Batta 1 Amit Batta WRIT 340 Section #65240 JJ Strong A3 November 20, 2012 HITCH: THE BEST BLACK-AND-BROWN-AND-WHITE

MOVIE I EVER SAW Introduction On February 11, 2005 Columbia Pictures released Hitch, a romantic comedy starring Will Smith and Eva Mendes. Smith plays the role of Alex Hitch Hitchens, an undercover professional dating consultant in New York City, and Mendes the role of Sara Melas, a gossip columnist at faux New York publication The Standard. The films plot is built around Hitchs profession of teaching clientele how to impress women they are deeply in love with--adhering to his mantra, ...any man has a chance to sweep any woman off her feet. He just needs the right broom. While mentoring one of his toughest clients to date, the afflicted Albert Brenaman played by Kevin James, Hitch finds himself falling in love with Sara Melas--ultimately risking the blow of his cover as a professional date doctor. Aside from receiving a mediocre critical reception1 and raking in over 350 million dollars at the US box office, Hitch is my all-time favorite movie. Why that is changes almost every time I have seen the film. Early on in my analyses, I was intrigued by the way Hitch achieves the seemingly impossible balance of understanding women with reverence, yet also being a badass without having to resort to misogyny. Hitch took time to understand the complexities of women when forming meaningful relationships instead of taking on an alpha-male temperament to get women in a What Women Want (2000) kind of way. This stance is especially vital to the
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Rotten Tomatoes averages Hitchs reviews at 69%.

Batta 2 creators of Hitch as evident by the way the date doctor quite literally shuns sexual objectification in a number of scenes. At one point in the plot, as the success of Hitchs consulting service begins to spread word in New York, Hitch confronts a particular client who essentially represents what sexual objectification may look like. Jefferey Donovans role, Vance Munson, uses the following to describe a woman he is interested in and wants Hitchs help with, You know, food has lost its taste. Colors they seem dull. Things that used to matter...I dont know, they just no longer do. I think things arent gonna change unless I...Unless I bang her. Hitch responds confoundedly, I think you may have misunderstood what I do exactly. My clients actually like women. Not taking no for an answer, Donovan insists he is willing to compensate anything monetarily so long as Hitch can help him court this woman. In response, Hitch causes a scene at the cafe and pins Donovan to the ground. This scene is a big win for Hitch. In the span of two minutes and 45 seconds, Hitch is able to intelligibly advocate against any sexual objectification so much that it makes objectification appear very undesirable for both male and female audiences. Additionally, the importance of actually liking women being portrayed in a major Columbia Pictures produced film does more to commend Hitch as a film out of the ordinary, as mainstream media outlets are so often filled with the portrayal of women as objects of sexual gratification. Black-and-White: Interraciality in Hollywood Though Hitch and its various subplots attempt, and in my opinion achieve, this new perspective on how romance plays in Hollywood2, one that focuses on the competence and intricacies of the female gender, it is the casting of Will Smith, a black actor, and Eva Mendes, a Cuban American, that make Hitch subject to the various forms of scrutiny discussed in this
Interpersonal Communication professors have often used Hitch when lecturing the Uncertain Reduction Theory (URT). URT describes the ability to predict the behavior of others in order to reduce uncertainty when interacting with others. See Dawkins, 2010 for further reading.
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Batta 3 essay. Will Smith and Eva Mendes as the lead roles was crucial in meriting the films commercial success to make Hitch a relic of race discourse in America. In other words, Hitch would inherit in an entirely different space in Hollywood history if Hitch and Sara were both black, or if one were black and the other white. Even Smith himself commented on the filmmakers casting decisions, noting how they avoided casting a black woman as the movies female lead because they feared the film would be labeled a black movie, which could make it less profitable, and avoiding casting a white woman as the movies female lead because they feared that such a coupling would offend audiences in the United States (Onwuachi-Willig 2007). This suggests that perhaps Hitchs success is due to its ability to digress from the Black Moviegoer Conundrum which, Huffington Postss Chevonne Harris notes, is a stigma given to movies with a predominantly black cast that essentially aggregates them as under an umbrella of Tyler Perry-esque filmmaking that seem to only draw predominantly black crowds and are in general seen as low brow cinematography. Most importantly, the stigma denotes a lack of ability to achieve a worldliness that could achieve box office success amongst white audiences and, subsequently, critical acclaim. Obvious to many, these notions of interraciality found in Hitch are nothing new. Hollywoods inclusion of interraciality in its films is congruent with the industrys tendency to reflect American political and sociological schemas of respective times. Everything from the prohibition and WWII, to post-9/11 Islamaphobia and abortion has seeped into the blockbuster films that compose what a general American audience will consume at their local theater. Whether these political and sociological conversations are a central focus of the film, or serve as relevant backdrops, American affairs are almost always felt in mainstream cinematic arts.

