Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness

By Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon

Book Overview

Screen Saviors studies how the self of whites is imagined in Hollywood movies-by white directors featuring white protagonists interacting with people of another color. This collaboration by a sociologist and a film critic, using the new perspective of critical "white studies," offers a bold and sweeping critique of almost a century's worth of American film, from Birth of Nation (1915) through Black Hawk Down (2001). Screen Saviors studies the way in which the social relations that we call "race" are fictionalized and pictured in the movies . It argues that films are part of broader projects that lead us to ignore or deny the nature of the racial divide in which Americans live. Even as the images of racial and ethnic minorities change across the twentieth century, Hollywood keeps portraying the ideal white American self as good-looking, powerful, brave, cordial, kind, firm, and generous: a natural-born leader worthy of the loyalty of those of another color.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0847699471
• ISBN13: 9780847699476
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.1" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Incisive Minds at Work

This is a neat and smart piece of work on American film. The authors have done their homework, their discussions of seminal Sixties and Seventies films is outstanding. Once you've read about what they have to say about the "Lethal Weapon" series, you'll never look at it the same. Which is a good thing for modern film is a carrier of all kinds of ideas, some of them are obvious, some are subliminal and it helps to know how to recognize both. Obviously the authors have spent a lot of time thinking about certain kinds of films and their intellectual impact. Their style is accessible, and though the terms they tend to use come from the very specialized worlds of contemporary academia, one grows to understand not only why they are used, but what they really mean. I recommend this book for specialists who need to reify their own critical radar as well as for movie buffs anxious to broaden their understanding of the subtexts behind the films they have grown to love.