Krin Gabbard. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture.

Krin Gabbard. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UPS, 2004. 299 pp. $62.00.

The recent surge of scholarly interest in African American films has yielded an increasing number of books on the subject, among them Manthia Diawara's Black American Cinema (1993), Sheril D. Antonio's Contemporary African American Cinema (2001), and Paula J. Massood's Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (2003). In contrast to these books, which focus on the presence of African Americans in cinema directed almost exclusively by African American directors, Gabbard's unique point of view is quite the opposite: in a lucid and compelling book he looks closely at what he calls "black magic," an invisible black presence in a group of American movies produced in "White Hollywood."

Black Magic is essentially organized into four parts: "Black Magic, Disembodied"; "Serving the White Audience"; "Unrepresentable Subjects"; and "Black Magic, Inverted." Chapter One in Part One begins with a full examination of the intriguing invisibility of an ongoing "improvisatory impersonation" of black jazz dancers and musicians by white actors. None of these "improvisatory impersonations" use blackface performance; instead, like Marlon Brando's characterization of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, they mimic the gestures and idiosyncrasies of famous black performers and musicians--Miles Davis, for instance. According to Gabbard, when a long tradition of blackface performance in the movies was finally coming to an end, Brando paved the way for what has become intrinsic to Hollywood films, "the wideranging appropriation of black culture without the actual representation of black people." In Chapter Two of Part One, Gabbard continues to argue that in The Bridges of Madison County Clint Eastwood, instead of singing himself, uses as background music the songs of Johnny Hartman, whose manly voice seductively creates a sexual persona for Eastwood. This persona infuses a nonthreatening but undeniable masculinity into his "unmanly" activities of writing love letters, reciting poetry, and shedding tears while in conversation with a woman.

Similarly, Part One's Chapter Three points to The Talented Mr. Ripley and Pleasantville as films that appropriate an African American tradition for use by whites without making black characters a part of the story. In the former movie, Gabbard insists that almost all of the white American or English jazz musicians, including the protagonist, Dickie Greenleaf, play in styles closely associated with African Americans. The latter movie, Pleasantville, is about the black-and-white world of an old 1950's television sitcom into which two teenagers from the late twentieth-century are magically dropped. In the black-and-white sitcom world, socially and sexually awakened citizens become colorful but must endure threatening words uttered by "colorless" members of the community. The movie, Gabbard argues, makes discrimination and small-town closed-mindedness a substitute for race and class prejudice, a process that uses narrative traditions about black people involving their struggle for civil rights.

There is a problem, however, with Gabbard's discussion of The Bridges of Madison County and The Talented Mr. Ripley. With such a heavy emphasis on the influence of black music as a codified black presence on white films and actors, the logic of Gabbard's analysis could be applied to almost all white Hollywood movies using black music in the background.

To continue, though, Chapter Four in Part Two provides a fascinating and convincing analysis as to how blackness plays crucial roles in the films Ransom and Fargo. Part Two suggests that Ransom is not only about a kidnapping, but also is in many ways a dialectic involving the protagonist's (in this case, Mel Gibson's) symbolic struggle with an African American FBI agent who is an obstacle to Gibson's regaining his manhood. This dialectic is revealed by Gabbard's meticulous account of the film's numerous scenes in which Gibson triumphs over the black agent, the foremost being when Gibson effectively blocks the FBI agent's ability to gain control over the abduction case, and when he (Gibson) shoots the kidnapper first.

Considering Fargo's grim satire of life in the upper Midwest, Gabbard notes it provides "an anatomy of whiteness." As this chapter shows, the film seems to have little sympathy for its nonwhite characters, including Japanese Americans and Native Americans, who are all portrayed as being mentally weak and socially unsuccessful. But we also soon see, through Gabbard's discussion of the film, that the most threatening white man in the movie is placed under arrest by a pregnant policewoman, an action that allows us to discover the emptiness behind the traditional myth of white masculinity.

