GEICO Cavemen

GEICO, the insurance company, didn't have to talk about racial discrimination at all, yet its ad agency uses oblique references to racism in order to sell a product. I'm talking about the famous "Cavemen" commercials.



Everyone knows about these ads, which is obviously one reason GEICO runs them. In case you have been in a cave for the last few years, though, the conceit here is that a group of modern-day cavemen are offended by GEICO's new slogan, "So easy a caveman can do it."

The ads are clearly based on discourses of racism: the "cavemen" in the ads-within-the-ads stereotype the "actual" cavemen in the commercials roughly in the same way that advertisements like those featured at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia used to stereotype African Americans. Why GEICO continues to run the ads is easy: they're popular, and therefore effective at getting the company's name out there. (After all, tens of thousands of viewers are looking up GEICO ads on youtube.)

The really interesting question is why they are so effective. Why would references to racial discrimination move products?

Some, like a blogger describing herself as The Angry Black Woman, regard the ads' cavemen as "thinly veiled pastiches of black people," and sees them as potentially racist (although she says she "honestly can't tell" in the end if they are racist or a satire of racism). On the other hand, this discussion forum associated with the Sean Hannity show discusses whether the GEICO commericals are implicitly advocating gay rights. Although the posters disagree on that point, they generally seem to agree that being pro-gay-rights would not be a good thing.

What is up here?

First, as my brother astutely pointed out, a modern-era advertiser has finally found a way to use racism to sell things. Racism remains a force in our society, and any force--from an advertiser's point of view--is potentially a force that can be used to sell things. The only question is how to do it.

Solution: be all things to all people. The GEICO cavemen ads, as The Angry Black Woman persuasively points out, can be read as simply racist, satirizing black people who complain about racism as a bunch of whiners who can't face the truth about their own behavior. (I haven't seen it, but apparently the short-lived "Cavemen" TV show based on the commercials is pretty direct in satirizing anti-discrimination voices: see the account here, especially the description of the character "Nick.")

On the other hand, as the Hannity forum posters discussed, the GEICO ads can also seem anti-racist, a satire of racism, because the cavemen's complaints seem just, and the stereotypers (the GEICO spokesman on the talk show, the therapist, etc.) are the real objects of the satire.

Either way, these advertisements are part of a long list of recent media that (arguably) get away with pretty overt racist humor while somehow managing to persuade viewers that they (the image-makers and the viewers) aren't really racist: South Park, Family Guy, Borat, Sarah Silverman's “The Great Schlep” video*, etc., etc. Those who protest are liable to be accused of being dense, missing the joke. I have to admit, the above list contains some of the funniest stuff around these days, and to dismiss it in simple terms as racist (while possibly true) unfortunately causes us to avert our eyes from some of the most interesting stuff the culture is currently producing.

The question, then, is this: Can we enjoy and rigorously scrutinize the humor? Or do we have to make that choice?


* (in which takes place this moment, dense with cultural information: the black actor finally gets a little too uncomfortable with Silverman's dubious commentary, says "No, no" and walks off the set--clearly, this was part of the script, but it's meant to look impromptu--and Silverman whispers that her comments are nonetheless "true in general")

Fear of a Black President

This topic (the last in my three-part series of golden oldies) is both timely and obsolete now that Barack Obama is maintaining a tidy lead in the presidential election with just over two weeks to go. When I wrote this paper, Obama was a state senator with no national name recognition, and if there was going to be an African American president anytime soon, most people assumed it would be a Republican, Colin Powell. (Also, the paper was written before the TV show 24, which initially featured the African American actor Dennis Haysbert as the president, or the Chris Rock movie Head of State, had debuted.)

In sum, I looked at the various representations of an African American president in the news media, film, and literature, and concluded that there have been two main strains:

1. the "liberal version," which focuses on the attainment of the presidency by an African American man (always a man, as far as I've seen), and scrupulously avoids talking about policy or any overty "racial" issues: once an African American assumes the office of the presidency, this myth assumes, the American history of racial conflict will immediately become a closed book.


2. the "Afrocentric version," which assumes that blackness is "an ideological rather than a purely visual or symbolic entity," and that the race of the president is a separate (although clearly related) issue from that of race relations in America.

