One will find this popular narrative hard at work in the current monster hit Shrek. A fine old adventure set in a dreamy period that existed roughly between the Crusades and the global slave trade, the movie features Mike Myers as an ogre with a Scots accent--one gathers that the sign of his ethnic accent corresponds with the signs of his greenness and general messiness. Myers' ethnic Shrek enjoys a solitary life in a swamp, scaring off Brueghelesque peasants and armored law enforcement officers. Now, the town at the center of this wonderland is run by a short and prosperous nobleman/property developer named Lord Farquaad. To make sure the current medieval cultural and financial boom is sustained throughout the countryside, Lord Farquaad denounces all members of the fairy-tale race as undesirable, and has them arrested. Those who escape the purge flee to the safety of Shrek's piece-of-shit property, which no human in their right mind has the nerve to trespass or claim. Suddenly, Shrek's peace is disturbed by the throng of homeless fairy-tale characters, and to restore his pleasant solitude he agrees to speak to the lord on their behalf. But it's not as simple as he thinks; speaking to the puny lord will not solve his real problems, which have more to do with the incompleteness of his swamp existence rather than the persecution of the fairy-tale race.
Now what concerns us in this narrative is not Shrek's Celtic heritage. Nor are we concerned about the gentrification theme, and the implied niggerization of the fairy-tale creatures, who are forced into the ghetto. What we want to point a finger at is the donkey, played by Hollywood's resident brother, Eddie Murphy. The Donkey (which is its official name) is talkative, humorous, and eternally wise. The Donkey knows exactly what the ogre needs, and after great effort and humiliation helps him locate and profit from that special something that has been missing from his swamp life.
Another movie that use the popular narrative is The Legend of Bagger Vance, which stars Matt Damon and Will Smith. In this movie, Matt Damon is a golf master who heroically enters World War I, but returns home a traumatized coward who lost his superb swing in the trenches of France. Impotent, alcoholic, and foul-mouthed, Damon no longer competes with white masters on the sunny green but gambles with whiskey-swigging niggers in the dead of night. Out of nowhere and in no time appears the brother, Will Smith, who, like the Donkey in Shrek, is humorous, talkative, and wise. At first Damon rejects the black man's advice, but eventually he realizes that the Negro is actually saying something important. He listens closely, learns, and by the end of the film profits from the Negro's knowledge.
Yet another use of the narrative can be found in miniature form in the concluding section of Harold Ramis' Bedazzled. The movie is about a white loser, Brendan Fraser, who enters into a contract with the devil, Elizabeth Hurley, and then finds himself at mile's end. Satan's seductive promises of happiness, power, and wealth at the cost of one's soul have landed Fraser in prison. Like the nigger Vance in Robert Redford's soft-focused pastoral, a brother with corn rows, beatific eyes, and a sweet, Southern hospitality smile appears from nowhere and no time on the bunk beneath the white loser. And like the Donkey in Shrek, the brother breaks it all down for the white loser, and shows him the path he must take to become a sure winner.
We could go on listing film after film (Jerry Maguire, Instinct, Men of Honor--all of which star Hollywood's resident idiot, Cuba Gooding Jr.) that have used, in one form or another, this narrative whose central figure of the all-knowing brother. And the moment we run out of cinematic examples, we can easily start mining American literature for even more hard evidence, beginning with the rich vein of Mark Twain's fiction. But what we want to determine is not so much the cinematic or literary history of the narrative, but another more bewildering matter: Why is the all-knowing brother never the beneficiary of his own knowledge? Meaning, why is he the Donkey or an indigent wanderer or a prisoner with a ghetto getup, when he knows so much about life, and holds the keys to success? To resolve this contradiction is to expose the root racism buried in the figure of the all-knowing brother.
Unlike most racism (such as the fact that most all-knowing brothers are unemployed or servants or sidekicks or caddies), the racism at the root of the figure of the all-knowing brother is totally invisible. Hollywood never says it or shows it, and offers us only a void--a void, moreover, that's not unlike the one from which the all-knowing brother issues (nigger Vance appears out of the pure black Georgia night; the Donkey in Shrek used to be owned by a Brueghelesque peasant woman, but there is no indication that he has a ma or pa; the prisoner in Bedazzled literally materializes from thin air like some phantom of the American prison system). Why doesn't the wise brother profit from his own wisdom? Hollywood's unspoken answer is this: Brothers lack the means with which to act on their own knowledge. They have the raw materials for success, but don't own the equipment or means of production to realize it.
For example, while it may be true that nigger Vance's knowledge about the opening swing of a golf game is second to none, he lacks the substance and stamina to string together an excellent golf season for himself. His best bet instead is to transfer his immaculate sense of rhythm to a down-and-out white man, who at least has the means with which to convert his good advice into real-world success. In Shrek, too, the Donkey is smart, always thinking and talking, but he is completely locked in his clumsy body. Only the white ogre owns the tools that can transform the Donkey's inner wisdom into hard terms.
This is Hollywood's current word on black Americans: They know lots of things but can't act on them, in the sense that the continent of Africa is rich in minerals (gold, diamonds, bauxite), but its people do not have the equipment to mine or convert these raw materials into shiny commodities. The most depressing thing about this cold determination is that it still has enormous cultural and financial currency in America and the world (at present, Shrek is well on its way to the $200 million mark--a figure it will certainly match in the global entertainment market), and so we can expect the narrative of the all-knowing brother to persist deep into the new millennium.
