Free Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Bell Hooks Page B

relationship and sustain a relationship of joy without some self-interrogation. A lot of white male recovery films—The Fisher King and others— are trying to say just that: “White man, you’re going to have to look at yourself with some degree of critical thought, if you are to experience any love at all.” But there don’t seem to be any films that suggest to the black man that he needs to look at himself critically in order to know love.
MFA:
What about Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger?
bh:
Charles Burnett is a powerful filmmaker, yet here’s his weakest film and that’s the one that gets the most attention. The Danny Glover character is so powerful, yet we don’t know why. Is he a symbol of creativity gone amok?
MFA:
He’s like the rainmaker—you know, Burt Lancaster’s Rainmaker.
bh:
Oh, absolutely. When he lies down on that kitchen floor, there’s no capacity to utilize his magic and his creativity. He’s just gone in terms of images of black men, I would just say that John Sayles’s portrait of the black male character Brother from Another Planet is a transgressive moment. The love scene between that character and the women in City of Hope is an interesting representation of what allows males to enter the space of heterosexual intercourse in a way that is evocative of tenderness and mutual pleasure. However, I do think that John Sayles has a strange relationship with black women because he always portrays us with these weird wigs—like the woman in Brother from Another Planet and the black woman in Passion Fish.
MFA:
Let’s talk about love and fear.
bh:
Sleepless in Seattle is a very interesting movie about passion and love and fear. In both Truly, Madly, Deeply and Sleepless in Seattle, the fear is that you’ve lost a grand love and you’ll never be able to experience it again. Passion and desire about love do have the potential to destroy people. It’s like losing your sense of smell or taste. There is that intensity of passion in films like Red Sorghum and Ju Dou—that sense of being so deeply, spiritually, emotionally connected to another person. Tragically, there’s so much weird focus on codependency in this culture—especially where women are concerned—that it has become very hard for women to articulate what it means to have that kind of life-transforming passion. I think that our culture doesn’t recognize passion because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries. I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else.” That’s what domination is all about: that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you. Redemptive love is what’s hinted at in The Bodyguard and in The Crying Game. Then it goes away and we don’t know where it’s gone. Why did it go away?
MFA:
For the same reason Thelma and Louise have to die.
bh:
Absolutely. We have to go to films outside America to find any vision of redemptive love—whether it be heterosexual love or love in different sexual practices—because America is a culture of domination. Love mitigates against violation yet our construction of desire is the context of domination is always, always about violation. There must be a tremendous hunger for this kind of hopeful love in our culture right now because people are so drawn to films like Raise the Red Lantern, Red Sorghum, and Like Water for Chocolate. Pedro Almodóvar almost always explores this tension between our desire for recognition and love and our complete fear of abandonment. In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! we don’t have this perfect middle-class vision of recovery. Many feminists hate it because the woman falls in love with her kidnapper yet the fact is that in our real lives there are always contradictory circumstances that confront us. Out of that mess, we create possibilities of