2023 in Film, Part 2: RACISM
In this series, Jimmy Lanyard explores the relationship between 2023 film releases¹ and what happened in real life that year. Part 2 looks at films about racism released in 2023 while Hollywood solidarity proved to be a finite resource that ran out before it could reach Palestine.
Hollywood loves to pat itself on the back for its supposed progressiveness. In his 2006 acceptance speech for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, George Clooney took the opportunity to praise Hollywood for being ‘out of touch’:
We're the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects, we are the ones—this Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I'm proud to be a part of this Academy, proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch.
I’m not sure if drawing attention to the Academy’s celebration of Gone With the Wind really makes the progressive point Clooney thinks it does. In fact, one doesn’t even need to go all the way back to Jim Crow to see how Hollywood has often been behind the rest of the world on racial politics. I wonder if Clooney would also be proud of the way his ‘out of touch’ colleagues booed Michael Moore off the same stage for daring to criticise the Iraq War three years earlier.
¹ Full disclosure, my favourite films that I saw as new releases in 2023 were: 1) The Settlers, 2) Killers of the Flower Moon, 3) The Old Oak, 4) Afire, 5) The Eternal Daughter, 6) The Boy and the Heron, 7) May December, 8) EO, 9) Babylon, 10) Poor Things, 11) Mars Express, 12) Autobiography, 13) Monster, 14) All of us Strangers, 15) Showing Up, 16) M3GAN, 17) How to Have Sex, 18) River, 19) Tar, 20) Talk to Me
‘Out of touch’ George Clooney as Bruce Wayne in 2023’s The Flash.
In 2023, Hollywood continued to be ‘out-of-touch’ with popular opinions about racism. Since 7 October, the vast majority of people internationally have supported an end to the genocide of Palestinians being carried out by Israel with the support of the United States. There is a huge disconnect between ordinary people and those with power: western politicians, the media and Hollywood. While the union movement has been strong in its opposition to apartheid and genocide internationally, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA were quick to lose the moral compass that guided them through the strikes.
The eponymous settlers setting out to commit genocide in a year of genocide committed by settlers.
In an environment when much of liberal Hollywood draws the line at acknowledging Palestinian humanity, it’s no surprise that films that meaningfully address colonialism sit uneasily in the industry. In 2023, the best came from outside the Anglosphere. No film this year hit me as hard as The Settlers. This Chilean Western captures the feeling of a Cormac McCarthy novel better than any adaptation and the parallels feel deliberate: one of the protagonists is an American veteran of the war with Mexico (famously depicted in Blood Meridian) and the film ends with a haunting rendition of All the Pretty Little Horses. Most of the action is driven by three protagonists: an Indigenous man from Chiloé², an English army captain and the aforementioned cowboy as they carry out the Selk'nam genocide at the behest of capital. Although it starts out like a Spaghetti Western with a rollicking score, playful titles and alternating wide / narrow / wide cinematography, it quickly subverts this mythology in horrific fashion. By the end, the modern Chilean State has been formed, every colonial power has gotten its hands dirty and the weight of the film stuck in my gut for days.
² The Settlers was just one of two films about the colonisation of Chile this year that prominently feature the island of Chiloé. Focusing on the 1880 Recta Provincia witchcraft conspiracy, Sorcery is also very effective.
Lily Gladstone is astounding in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Racist Hollywood did release a masterpiece about racism in 2023 but Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon can hardly be seen as anything other than an aberration in an industry that would rather make ‘theme park rides’. As Ernest Burkhart, Leonardo DiCaprio is the quintessential dangerous-idiot Scorsese protagonist, following in the footsteps of all the easily-swayed dumbasses that Robert De Niro portrayed for Scorsese in the 70s through 90s. Here, Burkhart is manipulated into committing unspeakable violence against his wife’s people by his uncle Bill Hale, played by De Niro. Wearing old-timey driving goggles while he blows his car’s “awooga” horn like a live-action Mr Burns, De Niro’s performance as the grinning personification of white supremacy is his best in decades. It’s not like the clown Hale needs to be smarter than anyone other than the men who does his bidding, he has the history-defining forces of racialised capitalism behind him.
