Sidney Poitier Effect?: the Leave It on the Floor Review
Did i just turn into an old black person!? As a movie watcher and film dull (i don't have the dedication to be a buff) I somewhat resented Sidney Poitier as this iconic black actor. Yes he broke down doors with the characters he played, but to me that only highlighted the yet penetrated doors that were slammed in his and other black actors' faces, plus to me his Sidney Poitier persona would always overshadow the character, probably due to type casting and icon status. But now, and especially with the film i just saw, Sheldon Larry's Leave it on the Floor (2011), I'm beginning to think that you just had to be there when he did it to get the full effect.
Leave it on the Floor is a musical about, not the gay male ballroom scene in L.A., but about one character's, Brad's, journey from his house, in which he lived with his ungrateful, unrepentant, unabashedly homophobic mother, to the home of the House of Eminence. Yes the main story is an age old one, boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boys loses girl, boy gets girl back, but with a twist: "girl" can remain "girl", however, girl is just another way of addressing a biological and self identified male. Interspersed within the film are some incredibly well done musical numbers, from the dancing/choreography to the score to the the singing (but excluding the mixing which was horrible since it was hard to hear the lyrics over the music). What really brought this film to life, was the intimate portrayal of a house, the variance of personalities and queer people included within it, and their familial bonds that extend into the greater black gay/ballroom community.
I felt very strongly about this movie because it gave black queer people an opportunity to feel the ideals created within this film's community. It is not real, which the musical genre clearly points out, but its a fairy tale that I feel like I can be included within, imagine myself included within, and once I leave the theater feel like I was included in. Motion Pictures since their dawn have been fairy tales. A way to escape realities, a paint by numbers canvas that you can color with your own dreams. But the film that began the modern motion picture industry was Birth of a Nation (1915), and that outline has excluded non-white PEOPLE (not caricatures and stereotypes) basically ever since. Subsequently non-white people are left facing a canvas with their paints and no paint brush. They can try to paint their dreams within the borders of the outlined shapes, but they only have their hands to do it with so we have to think how it will inevitably get messy. And what's the since of a messy fantasy, unless your into that kind of thing *wink*. So when a film like Leave it on the Floor comes along, and you are a black, queer person familiar with the goings on of certain black queer communities, you feel a tingle you have never felt before. The freedom to paint care free!---think something along the lines of The Wiz (1978). The light comes on in the theater and I know that that film meant something to me that it can never mean to at least half the people in the audience, because thats about the number of non-black people in there, plus the non-queer, plus the non-black-gay-community affiliated. It means something to me personally, and it means something to us as a community, which is why the following (completely valid) question my friend asked kind of threw me for a loop: where are the white people?
... he did not mean where are the white characters. He meant where is the recognition of whiteness within the unfortunate institutions on which the film pivots (heterocentrism/homophobia being the central one). He suggested we need to think about the fact that the films director is white. Within his suggestion and within my personal reaction lay the answer to his question.... they are lurking (which is what they should be doing for this movie, its a musical for goodness sake!) White people, whiteness lurks within every facet of (black, esp black american) life even when they don't appear to be there. And while it may or may not have been (i'm leaning toward not) part of the intended function of a white director, it does not remove the fact that the director can serve to remind us that much of black life in American is at the mercy of Whiteness.
Meanwhile with my burgeoning ecstasy in the freedom to paint, and the knowledge that that is what i've been missing watching all these happy ending movies about white people, my lack of desire to place myself in that fantasy because the framework for it never included me in the first place, I can never forget whiteness. Its lurking, not even of the back of my mind, but at the back of my emotions, waiting for me when that high comes down. I cannot disassociate this film from whiteness as it tries to carve itself a place within the white american movie-musical canon (which it does very well with its mix of the traditional and non-traditional musical tropes). But I can, just for a second, do what a good old american film is supposed to make me do, forget for a second that I am in Goddamned America (yeah I said it, and I mean it!). Afterwards, once I get down from my cloud, I can really consider where the white people are. But i'll leave that for another post.