Batta 4 Before interracial marriage between Whites and Blacks became legal, Hollywoods image of Black Americans alongside Whites had been largely tabooed. In 1915s The Birth of a Nation nearly all the black males in the film are portrayed as predators who raped white women. The Ku Klux Klan later saved these women from the predators, leaving the audience with obvious images of xenophobia and white supremacy on the surface of the film. It wasnt until the 1960s, a time when miscegenation laws were at question, that American cinema began to humanize the dehumanized African American on the big screen. The Loving v. Virginia court serves as one of these pivotal moments in American history that, in turn, changed the way Hollywood operates. In 1967 the Supreme Court ended race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States when Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, fought for marital status in the court of Virginia. Prior to this case, it had been illegal for White Americans to partake in interracial marriages, though marriage amongst all other colored races were considered just. Within the same year of Loving v. Virginia, Columbia Pictures released Guess Whos Coming to Dinner, the first major Hollywood production in which a black male and white female played the role of a couple. The story shows the hypocrisy of a white liberal father who is initially reluctant in allowing his daughter to marry a black overachieving doctor. With comedic undertones and wit, director and producer Stanley Kramer was able to depict the interracial marriage between Joanna Joey Drayton and Dr. John Prentice in a way that made the solemn issues of race at the time humorous and, more importantly, palpable for audiences. At its very core, Guess Who entertains by playing with the discomfort felt from both John and Joeys families. The plots linearity about a simple dinner between the white and black families is enlivened with ideas of race that particularly American audiences in the 60s were recently becoming contemporary to. Clearly the

Batta 5 casting of a black male portraying John and a white female to portray Joe were critical, if not the most important aspect of the film itself. During the epoch of these early forms of interracial casting seen in Hollywood, oftentimes the entire movie would be about race itself--Guess Who being the epitome. This concept of making a film that solely entertains because of the way race is played has continued since the 60s. The way in which it looks and feels, however, has changed. Interraciality as subject is most often only seen in in todays more colloquial works (Save the Last Dance (2001), Guess Who (2005)), rather than award-winning and historical films such as Guess Who (1967). The more enlightening interracial films of the past and their idiomatic counterparts of today, however, share the same struggle: interraciality becomes of such preeminence to the film that it inherits the films identity. Particularly in romance films, the role of interraciality is often potent enough to constitute its own genre: interracial romance. Interracial often only meant viewing the issues in black and white; Asians, Latinos, and brown folk were not so much of interest when it came to the spectrum of interraciality seen on the big screen. The implications of leaving out minorities who did not fit the under the identity of black or white did a lot to further complicate things once they did appear on the screen after the era of Guess Whos Coming To Dinner and Loving v. Virginia. Hitchs Accomplishments Perhaps, then, one of Hitchs greatest attributes to the cinematic arts is the attainment of portraying an interracial romance without interraciality being the focus of the film. Though the film technically has an interracial cast, it never asks its audience to think about the consequences of this interraciality. In fact, its very difficult for many audiences to even think of tropes of race

Batta 6 when watching the movie for the first time. As exemplified by the following film reviews, Hitch achieves the title of Romantic Comedy without having to trace how interraciality played a role: I did enjoy the buddy dynamic between Smith and James, who puts kind of a cocky spin on the clumsy fat guy cliches. And there were about a half-dozen jokes that had me laughing out loud. Richard Roeper - Ebert & Roeoper The movie's last two minutes, in which they all do goofy dances and have no dialogue or script to get in their way, is easily the highlight. It's the previous 113 minutes of plot that cause problems. Liam Lacey - Globe and Mail From the very opening, when Hitch begins explaining to the camera that love sometimes needs an outside assist to get started, he owns the audience. Jack Mathews - New York Daily News As a brown person living in America, I personally feel very gratified by this accomplishment: a film starring black and brown people that anyone, no matter what race, could enjoy and probably relate to. Hitch seems to achieve a utopian world where being colorblind seems attainable and plausible in progressive New York City. Aside from the multiracial starring cast, Hitchs efforts in conceiving a colorblind film can also be seen in the many marginal roles played by people of color. Security guards with only a few lines, a gay friend of Melas who also contributes at The Standard, and many bar-goers are played by black and brown actors. These dark-skinned roles in the periphery of the film help to contribute a modern, and probably accurate, image of New York City by targeting aspects of the film that only the subconscious is probably aware of. Further, the film even touches on how whiteness can sometimes be uncool and outdated with the use of Kevin Jamess various blunders in comparison to Will Smiths eloquence. One

Batta 7 scene that depicts this hilarity of Jamess character, Albert Brennaman, is when he is learning how to dance before a first date. Quick to respond to Ushers Yeah playing in the background, Albert opts for a goofy rendition of breakdancing that irritates Hitch enough to slap Albert in the face. Hitch then teaches Albert a more affable and appropriate form of dance that would be reasonable for a first sober date. The juxtaposition set in this scene illustrates an important power dynamic between Hitch and his white male clients. Because Hitch is simply a lot cooler than Albert, audiences are presented with a white man seeking assistance from a charming black man. These depictions of the black male in Hitch help to humanize the black American image in a pleasant and amiable way. This scene acquaints another big win for progressivists; a black male, whose tarnished image has lived through legacies of racism in film (The Birth of a Nation), is now deemed appealing traits that even a white male would find desirable. The Brown Wedge Just how the naivety of colorblindness sends chills down the spine of essentially every sociologist and critical race theorist, the idealistic interplay of race in Hitch I held onto as veracious for many years conceals darker truths about the current state of racism in Hollywood. Although Eva Mendes is not black, which still qualifies her and Smith as an interracial couple, and we may applaud and encourage such images of progression in American media, it is important to note that her identity as an attractive Cuban-American is what allows the interraciality to play in such a colorblind way. Angela Onwauchi-Willig, professor at the University of Iowa, suggests that these casting decisions ultimately allude to beliefs Americans held onto during the Loving v Virginia era. Willig writes,

Batta 8 one could argue that this new form of multiracial casting reinforces notions of white supremacy that the Supreme Court rejected in Loving by both demonizing and exoticizing the casting of relationships on screen between Blacks and Whites, devaluing intimate relationships between Blacks (in other words, any romantic relationship considered to be all black), and viewing as non-controversial those relationships between certain groups of non-Whites...this emerging form of casting that almost always avoids black-white loving relationships on screen yet treats intimate on-screen relationships between certain minorities--such as black men and Latinas--as less noteworthy, must, to some extent, accomplish the same task (Onwuachi-Willig 2007). As pointed out, American audiences are a lot more comfortable watching the experience of interracial love between colored people than between blacks and whites. The sentiments of impurity triggered when colored people marry whites seen during the Loving era are essentially one in the same of what exists today: blacks and Latinos dating each other is okay, but black and white romance is subject to more attention and adversity. This conflict that arises when romance is played in black and white thus becomes a problem Latinos, and other brown actors, are responsible for placating. Professor Willig uses the term wedge groups as an apt metaphor to describe this casting of Latinos as a way of avoiding the black-white loving relationship. She further ties the wedge group with its historical significance: For example, in early school-desegregation cases, Mexican Americans were used as a wedge group to prevent the integration of both Blacks and Mexican

Batta 9 Americans with those who were perceived to be the real white students in schools (Onwuachi-Willig 2007). Later in her thesis, Willig explicates the consequences of preventing such segregation between Whites and Blacks in the face of casting decisions, even when Will Smith cannot choose a black costar because producers are afraid it would hinder worldwide box office success. Her analysis focuses on current casting discrimination, how that changes the way intimacy is mapped on screen, and even poses some ways in which employee discrimination can be fought. Although Willigs insight on the way discrimination has developed in Hollywood is extremely beneficial for better understanding race in the film industry today, she never returns to explaining the implications of these brown wedge groups that are currently being used as solutions to a seemingly Black and White problem. For decades, brown3 people have been called for to be the solution to many problems America faced. From waves of immigration of 1960s, whose people primarily entered the US on account of their professional experience to help stimulate the American economy, to being able to pacify the image of Black and White romance exemplified in this paper, brown people have long been used to fill the gaps between Blacks and Whites to only further separate integration4. What this has done to Whites and Blacks is clear: though one may understand the wrongness in separating Blacks and Whites when casting for romance films, they also know why it is done, yet the dehumanizing effect of temporary fixing the issue with placing brown people in films instead, is rarely accounted for. During Hitch and Melass first date, the audience is presented with an opportunity to gain insight on Melass identity as a Cuban American. Hitch deliberately plans a trip to Ellis Island

