A Look at “Dear White People” with Director
“Dear White People” tackles racism on college campuses through comedy and satire. “Dear White People” follows a group of black students at a fictional, predominantly white, Ivy League school. One of the main characters, Sam, hosts the campus radio show “Dear White People,” where she confronts the racist stereotypes and dilemmas faced by students of color. Racial tensions on campus come to a head when a group of mostly white students throw an African-American-themed party, wearing blackface and using watermelons and fake guns as props.
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“Dear White People: Please stop touching my hair. Does this look like a petting zoo to you?”
“Dear White People: Dating a black person to piss off your parents is a form of racism.”
“Dear White People: There’s no need for a Dear Black People. Reality shows on VH1 and Bravo let us know exactly how you feel about us.”
Cue the uncomfortable laughter — which, if it does its job, will get white people, black people and everyone else thinking about race a bit differently. That’s the hope of 31-year-old breakout director and former awkward nerd Justin Simien, whose film Dear White People hits theaters — in limited release — today.
But what comes out today is the culmination of more than eight years of filming, editing and directing. It all began — inevitably these days — on social media. Just as some novelists test out characters by featuring them in short stories first, Simien tested his on YouTube and Twitter. The hair quip premiered on Simien’s edgy Twitter account @DearWhitePeople in 2012.
And along came a movie that’s one of the most anticipated small-budget comedies of the year. Armed with an Indiegogo campaign and a concept trailer shot with tax refund money in May 2012, Simien exceeded his financial goal of $25,000 in three days and raked in close to $50,000. He hoped a few people would watch the trailer; instead, it reached over a million views. Simien soon found himself on CNN and The Huffington Post promoting a movie that had yet to be filmed. With so much momentum heading into production, the film practically punched its own ticket to Sundance in January — where it took home a special jury award, and Simien was officially on the map.
“I never had the right haircut, wore the right clothes or liked the right things.”
It’s a banner year for black entertainment, from Shonda Rhimes’ dynamic duo of Kerry Washington (Scandal) and Viola Davis (How to Get Away With Murder) to the premiere of the ABC series Black-ish, which centers on an upper-middle-class African-American family wrestling with cultural roots. But that success hasn’t translated to the cinema. Yet.
Dear White People began as an “unwieldy and aimless” screenplay — Simien’s words — titled 2%. Over eight years, while the project morphed on camera, Simien was also building his characters off script. First came the Twitter account in 2012 to test out the inflammatory voice of his lead character, biracial Samantha White. Then YouTube skits featuring the other characters.
A gay black male, raised in Texas, Simien grew up struggling with what he thought of as “standard” black male identity. His outsider status is visible in all his characters: There is provocative Samantha, whose unending stream of inflammatory comments about white people is both funny and ironic because of her mixed-race status; there’s the Afro-sporting nerd Lionel Higgins, who spends the film dealing with his pariah status as a gay black man like Simien himself. And there’s the son of the university dean, Troy Fairbanks, who seems on a quest to be the golden boy of black maleness; the aggressively assimilated Colandrea “Coco” Conners, who prefers not to rock the boat and would skip the “Fight the Power” rhetoric, thank you very much. The characters each battle their own community’s expectations as much as white perceptions.
“I’ve gone through all of those phases of blackness,” baby-faced Simien explains of his cast, who serve as a kind of Greek chorus, weighing in on black issues of the day with impeccable comedy. “I never had the right haircut, wore the right clothes or liked the right things.” And though high school was a momentary relief, Simien’s college days at the predominantly white Chapman University in Orange County, California, felt like awkward middle school all over again.
Perhaps a more accurate, though less comedic, title for the film might be Dear White People, and, Asterisked – Also Black People, You Listen Up Too, as it seeks to address rifts within the African-American community as much as the gulf between black and white.
“We all walk around with our black identities for our black friends and our uber-black identities for our white friends who like our black identities,” Simien says. “It’s stopping us from being real people.”
Simien’s cast is a star roster: Tyler James Williams (Everybody Hates Chris), Teyonah Parris (Mad Men) and Tessa Thompson (For Colored Girls). The film went into production last summer on a limited budget (a “couple hundred thousand dollars,” Simien says) and debuted to rave reviews.
But the million-dollar question: Is the film really that good, or does it just have the best hype machine ever?