Chapter Five in Part Two also discusses the most striking examples of films in which "black angels" make life better for white people. The Green Mile is offered as an excellent introduction to this black angel phenomenon. The giant black protagonist in The Green Mile is reminiscent of Richard Wright's protagonist Jim in his short story "Big Black Good Man." In the film, the black giant magically cures the disease of a prison guard as well as the cancer of a prison warden's wife. Gabbard believes that the black giant belongs in the large group of recent films where black angels have appeared; such movies include The Family Man and The Legend of Bagger Vance, both of which, according to Gabbard, feature African American men who enhance the masculinity and sexuality of white people. In The Family Man, for instance, an indignant black youth pulls a pistol on a convenience store clerk after being refused payment for a winning lottery ticket; next he points it at a rich white male customer who has mercifully tried to save the youth's life by offering to buy the ticket. In contrast to the white man's effort, the black youth uses "black magic" to temporarily transform the life of the white man into that of an ordinary "family man," an experience that results in the white male's salvation by enabling him to appreciate life's "true values." In such ways, Gabbard examines how white people are often dependent on black people both socially and morally in these movies and tend to envisage race relations in terms of exaggerated virtue and villainy.

Chapter Six in Part Three stands in great contrast to Parts One and Two, sections concentrating on films in which black people never make a physical appearance yet whose identities are relentlessly co-opted and put in service for white people. This chapter examines three jazz documentaries on Thelonius Monk, and then considers the consequences of what would happen if such a prominent African American were to emerge prominently in film. Even though the three documentaries attempt to account for Monk's life and music, the "essential" Monk eludes all of their efforts in constructing a coherent image. The three different versions of Monk images presented by each of the three films reveals how difficult it is to represent concretely and exactly a prominent African American (male) artist.

Chapter Seven in Part Three details the psychology of white men, including Gabbard himself, who are almost completely devoted to collecting jazz and blues records. Gabbard gives a valid psychoanalytic explanation of this completist's behavior, suggesting that this is the persistence of the "anal stage," when children take special pleasure in holding on to material that should have passed out of their bodies. This chapter also provides a persuasive explanation for the behavior of white male collectors: they base much of their gender identity on the masculinity of African American men, thereby imbuing it with a "hip and subversive" aspect and rendering it "unrepresentable in mainstream culture." Nevertheless, the logic of Gabbard's analysis in Chapters Six and Seven remains quite elusive: his somewhat precarious juggling of a rather large number of disparate themes results in a slightly disorganized presentation. After detailing for more than 30 pages the psychology of white male fascination with black music, Gabbard puts most readers at an utter loss when they finally turn to consider precisely what this long oration has to do with the appropriation of black presence in white films.

In Part Four, Chapters Eight and Nine turn to a pair of films, Robert Altman's Kansas City and Spike Lee's He Got Game, respectively, which reverse the trend of placing black music and other aspects of African American culture at the service of white protagonists. The astonishingly contrary examination of He Got Game, in particular, is effective in its discussion of the reversal of black music appropriated for service to white people. In He Got Game, Gabbard argues, Lee has turned the blacks-serving-for-whites conventions upside down, allowing the music of white composer Aaron Copland ("Mr. Musician Americana") to enhance wonderfully the playfulness, grace, and masculinity of black youths on the basketball court.

To sum up, Gabbard attempts to come full circle in his argument by insisting that many of the films taken up in this book have moments of truth that should not be overlooked. His purpose is to evaluate how much mainstream "white" American culture, as represented by white Hollywood, is in debt to African American culture. Despite his concern that "the debt is growing fast and the payments are small change," this book has admirably accomplished part of the "payback" by showing the almost invisible and yet tangible and eminently valuable African American influence on European American culture. From Marlon Brando's impersonation of black performers in A Streetcar Named Desire, to the demystification of whiteness in Fargo, to the drastic reversal of black and white roles in He Got Game, we can see this influence working clearly. All in all, this book is exciting and its shortcomings are negligible. Scholars, film critics, and general readers alike will gain significant insights into many subtle ways in which African American cultures powerfully impact and alter the contemporary dominant American culture. No serious student of African American studies, cinema, or culture in general can afford to miss this superb book.

Toru Kiuchi

Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan)