Denzel Washington 9781838711573, 9781844574841

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first want to sincerely thank Martin Shingler and Susan Smith for allowing my work to be a part of the Film Stars series. I am also indebted to Martin, whose friendship and scholarship have been a source of joy and inspiration for more than a decade. This book would of course not exist without Denzel Washington’s remarkable career; it also owes a great deal to the rich and provocative body of work about film and the politics of representation, which has made me consider everything from multiple perspectives. I would like to express my appreciation to Donald McQuarie, Mark Bernard, and the many students and colleagues who have been kind enough to spend long hours talking about film acting, the entertainment industry and Washington’s work. I am grateful to Sophie Contento and Philippa Hudson for taking the book through production, and to film-maker Daniel E. Williams for the frame captures he carefully created, which served as invaluable guides as I worked through discussions in each chapter. Finally, I want to thank Emily Baron, who has been with the project from the start, was gracious enough to read and discuss essentially every word in the manuscript, and continues to be the most amazing friend and family member a person could ever hope for; thanks and much love.

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INTRODUCTION

Star studies are deceptive. They seem like fun, easy projects, when in reality they are arduous ventures beset by countless pitfalls. The actor (whose creative labour produces the performances) can become obscured by the star (associated with existential qualities). It is difficult to accurately assess the industrial, cultural and aesthetic factors that shape audience perspectives and actors’ careers. There are no straightforward ways to connect star studies with accounts, for example, of African-American cinema. Even ‘star image’ is an ambiguous term. Martin Shingler notes that star studies can (and should) consider a host of issues, including ‘a performer’s star qualities and idiolect, their career trajectory … the significance of collaborators … the emergence of their type and star vehicles’ (2012: 183). Beyond this, these studies will show how ‘stars embody, incarnate or personify social groups or historical moments, [and negotiate] ideological contradictions that emerge within or between social groups’; on the flip side, they also aim to clarify ‘how certain types of audiences or members of a specific social group … have engaged with and made use of stars at particular historical moments’ (ibid.). Juggling disparate visions of stardom, these studies consider how a star functions as ‘an industrial marketing device’, a meaningproducing element within films and a working professional involved in the fields of art and performance (Gledhill 1991a: xiii).

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A study of Denzel Washington must also address the vast literature on representational politics, stardom and the entertainment industry, and African Americans’ roles in American popular culture. It should consider his more than forty leading roles in films released over several decades, work that has led to: hours of film; scores of reviews, interviews and articles connected to each film; an abundance of chat show interviews, award show speeches and fan videos. His career and performances are analysed in the popular press, biographies (including several for young readers) and studies by scholars such as Donald Bogle and Melvin Donalson. As in commentary about other film stars, articles by fans and the press tend to discuss Washington’s performances as windows into his actual identity. A small set of details about his personality, beliefs and private life is recirculated by entertainment news, fan clubs and the websites of individual fans. In most instances, fan commentary is consistent with the public image crafted by Washington’s professional publicity team. With fans and journalists focused on the circumscribed and mostly scandal-free details about Washington’s private life, his film roles – and acting awards – are especially important aspects of his public image. With details about his personal life pared down to agent-authorised information, Washington’s off-screen life has not generated a significant distance between the star and his films. Instead, audiences seem inclined to see Washington as a reflection of his well-managed public bio and his films, especially in regular-guy roles. As with other stars, one can, and I will, discuss Washington’s star image as an evolving, figurative, discursive image reflecting ‘film roles, publicity, promotion and gossip’ associated with the actor; his star image can be understood as an ‘intertextual phenomenon born out of the actor’s previous roles, various filmic properties and publicity’, which is distinct from the actor and the fictional roles he has played (Shingler 2012: 183, 43). However, the close connection between Washington’s roles and the public’s ideas

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about him might make it useful for future studies to employ other terms used in star studies, such as picture personality or persona. Richard deCordova makes a distinction between star image and picture personality, which emerges from ‘a history of appearances in films’ and amounts to ‘a personality gleaned [primarily] from those appearances’ (1990: 92). Similarly, Christine Gledhill separates star image from persona. She finds that ‘the major sites for elaborating star personae exist outside films in studio promotion departments, publicity agencies, newspaper and broadcast journalism, TV chat shows, film criticism, and so on’ (1991b: 217). By comparison, the star image ‘is spun off from the persona and film roles, both condensing and dispersing desires, meanings, values and styles that are current in the culture’ (ibid.). Noting considerations raised by Richard Dyer and Steven Heath, Gledhill observes that a star image is not only ‘fragmented and open to contradiction … the rise of particular stars can be traced to their condensation of values felt to be under threat or in flux at a particular moment in time’ (ibid.). Thus, only some stars should be discussed in terms of a star image that can ‘incarnate or embody ideological values, coming to define specific moments in history’ (Shingler 2012: 149). Other studies could examine Washington’s roles and public image to determine if one should discuss his star persona rather than star image. They could consider the degree to which his stardom captures a moment in history, and so warrants analysis as a star image in the narrow sense. Paul Robeson’s multidimensional career has been seen as embodying the complexities of ‘blackness and masculinity’ in the pre-civil rights era (Dyer 1986: x). Sidney Poitier has been seen as ‘an icon of the American postwar integrationist movement and black middle-class masculinity’ (Shingler 2012: 149). Washington could be comparably significant. Donalson sees Washington’s career expanding the complexity of roles associated with ‘black masculinity, achieving [the] normality, depth, and

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humanity too often excised from earlier decades of extreme representations’ (2012: 84). I share Donalson’s view that Washington’s ‘contributions to and effect upon the images of black men have been crucial, significant, and historic’ (2012: 84), and see several reasons why his work has had an impact. Looking at Washington’s career alongside the numerous African-American musicians, athletes, writers, politicians and even academics prominent in mainstream American society, one could argue that his star image resonates with many audiences because it reflects the values and experiences of what Trey Ellis termed in 1989 the New Black Aesthetic (NBA), developed by the rising number of cultural mulattoes ‘educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures’ who grew up as the first generation of African Americans not to have their lives defined by legalised segregation (2003: 189). While Washington is on the early cusp of the NBA generation, born in 1954 (whereas, for example, Spike Lee was born in 1957 and Ellis in 1962), his image reflects tropes and conditions entirely different from those shaping the public images of Sidney Poitier (b. 1927) or Bill Cosby (b. 1937). Factors shaping Washington’s career choices have caused his image to reflect a complex intertwining of Black Nationalist and black bourgeois perspectives. Still sharing those values, work by younger NBA artists like John Singleton (b. 1968) sometimes reveals the significant influence of figures like Ice Cube (b. 1969) by focusing on urban environments and the oppositional stance of gangsta culture. Thus, there are various iterations of the New Black Aesthetic; contrasting and evolving perspectives on Washington’s career reflect shifting views of NBA masculinity and identity, which are open to contradiction because they exist ‘somewhere between the poles of … the race man and the nigga, … the true civil rights generation and … the hip hop generation’ (Boyd 2002: 6). I will let others decide if Washington’s public image symbolises, in some singular way, notions of race, gender and sexuality in the

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post-civil rights era, and so is a star image, narrowly defined. However, throughout the book, I will explore the cultural and industrial factors that have led to Washington’s success in mainstream American cinema, and prompted divergent responses to his identities as a black matinee idol, award-winning actor and commercial success. To balance my discussions that frame Washington as a cultural sign, I will also examine his performances as ‘signifiers … that are patterned into structures that have meaning for the spectator’ (Butler 1991: 11). Focusing on any star’s image or body as a single sign obscures meanings created by the actor’s performance choices. Given Washington’s star image, one needs to analyse roles and performances that have led him to be known and marketed as an Academy Award-winning actor. Washington is a star performer and prestige star whose public image, financial success, critical acclaim, cultural significance and industry position are linked in some way to public recognition of his acting ability. I will inevitably discuss Washington as a person with existential traits, if only to acknowledge that like any star, the path to recognition has been ‘long and arduous, requiring patience, stamina and determination as well as talent and star quality’ (Shingler 2012: 120). Yet I aim to analyse Washington as a performer, in a way that is comparable to discussing John McLaughlin as a guitarist or Ozzie Smith as a baseball player. My focus is on evidence of skill, technical proficiency and accomplishments that result from preparation and imagination, as well as the professional’s ability and labour to excel in an area of endeavour. However, more than with guitarists or baseball players, an actor’s work is obscured by comments about a star’s personality and fictional roles. In addition, guitarists and ball players reveal their skill through flamboyant, virtuoso performances, while the crucial aspects of a great acting performance might never catch audience attention. It is difficult to locate salient features of an actor’s performances if the star creates characters using their own repertoire of physical and

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vocal expression. Separating stars’ abilities as actors from their personality traits is tricky, insofar as great performances reflect: physical grace; ability to physicalise disparate individuals; commitment to physical and vocal training; imagination to understand characters; discipline to prepare for performances and remain focused during production. Those challenges lead most accounts to discuss personality traits; Douglas Brode opens his study of Washington by quoting the star’s statement: ‘What people write about me is who they are, and what they think I am’ (1997: xi). Brode then explains: ‘what follows should be taken, as Denzel himself would insist, for what it is: one person’s perception of any elusive human being who remains, regardless of what anyone writes, his own man’ (ibid.). Washington’s statement is a reminder that publicity and his roles in historical dramas (often biopics), crime stories (often detective thrillers), action films and family melodramas do not necessarily reveal anything about him as a person. It also suggests the need to study what Washington as an actor has done to establish and maintain his status as a star performer. This includes his off-screen labour surrounding choice of roles, forging good working and business relations with other film professionals, etc. It involves time spent preparing for parts, so that his physical and vocal details in a performance create a distinct character who has identifiable needs, goals and plans. It entails labour on set to ensure that performance choices illuminate the characters’ thoughts and feelings. It involves the ability to identify roles that would allow for moments that create ‘an awareness of a performer’s skills and talents’ (Lovell 2003: 264–5). It also requires an awareness of his brand (high-quality film performer) and the ability to determine when and to what degree his performances should include signature physical markers (smile and stride) so that the roles are legible to fans as belonging to his body of work. Facing the challenge of talking about a star’s work, Chris Nickson begins his book on ‘the consummate actor’ who has become

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‘a bona fide star’ by saying: ‘in telling the story of Denzel Washington, there are really two tales to be told – that of the man himself, his career and life, and also that of the lot of the black actor, and black man, in America today’ (1996: 7, 8). Nickson’s thoughtful observation highlights the thin line separating person as actor and person as member of society. It is also a reminder that star studies of Washington must negotiate complex questions of audience reception. Dyer’s observations about Robeson and his audiences suggest factors to consider; he explains that it was not a matter of blacks seeing Robeson ‘one way and whites the other’, but instead that there were ‘discourses developed by whites in white culture and by blacks in black culture which made a different sense of the same phenomenon’ (1986: 70). Dyer sees a ‘consistency in the statements, images, and texts, produced on the one hand by blacks and on the other by whites, that makes it reasonable to refer to black and white discourses’ (ibid.). He also recognises that ‘there may have been blacks who have thought and felt largely through [white] discourses and vice versa’ (ibid.). In Robeson’s case, blacks and whites seemed to value ‘the same things – spontaneity, emotion, naturalness – yet giving them a different implication. Black discourses [saw] them as contributions to the development of society, white as enviable qualities that only blacks have’ (Dyer 1986: 79). In Washington’s case, the qualities considered by black and white audiences would be quite different, in that he is associated with integrity, personal appeal and self-possession. Although I do consider various associations between Washington’s image and New Black Aesthetic values, the ostensibly contradictory nature of NBA identity makes audience responses to his star image a subject that warrants future research. Similarly, while my analysis outlines ways that different audiences make sense of Washington’s stardom, his career is so extensive and the complexity of audience responses is so great that more studies are warranted. The degree to which Washington’s qualities are seen as signs of

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individual achievement also warrants more analysis – to consider the conventions of mainstream stardom, ways that the history of slavery is elided, and the degree to which various iterations and interpretations of black masculinity have influenced (white) mainstream representations of masculinity. For now, it seems important to note that observers employ different frames of reference and interpret Washington’s films differently. Richard Corliss describes Washington’s directorial debut, Antwone Fisher (2002), as having ‘the thoughtfulness, the heroic withholding of rage that Washington the actor has lent to so many of his characters’ (2003: 54). He then compares Washington to other star-directors, George Clooney, Sean Penn, Ethan Hawke, Robert Redford and Kevin Costner, missing comparisons with black actors turned directors such as Bill Duke, Carl Franklin, Robert Townsend and Forest Whitaker. Illustrating a different perspective, Bogle ends a discussion of Washington’s performances in Crimson Tide (Scott, 1995) and Courage under Fire (Zwick, 1996) by saying: ‘Race was almost an afterthought in these Washington films, although African American audiences often saw a racial subtext’ (2004: 424–5). These two examples do not provide the type of straightforward evidentiary information Bogle’s remark might suggest. As in Robeson’s time, in the post-civil rights era there could be African Americans who see Washington in terms provided by (white) mainstream press and white audiences who see him in terms articulated by various black media outlets. As Manthia Diawara proposes, ‘Black spectator’ and ‘resisting spectator’ can be used interchangeably, in that ‘just as some Blacks identify with Hollywood’s images of Blacks, some White spectators, too, resist the racial representations of dominant cinema’ (1993a: 211). Challenging that characterisation, bell hooks argues that ‘resisting spectatorship … does not adequately describe the terrain of Black female spectatorship’, because black women ‘create alternative texts, ones that are born not solely in reaction against’ mainstream

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representations (1993: 300). Discussing such debates about spectatorship, Tommy Lott concludes that the ‘disagreement between hooks and [Michele] Wallace over the question of whether black women spectators experienced identification or rupture … indicates the major shortcoming of reception-based criticism, namely, its reliance on quasi-empirical claims, and a-priori arguments, regarding the responses of black spectators’ (1997: 295). Lott’s insight applies to statements about any spectators grouped according to abstract notions of identity. Despite knowing that quasi-empirical claims are suspect, I will inevitably discuss the views of different abstract audiences as I work at the intersection of star studies and representational politics. Yet by analysing Washington’s skills as an actor and businessman alongside the intractable realities of corporate Hollywood and racially divided America, I hope to continue the thread of academic enquiries into stardom, race and performance.1 The book considers Washington’s work in relation to AfricanAmerican cinema, which has, like American independent film and post-studio-era cinema, been identified with directors. Scholars’ focus on New Black Cinema as a director’s medium, and on 1970s Blaxploitation films and 90s New Jack Cinema as unique efforts to express ‘an authentic black cinematic voice’, has sometimes made Washington’s mainstream stardom seem irrelevant (Massood 2008: 102). Identifying contrasts between New Black Cinema and Washington’s career, Esther Iverem notes that Washington’s ‘general releases such as The Bone Collector, Courage Under Fire, and Crimson Tide [replicate] all of the ebony-and-ivory buddy films with Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker, Danny Glover, or Wesley Snipes’ (2007: 163). Capturing the often diverging focus of star studies and black film scholarship, Iverem observes: ‘We love Denzel but we wouldn’t call any of those films a “Black” film’ (ibid.). There are times when Washington’s work as an actor (and director) directly intersects with debates concerning black cinema.