“I enjoyed the film, but I was also unsettled by the times that I laughed alone and the times that the crowd laughed without me,” says Brooklyne Gipson, whose review for Complex stood out because she didn’t buy all the hoopla.
“Now that I’ve seen it, I feel more uneasy than satisfied. I’d like to report otherwise, but writer-director Justin Simien’s debut feature undermines its own efforts at generating an honest debate about race by pandering to white audiences.”
— Brooklyne Gipson, Complex
Of course, above all else, Dear White People is a comedy, and it’s about laughs. And if you share in the laughs, you can feel like an insider, despite the film’s obsession with outsiderness. The butt of the jokes? Taylor Swift, Gremlins, you name it.
Yet it’s telling that Simien’s influences aren’t comedic ones, but dark and uncanny films or social commentaries. It was the dream of making work like Stanley Kubrick’s erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut and Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing that encouraged the former theater geek to leave his menial production job and bet on himself.
A middle-class kid raised in a two-parent home in Houston, mild-mannered Simien moved out to California for college at Chapman. After graduation, he headed to Los Angeles to work studio jobs, first as a publicity assistant at Focus Features, then as a social media manager at Sony Television. It’s been three yearssince he struck out on his own, and he doesn’t plan on pausing anytime soon.
He’s a wide-eyed believer in the idea that pop culture can fight some of the deep psychological insecurities young minorities face — he believes he might not have felt so awkward as a young man if he’d had access to more diverse images of the black experience. “There are kids who need to know that it isn’t the end of the world if you are different.”
Next up? Three other films are in the works — he says they’re all under wraps — and Simien’s authoring Dear White People: A Guide to Inter-Racial Harmony in ”Post-Racial” America, being released at the end of October.
“I wanted to make an impact and want this to be the centerpiece of an ongoing conversation. That’s why it’s called ‘Dear White People’ — I want people to pay attention to it.”
>via: http://www.ozy.com/#!/performance/all-quiet-on-the-western-front/33251
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Movie Review: ‘Dear White People’
The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews “Dear White People.” / Photo by Ashley Nguyen/Roadside Attractions, via Associated Press.
“Dear White People” is the name of Justin Simien’s first feature film, and I’ll say right away that it is as smart and fearless a debut as I have seen from an American filmmaker in quite some time: knowing but not snarky, self-aware but not solipsistic, open to influence and confident in its own originality. It’s a clever campus comedy that juggles a handful of hot potatoes — race, sex, privilege, power — with elegant agility and only an occasional fumble. You want to see this movie, and you will want to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little awkward. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. There is great enjoyment to be found here, and very little comfort.
“Dear White People” is also the title of a series of campus radio broadcasts and viral Internet videos concocted by one of the movie’s major characters, a college student named Samantha White, played with heartbreaking poise by Tessa Thompson. Sam, as she is called, uses “Dear White People” to call out the hypocrisies, blind spots and micro-aggressions that African-Americans experience in their daily encounters with well-meaning Caucasians. Such people, including many of her fellow undergraduates at the Ivier-than-Ivy League Winchester University, make up a big part of Sam’s fan base. This is less because they want to subject themselves to her scolding than because they crave reassurance that they don’t really need it. The eagerness of some whites to prove that they “get it” on matters of race — their clumsy appropriations of African-American idioms and pop-cultural forms — is one of the targets of Sam’s critique and Mr. Simien’s satire.
The observant, yearning intellectual: Tyler James Williams in “Dear White People,” written and directed by Justin Simien. / Credit Ashley Nguyen/Roadside Attractions
And so, at least for this director, is the tendency of some black people to poke at that insecurity, and to engage one another in fierce battles about authenticity, appropriate conduct and political strategy. “Dear White People” deals out a deck of race cards, most of them jokers. To change the metaphor, the film leads its characters and its viewers — pale-skinned critics very much included — down a path strewn with eggshells, some of which sit on top of land mines.
Winchester is a hothouse of inflamed sensitivity and warring identities, populated mainly by young people who are eager to do the right thing as well as all the other things that college students usually do: drink beer, hook up, make friends, incubate careers and maybe even take a class or two. Like real-life American institutions of higher learning, this make-believe college strives to resolve painful and intractable social divisions, only to end up reproducing them on a smaller scale and in a more rarefied and intensified form.