The use of brown as a racial classification encompasses persons from, but not exclusive to, South America, South Asia, Middle East, Northern Africa, Caribbean. For the purpose of this essay it essentially means those who do not fit the description of Black or White. 4 Further reading on the brown solution can be found in Vijay Prashads The Karma of Brown Folk.
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Batta 10 where he plans on showing Melas a part of her grandparents immigration history that he researched prior to the visit. As Hitch and Melas are touring the museum, they come across an immigration record from the early 1900s that includes the name of one of Melass great grandfathers: a bandit from Cuba who lost ties with her family shortly after entering the United States. Instead of bearing the excitement Hitch had envisioned her to have when discovering parts of her familys history, the experience becomes quite distressful for Melas as she bursts out into tears and runs away from the exhibit. Melas explains to Hitch that her family intentionally disassociated themselves from her great grandfather. Its just one of those horrible family legacies weve all tried to forget, tells Melas. What was an opportunity to reveal the Cuban-ness of Melass character, is neglectfully brushed away as Melas insists she wants to sever herself from a history of immigration. Although this may be only one way of interpreting what Melas is actually crying about, I emphasize the importance of attempting to understand brown identity in the mainstream media in one way or another in order to prevent all such roles from being stripped of their races identity in order to make interracially feel more comfortable in the name of Hollywood. The role Mendes plays in Hitch any many of her other films5, as an attractive Cuban American alongside black men in major Hollywood movies, is one she herself is very aware of and has spoken about as a limiting factor to her career. Certainly Ive benefited, because Ive got to work with Ice Cube, Denzel Washington and Will Smith. But its lame. I wish the mentality wasnt so closed, explained Mendes at a Hitch premier (Malay 2005). Mendess Latinidad is not too white to prevent black man virility, yet not too black enough to alienate audiences, and just exotic enough to be titillating (Onwuachi-Willig 2007). Mendess ability to
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Eva Mendes has been casted alongside black males in a number of works: Training Day (2001), All About the Benjamins (2002), The Spirit (2008).

Batta 11 transcend being identified mainly by her race may seem convenient for the actresss personal success, but the prevalence of her casting to play such an archetype exposes American audiences to only a few faces of brown. In the same way, Will Smith is so often casted as the role of a Black male in a movie that does not want to be only for black audiences since he is well assimilated with White American identity. Just as Mendes can maintain a middle ground between black and white, the Fresh Prince himself is also not too Black for white audiences nor too white for the black as he maintains his solemn persona due to a history of sobriety and playful personas6. Hitchs identity as a sexually proficient and smooth-talker is one American audiences enjoy watching; Hollywood likes black guys to be funny, charming, fit and good at dancing. Yet if Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker or even Chris Rock played the role of the date doctor, Hitch would not achieve the same box office success because it would polarize audiences in the face of a more complex racial situation. Conclusion Undenibaly, Hollywood has come a long way since The Birth of a Nation and Guess Whos Coming to Dinner. Films today often consiously make an effort to diversifty their casts in order to fairly portray generations of Americans who have long been ostracized or exotified in front of the lens. However, as seen in the analysis of my favorite film of all time, the binary interracial hierarchy that existed during a time of antimiscegenationaccepting non-Whites with each other and rejecting White and non-White relationships, is still prevalent today. The use of non-White actors based on their rate of acceptance amongst only White audineces is now a common tactic used for falsifying measurements of progression in mass-media.

Will Smith is known to intentionally not curse in his music. Playful personas mostly refers to NBCs The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air which arguably launched Smiths career.

Batta 12 Through the labyrinth of sociological analysis of my favorite film, one would pose if Hitch remains at such high ranks in my judgment. The question is challenging: on one hand what I initially found beautiful about the film in 2005 ended up being a facade overlaying darker truths of racism I am now familar with. Yet on the other hand, the conversation I am able to weave in and out of the movie since having grown to better understand race discrouse transcends any sense of favoritism. Instead, it has helped develop the fruition of a kindred tie to Hitchperhaps the longest-lasting relationship one could have with a favorite movie.

Batta 13 References Covert, Colin. "There's just one 'Hitch'; Will Smith is suave in this romantic comedy with a men's-eye view." Star Tribune 11 Feb 2005, n. pag. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Dawkins, Marcia. "Communication Teacher."Communication Teacher. 24.3 (2010): 136-141. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Evans, Nicole. "Screen." Screen. 43.3 (2002): 271-292. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Graham, Renee. "In Casting Film Couples, Race is Still a Black-And-White Issue." Boston Globe 8 Mar 2005, Daily n. pag. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Harris, Chevonne. "Tyler Perry and the Black Moviegoer Conundrum." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 18 July 2012. Web. 7 Nov. 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chevonne-harris/tyler-perry-and-theblack_b_1659694.html>. "Hitch." Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes, 11 2005. Web. Web. 6 Nov. 2012. <http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hitch/>. Malmai, . "Eva Mendes solves Will Smith's 'Hitch'." Malay Mail [Malaysia] 12 Mar 2005, n. pag. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Onwuachi-Willig, Angela. "Wisconsin Law Review."Wisconsin Law Review. 319. (2007): 319343. Web. 19 Nov. 2012.