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David Leonard compares Training Day (Fuqua, 2001) to Antwone Fisher (Washington, 2002), finding that both ‘legitimize the dominant social order … by playing on racialized fears, moral panics, and societal yearnings for discipline and order’ (2006: 24). He sees Antwone Fisher ‘fulfilling hegemonic visions of blackness’ and replicating ‘dominant views of the military as … the source of opportunity for all Americans’ (ibid.: 44). By comparison, discussing the Black film movement’s ‘drive for Black people to tell our own stories’, Iverem argues that this ‘drive is what sets apart films like Malcolm X, Antwone Fisher, and Hotel Rwanda from movies, even if they have merit, such as Cry Freedom, Mississippi Burning, or Monster’s Ball’ (2007: 579). She lists Antwone Fisher as her favourite film of 2002, and includes it, along with Malcolm X and Glory, in her list of ‘the fiercest’ of the ‘New Wave’ Black Films released between 1986 and 2006 (ibid.: 599, 601). Discussions throughout the book will examine Washington’s public image in light of this sort of contrasting opinion. For example, to describe his work and its relationship to New Black Cinema, I discuss ways that perspectives on Washington’s stardom and his roles in Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1998) and Inside Man (2006) reflect conflicting and evolving perspectives on Lee as a director. On the one hand, Washington has been identified with Lee when critics see the director as complicit ‘with the very systems he critiques’, selling ‘movie tickets and [keeping] protests at a minimum by dispensing pseudo-solutions and pseudo-explanations of underclass plight’ (Rhines 1996: 130, 135). On the other, when critics view a film like Malcolm X as ‘a powerful marker of the hopes and possibilities of the new black film wave’, Washington’s work has been valued and the film is thought to represent ‘both Lee’s and Denzel Washington’s best efforts at black filmmaking’ (Guerrero 1993: 201). I will also consider how conflicting views of Washington are related, at least in part, to people’s different perceptions of the

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industrial, aesthetic and cultural factors shaping American cinema in the post-studio era. Washington does not merit mention when observers emphasise the contrast between a (white) Hollywood film and ‘a Black film … in which all three positions of authority (screenwriter, director, and producer) are held by Blacks and the story content presents a “representation of how Black people interact” that is believable to the general African American audience’ (Rhines 1996: 65). By comparison, scholars discuss Washington’s work when they consider ‘black “independent” cinema and the “mainstream” employment of black creativity in the dominant cinema system, but [see that] these labels overstate the case’, especially after ‘the surge of new black feature films … combined with the ongoing demand for more black-focused vehicles’ (Guerrero 1993: 167–8). Mainstream and black independent cinema’s increased connection reflects parallel developments in (white) independent cinema, which has gone from independent films of the 1980s to indie films of the 90s to indiewood films of the 00s. African Americans’ increasingly visible contributions also challenge the idea that mainstream film is shaped by white aesthetics. Krin Gabbard notes that in today’s music and media, it is ‘more difficult to find white performers who do not imitate black people than it is to find those who do’ (2004: 19). Todd Boyd sees George Clooney, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, John Travolta and Bruce Willis as belonging to ‘a long line of prominent White male actors who [have] adopted a distinct cultural style … associated with Black masculinity’ (2002: 118). Their borrowed cool persona involves: ‘a detached, removed, nonchalant sense of being. An aloofness that suggests one is above it all. A pride, an arrogance even, that is at once laid back, unconcerned, perceived to be highly sexual and potentially violent’ (ibid.). Washington is sometimes described in those terms. Thus, while Hollywood practices are marked by the legacy of slavery, Washington is a crossover star in an industry and aesthetic system where norms

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for filmic representations of masculinity have been substantially influenced by African-American culture. As in Robeson’s time, audiences encountering Washington’s performances might make different sense of the same phenomenon (physical/vocal modes of expression associated with black masculinity), with some audiences seeing African-American experience as the basis for the performance choices, and others seeing only familiar images. Yet in contrast to Robeson’s time, and especially since the 1990s, it is possible that many people see performative tactics associated with AfricanAmerican culture not as ‘enviable qualities that only blacks have’, but instead as ‘contributions to the development of society’, or strategies that could help any male, perhaps anyone, negotiate difficult social environments (Dyer 1986: 79). Although I was familiar with Washington’s film and television roles in the 1980s, it was Mo’ Better Blues and Mississippi Masala (Nair, 1991) that made me recognise his ability to create portrayals distinguished by character-specific repertoires of physical and vocal expressions, including postures in repose, inflections when agitated and facial expressions when puzzled, intrigued or determined to act. In each case, incidental details of Washington’s performance communicated the character’s temperament and emotional journey. Recognising Washington’s skill in creating varied and legible characterisations, I started using his work in my studies of screen performance. The counterpoint between Washington as the seasoned cop and Ethan Hawke as the resourceful rookie made their performances in Training Day a logical choice for illustrating ways Laban Movement Analysis could be used to discuss screen performance. Washington’s portrayal in Devil in a Blue Dress (Franklin, 1995) showed me how actors use combinations of restrained and expressive choices to convey characters’ efforts to disguise their thoughts and feelings in noir films. His performances in films like Man on Fire (Scott, 2004) helped me see how actors engage audience emotion in films with spectacular techniques.

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Thinking I could simply build on my studies of Washington’s performances, I started working on this volume several years ago, assuming it would be quite manageable. I imagined I could write about Washington’s stardom because I am a contemporary, having also been born in 1954, and so familiar with the socio-economic developments surrounding his career. I had done industry studies and star studies. I had been a regular viewer of St Elsewhere (NBC 1982–8); at the time, I saw Washington’s series-long portrayal of Yale-educated Dr Philip Chandler as one of many elements that kept my interest in the hospital drama. After reading popular press articles, I now know that many women watched the show just to get a glimpse of Washington. I will admit that I started this book seeing Washington as an actor, and continue to view him in those terms; yet I now also recognise the significance of Washington’s skill and good fortune as an independent contractor in Hollywood, able to secure representation by agents who facilitated his negotiation of industry challenges. I have come to realise the degree to which stars are not only seen differently by different audiences (defined by era and generation as much as class, race, gender or sexuality), but also that social meanings ‘entangled among the variety of star texts (both films and extra-filmic matter) are likely to reverberate differently over time’ (Shingler 2012: 175–6). In Washington’s case, impressions have changed because his image in the 1990s was different from his image in the 00s and because people looking back on Washington’s career see him in a different light than critics and scholars in the 90s did. I have also come to accept how difficult it is to write about star performances. The performance details that actors craft to create characterisations provide much of the evidence audiences use to construct ideas about stars. At the same time, audience interpretations are influenced by publicity and a star’s appearance in other films. Similarly, impressions conveyed by performance details owe their existence to the experience, preparation and collaboration

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of actors, directors, makeup artists, costume designers, cinematographers, stunt doubles and others. Yet interpretations of star performances are also influenced by the values and experiences that audiences bring to films. Claims about star performances reflect conflicting ideas about characters as written, films as directed, movies as marketed, and portrayals as discussed in trade papers and websites, mainstream and alternative presses, and essays by scholars working in different areas and eras. The discussion that follows reflects my best efforts to describe ways that Washington’s performances create legible and thus potentially engaging characterisations, and how his public image indirectly sheds light on mainstream stardom, post-studio Hollywood and aspects of American society in the post-civil rights era.

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1 STARDOM AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

Denzel Washington has been a screen actor since the early 1980s, a romantic leading man since the early 90s, and a bankable star since the early 00s. Known for his acting ability and Academy Awards, Washington has collaborated with other black film-makers to ‘put hundreds of African Americans to work in show business’ (Laski 1997). Like many stars in the post-studio era, Washington has not only directed films, such as Antwone Fisher and The Great Debaters (2007), he has served as a producer on films such as The Book of Eli (Hughes, 2010), and in 1990 established Mundy Lane Entertainment. He thus exemplifies ‘the star as entrepreneur’, managing his career and being attuned to business and creative opportunities (B. King 2003: 49). In addition to collaborations with African-American directors, Washington has also, for example, facilitated the careers of black executives. Debra Martin Chase, who led Mundy Lane Entertainment from 1992 to 1995, is now a Hollywood producer known for The Princess Diaries films. Cecil Cox, who started producing for Mundy Lane in 1997, has created media companies such as AffinityTV247. Thus, like Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first African American elected as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013, Washington belongs to the wave of African-American producers, directors, actors, screenwriters,

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cinematographers and other film professionals above and below the line whose work has transformed mainstream media and American popular culture. Marketed as a classic movie star, in 1996 Washington became the first African American named People’s Sexiest Man Alive. In 2000, People, Ebony and Essence included him in their lists of most beautiful people and sexiest black men. In 2005, Essence featured Washington in its article on the ten sexiest black men on the planet. As evidence of his ability to sustain that image, in 2013 the Movies for Grownups Awards sponsored by the American Association of Retired People gave Washington one of its two acting awards, while People listed him as a member of The Spectacular Seven: The Sexiest Men Alive. Empire included Washington in its 100 Sexiest Movie Stars of 2013, citing Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter in Crimson Tide as his sexiest role and his ‘initially amusing and then inspiring speech at the University of Pennsylvania’ in 2011 as evidence of his charm (‘Sexiest Movie Stars 2013’). Capturing key impressions of Washington’s stardom, Empire explains: ‘Despite being a two-time Oscar winner and leading man for over 20 years, Denzel Washington isn’t really the Hollywood type. He – like the characters he often excels in – is more the down-to-earth, stay-at-home type, and it’s that steadiness of purpose and good sense that makes him all the more awesome’ (ibid.) Journalists have discussed Washington’s ‘megawatt smile’ and signature stride; they described him as ‘the hottest black star in Hollywood history’ (Randolph 1994: 110). Corporate Hollywood has also recognised Washington’s ability to enhance profits. Named ‘entertainer of the year’ by Entertainment Weekly in 2002, he came to be seen as a star who could open a film. Washington’s sustained record of strong opening weekends since 2000 has made him one of the elite Hollywood players paid $20 million or more per film. The opening weekend for 2 Guns (Kormákur, 2013) led Box Office Mojo to comment:

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At 58 years old, Washington is about as much of a sure thing as one can be at the box office. Excluding The Great Debaters – a modest drama – Washington has had ten-straight $20 million debuts. 2 Guns has Washington once again working within his wheelhouse as a charming anti-hero, and it’s therefore reasonable to expect his fans to turn out in large numbers. (Subers 2013a)

Analysing 2 Guns’ top opening weekend position, Businessweek highlights Washington’s ‘peerless consistency’ in box-office success and identifies his ‘broad demographic appeal’ as a reason why he is ‘Hollywood’s most bankable star’ (Ebiri 2013). One might note that for 2 Guns, the ‘audience skewed female (51 percent) and older (77 percent were 25 years old and up). The crowd was 28 percent African American, and 14 percent Hispanic, which suggests that the movie had particularly strong appeal among minority audiences’ (Subers 2013b). Media analysts are not the only ones to document Washington’s wide appeal and recognise that his audiences are ‘diverse and gender-balanced’ (Ebiri 2013). Polls by public relations firm Harris Interactive have shown that Washington has been one of America’s top ten favourite movie stars every year but two since 1995. The polls also show that he was America’s favourite movie star in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2012. Washington was the number one star for women in 2012, while Clint Eastwood was the number one pick for men. Washington was the favourite star for Democrats, while Republicans preferred Eastwood, and independents chose Tom Hanks. Washington was number one with audiences 18–35 and 48–66; votes by audiences 36–47 led to a tie between Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, and audiences over 67 picked John Wayne. Audiences in the East and West named Washington as their favourite star, while those in the South picked Eastwood, and votes cast in the Midwest led to a tie between Washington and Hanks. Over the course of his career, Washington has become part of American popular culture. He has appeared on the cover of GQ,

