Thanks for that link! It doesn’t make me all that much more hopeful, though, that white gets labeled as such in the movie. It’s nice that this film on teenagers “addresses multicultural perspectives.” I wonder, though, if African American, say, is one such labeled “perspective” in the film, is “European American” or maybe “middle-class white” another one?
I also read this in the linked article:
Though the film is a directorial achievement on its own, another notable aspect of Wolf’s project is his choice of music. An intoxicating original soundtrack by Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox establishes the setting of the film through recognizable beats and also blurs the line between past and present, establishing a poignant and lasting connection with the viewer.
I haven’t heard this film’s music yet (and I’d still love to see the film), but if the frontman of (white) Indie band Deerhunter did music for it that strikes some as intoxicating, helping to create a “poignant and lasting connection with the viewer,” I would bet cash money that the viewer here is a white one (whether the filmmakers are consciously thinking so or not).
Oh sure, others could feel this connection too, but just as Laura Mulvey pointed out long ago that there’s a presumed male gaze in cinema, there’s usually a white one too. And again, part of how it works (and I’m not assuming that you don’t know this) is how white stands in as, instead, a norm, and how “multicultural” add-ons mean that we’re suddenly talking about race, but mostly just the racial experience of people who aren’t white. As if white people don’t have a race, as if it doesn’t matter in their lives, when it does in so many ways. They just tend not to see that most of the time.
Which is less about this movie in particular than about the way that movies by white filmmakers tend to be when it comes to race, and when filmmakers address such supposedly “universal” experiences as life as a teenager. If this movie actually addresses middle-class white kids AS middle-class white kids, recognizing as it does so how their experiences tended to differ from others (instead of just saying it was those others who had some that were “different,” which would mean different from “normal,” that is, actually, different from “middle-class white”), then yay! But I doubt it does.
