Finding Forrester
dir. Gus Van Sant
Now playing at Meridian 16.

"BLACK TO THE FUTURE" is what we used to say in the late '80s. The slogan was perfect because it appropriated the title of a Hollywood film that shamelessly cashed in on white nostalgia for the fabled Eisenhower era, and gave it a new and even radical meaning. In its totality, the slogan implied this: Offered a time-traveling device, whites didn't want to go the future, where there were bound to be even more black people--or "brown people" as Mike Davis' latest book on the "brownization" of America, Magical Urbanism, put it--but the past, where "people of color" were practically invisible. (It is no accident that Christiananswers.net calls Back to the Future "the perfect time-travel movie.") But blacks wanted nothing to do with the past and its long list of social horrors: segregation, lynching, the KKK, and vicious police dogs. They instead placed faith in the future, which was at least open, and not closed around the miseries of the past.

But now that we have arrived at this long-anticipated future, things have suddenly changed! Or rather, Hollywood says things have changed. Starting with The Hurricane (released in the last days of 1999) all the way to Save the Last Dance (January 12, 2001), Hollywood has asserted that "black to the future" is no longer "in the house." The more appropriate term is "black to the past." This new direction (or redirection) can be witnessed firsthand in a series of period race films that cropped up last year (Remember the Titans and Men of Honor, both set in the civil rights era), but also, at a thematic and narrative level, in films that were set in the present day.

Finding Forrester is an example of the latter. Though boasting a performance from a current hiphop star (Busta Rhymes) and located in the post-industrial projects, Finding Forrester is much closer to Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner than Hoop Dreams or Fresh. In fact, one can argue that Finding Forrester goes even further back in the past than Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, as it presents us with something of a younger Sidney Poitier--the black teen who is destined to become a brilliant scientist and marry the daughter of a wealthy white family. Save the Last Dance, the most recent race film, also takes its clues and narrative strategies from the past. True, it doesn't go as far back as Finding Forrester; but Breakin', the film that Save the Last Dance duplicates (through dance, white girl learns to move, act, and talk black), was made in 1984. Indeed, Save the Last Dance can be uprooted from our new millennium and happily replanted among early- and mid-'80s films like Carbon Copy, Soul Man, and Body Rock.

Now why has the past, instead of the future or the present, become the principle stage for the race drama? There are two answers: One, the brilliant race noirs of the '90s (Clockers, One False Move, The Glass Shield, to name but a few) performed poorly at the box office. Understandably, few Americans were willing to pay hard cash to watch films that presented the race problem not so much as an issue of right and wrong, but a serious quagmire that has no solutions or conclusions. Two, Hollywood has failed to usher in a new generation of young black directors, and so we are stuck with films by veteran directors like Spike Lee (whose Bamboozled was not only about the ancient practice of blackface, but also about the late '80s, when the upstart network Fox turned to black entertainment to boost its ratings), and John Singleton (whose remake of Shaft speaks for itself). There may be a third reason as well: It is possible that the race discourse, within the confines of the Hollywood formula, is exhausted. I mean, really, where else could Hollywood go after such baroque race noirs as Strange Days or Just Cause (another film that pairs Sean Connery with a black genius) except the past?

"This too shall pass," said the inscription on King Solomon's ring, and so it is with the race film. And what we are witnessing in films like Finding Forrester and Men of Honor is nothing more than the afterlife of a form that has no future but only its past to reflect upon.