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Esquire and other popular magazines. His daily routines are covered in online sites like iCelebZ.com. He was one of the people asked to read historical passages at the 2009 inaugural ceremony for Barak Obama at the Lincoln Memorial. In 2013, a Reader’s Digest poll found that the three most trusted people in America were Tom Hanks (number one), Sandra Bullock (number two) and Denzel Washington (number three). As a public figure, Washington is the subject of impersonations by Reggie Regg (who also does Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock and Bernie Mac) and Jay Pharoah (who also impersonates Will Smith, Eddie Murphy and Barak Obama). Washington also belongs to the star-performer category exemplified by actors like Meryl Streep, who are known for their ability to transform themselves to embody characters. He is among the Hollywood stars ‘famous precisely for their ability to give virtuoso performances’ in which ‘the very act of impersonation can become a spectacle in its own right’ (King 2002: 151). Washington has won Black Reel and BET awards, NAACP Image awards, Golden Globe and film critics’ awards. He has won Academy Awards as Best Supporting Actor for Glory (Zwick, 1989) and as Best Actor for Training Day (2001). He has a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Cry Freedom (Attenborough, 1987), and Best Actor nominations for Malcolm X, The Hurricane (Jewison, 1999) and Flight (Zemeckis, 2012). He won a Tony award for his leading role in the 2010 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Fences. Washington is ‘the quintessential actor’s actor [who] doesn’t just play a role, he inhabits it, infusing each part with its own spirit and soul, life and force’ (Edwards 1994: 118). For his efforts, he is the only African American in the elite group of actors and actresses who have won two or more Academy Awards. Martin Scorsese, who defines a ‘leading man’ as an actor who is ‘always pushing through to a darker side, pushing the anger, pushing the danger, pushing the complexity’, sees Washington as a leading man whose iconic status is comparable to Tom Hanks (2003: 90). Brode proposes that he ‘has

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achieved something no previous black actor had done’ in being viewed by white and black audiences as an ‘undeniably romantic leading man’ (1997: xxix). Seen as ‘the new Paul Newman’, Washington’s move into directing led journalists to compare him to another TV actor turned star and director, George Clooney (Simon 1998: 72). Like other post-studio-era stars, Washington and his managerial team play an important role in shaping his remarkably abstract public image consisting of ‘an apparent core of personal qualities’ that has the potential to engage a range of audiences (B. King 2003: 49, 60). With little known about Washington’s private life, his public image has come to incorporate the idea that he is mysterious, that he holds something in reserve. In this regard, his public image is comparable to other star performers who have found ways to negotiate the challenges of the post-studio era. As David Sterritt explains: today’s mass-media milieu is vastly more difficult to navigate than in the studio days of old, flattening all but the most prodigiously gifted actors (my personal pantheon includes Robert De Niro, Gena Rowlands, Meryl Streep, Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Denzel Washington, and quite a few character actors) into two-dimensional products of the celebrity marketing industry. (2012: 235)

As an actor who became a crossover star in the 1990s, Washington’s career also differs from many other star performers. While his crossover status is not unique – given the Academy Awards won by Forest Whitaker and Jamie Foxx, and the commercial success of Eddie Murphy, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson and Will Smith – it requires us to consider definitions of the term, conflicting audience perspectives, changing views of success, evolving configurations in the mainstream and independent cinema, and aesthetic trends in mainstream cinema. In general terms, crossover

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stars have wide appeal, but are recognised as and valued for being rooted in a subculture, with American crossover stars often ‘equally popular with black and white audiences’ (Dyer 1986: 67). In the 1970s, ‘comedian Richard Pryor was the primary crossover performer’, in the 80s Eddie Murphy ‘ruled as the premier crossover personality’, and in the 90s Whoopi Goldberg, Denzel Washington and Will Smith became crossover stars (Donalson 2003: 285). Some crossover films with white characters attract a high percentage of black audiences; other crossover ‘films with serious black themes’ are made by whites (Donalson 2003: 285). Crossover films by black directors address the concerns of non-white Americans while still securing ‘a significant return from white American viewers’ (Rhines 1996: 70). A crossover director, such as Michael Schultz, who directed Washington’s first film Carbon Copy (1981), can ‘bring African American experiences to a mainstream audience [and] complete Hollywood projects that bear no pronounced racial or ethnic focus’; his ability to tackle both types of projects makes him a ‘predecessor to black directors’ such as Forest Whitaker, who has directed Waiting to Exhale (1995) along with Hope Floats (1998), and Carl Franklin, who has directed Devil in a Blue Dress as well as One True Thing (1998) (Donalson 2003: 85). For crossover stars, one challenge is to secure a wide acceptance with white audiences without being seen as a sell-out by black audiences. Paul Robeson was criticised for being ‘too integrationist, too concerned with adapting himself to white cultural norms’ (Dyer 1986: 69). In the 1960s, playwright Clifford Mason called Sidney Poitier ‘a showcase nigger’, and Larry Neal, who worked with Amiri Baraka to establish the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, described Poitier as ‘a million-dollar shoe shine boy’ (Guerrero 1993: 73, 74). A biography of Washington written for the young adult market notes that some black audiences believe he ‘has betrayed his culture by becoming so successful within white society’ (Wooten 2003: 108). Washington’s success could disturb whites as

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well; Todd Boyd proposes that the economic success of black athletes and musicians has replaced the imagined threat of ‘the Black male/ White female scenario’ with anxieties about ‘the newly emergent image of the Black millionaire’ (2002: 67). Audience views of contemporary crossover stars are complex. On the one hand, some will assume that for any artist associated with a subculture ‘to cross over, one has in essence to sell one’s soul and compromise one’s art so as to attract the largest number of followers’ (Boyd 2002: 46). On the other hand, whereas the crossover appeal of musicians like Louis Armstrong and Michael Jackson depended on them fitting easily ‘into an allotted image reserved for Black performers’, audiences recognise that in the 1990s ‘hip hop did not sell out or change itself to become popular, the mainstream changed so as to accommodate the music’ (ibid.: 46, 45). Given hip hop’s popularity, for black artists ‘having the means to buy and sell oneself and one’s culture suggests a different level of power and agency at play’ (ibid.: 18). Definitions of subculture and mainstream also changed ‘in the 1990s as hip hop became a driving force in mainstream society’ (ibid.: 70). By 1999, Time would describe America as a ‘Hip-Hop Nation’ with ‘more than 70% of hip-hop albums … purchased by whites’ (Farley 1999: 46). Hip hop’s role in American mainstream culture has facilitated re-evaluations of black cultural influence and crossover film stars. Hip hop’s influence makes it possible to see black culture ‘not simply as something being plundered and victimized by potential exploiters but as a vibrant, energetic, and empowered social and cultural force that can potentially influence anyone with whom it comes in contact’ (Boyd 2002: 126–7). Recognising that ‘African Americans in popular culture have often found themselves operating somewhere between the reality of racism and the possibility of redemption through cultural engagement’, Boyd points out that ‘it is in the broad area of popular culture that African Americans have had their greatest and most profound effects on American society’ (2008: viii, vi).

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Acknowledging that African Americans in film and TV have fared ‘less well than their counterparts in music and sports’, he finds that directors and actors have changed American society, and highlights the ‘groundbreaking success’ of Sidney Poitier, ‘Denzel Washington’s critically acclaimed performances’ and ‘the financial clout of Will Smith’ (ibid.: x, xi). With Blaxploitation in the 1970s and New Black Cinema in the 90s giving popular cinema a ‘central role in defining African Americans relative to the larger society’ – and with black directors, actors and producers gaining more financial and creative control in Hollywood – there is good reason to analyse not only films ‘written, directed, produced, and distributed by individuals who have some ancestral link to black Africa’, but also films featuring black stars (Boyd 2008: xi; Reid 1993: 2). Studies of Hollywood valuably highlight that actors such as Halle Berry, Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jr and Denzel Washington appear in films that disregard questions of race, and that in many of his roles, Washington is a ‘chocolate chip in a sea of milk’ (Iverem 2007: 587). Yet it also makes sense for scholars to advance ‘the idea that the dialectic relations existing between black independent film and Hollywood are simply too strong to permit a clear and absolute division to be drawn between them’ (Flory 2008: 15). One can consider the ‘symbiotic relation between these two kinds of cinema [while still recognising] black film’s need to distinguish itself from the stereotypical themes and imagery of mainstream cultural representations’ (ibid.). African Americans’ profound cultural and aesthetic influence on mainstream cinema can be overlooked in part because Hollywood films often involve a ‘wide-ranging appropriation of black culture without the actual representation of black people’ (Gabbard 2004: 20). Hollywood films use jazz, blues or rap music to say ‘what the filmmakers are unwilling or afraid to say with images’ (ibid.: 256). Gabbard notes that in Batman (Burton, 1989), ‘Tim Burton and his collaborators [avoid] charges of overt racism by not showing black

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hooligans on the screen, but [make] the Joker more threatening by linking him to African American musical performances [by Prince] that scare the hell out of many white Americans’ (ibid.). Films also use music by African-American artists to convey sexual attraction in scenes with white characters. As Gabbard notes, romantic moments between Bill Murray and Andie McDowell in Groundhog Day (Reitman, 1997) are accompanied by ‘Ray Charles singing “You Don’t Love Me” and Nat King Cole crooning “Almost Like Being in Love”’ (ibid.: 255). As with films’ use of music, Hollywood screen performances reveal African Americans’ cultural and aesthetic influence, but one that can also involve white appropriation of black culture. Identifying Marlon Brando as key to the process by which ‘African American culture has been thoroughly assimilated by the Hollywood system’, Gabbard observes that Brando sought to craft innovative performances by approximating ‘the improvisatory aesthetic of African American jazz musicians’ (2004: 9). Searching for an aesthetic model that would make their performances stand apart from ones grounded in British traditions, Brando and other mid-twentieth-century actors were attracted to ‘the lyricism and vulnerability that accompanied the assertiveness in the solos of Miles Davis, or the pathos in many of the saxophone solos of Ben Webster and Charlie Parker’ (ibid.: 44). Yet in a move that reflects entrenched bigotry, Brando not only ‘followed the old minstrel performers in playing on the childish license supposedly granted to black men, he also imitated what he perceived as their hypermasculine violence’ (Gabbard 2004: 9). That reliance on stereotype would continue. As with cultural products by Norman Mailer and later generations of white men proving their coolness by embodying a ‘white negro’ persona, film performances ostensibly influenced by African-American artists involve reiteration of racist perceptions of black culture and black masculinity. Given Hollywood’s conservative (white) values and its

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emphasis on violence and spectacle, it is not uncommon for white (and black) actors to use gestures and expressions based on stereotypes of black masculinity; one could see Sean Penn’s performance in Gangster Squad (Fleischer, 2013) in this light. Arguably, some performances by white actors embody the lyricism, vulnerability and assertiveness associated with the trumpet solos of Miles Davis. Ethan Hawke’s performance in Training Day might be an example, for as embodied by Hawke, the rookie begins as a whimsical young man, bright but naïve and eager to absorb the wisdom of his superior officer; he finally asserts himself, using his dexterity against the greater strength of others, only when he is pressured to violate his code of ethics. White actors’ use of performance choices associated with work by black artists has both reified and transformed representations in Hollywood cinema. Capturing that paradox, Gabbard observes that the ‘swagger of white action heroes – even their stylish approach to handling a gun – is another reminder of familiar representations of black masculinity’ (2004: 19). That fact has contradictory implications. It means that racist images are pervasive and deepseated, with audiences identifying African-American men with brutish behaviour, and seeing actors’ choices as innocent stylistic selections rather than instances of misrepresentation. On the other hand, the pervasive representation of black masculinity means that, however distorted, physical and vocal expressions associated with black culture have become a natural part of Hollywood cinema’s performance repertoire; by now, mainstream audiences expect (white or black) male characters portrayed by (white or black) actors to include gestures and expressions associated with African-American cultural-aesthetic traditions. Although the implications of this reality are beyond the scope of this study, one can say that over time, the source of ‘white negro’ masculine performance has arguably become more visible, at least to some audiences. It also seems that white misperceptions of black

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masculinity are losing force. Donalson observes that Washington’s performances in the 1990s ‘emerged as a bellwether for Hollywood’s changing racial discourse on black masculinity and sexuality, outside the familiar extremes of hypersexuality and asexuality, super criminal or super human, and predator or saint’ (2012: 65). Pointing to Washington’s association with New Black Aesthetic masculinity, Donalson contrasts Washington’s image with the ‘prevalent gangsta rap masculinity of young hip-hop celebrities’; he also describes Washington as ‘more confident and virile than the older, stoic, conservative male figures of earlier media constructions’ (ibid.: 83). Thus, like other contemporary black actors playing characters not easily associated with the upright saint or nihilistic predator, Washington’s performances will, when appropriate to the character, include physical/vocal expressions associated with African-American culture, but not ones drawn unreflectively from white misrepresentations of black culture. His portrayal of Jake Shuttlesworth in Spike Lee’s He Got Game perhaps echoes the

Washington re-enacts a lyrical move by basketball great Earl Monroe in He Got Game (1998)

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vulnerability and lyricism associated with musical performances by black jazz masters. Washington’s boyish and tender courting of the hooker who befriends him contributes to the poignancy of their night together; the fluidity of his movements whenever Jake is in touch with his love of basketball communicates the character’s underlying poetic sensitivity. Gabbard believes that the film is marred by ‘its unapologetic embrace of misogyny and unreconstructed masculinity’, but notes that the ‘audience’s sympathy is drawn immediately to Jake if only because he is played by Washington’ (2004: 271, 270). Acting and musical choices also generate empathy with the character. One hears the Grover’s Corner movement from Copland’s Our Town score when Jake visits his wife’s grave; the combination of music and performance convey the unmitigated loss Jake experiences as a consequence of his actions. Gabbard thus describes Jake as ‘among the most complex figures in any of Lee’s films’, for he is keenly aware of his brutishness but is, realistically, unable to transform himself (ibid.: 270).

Dimensions and significance of Washington’s stardom Bogle has described Washington as an actor who has reshaped ‘the concept of classic movie stardom’ (2004: 423). His observation suggests that Washington is best understood as an earlier iteration of a romantic leading man, in part because his characters tend to share emotional rather than physical intimacy with female characters. Bogle’s comment also points to the idea that as a consequence of Washington’s prolific career, Hollywood stardom no longer requires a link with whiteness. I find that Washington, as an AfricanAmerican star performer, signifies a residual and alternative vision of black masculinity grounded in mastery of technique. For audiences

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who grew up with classical Hollywood cinema, his performances might recall the grace and proficiency of Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, a performance mode lifted and popularised by Fred Astaire (Boyd 2002: 123). Fans of studio-era films might also see in the force and lucidity of Washington’s performances a reflection of the dramatic acumen and rigorous character-building preparation associated with another biopic star, Warner Bros.’ Paul Muni, who, like Method-acting teacher Stella Adler, started in Yiddish theatre and became known for emphasising the value of extensive research into characters’ given circumstances. As a star who first received widespread attention for his portrayal of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in Cry Freedom, his performance as a defiant black Union soldier in Glory, and his depiction of the emotional, intellectual and spiritual journey of Malcolm X, Washington also embodies an image of black masculinity informed by Black Nationalism, which is neither assimilationist nor threatening, and which is distinct from the civilrights-era ‘race man’ and the hip-hop-era ‘nigga’ (Boyd 1997: 13–37). Black Nationalism not only ‘continues to be one of the strongest forces in the black community … the New Black Aesthetic stems straight from that tradition’ (Ellis 2003: 196). Reflecting the experiences of African Americans who ‘no longer need to deny or suppress any part of [their] complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people or black’, the NBA is ‘a post-bourgeois movement driven by a second generation of middle class’ (ibid.: 189, 192). The links between Washington’s star image and NBA values are not the only reason his stardom is a useful site for analysing representations in Hollywood films. The complications surrounding his status as a romantic leading man are another. As the next chapter suggests, it is possible that Hollywood’s (racist) representational and business practices have served to widen Washington’s appeal, and made him a matinee idol comparable to studio-era stars like Cary

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Grant. Because love scenes have been generally off limits, Washington’s portrayals have highlighted the personhood of his characters, who implicitly draw their strength and problem-solving strategies from African-American experiences. Because Hollywood films tend to avoid depictions of caring, physical intimacy between non-whites, Washington’s performances have revealed his ability to convey emotional intimacy, and thus increased his romantic allure. Brode compares Washington to Robert Redford and Paul Newman, proposing that they all ‘project intense masculine sex appeal despite a clean-cut aura’ (1997: xi–xii). Contextualising that comparison, he explains that Washington became ‘a sex symbol [for] millions of adoring fans’, which is ‘something no previous black actor had done, at least outside of films designed specifically with an African-American audience in mind’ (ibid.: xxix). His romantic leading-man image, secured by portrayals in films like The Pelican Brief (Pakula, 1993), is also significant, because it distinguished him from other rising stars of the 1990s, with Tom Hanks achieving fame by ‘playing sensitive and fallible men’ and Tom Cruise reaching ‘Hollywood’s A-list in roles that epitomized machismo and professional cunning’ (Haralovich 2012: 144). Washington’s Oscar nomination for Cry Freedom and Oscar for Glory made studio heads see his star potential, while critics highlighted the films’ reliance on the threadbare convention of placing white characters at the centre of the narratives. Washington’s work in Mo’ Better Blues and Malcolm X did not receive substantial analysis, as attention focused on Lee’s directorial choices and financial involvement with Hollywood that ostensibly compromised the films’ claims to authentic black expression. Washington’s subsequent roles in films like Crimson Tide, Courage under Fire, The Siege (Zwick, 1998) and The Bone Collector (Noyce, 1999) received limited analysis, in that the characters (naval officer, tank battalion commander, FBI special agent and forensics expert) had little in common with those portrayed by Lawrence Gilliard Jr,

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Washington reveals the brutishness of Jake and his environment in He Got Game

Ice Cube and Wesley Snipes in black urban youth films like Straight out of Brooklyn (Rich, 1991), Boyz N the Hood (Singleton, 1991) and New Jack City (Van Peebles, 1991). Yet Washington’s Oscar-nominated performance in The Hurricane, and the controversy generated by the Best Actor Oscar going to Kevin Spacey for his performance in American Beauty (Mendes, 1999), led critics and scholars to reassess Washington’s significance. When his portrayal of falsely imprisoned boxing legend Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter was considered in light of his performances in films such as Devil in a Blue Dress and He Got Game, it became clear that Washington had created characterisations that shared common ground with New Black Cinema by depicting the ‘police brutality and economic disparity’ that contributed to ‘the pressures of African American urban life’ (Massood 2008: 108). Like ‘black family films such as Crooklyn (1994), The Inkwell (1994) … and Soul Food (1997)’, He Got Game is now valued for dramatising ‘class divisions in African American families’ and in American society at large (Reid 2005: 36).

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The box-office success of Remember the Titans (Yakin, 2000) and Washington’s Oscar for Training Day changed many people’s view of his significance. The two films ushered in the stage of Washington’s career when his star power could guarantee a strong opening weekend and a worldwide gross of $100 million or more. The contrast between Coach Boone and Alonzo Harris, along with Washington winning a second Academy Award, solidified his reputation as a star who belonged to the elite league of legitimate actors. While Washington’s work in the 1990s had been noticed by Bogle and others, in the decade following his Oscar for Best Actor, more scholars came to see Washington’s critical success and financial clout as evidence that a black performer’s engagement with ‘the mainstream, by its very nature, can in fact alter its terrain’ (Sung 2008: 260). For cultural theorists, Washington’s crossover success was no longer seen as a failure to express an authentic black voice, but as an instance in which African Americans have prospered through cultural engagement. His ‘critically acclaimed performances’ could be seen as helping to change ‘the overall image of African Americans in Hollywood’ (ibid.: xi). There seems to be a consensus that Washington’s more than forty leading roles have contributed to a perceptible change in filmic representations of African Americans. Some observers attribute the change to his performances in roles written for whites, showing that characters in films like The Pelican Brief and The Manchurian Candidate (Demme, 2004) could be ‘successfully played, critically and commercially, by an actor who is black’ (Brode 1997: 220). Media analysts recognise that Washington’s career has contributed to a change in casting norms for Hollywood action films. The box-office success of films from Crimson Tide to Safe House (Espinosa, 2012) confirm that he is one of several African-American stars who can open blockbuster pictures in domestic and foreign theatrical markets. An evolution in representations of black male characters has been linked to Washington’s avoidance of roles that reinforce

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stereotypes of African Americans. Today, it is possible to see that his portrayals have changed expectations about what constitutes a plausible black character, not because his roles have generated a single positive image, but instead because they have made visible a rich and varied range of black identities. Washington’s character in Déjà Vu (Scott, 2006), Doug Carlin, the ATF expert who falls in love with a woman he’s never met, is wholly different from his character in American Gangster (Scott, 2007), Frank Lucas, the businessman with nerves of steel who is prepared to kill anyone who threatens the family operation. His character in He Got Game, a working-class man whose temper leads to a life of incarceration, bears little resemblance to his role in The Siege, as self-disciplined FBI agent Anthony Hubbard shapes the outcome of events far beyond the confines of a New York neighbourhood. Washington’s portrayals in biopics have also had a crucial impact on mainstream ideas about black characters and black experiences. As he reveals, there is a discernible difference between the easy-going graciousness of Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid leader in Cry Freedom, and the intense emotion of the title character in Malcolm X, whose evolving spiritual life offered a way for him to replace anger and self-doubt with vision and hope. As Washington shows, Coach Boone in Remember the Titans is required to confront entrenched prejudice after he assumes leadership of an integrated high-school football team, but those challenges pale in comparison to the world depicted in The Great Debaters, where debate coach Melvin Tolson, his students and their families live with the constant threat of being lynched in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. The portrayals that Washington has crafted throughout his career have also redefined the norms for representations of African Americans, because his performances in thrillers make visible the same cultural terrain evident in contemporary work in ethnic crime fiction, where crime ‘becomes a metaphor for all that is wrong with America’, and creating stories that feature detectives who represent

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racial and ethnic minorities becomes ‘a strategy for critiquing injustices resulting in racial discrimination’ (Goeller 2003: 175). Easy Rawlins, Washington’s character in Devil in a Blue Dress, is based on the character in Walter Mosley’s novel of the same name. Throughout Mosley’s novels that cover American history from 1939 to 1963, Rawlins is required to solve ‘the immediate, obvious crimes’, and is simultaneously confronted with the mystery of how to live in a society where he is ‘invisible, or at the very least treated as [a] second-class’ citizen (ibid.: 175, 177). Especially when his performances are considered in light of ethnic crime novels, Washington’s portrayals in Ricochet (Mulcahy, 1991), Virtuosity (Leonard, 1995), Fallen (Hoblit, 1998) and The Bone Collector give tangible expression to the existential threat that black men confront in the contemporary white world. Washington’s collaborations with a number of directors have helped to make African-American leading men a natural part of commercially and critically successful Hollywood films. Those collaborations include work with: Norman Jewison in A Soldier’s Story (1984) and The Hurricane (1999); Ed Zwick in Glory (1989), Courage under Fire (1996) and The Siege (1998); Jonathan Demme in Philadelphia (1993) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004); Carl Franklin in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and Out of Time (2003); and Antoine Fuqua in Training Day (2001) and The Equalizer (2014). His career also involves extensive work with Spike Lee, on Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1995) and Inside Man (2006), and with Tony Scott on Crimson Tide (1995), Man on Fire (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) and Unstoppable (2010). Washington’s collaborations have also enhanced his image as an actor of great versatility. Like other stars in the post-studio era, he has worked ‘for different production companies, with a variety of directors and crews [and] across a range of genres’ (Shingler 2012: 89). He has worked on indie films like Mississippi Masala and studio

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Washington’s performance in Glory (1989) led to starring roles in historical dramas

projects like American Gangster. Even his work with Spike Lee has involved both small productions like He Got Game and commercial features like Inside Man. Moreover, in contrast to many stars in the post-studio era, Washington is not identified with a franchise. Whereas Tom Hanks is the top grossing actor due to the Toy Story films, Harrison Ford is second with roles in the Star Wars films, and Eddie Murphy is third because of the Shrek franchise, Washington’s films average $50 million as of 2014, ranking him forty-first. Along with his high-profile acting awards, Washington’s distance from blockbuster franchises has secured his star-performer status and led media analysts to identify him as a high-quality brand that ensures a film’s success because of his fan base. As Chapter 2 will suggest, Washington’s astute negotiation of opportunities and challenges in 1980s Hollywood contributed to his image as an Academy Award-winning actor and industry professional whose work has helped change representational practices in mainstream American cinema.

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2 AFTER BLAXPLOITATION, BEFORE NEW JACK CINEMA

In 1990, Washington received a Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Glory, a drama about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first AfricanAmerican regiment formed during the Civil War, whose character and courage were documented in letters written by its white commander. The NAACP presented Image Awards to the film and to Washington as Best Supporting Actor. The Academy gave Glory Oscars for sound and cinematography. For audiences, one moment in Washington’s performance in Glory has become especially significant. As an IMDb member observes, Washington ‘portrays a slave who is on a personal mission to hurt those who have hurt him’; until he ‘learns to channel his hate into determination … he is humiliated and beaten down to the point that he can only rise up like a griffin and prove that he is as much a soldier as the rest of them’; in the whipping scene, ‘you see him go through that [process and see] every emotion known to a man culminating in a quiver of the cheek, a single tear escaping, and eyes that shred, plea, hate, mourn, haunt’ (SM 2006). Nickson explains that in this one moment, ‘Denzel connected the dots through history, illuminating the fury of the black race’ (1996: 77). The defiant stare Washington aims at his commanding officer shows that Trip ‘demanded not that the pain stop, but that he be afforded the respect of being a man’ (ibid.) For Nickson, Washington’s performance gives audiences ‘insight not only into the

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The moment in Glory when Washington’s acting ability made him a star

character, but also a culture. After watching Trip’s face, [they know] exactly why these men are there, and why they are willing to risk their lives’ (ibid.). Nickson proposes: ‘What resonated, long after the theaters were empty, wasn’t Matthew Broderick, or even the marvelous Morgan Freeman, but Denzel’ (ibid.: 78). Critics consistently praise Washington’s work in Glory, and at the same time identify the film’s shortcomings. For Iverem, his performance ‘obliterates the image of the servile darkie and instead imbues a runaway slave with what he had to have: spirit, tenacity, and daring’ (2007: 24). Yet she laments that the film ‘is another of our stories told from the perspective of a White person’ (ibid.) Bogle echoes her point, noting that it bears ‘the mark of wellintentioned filmmakers who still [feel] the need for inbuilt safeguards and points of identification for a large white audience’ (2004: 339). But he finds that scenes with Washington and Freeman are marked by a hot, fierce, brilliant glow and intensity. Here [are] two major African American actors; one never letting the other have a second more of

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screen time than required; yet each firmly remaining in character and never descending into the flamboyant type of grandstanding that lesser actors might have fallen victim to. (Ibid.: 310)1

One way to complement these and other studies of Glory is to consider aspects of Washington’s acting career that led to this landmark film. His Oscar acceptance speech offers a glimpse of the people he saw contributing to his success and included thanks to: the film’s director Ed Zwick; its producer Freddie Fields; his partner and manager Flo Allen; his agent, described by Washington as the ‘fabulous’ Ed Limato; and his first agent at William Morris, the late Ruth Aronson. He recognised the support of his wife and mother, and paid homage to the 54th, describing them as black soldiers who had helped make the country free. Taking a cue from the speech, this chapter focuses on ways that Washington negotiated the challenges and opportunities he encountered in Hollywood in the 1980s. It considers the film industry he entered, including factors that shaped films like Carbon Copy (1981). It examines the acting experience he brought to Hollywood, recognising that his theatre work created important opportunities. It considers professional choices that established Washington as a classic movie star, as he secured leading roles in international historical dramas (Cry Freedom and For Queen and Country [Stellman, 1989]), and roles as a romantic lead in independent films (The Mighty Quinn [Schenkel, 1989], Mo’ Better Blues and Mississippi Masala). The chapter proposes that Washington’s performances and career choices led audiences to see him as a gifted actor, able to communicate experiences important to African Americans, and as a black matinee idol, with a star image distinct from film/television star Bill Cosby and musician Ice Cube, whose work with N.W.A. from 1987 to 1989 and John Singleton in Boyz N the Hood established him as an artist identified with West Coast gangsta rap.

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Hollywood in the 1980s: studio-era practices v. civil-rights-movement values Building on Dyer’s concern with ways that star images influence how ‘we think about the identity of ourselves and others’, scholars have examined the industrial circumstances that provide ‘a context for the production of a star’s significance’ (McDonald 1998: 176, 177). As with any star, myriad factors shape the context of Washington’s stardom. For instance, in the 1940s, Hollywood representations shifted as the US Office of War Information (OWI) ‘played a crucial, if little known, role in trying to mobilize black support and in interpreting American race relations to an international audience [through] its liaison with Hollywood’ (Koppes and Black 1999: 130). In response to the OWI’s call for films suggesting that all Americans ‘shared a common stake in the Allied victory’, Hollywood produced war movies such as Bataan (Garnett, 1943) and dramas such as Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman, 1943) and Lifeboat (Hitchcock, 1944), which all featured black actors in more central roles (ibid.: 136). To support the US claim that it was a praiseworthy democracy, the OWI asked Hollywood to make films that would persuade international audiences that ‘blacks were full participants in American life’ (Koppes and Black 1999: 152). In response, Hollywood produced a collection of films featuring black entertainers, ranging from the all-black musicals Cabin in the Sky (Minnelli, 1943) and Stormy Weather (Stone, 1943) to Hazel Scott in Rhapsody in Blue (Rapper, 1945), whose scene could be cut when shown in the South. While marked by the same racist stereotypes that mar films like This Is the Army (Curtiz, 1943) or Song of the South (Jackson and Foster, 1946), movies reflecting Hollywood’s ‘Negro Entertainment Syndrome’ made African-American performers an integral part of Hollywood cinema (Bogle 2004: 118); the films, along with astute, critical responses by the NAACP and

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selected reviewers, also led Hollywood and mainstream audiences to have ‘a higher awareness of racial issues than before the war’ (Koppes and Black 1999: 151). As a result, racism in America would become the focus of problem pictures such as Home of the Brave (Robson, 1949), Lost Boundaries (Werker, 1949), Pinky (Kazan, 1949) and Intruder in the Dust (Brown, 1949). More broadly, the success of performers such as Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, James Edwards and Juano Hernández would pave the way for the stardom Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier achieved in the 1950s (Bogle 2004: 166–83). Dandridge’s Oscar-nominated performance in Carmen Jones (Preminger, 1954) and Poitier’s appearances in films from No Way Out (Mankiewicz, 1950) to The Defiant Ones (Kramer, 1958) contributed to the milieu that would help to define the context of Washington’s career. Cultural politics in the US were also shaped by America’s decision to embark on the Vietnam War (1954–75). Other factors impacting representations in and audience responses to Hollywood cinema include the intertwining legacy of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and Joseph Breen’s twenty-year term as interpreter and enforcer of the Hays Code, so named because it was a censorship and marketing tool employed during Will Hays’s tenure as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (1922–45).2 In 1954, the year Washington was born, the Brown v. Board of Education decision made school segregation unconstitutional, Hays passed away and Breen finally released direct control over all Hollywood representations. Despite these milestone events, Hollywood practices did not reflect the egalitarian values of the Supreme Court decision when Washington began making films in the 1980s. Instead, variations of visual and narrative practices codified during the studio era to pre-empt objections from vocal constituencies remained in place after Breen’s retirement; for example, even today romantic comedies consistently feature only

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white couples. One might recall that whereas Brown v. Board of Education was designed to expand civil rights, Hollywood business and representational practices are designed to protect investments and increase profits, which ensures that representations reflect the values of established (white, conservative) interest groups, and so lag behind changes in American social norms. With Washington’s screen career starting in the 1980s, his professional opportunities, choices and subsequent star image exemplify the mismatch between Hollywood practices and audience expectations; his career and star image emerge from a setting where representational policies are out of sync with social norms reflecting and arising from the 1954 Supreme Court decision. His stardom illuminates the fraught dynamic that was established when studioera values, which saw white social superiority as the natural order, were challenged by the civil rights movement, which regarded equality as a right guaranteed by the Christian Bible and the American constitution. As Washington was born the year of the Supreme Court decision and the change in Hollywood censorship personnel, his career has been influenced by cultural and institutional factors different from those shaping the careers of Paul Robeson (b. 1898), Sidney Poitier (b. 1927) or Jamie Foxx (b. 1967). Washington was in grade school when Poitier received an Oscar for Lilies of the Field (Nelson, 1963) and had won his first Academy Award before Wesley Snipes starred in New Jack City. Factors shaping Washington’s career perhaps most closely parallel those of Forest Whitaker (b. 1961), who won an Oscar for his performance in The Last King of Scotland (Macdonald, 2006). As scholarship on film censorship has shown, graphic depictions of sex or violence are ‘the most conspicuous subsection of industry regulation’, because Hollywood can present its control of that material as socially responsible, whereas its regulation of ‘politically sensitive topics’ reveals the industry’s

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profit-focused accommodation of powerful constituencies (Vasey 1997: 6; Black 1994: 245). From the 1920s on, Hollywood has regulated the representation of ‘religion, politics … corporate capitalism, ethnic minorities … and a host of other issues, large and small’ (Vasey 1997: 6). With cultural topics seemingly unrelated to ‘the potentially harmful effects of the screen [Hollywood has seen no] public relations advantage to be gained by advertising the film industry’s accommodating attitude toward big business’ and the presumed values of its widest and whitest audience (ibid.). Even before Breen took charge, Hollywood films avoided depictions of miscegenation to ensure distribution throughout the entire US. As Ruth Vasey explains, during the studio period, the MPPDA and the studios usually considered stories featuring African Americans in any central capacity – certainly any capacity implying social equality – as too sensitive. Sequences showing the ‘mingling’ of blacks and whites often led to protests in southern states and could lead to the movie’s distribution being curtailed in parts of the South. (1997: 139)

Once the Hays Code was established in 1934, Breen could cite its strictures on representations of ‘impure love, the love which society has always regarded as wrong and which has been banned by divine law’ to censor depictions of miscegenation or other representations of physical/emotional intimacy that might offend the ‘racial prejudices’ of powerful constituencies (Black 1994: 307, 297). By the 1980s, the mismatch between Hollywood’s studio-erabased representational practices, and audience expectations that films should reflect contemporary social values, was increasingly visible. Martin Luther King Day became a national holiday in 1986 and The Cosby Show (1984–92) was one of the most widely watched programmes on television. Trey Ellis and ‘other young black artists’ were coming of age

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feeling misunderstood by both the black worlds and the white … getting back into jazz and blues [and going to] punk concerts; [interested in] both Jim and Toni Morrison [and aware that they had] inherited an open-ended New Black Aesthetic from a few Seventies pioneers that shamelessly borrows and reassembles across both race and class lines. (Ellis 2003: 186–7)

Transforming representational patterns as an actor in the 1980s Washington’s New Black Aesthetic image reflects the reality that he started working in Hollywood when casting practices were in flux. As with his appearance in Much Ado about Nothing (Branagh, 1993), Washington’s status as the only African American in the cast of the St Elsewhere series can be seen both as a sign of racist norms and as signalling a break with traditional casting. Washington’s characterisation of Dr Philip Chandler established his image as someone who maintains his dignity even in adversity, is safe enough for white viewers, but has sufficient force of personality to attract the interest of diverse audiences. As an actor many viewers came to know in his performance as Dr Chandler, Washington’s subsequent roles often provide a secure point of identification. For audiences attentive to details at the margins of the narrative, from his portrayal of Chandler on, Washington’s characterisations have also illuminated the experiences of Americans who contend with racism on a daily basis. Articles in the black and mainstream (white) press also reveal that Washington’s role as Dr Chandler established him as a matinee idol. Described as a 1980s ‘household aphrodisiac’, Washington would soon be seen as ‘the hottest Black actor in Hollywood history’ (Randolph 1994: 110). With his role in a critically acclaimed series informing publicity about Washington, journalists described him as ‘a seasoned actor who has paid his dues [and] has refused to allow his

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looks to drive his work or life’ (ibid.). With his public image closely associated with black urban professional Dr Chandler, the popular press explained that women liked what they saw ‘in Washington the man: a committed husband, a devoted father, a superstar who never allow[ed] his family to become a sidebar to his career’ (ibid.). Washington’s early roles in Hollywood social satires would have less impact on his public image. Carbon Copy promised to be an important first film. Michael Schultz had also directed Cooley High (1975) and Car Wash (1976), but his farce about a white businessman (George Segal) who must contend with a black son (Washington) who shows up unexpectedly did not explore the son’s experience, but instead looked primarily at ‘problems white America believed it had to contend with’ (Bogle 1988: 50). Moving on, Washington sought out other roles outside the predator/saint binary, and secured a part written for a white middle-aged character in the political satire Power (Lumet, 1986). Landing leading roles in wellproduced mainstream films with established actors, Washington worked with Bob Hoskins in Heart Condition (Parriott, 1990) and John Lithgow in Ricochet. With the films shaped by studio-era conventions, their critiques of racism faltered; reviews saw both films as reinforcing rather than challenging racial stereotypes. Some people have seen Washington’s roles in the two films as offering more nuanced, if limited, representations of African Americans. Brode proposes that in Heart Condition, audiences ‘got to see not the street-pimp stereotype of the black male but a successful white-collar African American who has won assimilation into the upper echelon of mainstream society’ (1997: 114). He adds that the self-importance of Washington’s character makes him a ‘flawed, and therefore interesting, human being [and] a far cry from a perfect Poitier-style role’ (ibid.). Writing about Ricochet, Valerie Smith considers the film’s look at the threat white society poses to black middle-class success. Noting that the film lets stereotypes about ‘the black middle- and underclass remain intact’, Smith finds that

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Washington registers Roger’s disgust with his racist hosts in Carbon Copy (1981)

the film does convey the challenges of black middle-class life in the 1980s when Washington’s character turns to his childhood friend Odessa (Ice T) ‘for help in the face of widespread betrayal’ by whites (1998: 85). With Hollywood narrative and visual conventions still shaped by studio-era values, it is not surprising that these social satires did not advance Washington’s career. However, the films revealed his abilities as an actor, in that small details of his performances communicate his characters’ thoughts and feelings about social injustice in America. Washington’s craft is evident even in Carbon Copy. He portrays Roger as self-contained, his quiet but focused vocal and physical choices showing that Roger simply wants to settle for himself if his white father had ever loved his black mother. Even in moments of stasis, his expressive eyes and face show that

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Roger is well aware of the racism that surrounds him, including occasions when the ‘polite’ conversation of his father’s white family barely masks their distress in having a black dinner guest.

Opportunities created by work in theatre When Washington came to Hollywood in the 1980s, there were even fewer opportunities for black actors than in the previous decade. Although the studios had released thirty-nine films starring African Americans in 1972 and forty-five ‘black-oriented’ films in 1973, by the early 1980s African Americans ‘were not even getting their traditional exploitative or stereotypical roles’ (Rhines 1996: 82). In 1981, Hollywood released only six ‘black-focused’ films; ‘of the hundreds of films produced in 1982, only eight had blacks in starring roles, with three of them Richard Pryor vehicles’ (Guerrero 1993: 120, 121). A 1986 report by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists ‘revealed that all racial minorities combined got less than 10 percent of the leading roles in television, film, and commercials and that women of color made up less than 5 percent of all women in film and television’ (ibid.: 121). In 1988, African Americans made up 2 per cent of the Writers Guild, 2.25 per cent of the Directors Guild and 5.7 per cent of the Screen Actors Guild (George 2002: 96). In response, the NAACP threatened to sponsor a ‘nationwide boycott of new films released by the majors’ in 1982, but subsequently got only Disney and MGM/UA to sign agreements to ‘expand Black participation both in-house “and throughout the motion picture industry”’ (Rhines 1996: 80, 83). Washington belonged to this small percentage of working actors. Along with his series-long participation in St Elsewhere (1982–8), he worked in theatre throughout the 1980s. He was cast in A Soldier’s Story because of his success in the play on which the film

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was based, and he was later cast in Cry Freedom on the strength of his performance in A Soldier’s Story. Washington’s stage career began at Fordham University in New York. In his junior year, he won the leading role in the university’s production of The Emperor Jones; in his senior year, he secured the title role in Othello. Fordham professor of English, Robinson Stone (1919–2000), a casting director, talent coordinator and actor with roles in film and theatre, described Washington as ‘the best actor [he] had seen onstage’ (Farley 1995: 72). Stone’s assessment led him to invite talent agents to see Washington’s work; the young actor was soon represented by the William Morris Agency and cast in a small part in Wilma (Greenspan), which aired on NBC on 19 December 1977, the year Washington graduated from college.3 Washington’s experience at Fordham informs choices and methods he has used to create performances throughout his career. In portraying Othello, he whispered rather than shouted to convey his character’s rage and frustration in a key moment (Nickson 1996: 16). Learning the communicative power of compressed intensity early on, Washington continues to incorporate whispers, glares, clenched fists and tightened jaw muscles into his performances, as these choices convey strong emotion precisely because of the character’s effort to contain feeling. Having majored in journalism and drama, Washington places importance on the research required to build a character. As biographer Sara McIntosh Wooten explains, he believes that an ‘actor has to study and research his roles, just as an investigative reporter pursues a story’ (2003: 28). She adds: ‘Washington’s diligence and thoroughness in preparing for a part would become one of his trademarks, as well as one of the reasons for his success’ (ibid.). Washington’s keen interest in research brings him closer to the tradition of Method acting associated with Stella Adler (1901–92), whose approach is distinct from that of the other well-known Method-acting teachers, Sanford Meisner (1905–97) and Lee

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Strasberg (1901–82). Whereas Strasberg popularised the use of affective memory and the substitution of actors’ personal experience for characters’ circumstances and objectives, Adler highlighted ‘the value of the actor placing himself in the place of the character rather than vice versa’ (Barton 2006: 160). She emphasised script analysis, creative use of imagination and extensive research into ‘the world of the text and the world surrounding it’ (ibid.: 159). Meisner shared Adler’s opposition to Strasberg’s focus on affective memory and developed methods that help actors establish and maintain a deep connection with each other during performance. Washington’s experience at Fordham not only fostered working methods that would enhance his ability to do biopics and portray a wide range of characters, it also led him to be accepted into the prestigious training programme at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in 1977. Founded in 1965 by director William Ball, ACT is ‘widely known for the physical exuberance and close ensemble work of its actors’ (Blau 1991). Rather than focus, as Strasberg did, on aiming to have a performance emerge from an actor’s emotions, William Ball emphasised a perspective highlighted by Adler, proposing that ‘the key to all success in acting … is the systematic and thorough pursuit of the wants of the character’ (Ball 1986: 76). Seeing script analysis as the foundation of performance, Ball showed actors that Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Action could greatly facilitate execution of performance; as he put it: there is ‘a back door to the Method: if you do the act [or action], the feeling will follow’ (Blau 1991). Combined with his work at Fordham, Washington’s training at ACT facilitated his ability to immerse himself in and effectively physicalise his characters’ given circumstances, objectives and the series of dramatic actions they use to achieve their objectives, scene by scene. Washington appeared in ACT productions of Moonchildren and Man and Superman. Although accepted into the second-year programme, he sought theatre work outside of ACT. In 1981,

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he secured the role of Malcolm X in Laurence Holder’s When the Chickens Come Home to Roost performed at the New Federal Theatre in New York. To prepare for the part, Washington ‘dyed his hair red, the same color as Malcolm’s, listened to tapes of him speaking, and pored through film footage’ (Nickson 1996: 20). Although the play closed after twelve shows, the production ‘transformed his career’, as Washington gained notice in the press and was soon cast as Private Peterson in the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of A Soldier’s Play, which ran from November 1981 to January 1983 in New York (ibid.: 22). A review in The New York Times noted that Washington, ‘who recently scored as Malcolm X in When the Chickens Come Home to Roost, is equally effective here as another, cooler kind of young renegade’ (qtd. in ibid.: 23). The connection between the two roles is significant, in that Peterson’s ‘rhetoric recalls specific, well-known speeches of Malcolm’, and Washington ‘as Peterson, physically resembles Malcolm’ (Taylor 1993: 188). A Soldier’s Play garnered substantial critical acclaim and so enhanced Washington’s stature as an actor. In 1982, playwright Charles Fuller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play; the production received the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play; Adolph Caesar, in the role of Sergeant Waters, won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play; and the cast received an Obie Award (Off-Broadway Theater Award) for Distinguished Ensemble Performance. Washington, Adolph Caesar and Larry Riley as Private C. J. Memphis were cast in the 1984 film adaption written by Charles Fuller and directed by Norman Jewison. The play and film are structured as murder mysteries. Waters, the head of a segregated unit stationed at an army base in the South during World War II, has been murdered; the US Army sends a black officer to investigate the crime, which initially seemed to have been committed by the Klan. The investigation reveals that Waters’s intense persecution of Private Memphis led the young man to kill

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Washington as Private Peterson in A Soldier’s Story (1984): cool, intense, akin to Malcolm X

himself and that Peterson exacted revenge when he had the opportunity. Clyde Taylor observes that the film ‘imposes a more sharply defined closure on Peterson’s moral risk-taking’, to the point that Peterson becomes like other ‘heroes of resistance’ that Hollywood has ‘recoded and reinterpreted as villains’ (1993: 191). A Soldier’s Story is another instance where the film is critiqued while Washington’s performance has garnered positive attention. The film’s overall narrative makes Peterson’s destiny ‘coincide with the inevitable downfall of the rebellious Black’ (Taylor 1993: 191). Yet a review in the New York Native called attention to ‘the handsome, unrelenting ferocity of Denzel Washington’ (qtd. in Brode 1997: 24). Singling out his performance, a Village Voice review of the film argued that ‘Washington’s seething intellectual, Peterson – lean and dangerous and a ringer for Malcolm X – is a compelling figure’ (ibid.). Looking back at the performance, Bogle sees it as important to Washington’s ‘screen persona’, because it sets the pattern for many of his subsequent characters who are ‘cool, seemingly detached yet intense, intelligent, and free of affectations’ (2004: 311).

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Washington’s role in A Soldier’s Story was also important because it led to him being cast as anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in Cry Freedom. Nickson explains that director Richard Attenborough had ‘auditioned a hundred African actors before someone showed him A Soldier’s Story. Attenborough was immediately impressed by Denzel’s work, and a meeting was arranged’ (1996: 37). Citing an account of Attenborough’s decision to cast Washington, Nickson quotes the director as saying: ‘We had to have a man of charm, of erudition, of intellect, of perception, who was humorous, relaxed, yet confident [and] we found him in Denzel’ (ibid.). Nickson reports that Washington had reservations about taking the role because the film, which is ‘ostensibly about Biko, instead told the story of a white man, newspaper editor Donald Woods’, who eventually drew world attention to Biko’s murder by South African authorities (ibid.: 38). Employing methods he learned at Fordham and ACT, Washington built the character through extensive research, ‘listening to tapes of Biko’s speeches, interviewing people, both black and white (including Donald Woods), who had known him, reading all he could lay his hands on by or about the man’ (Nickson 1996: 38–9). He also changed his vocal expression and physical appearance to more closely resemble Biko: ‘a special diet helped him add thirty pounds to his body … He grew a thin goatee … learned to speak in a South African accent [and had] the caps removed from his front teeth’ (ibid.: 39). Nickson explains that Washington ‘worked long and hard to take on the mantle of his character, but was never sure he’d succeed until the scene where he had to address the football stadium full of people, extras from the local Zimbabwe population’; when Washington ‘finished his lines, the applause that rose was unscripted, loud and honest’ (ibid.: 49). Looking back on the film, Washington has noted that ‘it changed everything’ in his career, because it ensured that he would be perceived by Hollywood executives as someone capable of

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Changing mainstream perceptions: Washington as activist Steve Biko in Cry Freedom (1987)

handling substantial roles (Rottenberg 2010). The experience of being in Africa (Zimbabwe and South Africa), meeting members of the anti-apartheid movement and working to embody Biko also made an impression on Washington. The actor explains that he learned a great deal from the role, because ‘Biko had a tremendous knowledge and intelligence … was a very gentle man [and] a natural leader [who] didn’t have to be up front all the time [but instead] could pull people together with his analytical abilities’ (qtd. in Brode 1997: 45). After his success in Cry Freedom, Washington won his first leading role on Broadway in the production of Ron Milner’s Checkmates, which ran from August to December 1988. Despite negative reviews of the play, women’s enthusiastic responses to Washington’s performance led Spike Lee to cast him in Mo’ Better Blues (Nickson 1996: 89). Grounding his acting career in stage work even after the 1980s, Washington secured the leading role in The Tragedy of Richard III, which played at the New York Shakespeare Festival from August to September 1990. He won a leading role in Julius Caesar, which ran from April to June 2005. The New York Amsterdam News review applauds the production for featuring

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‘a marvelous cast of both African American and white actors’; it notes that there would likely be shouts from ‘female audience members when [Washington] first appears on stage’ throughout the run of the play (Armstrong 2005: 19). Washington’s performance in August Wilson’s Fences as Troy Maxson, a Negro-League ballplayer who becomes a garbage collector instead of a sports star, further secured his image as a star and accomplished actor. The Scott Rudin production, directed by Kenny Leon and running from April to July 2010, led to Tony Awards for Best Play Revival, Best Leading Actor (Washington) and Best Leading Actress (Viola Davis). Washington’s portrayal of Walter Lee in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun from April to July 2014 further substantiated that image. When the production of A Raisin in the Sun was announced, the Hollywood Reporter noted: In addition to Fences, Washington proved a major box office draw in a 2005 staging of Julius Caesar, despite tepid reviews for the production overall. Alongside Hugh Jackman, Tom Hanks, and a small handful of others, [Washington] is one of an elite group of actors considered surefire bankable names on Broadway. (Rooney 2013)

Negotiating challenges to Hollywood stardom Alongside the opportunities Washington secured through his work in theatre, the stardom he established in Hollywood films reflects a process of contending with industrial norms, which foster depictions of African-American men as over-sexed brutes or asexual figures seeking the approval of whites. A few lines from an Essence magazine article highlight the mismatch between Hollywood practices and contemporary audience expectations. While celebrating Washington’s twenty-five years in film, the article observes: ‘He’s done everything but the one thing his legions of female fans

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would like to see more of. Why doesn’t someone with his charisma do more love scenes?’ (Wilkerson 2006: 146). Although one might also ask this about a star such as George Clooney, the question goes to the heart of representational politics when considering the careers of African Americans. One need only recall that Hollywood’s ‘permissible field of representation’ remains influenced by studio-era values (Vasey 1997: 12). Thus, with stardom depending on the circulation of images that emphasise a star’s romantic allure, classic star status has been elusive for African-American men whose roles often reflect white culture’s vision of black men as less than human, as threatening or lacking normal desire. In Washington’s case, despite having the demeanour and physicality to be a movie star, from the 1980s on, his roles have rarely involved the standard scenes of physical intimacy between male and female stars. However, given contemporary social norms, those limitations seem to have broadened Washington’s star appeal. With romance at the margins of his films, audiences have been led to focus on the acumen and integrity of his characters. As love scenes were often off limits, Washington’s performances have highlighted his ability as a star performer to convey emotional intimacy. With his early career featuring a series of romantic leading roles in films with limited distribution and box office, his image as a black matinee idol also seems to reflect the passion of women’s cult connoisseurship. In the late 1980s, Washington sought and secured romantic leading roles as a means of attaining film stardom. These portrayals were designed to appeal to viewers who watched St Elsewhere primarily to see Washington, and elevate him from respected character actor (in Glory and Cry Freedom) to film star. Securing parts as a romantic leading man was a strategy Washington developed in collaboration with his agent Ed Limato (1936–2010). Limato, whose elegance and business acumen prompted the moniker ‘the Gatsby of the Agents’, had also grown up in Mount Vernon,

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New York. The romantic leading roles reveal their shared vision of stardom, and led Washington to be associated with the glamour of classic movie stardom. Washington has described Limato, whose clients included Robert Downey Jr, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson, Steve Martin, Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Diana Ross and Sharon Stone, as ‘the closest thing to a father figure I had after my father passed’ (Galloway 2012). In contrast to agents who leave day-to-day matters to managers, Limato worked closely with his select list of clients. In a Variety column titled ‘It’s Still Primetime for the Gatsby of the Agents’, Peter Bart notes: ‘While present-day client-agent relationships tend to be remote and businesslike, Limato is a throwback to the agent-as-friend, who becomes part of his clients’ lives as well as their careers’ (1998). Trade journalist Nikki Finke explains: ‘That Limato was out of the closet was accepted by his peers and clients as readily as his availability 24 hours a day … his showbiz clients and friends became his surrogate family’ (2010). Washington’s roles in A Soldier’s Story (1984) and Cry Freedom (1987) showed that he was an actor worth watching. With that established, Limato moved on to making Washington a star by securing the name-above-the-title role for him in The Mighty Quinn (1989). Given the patterns that govern Hollywood, a romantic leading role was a logical way for an actor to move into the star category. That idea infuses the film from the start. To introduce Washington as the island police chief, a slow tilt travels up his uniformed leg and trim torso to reveal his handsome face. He is immediately approached by one of the several women who will throw themselves at him during the story. The film concludes with a sensuous late-night reunion between the police chief and his estranged wife, played by Sheryl Lee Ralph; the scene fades into one showing the attractive couple in bed the next morning, tastefully covered by the sheets, with Sheryl Lee Ralph gazing lovingly at Washington as he rests his head on her, asleep.

