Challenging Hegemonic Racial Norms in Media

Bringing Down the House and the Half-Hearted Challenge to Hegemonic Norms

The film 2003 Bringing Down the House starring Steve Martin and Queen Latifah both reinforces and challenges hegemonic norms by playing up stereotypes in the first half for comic effect and then dismantling them in second, more melodramatic half. Although comedy is the main motif throughout the whole film, the dismantling of hegemonic norms comes with a serious tone that almost seems apologetic for the antics showcased in the film's first half. In this sense, Bringing Down the House appears to want to use norms for laughs because on the one hand it senses that they are true and on the other hand feels bad about it and wants to show that race is a serious issue that should be dealt with more respect. However, the film suffers when the comedy is displaced for a more politically correct approach to the theme of race. Thus, the film (ironically) makes an attempt to "subvert" norms but only after it has already successfully done so through satire -- and in the end only serves to reinforce them. It happens to such an extent that the viewer cringes at the sudden shift in tone as the filmmakers try to assert a "balance" in their representation of race relations. This paper will show how the uneven treatment of hegemonic norms and stereotypes in Bringing Down the House causes the film to ultimately fall flat, to be lukewarm, or to suffer from what Aristotle would call akrasia -- that is, softness of the will.

The film is set in an affluent suburb of Anywhere, America. The main character is a divorcee played by Steve Martin, who is a high-paid lawyer, estranged from his wife and three children (though he still loves them -- work just gets in the way). His routine life is interrupted when an ex-con played by Queen Latifah shows up at his door, having conned her way into his life by posing as a female lawyer on a chat room. Queen Latifah wants Martin to help her expunge her record (she has been convicted of a crime she did not commit). Martin wants nothing to do with her, being put off by her "ghetto" blackness. But every time he tries to get rid of her, she one ups him until he finally caves. To cover for her presence in his life, she poses as his nanny as he has the children for the week while his ex-wife has a holiday with a younger, handsome man (of whom Martin is jealous). Lo and behold, Latifah turns out to have more to her than the "ghetto" blackness that she poured on the audience in the beginning for laughs: she is amazingly astute to the growing pains of children and sensitive to the pain in Martin's life (sensing, stereotypically, that he needs to "lighten up" she teaches him to dance and "make" romance). Latifah turns out to be indispensible in the lives of the uptight white suburban family -- even beating up the self-identifying WASP sister-in-law of Martin in a rather unpleasant and violent (and meant to be funny) fight scene in the ladies room of a country club. In return for her help, Martin vindicates Latifah and there is a happy ending for all, as Martin is reunited with his ex-wife and Latifah's record is cleared and her social problems resolved.

The hegemonic norms that the film perpetuates are that black people are loud, crass, gambling, scheming felons. When Latifah appears for the first time, she is dressed in "booty-huggin" denim, as though she were still wearing her prison outfit with sleeves and pants legs cut off. The first words out of her mouth are "How you doing, baby?" to Martin. She speaks of "shanking" and uses "jive" speech to make it known that she is a person who has lived on the "streets." Martin is made visibly uncomfortable by her presence as she appears everywhere he goes -- his home, his job, his country club. All of this comes with a satirical edge because the stereotypes are exaggerated for humor's sake: the audience knows that what the film is reflecting is marginally true (a disproportionate percentage of blacks are imprisoned compared to whites) and there is an obvious culture clash between WASP American and black America. The collision is funny. But the movie begins to feel guilty for making light of the reality and does a u-turn, revisiting the norms it mocked earlier by adopting a more patronizing tone with its subject and turning Latifah into a more "white," motherly figure (though she is allowed to retain her "blackness" to some extent -- it is just toned down).

In this manner, the film caves to a sense of the "politically correct" way in which subjects of race may be discussed in the media and thus displaces any authenticity the film had in the beginning when it threw stereotypes in the face of the audience in the same manner that the good jester in King Lear throws the king's madcap foolishness in his face. Mockery, satire and exaggeration are effective tools in making serious points -- one need not adopt a more "sensitive" and saccharin tone in order to make those points. On the contrary, adopting such a tone (as the film does in the second half) can actually undermine the satirical jabs given prior. Instead of questioning itself (or even simply accepting itself in humility) the audience is made to sit through an hour's worth of contrived plot designed to let the filmmakers off the hook for the "culturally insensitive" materially it dished up earlier in the film. Essentially, the film does not know what it should do -- or how to do it. It wants both to make light of stereotypes and at the same time show that we are all the same because those hegemonic norms are only on the surface and do not really "exist" when push comes to shove. That is the message of the film -- but it is a duplicitous and inauthentic message, forced by the filmmakers' attempt to balance to opposite extremes -- biting racial satire on the one end and kowtowing political correctness on the other.

As Dana Mastro points out, "the offerings provided in the media have historically been unfavorable when it comes to the quality of racial/ethnic representations" (3) and this is the reason: when it comes to reality, mass media is spineless. It will challenge norms by making jokes about them, but at the same time it will be sensitive to the fact that in a "pc" culture, joking about taboo issues is unacceptable. For whom is it unacceptable? The answer is that it is unacceptable for the social engineers who lack both lack a sense of humor and the capacity to see how humor and satire can actually produce more social awareness and social appreciation than sentimental, saccharine tripe.