke Duncan, is an amalgam of racist stereotypes: he is simultaneously represented as profoundly ignorant, childlike, and hypersexualized a latter-day Uncle Tom/Christ eager to pay with his life for the sins of others. In my own reading of the lm, I would like to explore its racial thematics while focusing on it specically as a drama of the workplace. The eponymous Green Mile is represented less as a horrifying holding pen for doomed men, than as a pleasant, even fun-lled workplace for those who guard them. Given the obvious dramatic potential contained in the nal days of a death row inmates life, one might anticipate that the lm would concentrate most of its attention on its prisoners and their responses to their predicament. Yet on every level this lm prioritizes the guards lives as workers over the inmates experiences. Not only does the lm explore the daily existence of white working men but, like the other lms I discuss here, it also dramatizes these mens negotiation of their gendered identity through their work lives. As in Unbreakable, the white male workers of The Green Mile experience femininity as an encroachment on their identities, an encroachment against which they rebel. While Unbreakable, counter to its title, represents David as a man who has been broken by his wifes inuence and who thus must be repaired by Elijah, The Green Mile imagines the white workers on death row as much more fully in command of their masculinity. Through much of the lm, then, John Coffey serves less as a catalyst for change than as a conservative presence who helps to obstruct this encroachment of the feminine. It is only after the white male protagonist Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) destroys John Coffey that he nds that the very power Coffey has enabled him to achieve is a curse burdening and haunting him, again suggesting a complex and ambivalent relation and relay of power between these black and white friends. Part of the lms complex negotiation of issues of work and gender involves its historical setting. On the one hand, by setting its action in the Great Depression, the lm implicitly pro-

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vides a rationale for the mens choice of work. That is, its recurrent visual and verbal allusions to the scarcity of jobs provide an excuse for the guards enthusiastic relationship to such seemingly morally questionable and dispiriting work. Yet the historical context of the Great Depression also defamiliarizes the very notion of work in the text. Work is no longer a thing of relative certainty for these men, and so its meanings and signicance to their identity are foregrounded. While its focus on the 1930s, then, would at rst seem to disqualify it from consideration as a meditation on postindustrial economic trends, its very preoccupation with the endangered status of white mens work signals its afnity with the other lms I am discussing. In this sense, The Green Miles focus on a collection of prison guards can also be read as a nostalgic treatment of an era when working as a guard the very sort of work that creates so much despair for David Dunn in the contemporary service economy portrayed in Unbreakable still provided white men with prestige and a decent wage. Even more crucial to the lms exploration of work and white masculinity, however, is its depiction of Paul Edgecomb. Because the lm is organized as a recollection of events in his life, Paul must be viewed as its protagonist, despite the lms ostensible interest in the gure of John Coffey. In general, Paul is constructed as the consummate manager, masterfully supervising a team of other guards. Indeed, one of the most unsettling aspects of the lm is the highly businesslike attitude Paul and his coworkers take to their specialty putting men to death in the electric chair. In the rst execution scene of the lm, we see the men carefully rehearsing the steps to the prisoners annihilation. While it is true that by maintaining their prociency in the protocols of the death chamber Paul and his team help to ensure the most humane death possible for the inmates, their rationalized approach to the process underscores the degree to which Paul and the others think of their activities as a job in order to avoid confronting the moral issues those activities raise. Certainly, here and elsewhere both Pauls persona as a highly competent manager and the elaborate work protocols within the prison overshadow the prisoners experiences as the central preoccupations of the lm.

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There are virtually no female characters in The Green Mile, only brief appearances by the wives of Paul and the prison warden ( James Cromwell). Once again, however, the lm organizes its meditation on the workplace in deeply gendered terms. Interestingly, in some sense the lm imagines death row as a merging of the public and private spheres. The prison is a sort of home, a comparison that is rst made evident when parallels are suggested between the nursing home in which a now elderly Paul dwells in the opening scenes and the Green Mile of his memory. In these scenes, set in the present, a black male orderly chastens Paul for his periodic absences from the facility, clearly inverting the dynamic between Paul and John Coffey the lm later explores. Paul is now on his own death row: the nursing home is the last stop for the aged. Like this other sort of home, moreover, the Green Mile is a place where the inmates are both cared for and disciplined like children. In an early scene, Paul lectures a fellow guard, Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), that the prisoners should not be frightened. Percy retorts that theyre not running a cradle school, although Paul and the others often behave as though they are. This conversation foregrounds the degree to which the male guards play a domestic role in relation to their infantilized prisoners. Later in the lm, for example, Paul and a coworker attempt to comfort Del (Michael Jeter), a prisoner who is about to be executed, by telling him a fairy tale about the fate of his pet mouse, Mr. Jingles. On other occasions, the guards are victimized by a prisoner who plays a number of childish pranks on them. They, in turn, punish him by placing him in solitary connement, in effect giving him a time-out for his bad behavior. And most important of all, the guards consistently treat John Coffey with care as he cries, expresses fear of the dark, and generally comports himself in the manner of a very young child. Despite or perhaps because of this apparent merging of public and private notions of work, however, the lm suggests that certain threatening aspects of femininity must be purged from the Green Mile. Most central to the meditation on work and gender that the lm generates is the sissy guard, Percy Wet-

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more. Percy, whose name sounds like Pussy when uttered by his Southern coworkers, is the feminized other in this world of white male control and order. From his rst introduction, when he enters the prison at the side of John Coffey, Percy is conspicuously smaller and weaker than his counterparts. While the other men earned their positions on the staff of the prison, it is quickly revealed that Percy is only working on the Green Mile because he is the nephew of the governors wife. If these associations with the feminine were not enough, Percy is later singled out by the unruly prisoner, Wild Bill (Sam Rockwell), who notes that Percy is soft like a girl and threatens to rape him. Within the context of this male world of work, a world where work is life or death in ways few contemporary jobs are, Percy represents the chaos that results when the feminine is given power. Percy is sadistically cruel from his rst moment on the screen, taunting John Coffey and attempting to kill the prisoners beloved Mr. Jingles. This cruelty culminates in the hideous centerpiece of the lm, a botched execution of which Percy is in charge. Percy is presented in the scene as both savagely cruel and incompetent cruel because he intentionally fails to take a crucial step that will make the prisoners death in the electric chair less painful, and incompetent because omitting the step leads to a macabre spectacle that creates unexpected chaos among the executions audience.12 By the end of the lm, Percy is rendered vegetative and committed to a mental institution, an appropriate form of containment for the gure of female hysteria in the lm. Importantly, it is John Coffey who renders him an imbecile, inicting him with the brain cancer he has exorcized from the wardens wife (Patricia Clarkson). Coffeys role in removing Percy from the masculine domain of work the lm imagines suggests that, once again, a black man with supernatural powers is assigned the role of negotiating the social relations of white men to gender and work. Indeed, John Coffeys very treatment of the wardens wife has already established his role in preserving associations of public, paid work with masculinity and the domestic sphere with femininity. Signicantly, for the warden, the most disturbing element

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of his wifes illness is her tendency to use vulgar language during episodes of madness. I didnt know shed ever heard words like that, he remarks, implying that her life within the private sphere should have shielded her from this masculine, public discourse. His emphasis on the disjunction between the expletives she uses and her sweet voice further suggests the way he perceives her femininity to be compromised by this more typically masculine language. By staging John Coffeys healing of the wife within the home of the warden (it is one of the few scenes not shot within the prison setting), the lm suggests the degree to which Coffey serves to restore the relation between the domestic and the feminine. Nor are these the only moments when Coffey serves to mediate the relation between identity and the separate spheres. Early in the lm, Paul is suffering from a severe bladder infection, which manifestly compromises his ability to perform his job when an unruly prisoner resists being put in a cell. As Paul lies on the oor clutching his genitals, helpless to take command of the situation, a clear correlation between masculine potency and functioning in the workplace is suggested. It is at this moment that John Coffeys ability to work miracles is rst communicated. He calls Paul to his cell, reaches through the bars, and grasps Pauls crotch. As a result of this act, Pauls bladder infection is healed. In her analysis of this section of the lm, Tania Modleski has pointed out that John Coffey conveys a hypersexuality to Paul through this touch, as Paul goes home that evening and has sex with his wife four times in the course of the night.13 Yet it is also important to note that this virility is correlated directly with his vigorous job performance in subsequent scenes. Such an act raises the question of John Coffeys relation to his jailers. Coffey should have somewhat adversarial feelings toward Paul, and restoring him to optimal health does not increase Coffeys chances for freedom. Yet on the Green Mile even the prisoners are part of the work culture the lm imagines. Indeed, in the scene in which the prison is rst introduced, we see a vast army of prisoners working on chain gangs around the facility. On death row itself, prisoners refer to their guards as Boss, implying that they are even workers in the job of their own deaths. And,

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most important, Coffey himself constantly refers to Paul as Boss, suggesting that, supercially at least, he understands himself to serve Pauls interests in his actions. Equally crucial in understanding John Coffeys relation to the white male workers who surround him, however, is his childlike quality. Like Elijah Price, John Coffey reduces the world to simple, Manichaean terms. There are good men and evil men, and good versus evil is a very clear-cut matter. While Unbreakable ultimately associates Elijah himself with evil, John Coffey, as his initials suggest, constitutes a Christlike martyr in the lm. Yet whether good or evil, the functions of Elijah and John Coffey prove similar in that they both reify a construction of the white male worker as a heroic protector. On the most fundamental level, The Green Mile can be seen as a nostalgic celebration of an era when white men made the rules. Despite their businesslike treatment of executions, the guards of the Green Mile are often represented as astonishingly gentle and kind, a fact foregrounded by the actions of the soft-spoken guard named Brutal: his very lack of brutality is made conspicuous by his unusual name. Yet the guards can be gentle or stern as they like because they are in total control of their world. The uniforms they wear only underscore the power granted by their gender and race.

Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile (dir. Frank Darabont, US, 1999)

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For the most part, then, John Coffeys relation to Paul and the other white male guards seems to involve preserving the status quo rather than producing radical transformations. The very structure of the lm itself, however, invites us to see the arrival of John Coffey on Pauls cellblock as a transforming event in Pauls life. The lms opening scene, in which a geriatric Paul bursts into tears at the memory of the events surrounding John Coffeys life and death, underscores the lasting impact Coffey has had on Paul. In fact, Pauls participation in the execution of John Coffey, who has been revealed as entirely innocent of the ghastly crime for which he was convicted, leaves him unwilling to continue to work on death row. Consequently, one might say that Paul learned from his encounter with John Coffey that the work to which he had committed himself was wrong, that it threatened innocent lives, and that he needed to nd another line of work (indeed, we are told in Pauls voice-over that after John Coffeys execution, he left the Green Mile and went to work at a juvenile delinquent shelter so that he could help to stop criminality before it took root). Yet at the conclusion we learn that the real transformation Paul has undergone is a physical one. Near the end of the lm, John Coffey grasps Pauls hand, desperate to share some of the suffering he has absorbed from those around him. I gots to give you a little bit of myself, he says to Paul, a gift of whats inside of me, so you can see for yourself. Later it is revealed that this physical contact with John Coffey has imbued Paul with an unprecedented longevity. We learn at the end of the lm that he is well over one hundred years old, and it appears he will live indenitely. In this sense, Paul has clearly become unbreakable in ways not dissimilar to David Dunn. Once again, then, the lm ultimately uses a black mans magic to imbue a white man with superhuman power. Yet as in the previous lm, this empowerment is highly ambiguous. While Davids status as superhuman leaves him consigned to the economic no-mans-land where he started, Paul experiences the power he has gained from his contact with John Coffey as a curse. He wishes to die and cannot, a fate that leaves

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him simply to wait out his longevity and watch all whom he loves leave him behind. Such a surprise at the end of the lm clearly complicates the friendship between Paul and John Coffey. Given the lms preoccupation with the guards as caretakers of the childlike Coffey, this nal development seems a grotesque amplication of retrograde notions of the white mans burden. Paul, that is, nds himself too empowered by his contact with the hapless John Coffey, empowered to the point where he wishes to disown the responsibilities that come with his role as white manager/ protector. Yet we cannot overlook John Coffeys agency in instilling this power-which-is-not-power in his white counterpart.

I Choose Us

Compared to Unbreakable and The Green Mile, Family Man appears to wear its economic narrative on its sleeve. That is, as a lm that transports an autonomous businessman into an alternative life which enmeshes him in domesticity, the lm overtly explores the tensions for contemporary white men between their selfconception as public workers and as private husbands/fathers tensions that exist only as subtext in the former lms. What is perhaps most interesting about Family Man, however, is the degree to which it diverges, or at least wavers, from its own apparent agenda. That is, although it is packaged as a sentimental lm privileging love within the nuclear family over a life of consumerism, it so skews its own relation to these two modes of existence that it can readily be understood to debunk the construct of the family man it purports to celebrate, instead offering an ominous portrait of the feminization of work.14 I want to argue here that the magical black man who serves as the conduit between public and private identities must be read in relation to this ambivalence. As in Unbreakable, the MAAF in Family Man is equated with a young child who facilitates the white protagonists transformation. In this case, however, the transformation, supercially at least, is the inverse of that staged in Unbreakable. Jack Campbell (Nicholas Cage) is changed from an autonomous icon of masculine power to a domesticated, unin-

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dividuated, and economically disempowered gure. Yet nally the gender and racial dynamics within all three lms are quite similar: rather than a guardian angel, the black magical man becomes a harbinger for, and facilitator of, the marginalization and disempowerment the white man is fated to suffer in a feminizing service economy. The premise of Family Man is that a successful businessman, Jack Campbell, is afforded the opportunity through the magical intervention of a supernatural black man to see what his life would have been like if he had settled down with his girlfriend, Kate (Ta Leoni), thirteen years earlier. In the opening scene, the young couple are poised to bid farewell to one another at an airport terminal. Suddenly, however, Kate changes her mind and makes a plea that Jack not go to London to do a prestigious banking internship as they had agreed. She then declares, I choose us, a statement determining the fundamental tension that will organize the remainder of the narrative, a tension that pits a model of masculine power associated with autonomy and economic prosperity against a vision of the feminine and the domestic associated with collectivity and economic disempowerment. When Jack counters that they must stick to their plan, Kate passionately asserts, The plan doesnt make us great, Jack; what we have together, thats what makes us great. Following this opening, the lm ashes ahead thirteen years to Christmas Eve, and its ambivalence regarding white mens relation to gendered identity and work begins to emerge. We quickly discover that Kates dire predictions at the airport were correct; her relationship with Jack did not survive their absence from one another, and in the intervening years, Jack has become a wildly powerful and rich businessman. By not choosing us, Jack has achieved a remarkable degree of economic autonomy and social prestige. He lives in a spectacular penthouse apartment, drives a Ferrari, and is president of a Wall Street investment rm. Constantly singing and smiling, he appears to be a fullled and happy man. Nor is he unkind or ungenerous: he is depicted irting playfully with an older tenant of his apartment building and giving stock advice to the doorman.

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Yet the lm simultaneously insists on Jacks spiritual impoverishment. Openly aunting his indifference to the familial traditions surrounding Christmas Eve, he chides one of his employees for his wish to leave the ofce and be with his family. He insists that his team of nanciers work late on a major merger, suggesting that the only sort of holiday giving that he cares about is giving everything Ive got to this deal. He openly emulates the owner of his company, who proudly describes himself as a heartless bastard who only cares about money. Taking his bosss advice, when Jack learns that Kate has called him after so many years, he nonchalantly decides to ignore her request that he contact her. It is this ambivalent portrait of Jacks identity as a worker that makes the role of the magical black male character, Cash, played by Don Cheadle, more complex than it rst appears. Released at Christmastime, Family Man is a loose adaptation of Frank Capras Its a Wonderful Life (US, 1946). In that well-known lm, protagonist George Bailey, played by James Stewart, is a young man who is ambitious to leave his small hometown but is stopped by the local demands of love and family. Years later, at the point when he is almost certainly ruined emotionally and nancially by his various responsibilities, he attempts suicide. He is rescued by Clarence (Henry Travers), a childlike and bumbling angel, who casts him into an alternative universe where he was never born at all, so that George can understand the contributions he has made to the lives of those around him. On the surface, Cash, as an updating of the character Clarence, is the lms answer to Jacks spiritual emptiness. En route home this same Christmas Eve, Jack enters a convenience store only to witness Cash, a stranger clad in gangsta attire, get in an altercation with the shop owner. Cash has a winning lottery ticket, and when the Asian cashier doubts its authenticity on racist grounds, he pulls a gun. Jack approaches and offers to buy the ticket in order to defuse the situation. Cash accepts the deal, and they leave the store together. If we understand him as performing Clarences function, Cash, in staging the confrontation at the convenience store, must be understood as intervening in Jacks ongoing spiritual suicide.

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And, indeed, after a brief conversation, Jack and Cash part company, Jack returns home, and he wakes up in an alternative universe where he stayed with Kate and had two kids. Yet while Clarence is depicted as sweetly incompetent but well intentioned, Cash is represented as menacing and punitive in his dealings with Jack. In their conversation outside the convenience store, Jack attempts to counsel Cash on how he might rehabilitate his apparently violent and wayward life. Cash scorns Jacks implication that he needs to be saved, and, turning the tables, asks Jack what he needs. When Jack asserts, I got everything I need, Cash laughs, and ominously remarks, Im going to really enjoy this. As he prepares to launch Jack into his alternative life, he chides, Just remember that you did this, Jack, you brought this on yourself. While Cash later explains that Jack is being given a rare opportunity, a glimpse of the life he could have had, it seems equally credible to read Jacks experience as punishment for his arrogance and economic privilege. Indeed, while this glimpse into the life that Jack could have had is ostensibly meant to awaken him from his spiritual oblivion, it could as easily be understood as a painful subjection to all he had heretofore escaped. Supercially, the lm attempts to romanticize family life in the suburbs. Yet Family Man has already depicted Jack as ebulliently fullled by his exciting and challenging work. And, specically, it has underscored that his work provides him with the privileges of white masculine power. From his powerful car, to his elevated view, to his tailored suits, to his sexual claim on beautiful women, Jack has earned the comforts of masculinity through his paid, public work. His comments about his split with Kate convey his sense of autonomy. Explaining his decision to prioritize his career over his relationship years earlier, he remarks, I took the road less traveled. During this glimpse into his alternative life, the sense of individualism and agency he enjoyed through his powerful position is replaced by the mass consciousness and conformity that characterize suburban life. From the moment he awakens in his new life, Kate polices his tendency to act autonomously. When he rst discovers that he is in the suburbs, for instance, he immedi-

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ately drives back to Manhattan to attempt to reclaim his old life. When he returns, despondent, to the house he shares with her, Kate chastens him for leaving without explaining where he was going. As the narrative unfolds, his life is merged with hers: he shares household responsibilities from diaper changing to walking the childrens dog. Even his job becomes an extension of their relationship, both because its only reward for Jack is the nancial support it provides for the family and because he is working for Kates father. Early in the lm, when reecting on his past with Kate, Jack remarks that he was almost married and almost a broker at E. F. Hutton, a formulation that links marriage with becoming a generic part of a massive corporation. Once Jack actually experiences marriage, this erasure of his individuality is indeed striking and becomes particularly evident in his clothing. While in his new suburban life Jack actually works for a small business rather than a giant, anonymous corporation, he is still slotted into a low-level service position, and his distinctively tailored designer suits are replaced by a set of uniforms, from bowling shirts to his standardized work attire, which underscore the conformity that now denes his existence. As the lm progresses, Jack is trained in this new life by his young daughter, Annie (Makenzie Vega), who has taken on the role of teacher after deducing that Jack nds himself in an altered state. Importantly, the lms structure implies that Annie and Cash are doubles. During their second encounter, Cash offers Jack a small bell and explains that when Jack rings the bell, Cash will appear. Yet on the rst occasion that Jack attempts to summon Cash with the bell, it is not Cash but Annie who materializes before him. At this point, Annie has become the angel who facilitates Jacks domestication. As in Unbreakable and The Green Mile, then, the magical black man functions interchangeably with a young white child. Yet here the childs female gender helps to foreground the ostensible difference in the black mans role. On the surface at least, he is debunking rather than reinforcing fantasies of autonomous masculine heroics. Near the conclusion of the lm, Jack sees an opportunity to return to the role of tycoon he had occupied before being pro-

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pelled into this feminized existence. He interviews for a job in his old rm and, after receiving an offer, attempts to merge his old life with his new one. Kate resists passionately, however, again rebelling against Jacks wish to act autonomously (Dont go get a new career without even telling me about it! she exclaims). Kate then shares with him her domestic vision that they grow old together in their current house. While she ultimately and grudgingly concedes the possibility that they might be able to achieve the compromise Jack proposes, her emphasis on their home suggests the degree to which Jacks autonomy has been subsumed within a new domesticated and collective identity. Thus the lm suggests that Jack does embrace this new mode of collectivity into which Kate has indoctrinated him. Once his glimpse is over, and he is returned to his life as an urban executive, Jack feels deeply despondent that he is completely and utterly alone. To remedy this sense of loneliness and isolation, Jack seeks out Kate, hoping to resume the relationship that he had sacriced to his ambition so many years earlier. Interestingly, when he nds Kate, he discovers that she is not the domestic gure he was married to in the alternative universe; rather, she is as ambitious, powerful, and self-sufcient as he had long prided himself in being. When he arrives at her home, she is preparing to leave for Paris to head up her law rms ofces there. The very act of moving, tearing apart the order of the space she has apparently long inhabited, emphasizes that this Kate, the real Kate, has none of the domestic sentimentality of her counterpart in the life Jack has been visiting. Ultimately, then, Jack is in the position of advocating a more feminized existence for both of them. The nal scene of the lm inverts the rst: Jack rushes to the airport to implore Kate not to go to Europe, just as she had begged him to stay thirteen years earlier. I choose us, he says at the conclusion of a speech in which he lays out a vision of the domestic life they could share together. At this point, the ambivalence that haunts the lm again emerges. Like Jack at the beginning of the lm, Kate appears very excited and pleased with her current life. She has foregone marriage and children for the new economic power available to

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her, and as Jack implores her to settle down in the suburbs, what is most evident is not what she stands to gain, but what she will lose. Importantly, the lm fails to provide a predictably sentimental ending in which Kate falls into Jacks arms and agrees to join him in suburbia; instead, it concludes only with Kate conceding to postpone her ight to talk to Jack, leaving her response to his proposal unresolved. While Ratners lm supercially celebrates a new, more integrated social role for male workers, it also makes available a reading in which conventional notions of white masculinity are threatened by a collective ideology associated with femininity and blackness: an ideology that, by celebrating family and disavowing materialism, threatens to suck white masculine subjects be they men or women into a mass existence that effaces their distinction. Certainly, the glimpse to which Cash subjects Jack requires that Jack acquiesce to forms of economic disempowerment and feminization with which black men have long been associated in the service economy, forms with which Cash himself is associated throughout the lm. Cashs name, like Elijah Prices, draws attention to the economic relations in which he is embedded. Those relations are in turn illuminated by his desperate attempt to cash in a lottery ticket at the outset of the lm and his later manifestation as a convenience store clerk. The punitive attitude with which Cash offers Jack his glimpse of another life suggests that while collective social relations can certainly be rendered in positive terms, in Family Man they constitute the sort of diminishment of power and freedom that black men have long suffered.

Conclusion

In each of the lms that I have explored here, white mens sense of masculinity is invested in work compromised or threatened by a feminizing presence. While in Unbreakable damage has been done that must be undone by the magical gure of Elijah, in The Green Mile the threat is more remote, though real, and is eradicated by John Coffey. In Family Man, meanwhile, the process of feminization is much more radical, and the black angel can be

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understood to inict the feminization rather than standing in its way. Yet in no case is the function of the black friend unequivocally positive. In Unbreakable, Elijah indoctrinates David into an epistemology of place that is an economic dead end. In The Green Mile, the lesson is that one can have too much power, and, by the conclusion of that text, Paul Edgecomb is cursed with the excesses of life he unintentionally siphoned from John Coffey. Finally, in Family Man, Cash punishes Jack Campbell for his condent pleasure in his own socioeconomic power. At this point, we must come full circle and return to Farley and Appiahs speculations regarding these Magical African American Friends. First of all, they clearly are not friends. Nor are they saints. They are ghosts, or, at least, tips of a historical iceberg jutting into the present. And, as such, they are provocateurs, forcing latent troubles into the light of day. The lms themselves drip with nostalgia: nostalgia for the era of superman, for the simpler times when white mens authority was less assailable, when Capras George Bailey could be sure he had made the right decision in foregoing his own dreams for his family and community. Yet along with this nostalgia comes the haunting presence of other lingering histories: black men systematically excluded from public, paid work because of the threat to white male hegemony they might pose if they had economic power. So in these lms they emerge as if from another dimension, magical not only, as Farley suggests, because their daily lives are a mystery, but because their very means of existence are a mystery. What powers them must be magic, the lms imply, because it cannot be the simple dollars and cents that keeps the rest of America moving. As I have suggested throughout this essay, the black characters removal from the realm of the economic is signied by their association with childhood in each of these lms. Yet it was also this history of economic marginalization that inspired the African American tradition of the trickster, a cultural cognitive model which enabled Afro-Americans to reect on the moral dilemmas imposed upon them under conditions of servitude and economic bondage.15 And indeed the relations between these

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black and white men perhaps come closest to the relation of trickster to dupe. Like older versions of the trickster, these black men are power broker[s] (159) who interact with their white counterparts not for seless reasons, but to fulll their own needs. Whether that need is to conrm ones own (wicked) identity, to share ones burden of suffering, or simply to give a powerful white man his comeuppance, each of the transactions between black and white men that these lms imagine is the sort of exchange of value that typies a trickster encounter (160). Although these lms initially seem to foreground conicts around gender while suggesting harmonious and cooperative race relations, a closer consideration reveals that the lms present white masculinity as beset from both fronts. The fantasy of a black man stepping in magically to bolster the crumbling ction of autonomous masculinity only temporarily defers the deeper fears the works reect: that the other construction, whiteness, might itself be equally tenuous. Finally, perhaps the very yearning for miracles these lms express must serve as a measure of how dire the condition of both constructs is, and in that regard the ascendancy of the MAAF may indeed be good mojo.

Notes

My thanks to Michael Berthold for his careful reading of an early version of this article. 1. 2. Christopher John Farley, That Old Black Magic, Time, 27 November 2000, 14. This is not to suggest, of course, that it is exclusively black men, or even exclusively blacks, who are represented as magical helpers in lms of the past fteen years. In lms such as Ghost and The Matrix (dir. Wachowski Brothers, US, 1999), black women have been assigned powers of clairvoyance and prophecy, while in the lms The Gift (dir. Sam Raimi, US, 2000) and Michael (dir. Nora Ephron, US, 1996), it is a white woman and man, respectively, who possess supernatural or angelic powers. The trend nonetheless seems most prevalent in the casting of black men, and here I want to focus on the particular implications of this alignment of black masculinity with magic.