Sam, a mass of contradictions in her own right, is just one element in a sprawling and intricate narrative machine. Mr. Simien audaciously sets in motion at least a half-dozen crisscrossing plots, all of which converge at a campus party that goes terribly and all too believably wrong. Sam is running for the leadership of a dormitory whose traditional character as an all-black residence is threatened by a change in university housing policy. Her rival is Troy (Brandon Bell), a square-jawed, clean-cut Big Man on Campus who is also her ex-boyfriend. His father (Dennis Haysbert) is the dean of students, and Troy’s current (white) girlfriend, Sofia (Brittany Curran), is the daughter of the university president (Peter Syvertsen). Sofia’s brother, Kurt (Kyle Gallner), is the editor of the college humor magazine and a proudly politically incorrect provocateur (and, as such, kind of a jerk).
Skewering attitudes: a scene from Justin Simien’s film. CreditRoadside Attractions
Sam’s current lover, a teaching assistant in her film class, is also white, which may be why she keeps their relationship secret, tolerating the amorous attention of Reggie (Marque Richardson), her ally in militancy and, perhaps in her own mind, a more appropriate romantic partner. But the heart rarely obeys the imperatives of ideology, which can be confusing enough on their own. Sam’s struggles are mirrored by those of two other African-American students seeking a way to fit in at Winchester while staying true to themselves. One is Coco (Teyonah Parris), who tries to set herself up, in web videos and in the way she dresses, talks and does her hair, as Sam’s antithesis, an advocate of assimilation and upward mobility. She also wants to impress a reality-show producer who is sniffing around campus looking for provocative material.
And then there is Lionel (Tyler James Williams, faintly recognizable to fans of “Everybody Hates Chris”), a gay nerd — though he detests such labels — with an unruly Afro and a clear allergy to the posturing and position taking that surrounds him. Recruited by the school paper to report on race relations at Winchester (and also on Sam’s campaign), he endures condescension, curiosity and contempt as his white and black peers try to slot him into a pre-existing stereotype, refusing to see him as the brainy, observant, yearning intellectual that he is.
Such misrecognition is the universal currency at Winchester and also, implicitly, beyond its walls. “Dear White People” brilliantly uses the complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic paradox of interpersonal interaction. We are all stereotypes in one another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in our own minds. Somehow, within the compass of a compact, modestly budgeted (and independently financed) feature, Mr. Simien holds the antics of an astonishing variety of recognizable human types up to critical scrutiny. At the same time, he explores the desires and frustrations of a motley collection of plausible human beings with amused compassion.
From left, Nia Jervier, Teyonah Parris and Brandon P. Bell in “Dear White People.” Credit Roadside Attractions
Not that anyone is let off the hook. “Dear White People” does not point the way toward a happy, huggy, post-racial future. Nor does it prophesy a revolutionary fire next time. And it does not pretend that “race” is a symmetrical problem to be solved by acts of reciprocal good will on both sides. This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves on their diversity and tolerance. It is, in other words, about how the distance from a place like Winchester to a place like Ferguson, Mo., is not as great as some of us might wish or suppose.
Mr. Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy. Someone says of Sam, an aspiring filmmaker, that she secretly likes Ingmar Bergman more than Spike Lee. Mr. Lee’s “School Daze” is a clear reference point here, and while Bergman is not an obvious influence, it’s possible to catch echoes of Whit Stillman, Claude Chabrol and even Pedro Almodóvar in Mr. Simien’s feel for the nuances and perversities of social life.
Everyone should see this movie, and everyone will see it a little differently. Maybe you will think it goes too far, or not far enough. Since I happen to belong to the group to which it is explicitly addressed, a direct response seems warranted. Dear “Dear White People”: Got your message. Keep in touch.
“Dear White People” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Offense freely given and eagerly taken.
Written and directed by Justin Simien; director of photography, Topher Osborn; edited by Phillip J. Bartell; music by Kathryn Bostic; production design by Bruton Jones; costumes by Toye Adedipe; produced by Mr. Simien, Effie Brown, Julia Lebedev, Angel Lopez, Ann Le and Lena Waithe; released by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.
WITH: Tyler James Williams (Lionel Higgins), Tessa Thompson (Sam White), Kyle Gallner (Kurt Fletcher), Teyonah Parris (Coco Conners), Brandon Bell (Troy Fairbanks), Dennis Haysbert (Dean Fairbanks), Brittany Curran (Sofia Fletcher), Peter Syvertsen (President Fletcher), Marque Richardson (Reggie) and Malcolm Barrett (Helmut West).