****SPOILERS ALERT FOR WHITE HOUSE DOWN**** (Discussions of characters, plot and subplots).
I’ve been itching to formulate some thoughts about the movie White House Down since Saturday, when I saw it. I am not always up to date with movies, sometimes seeing them weeks or even months after they’ve been released in theaters. This means my commentary about film is generally late, after everyone is done discussing whatever might be worth discussing. But I saw White House Down and I’ve googled for reviews and commentary and everything I came across has been about the jingoism and the blatant “RAH RAH” nature of the film. Which, yeah. White House Down is jingoistic. It is RAH RAH and it is trite in the sense that films depicting the US as a military superpower generally are. The thing is, I am accustomed to Hollywood’s jingoism. It is what it is and even sci-fi or fantasy films tend to be filled with this not so subtle propaganda. When it is not filled with propaganda (i.e. Pacific Rim), the film tends to be relegated to a niche category and described as “geeky” or “for nerds” or, gods forbid, “for women” (in all these cases, the propaganda will be of a different nature, perpetuating gender and/or racial stereotypes rather than the political superpower, but that’s a topic for another post).
So, underneath the layers of jingoistic plot devices, I was left with something I rarely see in any films at all: a Black man in a position of authority who is worth dying for. Sure, we’ve seen Black people (mostly men, with maybe a couple of notable exceptions that I can think of out of the top of my head in the form of Gina Torres in Firefly and Kerry Washington in Scandal) in positions of authority. Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, even Chris Rock, have portrayed powerful men in film, presidents, generals, heroes, etc. However, in each and everyone of those cases, the men in question were at the service of the dominant culture. When they “save the world”, they are saving “the world as we know it” (i.e. a white dominated world with racial, gender and socioeconomic hierarchies like the world we live in). What White House Down does, for the first time (at least that I’ve noticed) is turn the tables: the man doing the saving is White and the man being saved is Black. This Black president, who of course I am aware wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Obama being in the White House, is not the hero that is about to die to save “the world as we know it” but he is presented as someone worth dying for, someone worth giving one’s life for, someone worth protecting. This Black man, whose entirely Black family is also shown on screen, is someone that people go out of their way to protect. And it didn’t escape me that the entire plot is based on an alliance between old school conservatives trying to maintain the military industrial complex alive and rabid White Supremacist/ Neo Nazi types who hate the President because he is Black.
When I searched for reviews of this movie, I was looking for the political commentary rather than a critique of the film’s cinematic qualities (let’s be honest, White House Down is not set to change the history of cinema by presenting us with an entirely new genre; it’s a summer blockbuster, not the next Citizen Kane). What I was interested in was the way people read the film’s overtones, not necessarily what was said but what is shown. In my search I came across this review by Joshua Clover in the September edition of The Nation. Mr. Clover is a white Professor at University of California. I was surprised that all he could see was the military/ patriotic jingoism, especially considering the review was posted at The Nation, a magazine that usually goes beneath the surface. I left the topic alone for a couple of days because I tend to self doubt: am I seeing things that are simply not there just because of my capability for wishful thinking? But then, I remembered my visceral reaction to the race fail in World War Z and realized that even if this racial subplot wasn’t entirely evident, it IS there.
White House Down is an entirely masculine movie. It does fail in the sense that no Black woman is presented as equally worthy of dying for (sure, tangentially, the President’s wife and daughter are mentioned and shown but they are not central to the plot). However, in a world where anti Black racism is rampant, where mostly Black undocumented immigrants from Africa die by the thousands, where Black bodies are valued as “less than” in a systematic, political, ongoing way for centuries, I’ll take a small victory over no victory at all. If beneath the layers of jingoism and RAH! RAH! anyone walks from this film with, at least, one visual queue that differs from the centuries of White Supremacy, I’d say it’s still better than the majority of what Hollywood produces. Sure, White House Down will not go down in history as a game changer. But honestly, I am tired of seeing films where we all die at the service of “the world as we know it”.
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