White Filmmakers Need to Mind Their Own Business

“I know that as a white filmmaker, a Jewish filmmaker if I'm writing a Black character, there is going to be a little bit more scrutiny, and I'm good with that because I'm good with the process. And I knew going into it that I had two great actors, but I also had two great producers in them, and a lot of different voices.”- Sam Levinson for THR’s Writer Roundtable

White filmmakers trying to make art through the Black lens is not a new phenomenon. There are some who are able to do it well, however few, but most have not. Across the spectrum, we have films like The Color Purple (1985) and Waves (2019), both directed and written by white men, featuring Black protagonists, but executed in vastly different ways. In a space such as the film industry, that feels lacking in its representation of the Black experience, and is lacking in its breadth of Black creators, it is frustrating to have to share the Black film space with non-Black filmmakers. Does this mean white people can’t or shouldn’t write Black stories? I can’t answer that. But, when whiteness is so heavily left unexplored, why do white filmmakers gravitate toward telling stories outside of their experience? And what would it mean if instead of mining the experiences of marginalized people for content, white filmmakers used their own experiences to examine whiteness? I’ll try my best to examine these questions using as an example a film most of us are by now familiar with, Netflix’s Malcolm & Marie (2021). 

I would like to preface I’m not here to have the answers to anything. To paraphrase Daniel Kaluuya in a recent interview, “I came in this game in [1998], man. I don’t know. I don’t have the answer.” I can’t dictate whether or not white people should be allowed to tell Black stories, I can’t define with precision what constitutes a Black film, and I can’t answer for this wide phenomenon in the industry. I can only give my input on what I see as a young Black female filmmaker trying to navigate her way through the muddy politics of the film industry. So with that being said, let’s begin. 

It’s not new for white creatives to want to tell stories from outside of their experience. Otto Preminger directed Carmen Jones (1954) (among many other films with Black leads), Steven Spielberg directed The Color Purple (1985), Katheryn Bigelow directed Detroit (2017), Peter Farrelly directed Green Book (2018), Trey Edward Shults directed Waves (2019), and the list continues. Each of these films, more specifically the latter, racked up their valid criticisms for the ways their directors approached race and whether or not they were the right storyteller for the subject. The Color Purple is a phenomenal film, but what would it have looked like if a Black, queer woman directed it instead? So, by the time we rolled around to Sam Levinson’s effort in the year 2021, fresh off of a summer of reckoning, marching, and non-Black people’s awakening to the terms anti-racism and anti-Blackness, it felt tiring to see on my TV screen what essentially felt like a form of blackface set to jazz music and the sounds of Zendaya’s and John David Washington’s screams.

Malcolm & Marie, written and directed by Euphoria creator Sam Levinson was the brainchild of Levinson and Emmy winner, Zendaya, who approached Levinson to create a project for her at the start of quarantine. Washington was a producer on the film, but was later brought in to play the “Malcolm” to Zendaya’s “Marie” at Levinson’s request; a casting choice that raised eyebrows from the beginning. While much of the discourse surrounding Malcolm & Marie before its release focused on the casting, especially the 12 year age gap between its titular characters, it was evident upon seeing the film this was far from the only issue within the film. 

I will say I didn’t hate Malcolm & Marie. I’m not sure if I liked it, but I didn’t hate it. I, like many Black critics and viewers alike, had many qualms with it, particularly, that a white man was behind a story involving two Black characters. Yes, even taking into context how the film came to be, and the incessant claims the two leads helped collaborate on the script, I still took issue with Levinson being the mastermind behind this production. 

Much of the criticism I saw centered on Levinson’s use of Washington’s character as a mouthpiece to air his grievances against critics and Hollywood. Malcolm rants at length at various points in the film about “that white lady from the LA Times” which is likely a reference to Katie Walsh, a real reporter at the LA Times who panned Levinson’s feature, Assassination Nation. Within the first five minutes, Malcolm paces the living room spouting his grievances about how this woman will politicize his film. “What was interesting, though, was that you can tell that because I’m Black, as the director, and the woman is a Black lead, stars in the film, she’s already trying to frame it through a political lens when in reality it’s a film about a girl trying to get clean....it’s not a film about race.” About an hour of arguing later, “that white lady’s” review for Malcolm’s film is posted and he launches into another tirade about politicism of Black films. It’s a familiar conversation amongst Black filmmakers within and outside of the industry. Why are we constantly asked questions about race and not craft? Why are even our films with the lightest subject matter given such a deep analysis when really they’re made to be fun? Why can’t our art, like white art, just exist without having politics attached to it? These questions weigh heavily on Black filmmakers who want to do justice to the representation of our communities, but also feel the weight of expectations to speak for our entire race. It’s exhausting, and surely something Washington and Zendaya voiced to Levinson during their writing sessions, but it is something in his hands that is void of any nuance. Coupled with Washington’s breathless (like literally out of breath) delivery, the monologues sound foreign and uncomfortable coming from the Black character’s mouth. 