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3.

Anthony Appiah, No Bad Nigger: Blacks As the Ethical Principle in the Movies, in Media Spectacles, ed. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1993), 81. Appiah denes white Hollywood movies as those that we understand, in the complex way we construct the authors of movies, as authored by whites (79). Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 166. Other lms from the past fteen years, including What Dreams May Come, City of Angels (dir. Brad Silberling, US, 1998), and Legend of Bagger Vance also feature some variation on the theme of black men as magical. In the rst two lms, the MAAFs are literally angels, and the lms thematic concerns with Christianity and the afterlife overshadow their representations of material conditions in American society. The Legend of Bagger Vance, meanwhile, seems best understood in terms of Appiahs notion of the black Saint, since Bagger Vance (Will Smith) restores his white counterpart (Matt Damon) to both professional success and a sense of masculine strength without exacting any signicant penalty from him. Elsewhere I have discussed how the feminized nature of security guard work specically its boredom and low pay has been dramatized in another recent lm obsessed with postindustrial work, Peter Cattaneos The Full Monty (UK, 1997). See my Postindustrial Striptease: The Full Monty and the Feminization of Work, Colby Quarterly 36 (2000): 48 59. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 156 57. By explicitly stating that David has the unfullled potential to be the opposite of both his wife and Elijah, the lm clearly signals its trajectory toward reinstalling white masculinity in its place in a set of unambiguous binaries: man/woman, white/black, strong/weak.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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10. Interestingly, one of the violent acts that David perceives but chooses to overlook is a race crime. As he brushes against an anonymous white man in the train station, David experiences a psychic vision of the stranger randomly striking a member of a black family with a bottle, shouting, Go back to Africa! Once again the issue of staying in or returning to ones place is foregrounded, and Davids choice to forego pursuing this man subtly but disturbingly downplays the severity of this act, if it does not actually afrm its appropriateness. 11. Cynthia J. Fuchs, The Buddy Politic, in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993), 201. Fuchs borrows her denition of hypermasculinity from Lynne Joyrich, Critical and Textual Hypermasculinity, in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 156 72. 12. The degree to which The Green Mile is about work and gender, more than about the moral issues that attend capital punishment, again becomes evident in the scene that follows this grisly episode. As Paul grills the other guards about what went wrong, Pauls own superior arrives to demand similar answers. At this point, Paul becomes the consummate middle manager, generating spin control in which he emphasizes that the job was done properly because the prisoner is now dead. The horror of the death is subsumed by the discourse of the prison as a workplace and inicting death as a job well done. 13. Tania Modleski offered this analysis in a talk entitled Hollywood Men at Bryn Mawr College on 21 February 2000. 14. A number of critics who reviewed the lm on its release, for example, felt that the life Jack is meant to embrace in suburban New Jersey appears considerably less desirable than the glamorous, if supercial, existence he enjoyed in New York. In a review entitled Here for the Holidays, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, for instance, remarks that Jacks new life seems pretty boring and that once she becomes his wife, Kate is more killjoy than dream girl (22 December 2000). Christy Lemire, writing for the Associated Press, observes that Ratner cant decide whether to condemn suburbia for its domestic banality, or celebrate it for its comfort and reliability (18 December 2000).

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15. Jay Edwards, Structural Analysis of the Afro-American Trickster Tale, Black American Literature Forum 15 (1981): 160.

Heather J. Hicks is associate professor of English at Villanova

University, where she teaches courses on postmodern ction, contemporary narratives of race and ethnicity, and feminist theory. She is currently writing a book on how American authors and lmmakers have depicted transformations in the meaning of public, paid work since World War II.

Nicholas Cage and Don Cheadle in Family Man (dir. Brett Ratner, US, 2000)