Lots of examples to look at (again, remember that this is pre-Barack Obama, pre-24 and Head of State):

• Toni Morrison famously wrote, during the Clinton impeachment scandal of 1998, that Clinton was "our first black president." However seriously she meant her remarks to be taken, Morrison clearly saw blackness as something other than a matter of skin color--as a cultural rather than a biological phenomenon. In the animosity Clinton faced from the right, she saw a glimpse of what African Americans in positions of power consistently face in our culture; thus, her view can roughly be categorized as part of the "Afrocentric" perspective.


• The 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed touches on the rumor that President Warren Harding had black ancestry. Wrote Reed, "When Republicans approached Harding with these rumors and asked him to deny them he said, 'How should I know. One of my ancestors might have jumped the fence.' What kind of answer was that?" Clearly, Reed was not charmed by Harding's unwillingness to acknowledge (or, for that matter, even to bother to repudiate) a possible black heritage.
• The 1964 novel The Man by Irving Wallace tells the story of Douglass Dillman, a black senator who (through a series of coincidences) ends up as president. Although Wallace is taking a stand against racism, he also betrays his implicitly racist attitude in a couple of key passages. His character, President Dillman, thinks to himself, "an original piece of paper is white, but the carbon is black, and often the carbon copy, no matter how weak, is almost as useful." Almost as useful? A racist Secret Service officer resents Dillman's ascension to office; however, (anticipating the motif of the "noble racist" later seen in Matt Dillon's character in Crash) he nobly risks his life to save Dillman's and is rewarded by a promotion that allows him to move into a segregated neighborhood. (I'd feel better if I felt that Wallace was conscious of the irony here, but I'm not convinced he was.)
  

  Inevitably, Dillman is impeached (one of the points I suspect Morrison was trying to make was that the first African American president will surely, like Clinton, be impeached--we'll see). He is charged on four counts, but he knows very well that the real reason he's being impeached, what he thinks of as the "fifth article," is being black. Eventually, he's acquitted and his lawyer informs him that he was acquited of "all five" charges--that is, he's acquitted of being black!

• Although I have not seen it, I read a very interesting article about the film version of The Man (starting James Earl Jones), written by Samuel B. Garren and published in CLA Journal. It explains that the original screenwriter, an African American novelist named William Attaway, attempted to push the story in the direction of a more distinctly anti-racist message (for example, showing that racism was present throughout the nation, not exclusively in the Deep South, and--in contrast to the novel--including scenes in which African Americans speak out against racism without being regarded as whiners or schemers). Garren, who read the various rejected drafts of the screenplay by Attaway, shows that he was flouted at every turn by Wallace and the film's producers. (The film was eventually made using a screenplay by Rod Serling.)
  
• Then there's Deep Impact, the 1998 movie in which Morgan Freeman plays a president who must contend with an asteroid that threatens to destroy the world. The movie follows the "liberal" model of African-American-president mythology. The producers cast a black actor to play the president, true, but only in the absence of the slightest whiff of political topicality in the movie. We're all anti-life-destroying-astroids, and so it must have seemed safe to cast the president as a black man (knowing, presumably, that this was unusual, and maybe even benefitting from the appeal of newness). Movies about actual issues upon which Americans can disagree, in contrast, cast white actors as the president.

I'd be interested in how people think recent developments alter the thinking outline above. Clearly, Obama's candidacy has (to the minimal extent it has touched directly on race at all) traded exclusively in the "liberal" version of the myth in its rhetorical and symbolic gestures. On the other hand, assuming Obama is elected (as polls suggest he will), it will be interesting to see how his racial identity--Obama is, of course, the son of a black man and a white woman--influences the discourses that surround him.

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: The first black president is neither black nor a president. Discuss.

Citizen Kane and Race

Part Two of my tour down memory lane (i.e. old conference papers in cultural studies areas).

"Citizen Kane and Race" is something I'd like to revisit, and possibly publish, someday, as I really like the ideas in it and I haven't seen anyone else pursue similar ones (which is not to say that someone hasn't, beyond my knowledge, of course).

In this paper, which I wrote and delivered at a conference in 2002, I read Citizen Kane as "part of a body of work by writer/director Welles that is often preoccupied with racial difference and injustice." I have been fascinated by Citizen Kane for some time, and by the ability of 25-year-old Orson Welles to pull it off, but I didn't initially realize he had at that time just attempted two works that wrestle with an "Africanist presence" (Toni Morrison's term) in art: the notorious all-black staging of Macbeth on Broadway (sometimes called the "Voodoo Macbeth"--Simon Callow gives the best account I know of, in his biography of Welles), which was widely regarded as successful, and an attempted filming of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he didn't pull off. When he made Citizen Kane, did Welles still have racial issues on his mind?

