Kyle Buchanan has a post at Defamer taking Jeff Wells and Anthony Lane to task for questioning the plausibility of race relations in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. His basic point is that critics who are old and white can’t hold back their “thinly veiled discomfort with the shocking idea that white people can marry black people in 2008 without someone giving a speech about it.” But this is actually a common complaint about the film, and it’s definitely not limited to those afflicted with either oldness and whiteness. I saw and sort of fell in love with the film at Toronto where a lot (a LOT) of critics were dismissing the film for its allegedly laughable multiculturalism. Not only does the white Rachel take a black husband without comment or incident, but the members of the wedding party wear saris, even though no one involved is visibly of sari-wearing ethnicity. Scandal!
At Toronto, I was still a little bit too in love with the film from first viewing to be able to come up with a finely calibrated, bullshit-free rationalization, but I knew that to make the argument that the film’s melting pot was somehow inauthentic, and/or tacked on by Demme to reflect his own sensibilities rather than those of his characters, was to fundamentally misunderstand the film. I think I thus may have said something stupid in defense of the film whilst under the influence of whiskey and petulant certitude. Whoops.
But a month later, I’ve calmed down and sobered up, and I’ve figured out exactly why Demme’s “cultural appropriation” is not just “obnoxious exoticism“, but is absolutely integral to the film’s story.
First of all, the “why don’t any of the family members freak out over the interracial marriage” is just categorically stupid. For one thing, as Buchanan notes, in “real life” (scare quotes used to acknowledge the inherent silliness of referring to the whole of reality as a solid construct about which we can make objective judgments), “one might think that by the time Rachel and Sidney had gotten married, their families would have gotten used to the idea that they were of separate races.” But the lack of racism amongst the two families plays into a larger issue, one which engulfs those dreaded saris as well. Holed up in their sprawling Connecticut manse, Rachel and family are cut off from the functioning world by virtue of their obvious immense wealth. Rich, sheltered people do “eccentric” things like wearing saris instead of wedding dresses, partially because they can afford to explore stupid whims, and partially because their stupid whims mark them as “unconventional.” From the color blindness of both families, to the (unfortunately sexless) all-night orgy of fractured cultural reference into which the wedding party gloriously devolves, Demme is telling us that this family prides itself on its creativity, its liberalism, its openness, its ostentatious rejection of convention.
But of course, this self-styled nonconformity is not only unsustainable, it’s revealed to be totally false. When filterless addict Kym (Anne Hathaway) is dropped straight from rehab into this happy liberal idyll, nobody can deal with her brand of actual nonconformity, her inability to simmer down to normal. Rachel’s volatile, often unpleasantly frank younger sister is the only thing that could puncture the bubble in which she’s determined to marry. Seen from this angle, the over-the-top multiculturalism is absolutely essential: this is ultimately a film about a family that’s self-consciously molded itself as the most accepting, post-60s construct possible, and then force them to confront the only thing that could possibly make them uncomfortable, the embodiment of the problems they don’t have, the kind of unresolvable personal misery that even money can’t stave off.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth