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depicted) in Hollywood’s movies. Movies are an important cultural form
not only because they reflect the dominant views of society, but also due
to the possible influence on the views of members of society, especially in
regards to issues of race and ethnicity (Denzin 1991; hooks 1996;
Marchetti 1991). Through the racial images that Hollywood creates—
positive or negative, real or imagined— it has “the power to define
difference, to reinforce boundaries, and to reproduce an ideology that
maintains a certain status quo” (Marchetti 1991:278). Films can appear
to espouse rather liberal attitudes toward race, while maintaining a rigid
hierarchy regarding interracial relations.
Therefore film can be read and analyzed as
texts that reveal
America’s underlying dominant beliefs about interracial couplings. These
interracial images function to serve the white hegemony in deviantizing
interracial relationships, by projecting stereotypes and racial biases as
“reality.” In
Seeing Film Politically, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh notes “that both
momentous and trivial films fulfill this hegemonic function . . . the
distortive messages conveyed in so-called ‘minor’ or ‘trivial’ films have a
far greater effect on popular culture precisely because of their
insignificant nature; they create ‘the space in which the daily is
negotiated; it is the space that is represented as ‘real’”(Zavarzadeh 1991:
vi). Patrica Williams alspo argues aout the “aesthetic visual power “ of
racial representations in popular culture, since it “has begun to rival
Convention