Something told me that he did, and I wanted to explore what that "something" was.

First of all, there are several small but conspicuous visual images of non-white people scattered throughout Citizen Kane. For example, in the "News on the March" newsreel near the beginning of the film, we see the aged Kane being pushed by an African American man, presumably a servant, on a wheelchair. (The footage is taken through a fence; we are apparently meant to think of it as illicitly obtained, as Kane was described as a recluse in his last days.)

Later, during Kane's years of triumph, we have the famous scene with the dancing girls and the performance of the song written in Kane's honor ("You buy a bag of peanuts in this town, you get a song written about you!"). Midway through, we get an extreme close-up of an African American man's face. He is wearing a strange sort of tall, feathery headgear, and only the closest of observers will figure out that the man is a member of the marching band that accompanies the dancing girls. (Other band members are visible in the frame, but the image is so fleeting that only the face in the left foreground really registers; it's an image that imprints itself in your mind without anything in the narrative suggesting you should really think about it.)

Similarly, in the last third of the film (the period of Kane's decline), we have the scene in which Kane and his second wife, Susan, argue on the beach. The setup is grim: the black cars taking the Kanes and their guests out onto the sand reminds us, without much subtlety, of a funeral. That night, as the Kanes argue, their words may or may not be drowned out by the musicians they have apparently hired for this elaborate "picnic." The singer sings, again rather ominously, "It can't be love, for there is no true love" (a version of which the White Stripes recorded a few years back in a tribute to Citizen Kane), and once again Welles uses an extreme close-up of an African American man's face.

I have watched Citizen Kane many, many times, and for a long time these images stood out to me, but I didn't have a way to account for my reaction to them. Why are they there? What do they mean? The easiest way to interpret them is to say that they simply don't mean much of anything; that they are just background elements in a context where (1) African Americans' public role was often that of a servant or a performer, (2) Welles was experimenting with the uses of foreground and background, and with striking transitions between scenes, and so there's no particular meaning to these seemingly racialized images--at most, they confirm what we already think we knew about Welles and his era.

I've never been convincined that this is the full story, and becoming aware of Welles's interest in African American life just before making Citizen Kane told me that I was on the right track. Other evidence I discussed in this paper includes: the character of Leland Bernstein, who is played broadly according to stereotypes of Jewishness and who functions variously as a figure of fun and as the pseudo-profound executive who takes over the operations of Kane's company; the un-accounted-for accent (Hispanic?) of Kane's butler, Raymond; and the much-remarked-upon use of black and white throughout the film (which has not, to my knowledge, been connected to the film's commentary on race).

This is getting to be too long, so I'll end with a brief quote from the paper, just to give a taste of where I'm heading here:

Generally speaking, the black hues in this film are introduced to suggest moments of depth, whereas the film’s bright whites—which dominate frames much less frequently—are found at moments of stasis (as in the brightly lit old-folks home where Jed Leland has ended up) or else suggest something unknowable (as in the famous snow globe in Kane’s death scene at the start of the film, which seems to transform from a transparent glass ball to an opaque one at the moment of Kane’s death). Although the film’s colors, spoken of in this sense, may seem only tangentially related to race, Morrison points out that blackness has consistently been a locale for negotiation and change in literature, whereas whiteness is usually a trope for impenetrability. And this symbolism is important: for American whites, asserting impenetrability is a way of maintaining power.

Still, Welles does move beyond such abstract symbolism, and visually represents blackness and whiteness in a more distinctively racialized manner; that is, upon actual faces and bodies. The portrayal of Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander Kane, is worth careful consideration. As Kane’s most important possession, Susan’s very light skin and blondness is featured prominently; although Welles tended to dislike close-ups and uses them selectively in this film, Susan’s face is zoomed in upon over and over again, emphasizing her extreme whiteness. In a very real sense, Susan’s whiteness is what Kane wishes to possess; this is suggested also by her association in is mind with his lost childhood, which has been presented to us in the whitest scene in the film, amid a field of Colorado snow.

On-track? Going too far? You be the judge--comment and tell me!