CINEMA-USA: Men! Not Just Black Men

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yvette Collimore

Washington, Jan 9 1996 (IPS) - Is it race or is it gender?

Film critics across the United States start to realise it may be more of the latter as white women join black women in a steady parade to the cinema for a film that is raking in the bucks with the underlying message that men are pigs.

‘Waiting to Exhale’ — Forest Whitaker’s adaptation of Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel — offers a series of vignettes of four middle-class, black women who are seeking relationships with men on whom they could rely to be sensitive to their needs.

These women, played by Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon live in Phoenix, Arizona — a desert not only in topography but multiracially as well.

Each woman has her own peculiarities and the only time they can exhale is when they are together. Savannah is a succesful television producer, who is fighting a long-distance battle with her mother over whether to pursue a successful — and married — former flame, now a doctor.

Bernadine transforms her husband’s personal possessions and BMW into a bonfire in their up-market parking strip after he blithely tells her he his going off with another woman. A white woman, to boot.

Then there is the matronly Gloria who runs a hair salon where these women convene regularly to pour out their heartaches and deck themselves. Gloria has her own problems. Her man has already left home. But the news is, he’s gay. Robin, the fourth woman, is a magnet for ne’er-do-wells of various kinds.

At the outset, the mainstream media saw the film as appealing primarily to a black audience in the same way that the super-macho Shaft and Super-Fly series of the 1970s were designed to draw black audiences.

And indeed in the early days, the overwhelming majority of audiences were black women. So much so that in a quickly over- worked cliche, it was seen as the black women’s answer to last fall’s ‘Million Man March’, when tens of thousands of black men converged on Washington to seek atonement for their sins and affirmation of their manhood.

‘Waiting to Exhale’ was seen as primarily trashing black men. The egocentrism of the men in the movie was embodied in their love- making or lack thereof. As the men struggled towards fulfillment, their mates stared absent-mindedly at patterns on the ceiling, occasionally feigning joy.

As one white European wag smirked after seeing the movie, “Seems like black men don’t give two sticks about satisfying their women.” (MORE)

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