My Al Jolson Problem—And Ours (Updated)

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Steve Daly’s wrong-headed hand-wringing about Warner Home Video’s three-disc release of 1927’s The Jazz Singer ever since I was steered to it last week by Dave Kehr’s droll line “Entertainment Weekly alerts us to the blackface menace that threatens America.” Dave’s putdown (from his blog, which will also direct you to Dave's very fine New York Times consideration of Singer) is funny but maybe a tad too dismissive. Both Daly’s move for the fainting couch and the Warner package’s own features raise a question that has lost none of its pertinence over the years, said question being “How do we deal with the issue of minstrelsy in American popular culture?"

Daly’s notice (and I'll state here that Daly's a friendly acquaintance whose work I largely admire) finds him smelling a rat right off. He notes the cover of the Jazz Singer box show’s only Jolson’s silhouette. What’s this set got to hide? Why, “an ugly racist stereotype,” that’s what. “Jolson spends a significant portion of Jazz Singer in blackface,” Daly writes, uncovering the film’s dirty little secret. About fifteen minutes, to be exact, and in none of those fifteen minutes does Jolson caricature blackness in earnest. His character, Jack Robin, isn’t even part of a proper minstrel show; he’s one of many vaudeville acts in a socko revue. As a film,The Jazz Singer doesn’t have anything to say about blackness or even blackface per se; here, “blacking up” is a showbiz convention, just as the donning of rabbinical robes by Jack in the film’s climax is a, um, showbiz convention. (Jolson does, incidentally, portray a full-fledged minstrel in 1930's Mammy, the worst picture Michael Curtiz ever made.) Daly recognizes this, and admits—albeit grudgingly— this to be a part of whatever emotional pull the picture still has: “Watching Jolson treat Jewish ritual as just another form of ‘showmanship,’ thereby equating blackface with cantorial melodies as an expression of a mournful history, remains a remarkable act of ethnic drag.” Indeed it does—an act which, arguably, would not have nearly the resonance it does had the film dropped the blackface element of Jack Robin’s “showmanship.”

If Daly can’t contain his indignation over the film’s putatively racist component, the two men on the disc’s commentary track are eager to deflect the issue altogether. Daly’s review fumes that there’s not a single individual on the set’s supplements who speaks “from an African-American perspective.” Indeed, the docs and commentary are far more concerned with Jazz Singer’s status as a milestone of the early sound film than as a monument to a racist practice. The audio commentators are Ron Hutchinson of the Vitaphone Project (which is devoted to restoring early Vitaphone pictures) and ace musician Vince Giordano, whose period expertise has been put to good use by the likes of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. During the scene when Jolson “blacks up,” they talk about the convention of blackface, and note that performers such as Jolson and Cantor did the same act whether in blackface or not. This skirts, somewhat, the issue of the extent they mimicked black performance practices when out of blackface. Hutchinson and Giordano then go on to aver that in the cases of Jolson and Cantor, blackface was not used for purposes of racial caricature, but to accentuate the whites of the eyes and the white-gloved hands of the performer. To which one can only say, “Nice try.”

Here’s Nick Tosches, from his book Where Dead Voices Gather, one of the best on a perpetually vexed subject:

Minstrelsy was a form of stage entertainment in which men blackened their faces, burlesqued the demeanor and behavior of Southern blacks, and, above all, performed what were presented as the songs and music of those blacks. But it was not so simple as that. Not all minstrels were white: many of those who blackened their faces in burlesque were black. And while the songs and music of minstrelsy were indeed far from black in origin, the impact of those songs and that music was profound upon the inchoate and gestative forms of blues and jazz. As for the grotesquerie of minstrelsy, there were many, both black and white, who found it no more offensive than the comedy built upon any exaggerated ethnic stereotyping. As late as 1922, a debate was carried on in earnest in the pages of the New York Herald as to whether blacks or whites were better at playing blacks: “Your correspondent who signs himself ‘Negro’ makes a mistake in taking issue with Herbert S. Renton on the comparative merits of white men and negros as blackface performers.” And it must be remembered that minstrelsy was born in the anti-slavery climate of the emancipatory North, in the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan city of America.

If minstrelsy is to be understood, it must be seen neither with myopic simplicity, as a “racist relic”…nor as a textbook manifestation of ideology or psychology.

How to deal with the significant “racist relics” of our culture, the things that would have better never been made? The critic Terry Teachout wrote a deft dismissal of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation on his blog last year, a very nuanced equivalent of a cop’s “Move along, nothing to see here, folks.” Yes, he allowed, Birth is a historically significant film; yes, it is virulently racist, but hey—turns out it’s boring, too, and hence not really worth your time, and aren’t you glad that I sat through it so I could tell you so? Teachout: “It is the quintessential example of a work of art that has fulfilled its historical purpose and can now be put aside permanently—and I don’t give a damn about history, at least not in my capacity as an aesthete.”

I understand where Teachout’s coming from. I sometimes dearly wish that Birth of a Nation was not in fact a turning point in the development of cinematic narrative, and that its place in a particular canon could be taken by something more agreeable, say, Feuillade’s Judex…but wishing won’t make it so. Teachout’s remedy to a potentially embarrassing state of affairs is that Birth of a Nation not be engaged at all. (And as far as how film functions in most people’s lives, well, he’s largely got his wish already.) Daly feels that The Jazz Singer can only be engaged with a lot of attendant shame-on-us posturing. (Since he offers little by way of would-be solutions for the marketers of this particular intellectual property, one can easily infer that Daly’s preference is that they don’t market it at all.) And here’s where he goes farthest wrong: “Thankfully, history has moved beyond this movie and its attitudes,” Daly sighs in blessed relief as he nears the conclusion of his piece.

Is that so? Is it possible that the tradition of minstrelsy no longer obtains in American popular culture? Um, as Baba Looey used to say, “I doan theenk so, Quicksdraw.” From Sam Phillips musing “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars,” to The Rolling Stones, to The Red Hot Chili Peppers, to Eminem, to, let’s face it, Michael Jackson (who was once deemed the world’s greatest entertainer, just like, um, Al Jolson), to the Wayans Brothers in White Chicks…minstrelsy and its reversals, like the poor, are always with us. It just so happens that overt blackface is the form of minstrelsy it’s been deemed necessary to condemn, just so we’ll all look very considerate and conscientious and progressive and so on. "History has moved beyond" whatever we'd like to say it's moved beyond, as we pat ourselves on the back. It’s a sop and a crock, and it’s a reason I can’t personally get overly huffy when confronted with images of Jolson wearing that particular mask.

UPDATE: I see my old buddy Ty Burr was way ahead of me on this. He took my arguments to the next level...a week ago!

Comments

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[Dave Kehr]

Glenn,
Steve Daly is a good guilty liberal and I admire him for that; on good days, I'm one myself. But I can't help feeling that "The Jazz Singer" is pretty safely buried in the past, and that hysterical denunciations like Daly's only serve to flatter the writer's sense of his own importance. If someone needs to read "Entertainment Weekly" (or The New York Times, or "Premiere") to find out that blackface is bad, I suspect that person has issues that need to be addressed well before his or her "Al Jolson problem." If a writer wants to look at racial issues in American movies, there are plenty of dispiriting current examples. I'd start with Peter Jackson's "King Kong" remake, which features "natives" far more hideously caricatured than those in the original film.

best

Dave Kehr

[Peter Debruge]

If Steve's so worked up about the outrage of blackface, he would do better to direct his ire at contemporary examples, such as the "I get what they're trying to do, but that still doesn't make it funny" recurring sketch on the BBC's otherwise hilarious "Little Britain," where modern minstrels go door to door performing in blackface to aghast suburban audiences.

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One thing I'm curious about after watching more old movies is all the different -faces and how they were used. Obviously yellowface was another really big one, also now heavily condemned, but what has struck me is seeing Noble Johnson in whiteface (The Most Dangerous Game, Murders of the Rue Morgue, arguably She, although that's kind of cavemanface) or, hm, indianface (Mystery Ranch). How much other whiteface or ethnicface was there, and when and why was it used? Then there's the whole world of theatrical "ethnic accents" to ponder ...

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Eric Lott's terrific book "Love and Theft" offers some smart theory & historical context that the dvd lacks.

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