6 pm update: I’ve been wised up about Don’t Worry Darling, and basically the ’50s thing is all bullshit. I won’t say how or why but it’s not to be trusted. So everything that follows is beside the point as the ’50s thing, and therefore the “presentism” I’ve spoken about, is off the table, so to speak.
Earlier today:
Don’t Worry Darling’s presentism was given a good going over in yesterday’s comment thread responses to “When A Film Has Issues.” Just for the record…
It began with HE’s “Humana Humana” taking issue with a line in Glenn Kenny’s 9.5.22 Venice Film Festival review, in which he lamented the film’s “condescending racial dynamic.” Darling is set in a 1950s desert community called Victory, and Kenny complained that “the sole Black female with a speaking part is relegated to a martyrdom prop.”
I don’t know what this means as I haven’t yet seen the film, but the mere presence of BIPOC characters in such a community is a woke projection thing.
“Within the suburban realm of 1950s homogenized America,” I wrote, “there were very few BIPOCS or Asian Americans living ‘next door’, so to speak.
“Outside of your liberal big-city enclaves, the US of A of the Eisenhower era was a largely segregated society**, and especially in planned Wonderbread communities like Victory.
“Where are the BIPOC residents in Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment (‘57)? There was a Black longshoreman in the Hoboken-based On The Waterfront (‘54) but not a single Black motorcycle rider in The Wild One (‘53), which was set in rural California.
“So if you’re making a film about an isolated suburban community in the mid ‘50s, you have to create an alternate vision of how things were. The key to this alternate vision is a little thing called ‘presentism.’”
At which point the erstwhile Bob Strauss chimed in:
HE reply: “Then why not set it in a more socially liberal time? In the ‘80s or ‘90s or early aughts, say?
“My presumption is that director Olivia Wilde and her screenwriter, Katie Silberman, fell in love with the affluent ranch-style or Kaufman House-inspired architecture of the ‘50s (displayed in No Down Payment as well as 1955’s The Big Knife) as well as the cool ‘50s retro cars and clothing fashions.
“In 1961’s Paris Blues (also directed by Ritt) Sidney Poitier plays jazz performer Eddie Cook, who lives in Paris, in part, because he despises the racist culture of the U.S. whereas racial attitudes are much more casual in the City of Light.
“When Poitier himself was making A Raisin in the Sun in Los Angeles in ‘60 or early ‘61, he was more or less obliged to stay at the liberal-minded Chateau Marmont because no one in the affluent nabes (including Beverly Hills) would rent their home to a black dude, even if he was a big-time movie star.
“If the exalted Poitier (Tony Curtis’s costar in 1958’s The Defiant Ones) wasn’t able to rent in the nominally liberal Beverly Hills, what are the odds that Kenny’s ‘Black female martyrdom prop’ would have been living in Victory a few years earlier?”
** In the South and, I think, other regions, even public transportation was segregated in the ‘50s. Which, of course, is what triggered the Freedom Rider movement among black activists.