Green Book, colored bathroom, movie, and how we interpret things
Since these racial issues tend to blow up on many aspects, recently I have been concerned about any civil rights movement and racial movies. We know that, these racial phenomenon are highly sensitive. This blatant issues sometimes were placed as a “Hollywood’s obsessions” within the historical context of racism to entertain the audience through a movie. But the most thing that took my concern is, why the story frequently fell off from the way it should be focused — in order to be centered on the movement nor the capacity on the actual perspective. Moreover, there are lot of details that seem to be lost in track and serve as a classic example of white savior narratives.
“It wasn’t the voices from the maid that were heard” said Viola Davis, spoke on her role as Aibileen Clark, the maid on The Help. She stressed that the movie tends to focus on the white voices rather than the black ones. The Help projection showed more on the white writer — which played by Emma Stone as Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan’s perspective; the main character that lifts a story from local black maids. She writes this book — The Help, in order to reveal the discrimination and exploitative undertones towards black people. The story goes to the struggle of the maids serving to their white family on the neighborhood and how they actually have this discrimination and fear during their days. Other than that, the movie also highlighted the bathroom use for colored people (the maids) as one of the symbols of racism during those days.
This term of colored bathroom appeared around the 60’s where black people were only allowed to use a certain bathroom. Aside from The Help movie, Hidden Figures (2016) also highlighted the symbolism of colored bathrooms that condescending and evokes outrages as in racist circumstances. Katherine Johnson’s speech scene on Hidden Figures (2016) about her bathroom break that took her half mile away everyday just to relieve herself because the only colored bathroom is located on the other side of NASA’s building, is the brilliance of how the movie represents the fundamental injustices of racism through daily activities.
Colored bathroom is one of a split issue that tells us about segregation in the form of racism. On Green Book (2018), the story bring us to explore a lot of humiliating discrimination that happened to Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) during his tour. Shirley faces a lot of discrimination toward his racial identity wherever he goes, regardless of his title as a world-class African-American pianist. The Green Book in the movie refers to the guide of negotiating areas such as hotels or restaurants for black people. Even though Dr. Shirley has esteemed identical figures, this won’t change on the behalf of racism despite having a high status. The movie illustrates Shirley’s behavior to be acceptable to his white audiences whenever he performs — that in fact, he knows once he leaves the stage, the racism still surrounds him.
But again, what to be more concerned about, Green Book also fell off in order to prevent racism. The movie depicts the racism about how black people still had to face white supremacy and injustices even to this day. Moreover, unless the emotional friendship between Tony Vallelonga and Dr. Shirley — whether they become friends, the movie showed how Tony fails to understand the difficulties of his friend in facing racism. Another scene where Tony instructs Shirley to eat chicken like “the real black do” is picturing how the film somehow loses the context.
Both Green Book and The Help ironically paint racism on the view of white narratives. It is unfortunate — besides both movies are very amazing with outstanding characters. These two movies are very well performed by having talented casts in shaping into a great movie. Both are remarkable and worthwhile movies.