Another grievance with the film’s introduction is when Malcolm, again talking about “that white lady from the LA Times” says she’s compared him to Barry Jenkins, John Singleton, and Spike Lee. These are three well-known directors whose films couldn’t be more different from one another and yet Malcolm somehow possesses the gravitas of all three. The line was entirely too self-aware, possibly a credit to the “collaboration” of the film’s two actors. For a white director, through the mouth of his Black character, to call out a white critic for doing that “white people thing” of naming any relevant Black person in a field to compliment you is ironic. We’re meant to see Malcolm has an inflated ego and thinks highly of himself, but there are several points in the film where Marie reinforces he is not alone in this thinking. If he is meant to be some savant, some auteur, it’s still unclear where on the directorial spectrum he’s supposed to be considering the directors he’s compared to. Malcolm even goes out of his way to distance himself from being compared to these directors, insisting instead he should be seen like a William Wyler type, a famous white director who is known for Ben-Hur and Roman Holiday. In one breath Levinson seems to be critiquing the whiteness of critique, but in the next breath falls into the same traps of that whiteness himself by asserting that comparing Black directors to those that came before them is somehow an insult. As a matter of fact, Malcolm’s cinematic literacy is crowded with white directors. Has he heard of Oscar Micheaux? Ossie Davis? Ousmane Sembène? Euzhan Palcy? I found this to be an oversight a Black director most likely wouldn’t have made. And sure, Levinson’s stated several times Marie is meant to be a source of grounding and rationality in comparison to Malcolm, but I felt her “pushbacks'' to be weak. Nothing she said moved the needle and there was nowhere in Malcolm's arc throughout the film where he really took on anything Marie said and altered his viewpoint. 

Perhaps Levinson's biggest offense is his attack on Barry Jenkins. In another of his breathless rants about yes, “that white lady from the LA Times”, Malcolm disparages the critic for her “audacity” to call out Malcolm’s shortcomings in telling the story of a woman, as a cishet man. “You can’t hang everything on identity. You can’t say I brilliantly subverted this trope ‘cause I’m Black, but I fell into this one because I’m a man. Identities are constantly shifting.” Levinson seems to be poking at Katie Walsh's review and criticisms of Euphoria, for which he’s had a hand in writing every episode. These are both narratives largely centered on young girls. It begs the question, of course, why he doesn’t write stories centered on men in the first place if he’s so tired of the criticism? 

Nevertheless, at this point in the film, Levinson unleashes an unrelenting onslaught of what I can only call his insecurities masqueraded as analysis. He names directors who’ve written outside of their experience, Gillo Pontecorvo, Billy Wilder, Ida Lupino, etc., and then drags Barry Jenkins into his mess once again (seriously, he name drops the director at least six or seven times). “The fact that Barry Jenkins isn’t gay, is that what made Moonlight so universal?” Levinson has been praised far and wide for Euphoria, but for him, it’s still not enough. Apparently reeling still from the negative review for Assassination Nation, it felt as though Malcolm & Marie was meant to be his “I’m going to prove them wrong” film. John David Washington’s character, Malcolm, is clearly a mouthpiece for Levinson used to address his criticisms with the industry without having to voice them himself. Typical. By using a Black man in his place and adding in elements of race, ranting about politicizing work that doesn’t need to be politicized just because of race and people who are too woke, Levinson launched an assault against his critics who feel as a grown cisgendered heterosexual male, he has no business writing so many stories from teenage girls’ perspectives. But what offended me most about his- I, mean Malcolm’s, griping was that he brought Barry Jenkins into all of this. Jenkins, of course, quickly became an indie darling and one of the Black community’s best-known directors after the release of his second feature film Moonlight. There are several things wrong with Levinson picking on Jenkins (who still has never addressed this situation.)

For starters, he completely erases Tarell Alvin McCraney from his own narrative. Moonlight is based on a play, “In Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue,” written by McCraney largely based on his own upbringing and relationship with his mother. McCraney and Jenkins co wrote the script and both received the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The rant also removes Jenkins’ own personal connection to the story. Although Jenkins is not gay, he did grow up in the same neighborhood as McCraney (down the street from one another as the two would learn) and also had a similar upbringing with a drug-addicted mother, so he was not entirely writing out of his own experience. He and McCraney together made a film true to their experience growing up in Florida with McCraney lending his authenticity to the queer experience.

Furthermore, if Levinson has an issue with Jenkins being praised for what he’s done, his issue is with the wrong person. Hollywood is a business wrought with nepotism, which Levinson knows very well as the son of Oscar-winning director of Rain Man, Barry Levinson. Jenkins, who was not born into wealth or connections, worked his way to his current position in the industry. Levinson should leave that smoke for other well-liked nepotism babies, like Sofia Coppola, Max Landis, and Jason Reitman, all children of famous directors who manage to succeed in the industry. Why pick on someone who had less than you and scraped their way to the top when you have other contemporaries you could be mad at instead?

Despite all of the criticism, Levinson and his actors don’t seem to agree they were used in the way many viewers and critics suggest, but I find that hard to believe. Levinson, during a Clubhouse talk which I took part in, and in other interviews has confessed the main conflict between his characters was based on the reality of him forgetting to thank his wife during a speech he made at the premiere of Assassination Nation. There is the connection between Katie Walsh and the infamous “white lady at the LA Times,” and Malcolm’s rants about critics and directors needing the freedom to make the art they want regardless of identity and reviews of Levinson’s work. Too much of his personal life has been poured into this story to ignore the obvious. Malcolm, himself, does the same to Marie- uses her life experiences and puts them into a movie; a decision Marie and the audience are meant to feel is exploitative. So why then, when we point out the parallels with reality, are we meant to believe the opposite? There is only so much agency Zendaya and John David could have had, no matter how much they stress the collaboration aspect because they’re not credited as writers of the script. How much influence could they have truly had? And if their influence is bigger than credited, it’s upsetting this is the lens of Blackness they’ve offered Levinson to look through and interpret; one that is muddy, uncomfortable, unnatural, and void of nuance and feeling.  

My issue with Malcolm & Marie is that Levinson didn’t need to focus so much on race. Yes, when Black characters are involved in a story, race is inevitably there and had there been cultural references either in speech or in visual cues, or allusions to some of the struggles Black directors face in the industry, it would have felt more authentic. But for Levinson to have spent half his dialogue yelling and cursing a “white lady at the LA Times,” was draining and unnecessary. I didn’t need to see a film where Twitter topics were turned into dialogue, that’s what I have Twitter for. The real story between these two characters was the predatory nature of their relationship and the way Malcolm has a pattern of dating young, vulnerable women. Had the movie focused on that, I think it could have really said something. But it didn’t, instead, it focused a lot on a white critic at a publication and the way she vexed this Black man, who really is Levinson, by doing her job and critiquing a film. By using a Black man as his stand-in, he tried to shield himself from any possible criticism the film would face by ranting about it all, but instead played right into it. And instead of owning up to his critique, he’s hiding behind his Black actors, who are happily playing the shield for him. 

Levinson will not be the last white writer or director to make a story about Black folks and this debate will not end because for some reason everyone feels entitled to tell our stories. And if this phenomenon is not going to stop, we have to interrogate why white writers and directors feel so strongly about creating work far out of their experience. What does it mean that these people, largely privileged and sometimes wealthy and connected, go out of their way to write stories centered around people from marginalized backgrounds? Where does this boredom come from? Why do they lack so much confidence in their narratives and imaginations that they have to borrow from ours?

Is it the praise they receive? It’s just a firm truth and an absolute shame that white male directors receive more praise when they make films speaking from outside of their experience. Green Book won Best Picture at the Oscars despite criticism its entire press run of how it decentered its main character, a Black man from his own narrative. Why do white, usually male, directors get to make movies about Black women while Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye, Kasi Lemmons, etc. are not given the same regard? These are not women we see on those “100 Best Directors lists”, these women don’t have Oscar nominations, they are not on magazine covers lauding their genius although they are approaching these stories with more care and nuance. 

What would it mean for white artists to truly take a step back and examine these mediocre aspects of their whiteness by itself? Why do we always look at whiteness by looking at what it is not rather than what it is? Also, when whiteness is so widely unexplored as itself rather than what things are in opposition to it, why don’t white writers and directors choose to examine that instead of our experiences? It’s one thing to acknowledge your elevated position in society, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more real work to be done beyond. I guess that is whiteness in its nature, avoidance of actual introspection, and deflecting work that requires effort. But, hey, maybe another summer stuck inside will force these directors “listening and learning” to listen and learn to their whiteness for a change. I’ll try not to hold my breath. 

This article was originally posted on February 24, 2021 on brainwash.media