Killers of the Flower Moon flopped, but everyone who saw it went on to write an essay. There has been robust discussion about whether a white filmmaker was the right person to direct a film about the Osage Terror and I won’t relitigate what has already been discussed by smarter people than me. What I think works about his approach is that he stayed in his lane of ‘films about toxic masculinity’ even while working collaboratively with the Osage Nation, leaving space for Indigenous filmmakers to make films about the Terror in future. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the film is the depiction of Burkhart as a guy who genuinely loves his wife while betraying her constantly. I think this cognitive dissonance is key though: loving an individual person of colour doesn’t let you off the hook for participating in structural violence. Burkhart is one of many characters in the film who embodies this contradiction and it’s something that white viewers are forced to grapple with, no matter how many Indigenous friends they have.
Ebla Mari and Dave Turner in The Old Oak.
Scorsese (81) wasn’t the only octogenarian who released a career-highlight film during the year. Some of the most essential work came from Ken Loach (87), Hayao Miyazaki (82), Paul Schrader (77) and Jerzy Skolimowski (85)–all men who likely remember a time before the ‘end of history’, when better things still seemed possible³. Loach’s The Old Oak is astounding, depicting solidarity between the working class residents of a northern English mining town that has been hollowed out by capital and the Syrian refugees settled there. This film felt so current in its depiction of people who have every reason to feel hopeless, overcoming racist and classist structures to create their own reasons to hope. A long-time advocate for a free Palestine, it’s no mistake that Loach has broken with his country’s political establishment in presenting Arabs as human beings.
³ Ridley Scott (86) also made a movie.
Nia DaCosta doesn’t deserve the blame for this.
If many of the most interesting films about racism came from old white men, that's largely down to how the institution treats up-and-coming filmmakers of colour. Disney (who you should be boycotting), has in recent years hired diverse filmmakers to front its work, benefiting financially from culture wars while making the same conservative product it always has. It used to be that filmmakers took a “one-for-you, one-for-me” approach, alternating work-for-hire with more personal projects. Now, they get sucked into the studio system when they are still cheap, are used to promote the films, have their artistic freedom stifled by the much-more-powerful studio and blamed if the film sucks. Nia DaCosta ended up getting stuck holding the bag just as Marvel's multi-billion dollar experiment was at its lowest point. I hope she puts the failure of The Marvels behind her and gets to make more films like her 2018 debut Little Woods (but not for Disney).
Taika Waititi has had more success (financial, not artistic) in his association with Disney/Marvel. Your mileage may vary on whether he was ever good but few would seriously defend his 2023 stinker Next Goal Wins. Waititi, who had previously implored New Zealanders to “give nothing to racism”, decided to give it to racism in 2023, signing a letter imploring Genocide Joe to keep it up. Waititi wasn't the only artist who enthusiastically supported the genocide in 2023. His name appears alongside outspoken Zionists like Gal Gadot, Sacha Baron Cohen and Amy Schumer in the letter.
‘Anti-racism’, pro-Israel filmmaker Taika Waititi brings his thematically and tonally confused touch to Next Goal Wins.
It was heartening to see a much greater quality and quantity of talent on the American, British and New Zealand anti-genocide letters. In these cases, however, the language is cautious, with the focus on ceasefire important but never particularly radical in and of itself. When artists have gone a step further and more unequivocally called for decolonisation or an end to the occupation, they have faced repercussions. This has even resulted in a return to 1950s-style blacklist politics where widespread censorship has been enacted against actors like Melissa Barerra and Susan Sarandon.
The thing that is ‘out-of-touch’ about Hollywood’s racial politics isn't necessarily the individuals (give-or-take a Waititi or a Schumer). Like people across nearly every section of society, most of them are anti-genocide. But as a capitalist institution with deep ties to the US military industrial complex, popular politics are secondary to making money. Sometimes, although increasingly less-frequently, that profit incentive may result in great movies, the understanding being that an anti-racist piece of art may not in itself threaten racist structures.
Jimmy Lanyard is an unexceptional Pākehā public servant from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. While he is not doing Borat impressions for the graduate advisors, he enjoys matching his sneakers with his Barkers suit, drinking almond flat whites and watching supercuts of Air New Zealand safety videos. Listen to Jimmy talk about film on Dinner and a Movie podcast with Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman.