The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation by Sharon Willis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation by Sharon Willis Derek C. Maus Sharon Willis, The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation University of Minnesota Press, 2015. iv + 255 pages ($22.50 paper/$79.00 hardcover). It is not often that one can say that a scholarly book whose central thesis recedes into the background for lengthy stretches is still successful at developing that thesis convincingly. It is even more rare to be able to say without qualification that such work is also engaging, thought provoking, and insightful. But Sharon Willis’s broad-ranging and raucous examination of what she calls “the Poitier effect” on the last fifty years of Hollywood filmmaking is just such a book. As much a collection of six interrelated essays – an introduction, four substantial body chapters, and a lengthy conclusion – as a unified monograph, this study manages to transcend traits that would doom lesser works to incoherence, a situation that testifies not only to the clarity of Willis’s prose but also to her unquestionable command of the formal, textual, and contextual aspects of her subject matter. The introduction and opening chapter of the book work together to establish its critical framework, the titular “effect” that Willis sees arising from the “obsessive sameness” (16) of the characters played by actor Sidney Poitier in a series of films dating from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. She argues cogently that Poitier’s “iconicity” as “the only black male lead in Hollywood in this period meant that he was always appearing as himself alongside whatever character he was playing” (24); this constant state of dual perception created a “familiar singularity” around Poitier that facilitated a “dream of achieving racial reconciliation and equality without any substantive change to the ‘white’ world or to ‘white’ culture, and, especially, to white privilege” (5). Without accusing Poitier himself of being a rube or a “sellout,” Willis nevertheless suggests that the “nonthreatening goodwill and...eager and patient pedagogical impulses” of the characters he played helped in “averting or deflecting the possibility of a kind of critical thinking that would involve a serious reciprocal interracial exchange, instead offering a fantasy of racial understanding and ‘assimilation’ that requires no effort on the part of white people” (5). The opening chapter of the book traces the development of this effect by intricately explicating a series of films starring Poitier, beginning with The Defiant Ones (1958), and moving through Lilies of the Field (1963), A Patch of Blue (1965), To Sir, With Love (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). As she does throughout the book, Willis expends considerable effort interpreting these films’ plots and characterizations, but she also pays special attention to the manner in which extranarrative cinematic techniques reinforce and/or complicate the films’ more overt racial representations. She is especially conscious of the composition of, and camera movements within, particular shots, the use of such methods as focus-pulling or conspicuous point-of-view in controlling viewers’ perceptions, and the cinematic interactions between image and sounds. For example, after noting that “[i]n Poitier’s films, disenfranchised blacks often register only as a marked absence or as an undifferentiated amalgam at the edge of the frame and the drama it encloses,” Willis literalizes this observation beyond simple metaphor: “At the level of sheer physicality and bodily performance..., the [visual] frame often has difficulty containing [Poitier].” Moreover, she extends into the realm of the acoustic by adding that “equally often, the film frame is strained by the sound track’s pressure on its [End Page 86] visual field” (23), resulting in a situation in which “[m]usic haunts the image and the story, much as the actor’s iconicity ‘ghosts’ his characters.” Here, Willis is both establishing the “Poitier effect” and simultaneously “troubling” (24) its overly saccharine depictions of a pathway to racial harmony. In sum, the chapter on Poitier is a wholly convincing demonstration of the Poitier effect’s narrative and technical construction. In the next three chapters, though, the “Poitier effect” becomes more of an undertone than an organizational principle, a development that initially threatens to...