Jungle Fever: Do We Need A Doctor?
By: Betsy Bonilla
There aren’t very many interracial
couples in movies, if at all. So when looking at the very few that do have them
we notice that the whole movie is based on the racism surrounding the “abnormal”
couple or besides those kinds of films, the “Only way that Hollywood would pair
a black man and a white woman would be if he were paralyzed from the waist down.”
Gallagher 2012:368) As was Denzel Washington was in The Bone Collector.
Yet regardless of why interracial
couples are on the big screen, especially in the past, it’s refreshing to see
someone trying to break the mold. When looking at Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) we see “some” of the
struggles that a black man and a white woman face. From all sides of the relationship someone
had something negative to say. Both families strongly disagreed with the
relationship and so did their friends. While there was some support the bad out
weighted the good.
However the movie as a whole could
have been laid out so much better. For a film trying to get a strong point
across like racism it was still playing it safe. It was filled with a lot of stereotypical
actions and behaviors for both Blacks and Italian-Americans. For example Flipper
and his family seemed to be wealthy and well educated yet they were still
surrounded with drugs and the possibility of future prostitution and Angie’s
family and friends were portrayed as “Mafia” types who keep to their own and literally
beat up whoever strays away.
I wonder how this movie would have
turned out if Flipper wasn’t married when he got with Angie and if Angie wasn’t
an Italian-American but just American. Also if Flipper hadn’t felt that his
attraction to her was solely that he was only curious about being with a white
woman and that he hadn’t told Angie that she should accept she was also only curious
about black men. Leaving her with that only option where as maybe she actually liked
him and wanted to have cute interracial babies with him, not just lots of “forbidden”
sex. I fear that if that where the case then we would have never heard of this
movie Jungle Fever.
Not to say that the term Jungle
Fever wouldn’t have existed but maybe used less frequently. That’s another
thing I would have changed about this movie, the name. I understand it gets the
attention of many people but not always good attention. Especially when the
term its self, is demeaning when talking about people because it refers to animals
and well to a disease. It’s to say that you are so sick “feverish” that you now
act as an untamed animal from the “jungle” and that that is the only
explanation that there is for you or someone else to be in an interracial relationship.
So that interracial couple, not too
long ago, had every right to get upset about their Valet writing on their keys “Jungle
Fever” because that was racist, disrespectful and hurtful on so many levels. It
didn’t really matter if the valet was white, black, or Asian. We must all get away
from derogative saying!
Work Cited
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, ed. 2010. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism
and Racial Inequality in
Contemporary America. 3rd ed. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
Inc.
Gallagher,
Charles A., ed. 2012. Rethinking the Color Line: Readings in Race and
Ethnicity. 5th
ed. La Salle University
No comments:
Post a Comment