Hollywood hype, black stereotype

Halle Berry's Oscar-winner is just another blaxploitation movie.

Three months after doling out the 2001 Academy Awards, Hollywood is still aglow with the self-satisfaction of giving two of its biggest honours, best actor and actress, to black performers Denzel Washington and Halle Berry. This was, as the press corps kept reminding us, history-making. The industry hasn't been so pleased with itself since the counterculture 70s, when A-list stars such as Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman bucked tradition by openly disparaging the Oscars and all the mainstream success they stood for.

The political pendulum has swung back mightily since then, of course; making it in Hollywood is once again a many-splendoured thing, though for black artists it was still, as it had always been, a very sporadic thing at best. In March, however, the academy finally broke with that bit of bad tradition. And it was Berry, a relative novice, who garnered most buzz with her tough-love movie, Monster's Ball. Playing, against type, a destitute black single mum to Billy Bob Thornton's white-trash prison guard, the glamorous Berry became the instant belle of Hollywood's ball; British audiences can make up their own minds on her performance when the film opens here this week.

If they are paying attention, it won't be all they'll be watching. Beneath the touted magic of the movie and its larger meaning lie some ugly truths about race and power that affirm, rather than assault, some of the most ironclad traditions in America. To cut to the chase (without giving away too much about the movie), Berry got most critical and popular attention for baring her backside and engaging in graphic sex with her co-star.

W hat was hailed by many white observers as courageous and groundbreaking was denounced more privately by black Americans as embarrassing and stereotypical. Sure, we haven't seen this sort of coupling in a long time, but the last time we did was in patently stereotypical stuff like Foxy Brown and Coffy, movies of the "blaxploitation" era of the 1970s that claimed to bolster images of the new black power (big afros, bigger guns) but which traded almost exclusively in ancient racial and sexual fetishes (ghetto life, unchecked libido).

Such is the case in Monster's Ball, which purports to level the playing field with the leading-lady prominence of Berry, but which grants her exactly the sort of, er, prominence that black women have suffered from for generations and could do without. When she isn't naked, Berry is scantily clad, looking less like a southern woman of little means and more like an LA ingenue hanging around waiting for her next audition.

Part of my gripe here is about gender, not race. Women in film have had to battle sexual objectification since they first stepped in front of the cameras. But race makes that objectification more historically and culturally insidious and harder to fight. It's interesting to note that leading women such as Julia Roberts almost never do nudity on screen these days, and that when they are provocatively dressed, as Roberts was in Erin Brockovich and Pretty Woman, it is generally consistent with plot or character. Berry in Monster's Ball is naked mostly for the cheap thrill of it all. And contrary to all the critical plaudits, she projects little character, instead alternating between sullenness and all-out hysteria, the sort of emotional extremism long ascribed to black characters.

Following another stereotyped narrative of the noble savage, boyfriend Billy Bob Thornton undergoes a spiritual transformation wrought by his mere proximity to a black person, the first such relationship in his life; he begins the movie with encoded racist beliefs and in the span of two hours is miraculously enlightened. Too bad that Berry experiences no parallel transformation, or any transformation at all. In the great tradition of American film-making, she is black and needs to be nothing more than a fixed emotional point around which the rest of the universe can revolve and evolve.

The argument for individual and artistic free will, for Berry having the right to do whatever she wants to on screen, is a seductive one. It sounds like progress. But the fact is that we are still collectively seduced by the power of racial tropes, and they still control black images far more than any isolated wish to transcend them. Not to be aware of that is to invite the kind of racial exploitation, whether conscious or not, of Monster's Ball.

Berry said in an interview that she was tired of being perceived as a role model, of bearing the burden of racial and moral representation, and casting off her clothes was a personal liberation, a conscious casting off of what bound her. Sounds good. It's a pity she didn't realise that that burden, borne as it is by all African Americans, is simply not hers to lose.