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The Mighty Quinn (1989): a vehicle for marketing Washington’s romantic leading-man image

Reviews of Washington’s performance were positive. Roger Ebert compared him to Robert Mitchum, Michael Caine and Sean Connery, in that he was able to ‘be tough and gentle at the same time, able to play a hero and yet not take himself too seriously’ (qtd. in Brode 1997: 72). Vincent Canby proposed: ‘Washington gives the kind of smooth, funny, laid-back performance that could help make him the first black matinee idol since Sidney Poitier’ (ibid.). Throughout the film, costuming, lighting, framing and setting choices highlight Washington’s appeal, with the island locale offering many opportunities for glamour shots. However, with Hollywood conventions and practices still shaped by studio-era values, Washington’s first appearance as a romantic leading man went largely unnoticed. The Jamaican detective story, complete with amusing references to Dr No (Young, 1962) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Kramer, 1967), earned only $4.5 million at the box office. Although the film’s narrative was

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weak, a more fundamental problem was that Washington and Limato had underestimated entrenched business practices: MGM did not expand distribution beyond the opening weekend’s 234 theatres, having determined before the film’s release that it was suitable only for ‘ethnic audiences’ (Brode 1997: 73). Following the February 1989 release of The Mighty Quinn, Washington starred in the Working Title production For Queen and Country, which premiered at Cannes in 1988 but was released in the US in May 1989. With Washington and Limato searching for leading roles that would make Washington an A-list star, the critical acclaim for Working Title films like My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Frears, 1987) had made For Queen and Country seem like a good star vehicle. The film would allow Washington to continue working in socially significant projects like A Soldier’s Story and Cry Freedom, and lead nicely into his performance in Glory, released in December 1989. It put Washington at the centre of the narrative and made the courtship between his character and a neighbour played by British television actress Amanda Redman central to developments in the story. Washington delivers a striking performance in the film. There are moments when his classic movie-star charisma comes to the foreground. Yet these quickly recede in his closely observed portrayal of a young paratrooper, Reuben James, who discovers that ‘the country he’s defended on foreign shores is blind and deaf to his simple desire to find a decent job’ (Brode 1997: 52). Washington’s work again received positive reviews. Seen as a ‘subtle and powerful performance’ marked by ‘clarity and definition’, the portrayal prompted David Edelstein to write: ‘the gifted American actor Denzel Washington doesn’t fall into dignified, Sidney Poitier cadences. There’s caginess in his silence, and his voice is a crafty purr’ (qtd. in ibid.: 60–1). Combining those vocal choices with light, measured movements that show a keen awareness of every

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For Queen and Country (1989): a role showcasing his acting ability and romantic appeal

environment, Washington reveals that social realities might entrap James in the South London housing project where he lives, but that those realities do not define who he is. Yet For Queen and Country fared no better than The Mighty Quinn. The film made less than $200,000, with Atlantic Releasing placing it in only thirty-three theatres. While Atlantic’s instability is a factor, its decision shows that the film seemed unmarketable, even though a year earlier Atlantic had found ways to promote the antiapartheid drama A World Apart (Menges, 1988) so that it made $2.3 million. The distributor’s decision to limit investment in the film’s release would not be seen as censorship, because it was ‘sanctioned by the “profit principle”’ (Jansen 1988: 15). However, Atlantic’s prediction about what would attract a lot of customers reflected assumptions shaped by decades of Hollywood censorship – thus, the calculation that whites battling apartheid was commercially viable, but that interracial romance was a politically

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A New Black Aesthetic figure without a safe community in For Queen and Country

sensitive topic, especially when the social drama created sympathy for the young black man who eventually takes justice into his own hands by killing a corrupt and abusive white cop. Despite the box-office returns, The Mighty Quinn confirmed Washington’s matinee-idol status and For Queen and Country confirmed his range as an actor. His characterisations in the two films also reflected the era’s New Black Aesthetic exploration of independent figures intent on securing agency in the world. In both films, Washington’s characters are separate from both black and white worlds; they have deep but strained bonds with their families and childhood friends. Their acumen makes them well equipped to operate in the white world, but they are continually forced to grapple with their social position that places them below even shiftless whites. For audiences attentive to details, Washington’s portrayals in both films communicate the righteous indignation of civil rights advocates. Slipping through the cracks of Hollywood conventions,

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these performance details could resonate with contemporary audience values. Washington’s Oscar for Glory in 1990 gave him more visibility as an actor, but his subsequent roles as a romantic lead in Mo’ Better Blues, released in the US in August 1990, and Mississippi Masala, released in the US in February 1992, did not make him a mainstream star. Spike Lee’s film made $16 million; Mira Nair’s made $7 million. The limited release for these films again arises from Hollywood practices bound by studio-era values. In the case of Mo’ Better Blues, the box-office returns also reflect negative responses to the film’s sexual politics. Critics objected to its ‘world of black male homosocial bonding where black women are seen primarily as sex objects’ (hooks 1992: 105). They saw the central character, musician Bleek Gilliam (Washington), as never developing ‘a mature adult identity’ and as resolving his social and personal problems through an ‘uncritical acceptance of the traditional patriarchal role’ (ibid.). While critics objected to Bleek as written, they did not question Washington’s appeal, and so Lee’s film became much like The Mighty Quinn and For Queen and Country, offering material for (female) audiences interested in and able to see Washington as a romantic leading man. Mo’ Better Blues represents another occasion when Washington’s performance warrants consideration, because it provides a subtext rarely considered in commentary on the film itself. Just as he would when portraying crime boss Frank Lucas in American Gangster, in Mo’ Better Blues Washington drains the affect from his face, presenting an emotionless mask to people and the world around him. That risky performance choice (which establishes a distance between character and audience) suggests that in being a musician, Bleek has taken on a role prescribed for him by others. As a consequence, leaving that world might be traumatic for Bleek, but as Washington’s portrayal reveals, setting down the trumpet is a huge relief. In the closing scenes, Bleek does take on the

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Washington in Mo’ Better Blues (1990): a romantic leading man in a role still open to debate

conventional role of a father and embraces middle-class life. Yet as Washington’s open, free-flowing gestures and relaxed, expressive smiles convey, being a supportive member of a middle-class family is precisely what Bleek has really wanted. Looking back at films like A Soldier’s Story, Cry Freedom, Glory and Mo’ Better Blues, it is the variations in Washington’s performances that are striking. Continuing that trend, none of those portrayals anticipate his characterisation in Mississippi Masala. Through details in his voice, gesture and posture – the twang in his voice, his extended chin and hitched-up-pants – Washington creates an entirely unique character. Rather than recycle conventional gestures or personal mannerisms, he embodies a physicality specific to Demetrius Williams, someone well aware of the limits imposed on a black man in 1980s Greenwood, Mississippi, who also aims to be his own man by succeeding with a one-van carpet-cleaning business. Responses to Washington’s performance in Mississippi Masala reveal that his ability to craft a unique but entirely

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recognisable character paradoxically transformed the role into that of a romantic leading man. Nickson explains that in portraying Demetrius, Washington: found the magic in the ordinary man, the way someone good and decent, an everyday person, could be remarkable. To be fair, some of that was due to the writing, but it was Denzel who brought him to life, the mixture of shyness and boldness, the boy and the man in one package. (1996: 117)

Another reviewer described Washington as ‘debonair … magnetic [with] an innate sweetness like Henry Fonda’s but with even more steel’, and proposed that the film confirmed Washington’s status as ‘an A-list movie star and sex symbol’ (qtd. in ibid.: 116). Comments such as these suggest that in the crucial initial period of his career, Washington’s professional choices, on screen and off, involved a remarkably effective negotiation of film and social norms. Industry conditions and social values play a role in the formation of any star image, but they are clearly pertinent in a star study of Washington, whose early stage career included an Obie Award in 1982 as a cast member in A Soldier’s Play, and whose career as a dramatic actor in TV and film began in the early 1980s, in the time between Blaxploitation and New Black Cinema, when Eddie Murphy was taking Richard Pryor’s place as Hollywood’s most successful black comedic actor. As with genre films, star images represent negotiations between a production system and an audience at a specific point in time. With Washington’s career starting in the early 1980s, moribund Hollywood practices have influenced his film roles, while audience responses often reflect social norms that developed in the wake of decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. Washington’s image thus emerged in part from a mismatch between representational and reading practices, between film conventions and audience expectations. Despite being designed not to offend the widest and whitest audience, even his early film work

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reconfigured ‘the concept of classic movie stardom’ to include an image of masculinity that ‘borrows and reassembles across both race and class lines’ (Bogle 2004: 423; Ellis 2003: 187). Describing himself as someone defined both by his culture and individual agency, in 1990 Washington explained: ‘I’m very proud to be black but black is not all I am’ (De Vries 1990). With his performances embodying substantial characters and redefining romantic leading roles, by the end of the 1980s Washington had become recognised as a star who conveyed depth, integrity and emotional intimacy in moments and at a distance. His early negotiation of Hollywood restrictions helped make him a respected actor and a black matinee idol, whose glamour was keenly visible to audiences able to see it.

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3 ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING ACTOR

Official recognition of Washington’s work as an actor continued through the next three decades. After receiving Oscar nominations for Best Actor for his performances in Malcolm X (1992) and The Hurricane (1999), Washington won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a rogue Los Angeles narcotics officer in Training Day (2001). Then, after a decade of box-office hits, and critical acclaim for portraying drug kingpin Frank Lucas in American Gangster (2007), Washington garnered yet another Best Actor Oscar nomination for Flight (2012). This substantial level of official recognition is integral to Washington’s star image and an important part of the off-screen factors that shape audience expectations about his performances. Like other star performers, Washington’s image reflects his association with awards and leading roles in films considered high quality; his performances are seen as instances of impersonation, with audiences appreciating his ability to inhabit distinct characters. Reviewers’ praise and institutional recognition have made Washington a prestige star, with audiences approaching his portrayals as work by a legitimate actor. Oscar nominations and awards are also vital to Washington’s image, because the Academy’s recognition has import in American/African-American cultural histories. As of 2014, Best Supporting Actress Oscars have gone to Hattie McDaniel for Gone

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with the Wind (Fleming, 1939), Whoopi Goldberg for Ghost (Zucker, 1990), Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls (Condon, 2006) and Lupita Nyong’o for 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013). Along with Washington’s recognition for Glory, Best Supporting Actor Oscars have gone to Louis Gossett Jr for An Officer and a Gentleman (Hackford, 1982), Cuba Gooding Jr for Jerry McGuire (Crowe, 1996) and Morgan Freeman for Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood, 2004). Halle Berry won the Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball (Forster, 2001). In addition to Washington’s Oscar for Training Day, Best Actor Oscars have gone to Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field, Jamie Foxx for Ray (Hackford, 2004) and Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland.1 Discussing Berry’s Oscar, Washington’s Oscar and the Honorary Award Sidney Poitier received at the 2002 Academy Award ceremony, Wendy Sung observes that this recognition from ‘America’s most prestigious cinema institution [not only] marked climactic milestones in their Hollywood careers … more importantly, this triptych of awards unfolded into a night of significance for African American history’ (2008: 245). With people seeing these awards as a sign of ‘Hollywood’s racial progress and tolerance’ and as long overdue in ‘the bitter struggle for representation and control that has characterized the African American relationship with cinema’, she explains that the ‘watershed moment was rife with ambivalence’ (ibid.). The Academy’s recognition of Washington’s work in Training Day was fraught with contradiction. Iverem explains: we know ‘that Denzel Washington “won” the Oscar for Best Actor when he starred in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in 1992. We know he “won” it again when he played Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the movie The Hurricane three years ago’ (2007: 343). The delay in Washington receiving an Oscar was a problem, but not the central one; Edward Mapp notes that ‘Oscar history is rife with nominees who did not win for their best performances but for lesser ones in a subsequent year, perhaps

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as a consolation prize’ (2008: 100). Instead, dismay with the Academy emerged from the perception that his performances in Malcolm X and The Hurricane were overlooked because the films explored African Americans’ ‘complex existence in a racist society’ (Iverem 2007: 343). Washington’s image as a star performer has allowed him to maintain a slight distance from debates about Hollywood and representational politics. His legitimate actor status has also contributed to his wide appeal, with different audiences perhaps making different sense of his star-performer image. For Washington, award-winning actor is a brand that allows him to negotiate the demands of being a mainstream star. After becoming a crossover star in the 1990s, he retained the approval of African-American audiences ‘as a screen persona that reflected ethnic authenticity to that particular ethnic community [and] an offscreen personality who reflected a combination of racial pride and individual integrity’ (Donalson 2012: 67). Washington’s credentials as an award-winning actor have also likely fostered acceptance by (white) mainstream audiences. His association with quality films has to a certain extent mitigated the criticism of those who see some of his roles as demeaning to African Americans; conversely, it has also led audiences who value edgy films to see Washington’s quality portrayals as middlebrow, and so linked to Bill Cosby and ‘the ideology of the race man’ (Boyd 1997: 17). Yet Washington’s wide appeal as an accomplished actor indicates connections between his star image and New Black Aesthetic values. Writing about the NBA cultural mulattoes who came of age in the 1980s, Ellis points out that they could ‘feel secure enough to attend art school instead of medical school’ (2003: 193). Describing the generation’s (middle-class) valuing of individual expression that still recognises African-American cultural heritage, Ellis notes: ‘The New Black Aesthetic says you just have to be natural, you don’t necessarily have to wear one’ (ibid.: 190). As a star

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on the early cusp of the NBA and an actor in Hollywood, Washington’s image manifests the NBA’s ‘bourgeois underpinnings’ more clearly than film-makers, artists, and musicians whose work reflects ‘an underclass aesthetic’ (Boyd 1997: 17, 34). More to the point, the various roles that have secured his reputation as a legitimate actor and crossover star shed light on the NBA’s embrace of both African-American traditions and upward mobility. Looking at his high-quality roles in pragmatic terms, it is possible to see them as a zigzagging negotiation with the opportunities available. Leading roles in Malcolm X and The Hurricane were occasions for Washington to create characterisations that would not only resonate with African Americans but also secure box-office support from white audiences. Co-starring roles in The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia gave him the chance to demonstrate his skill as an actor in high-visibility films, with The Pelican Brief confirming his appeal as a romantic leading man and Philadelphia proving his ability to offer a point of identification for mainstream audiences. Training Day was an opportunity for Washington to reveal his ability to create engaging but disturbing characters who had little connection with the heroic figures in historical dramas like Cry Freedom, Glory, Malcolm X and The Hurricane, or the reflective men in The Mighty Quinn, For Queen and Country, The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia. Cast against type, Washington’s well-crafted bravura performance in Training Day significantly contributed to his reputation as a star performer associated with great performances rather than types of characters.

Contributing to a New Black Cinema landmark Washington’s role in Malcolm X has a paradoxical place in his career. It gave him visibility and linked him to African-American cinema, as the film ‘remains the most striking example of commercial success

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and critical acclaim of the black new wave period’, and is recognised for securing a domestic box-office gross of more than $94 million when ticket prices are adjusted for inflation. Yet discussions about Washington’s performance have taken a back seat to ones about the film itself. Thomas Cripps notes that attention-grabbing conflicts surrounding the film’s production go back to 1968, when ‘willing backers and sensitive moviemakers [first] clashed with African American keepers of Malcolm’s flame’ (1993: 174). Spike Lee’s objection to Norman Jewison as director led to Lee taking over in 1991, but the change ‘merely set alight the fraternal black struggle for control of the image of Malcolm X’ (ibid.: 178). As Boyd observes: Lee’s public campaign to gain control of the film, his arguments with several other African Americans, most notably Amiri [Baraka], over his ability to properly render the life of Malcolm X in film, and his financial difficulties in completing the project were the events that defined … the release of what is arguably the most important Black film to date. (1997: 26)

Acclaim for Washington’s performance in Malcolm X has also been muted by critics’ view that the film is too middlebrow. Cripps finds that by ‘setting a comic mood’ at the outset, the film ‘lessens the audience’s anxiety over what is to come’, and by closing with ‘Malcolm’s famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 – after which he embraced a broadly ecumenical vision of humankind – [it] ennobles Malcolm while broadening the base of the audience’ (1993: 179). Echoing that, Boyd argues that once Malcolm X was released, ‘the film and the filmmaker [could be] seen in their true light, that of middle-class acceptability’ (1997: 26). Identifying the film as ‘neither a conventional black genre film nor a pandering crossover’, Cripps describes it as ‘an old-fashioned, classical Hollywood biopic, in which the subject is given a life in the form of a rising arc of conversion experiences and deepening convictions,

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all of them ending in a martyr’s death – tragic but ennobling’ (1993: 179). Malcolm X disappointed people who expected that a film about ‘a fiery unconventional leader’ would lead to something other than Lee’s ‘most conventional film’ (Bogle 2004: 355). However, given Hollywood’s disinterest in African-American biopics, which has led observers to refer to ‘the biopic [as] “the motion picture equivalent of the all-white neighborhood”’, it is notable that the ‘first time an African American filmmaker lays hands on the levers of big-time Hollywood epic biopic filmmaking’, the film is about Malcolm X (Bingham 2010: 170, 172). One could argue that it was unconventional to appropriate a white Hollywood genre for this black story and to use classical biopic form to depict the life of an individual ‘outside the mainstream culture’ of his time (ibid.: 176). Intertwining images of ‘Black and bourgeois’, the film has been seen as showing the degree to which (middle-class but culturally specific) New Black Aesthetic perspectives were ‘infiltrating’ mainstream society in the 1990s (Boyd 1997: 28). Biopic expert Dennis Bingham argues that if Malcolm X ‘is a conventional biopic, then Malcolm X, and by implication African American culture in general, [had by the 1990s] earned a place in the traditional pantheon of American myth’ (2010: 190). Critics have applauded Washington’s ability to convey Malcolm’s changing perspectives through performance choices. Echoing a perception expressed by many observers, Donalson explains that Washington’s performance makes it possible for audiences to ‘actually see and hear the transformation from petty criminal to a thinking, purposeful man’ (2003: 112). At the same time, his portrayal has not been universally acclaimed, because of the perceived inadequacies of the biopic genre. Writing about the biopic as a ‘respectable genre of very low repute’, Bingham notes that it tends to be a pejorative term, with film biographies ‘often thought of as tedious, pedestrian, and fraudulent’ (2010: 3, 11). Outlining trends from the studio era on, he explains that it was not

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until the 1980s that auteur directors made biopics more respectable with films like Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980), The Last Emperor (Bertolucci, 1987), Tucker: A Man and His Dream (Coppola, 1988) and Malcolm X (ibid.: 19, 20). Qualifying the impact of those films, Bingham notes the ‘glaring disconnect, especially since 1980, between the genre’s withering critical and academic reception and its enduring success with the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other award-giving bodies’ (ibid.: 21). Thus, some black and white audiences, perhaps for different reasons, have likely seen Washington’s Oscar nomination for Malcolm X as more damning than noteworthy – with that accolade and his Cry Freedom nomination prompting various audiences to see him as a star associated with plodding middlebrow movies that lack authenticity. Some critics have valued Washington’s contributions to Malcolm X. Bogle finds that his ‘quick and ready smile, smooth handsome face, and indisputable charm make it hard not to like [Malcolm] or agree with his politics’ (2004: 355). He proposes that Washington made Malcolm’s ‘conversion and straight-arrow drive altogether convincing’ and found a way ‘not to be dwarfed by comparisons with the real man’s charisma, look, and speech patterns’ (ibid.). Seeing the film’s most brilliant moments as ones involving ‘a transformation wrought out of suffering leading to illumination’, Ed Guerrero highlights Washington’s work in the ‘subtle but striking scene when “Red”/Malcolm is thrown into solitary confinement for not answering to the prison-assigned number replacing his name’ (1993: 202). The scene is harrowing; Washington’s enraged growls convey Malcolm’s anger, his agonised cries communicate the young man’s loneliness and storehouse of bitter loss. Turning to another moment of transformation, Guerrero calls attention to Washington’s performance in ‘the contrasting scene to this solitary confinement sequence [which] occurs in another sort of isolation, the shadowy inner sanctum of power, the guarded private office where, on release from prison, the dedicated and cleansed

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Washington embodies the young disciple’s outpouring of emotion in Malcolm X (1992)

disciple Malcolm meets the leader of the Black Muslims’ (1993: 203). The scene offers ‘insight into the often-written-about meetings between guru and acolyte … as Malcolm (Washington) bows, clasps the teacher’s hands, and bursts into silent tears of joy’ (ibid.). In this moment, Washington’s tears are entirely apt; as pieces in the overall structure of his performance, the stream of tears simply and clearly conveys the emotion that has been building throughout Malcolm’s disciplined period of study in prison. Guerrero also highlights the film’s Harlem ‘speakers’ corner’ sequence, which creates a fictional moment that links Malcolm X to other African-American leaders. The sequence starts with Malcolm engaging Harlem residents with the Nation of Islam message of black pride; then it seamlessly pans to ‘reveal the other two speakers [we have been hearing in the background], played by Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther party, and New York black activist the Reverend Al Sharpton’ (1993: 202). Revealing Malcolm’s charisma, the sequence continues with Washington pouring on the charm as Malcolm invites people leaving a Christian church to listen

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Washington personifies the joy of preaching that black is beautiful in Malcolm X

to the Nation of Islam message. It ends with Washington, even more ebullient, sharing the movement’s black is beautiful message with a group of women. Grounded in Washington’s vocal-physical choices, the sequence lucidly conveys Malcolm’s transformation from cagey street-smart conman to centred, devout minister of social justice and redemptive black pride. Embodying that transformation, Washington creates a highly legible and sympathetic character who has found a way to jettison fear and anger to access experiences of empowering joy and peace. The light, mobile, free-flowing qualities of Washington’s gentle, sustained physical and vocal expression throughout the preacher’s sequence visually establish that black is beautiful.

Mainstream stardom: a source of identification for a range of audiences Writing about Washington’s career after Malcolm X, Nickson explains that despite all the acclaim,

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he remained an actor who was slightly removed from the mainstream. His biggest roles had been in pictures that were either very ‘black’ (Malcolm X, Mo’ Better Blues, Mississippi Masala, The Mighty Quinn, Glory; even Cry Freedom could be considered that way), or fairly unsuccessful (Heart Condition, For Queen and Country, Ricochet). (1996: 144)

To advance his career, Washington ‘needed two things to help him up the ladder to superstardom – wider visibility, and a perfect starring vehicle’ (ibid.). Equally important, in the early 1990s Hollywood needed stars like Washington, because an ‘overall drop in profits caused by the disappointing returns of expensive blockbusters, a crash in video rentals, and a deepening national recession resulted in another one of Hollywood’s periodic economic slumps [so that] by 1992, ticket sales were at a fifteen-year low’ (Sung 2008: 256). Scholars have recognised that in response to its financial duress, Hollywood provided new opportunities to a wave of black directors. Yet established African-American actors were also part of Hollywood’s calculations to increase profits. Mainstream cinema’s turn to African-American artists in the 1990s makes sense, for while Blaxploitation films were something of an anomaly in 1970s popular culture, in the 1990s African-American athletes and musicians were playing an increasingly central role in mainstream American culture. Whoopi Goldberg’s Oscar for Ghost and the success of films by Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes brothers, the Hudlin brothers and other black directors might have reflected ‘America’s new obsession with the consumption of difference’, but Hollywood’s need to attract audiences with civil-rights-era values did foster opportunities for African Americans in mainstream cinema (Sung 2008: 257). Hollywood’s interest in African-American film artists provided a way for Washington and his agent Ed Limato to negotiate industrial and cultural conditions in ways that would facilitate Washington’s

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path to stardom. His Oscar award and nominations had established him as a legitimate actor. His leading roles in the 1980s had revealed his appeal as a romantic leading man. The timing was right for Washington to star in (white) A-list prestige pictures such as The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia, which would ensure that his portfolio of characterisations included urban professionals distinguished by their wit, determination, ethical decency and ability to share emotional intimacy with colleagues, friends and family. With his earlier romantic leading roles bucking Hollywood censorship patterns and failing to secure Academy Awards, with starring roles in comedy films going to Eddie Murphy, and with leading parts in urban crime films taken by younger actors, for Washington to become an A-list star, he would need to be cast as the lead in films that were more serious than Eddie Murphy vehicles, less ethnic than the urban crime films and strategically ambiguous about his status as a romantic leading man. The Pelican Brief was the first of many films that offered that opportunity. With prices adjusted for inflation, the film remains the top grossing movie in Washington’s career. The film’s on-screen segregation of the co-stars also exemplifies Hollywood’s ingrained racist conventions. As John H. McWhorter noted at the time: ‘if Julia Roberts had been costarred with absolutely any attractive white male working in Hollywood, a romantic angle would have been assumed [yet] there was America’s black matinée idol … on screen with lovely Julia Roberts … and the two of them are “friends”’ (2000: 108). bell hooks saw the main characters as ‘allied with the existing social structure of white-supremacist patriarchy’ because there was no romance, despite Washington being ‘the black male sex symbol’ of the period (1996: 85). These observations are entirely right. Yet with romance set aside, Washington’s performance as the sharp, quietly determined reporter filled American screens with an image that had no connection to stereotypes of AfricanAmerican men as predators, saints or buffoons.

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By embodying Gray Grantham, an established reporter covering the Supreme Court, whose investigative journalism uncovers a scandal involving the president, Washington also provided a secure point of identification for audiences. His seemingly effortless portrayal of a skilled, tenacious and highly professional black journalist reflected NBA perspectives rather than white expectations about broadcast journalists. One might recall that while the colour barrier had been broken in the 1960s by reporters like Mal H. Goode and Bob Teague, in the 90s broadcast news was still a decidedly white profession. Even today, Ed Bradley’s work at CBS, reporting for 60 Minutes from 1981 until his death in 2006, and Bernard Shaw’s at CNN, as a news anchor from 1980 until he retired in 2001, are the exceptions. The Pelican Brief breaks with those norms, and lends additional validity to Washington’s character by having journalist Edwin Newman (NBC anchor from 1961 to 1984, who broke the news of Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963) portray the TV reporter who interviews Grantham and congratulates him for his investigative journalism. Washington presents Grantham as a man distinguished by his grace, intelligence, humour and inner reserve, and thus well qualified for professional public life. In his co-starring role in Philadelphia, also released in December 1993, Washington again embodies a black urban professional fully capable of navigating situations requiring specialised knowledge and imbued with the cultural wisdom to participate effectively in efforts to secure justice. Some critics have been troubled by the film’s narrative. bell hooks proposes that ‘white patriarchal men are not presented as horribly homophobic in this film [while the] individual who most expresses antigay sentiment is the black lawyer, played by Denzel Washington’ (1996: 87). Linking The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia together, she also finds both suggesting that films can ‘represent black males and other men of color as acceptable, even lovable, only when they are willing to drop everything in their lives and care for the well-being of “superior” white men’ (ibid.).

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Transforming expectations: Washington as a black professional in The Pelican Brief (1993)

Other critics see Washington’s portrayal as challenging social norms. Andrew Sullivan proposes: the film ‘brazenly took a black, straight movie icon and made him grapple with a gay man [and so] Denzel Washington’s role for this reason took far more social bravery than Hanks’s’ (1994: 42). The gap between Hollywood’s censorship-based conventions and audiences’ civil-rights-movement values makes Philadelphia a film that has lent itself to progressive readings. Following Hollywood conventions, the film centres on the private life of Tom Hanks’s character Andrew Beckett, and there is a good deal of screen time featuring Beckett with his lover and the members of his extended family. By comparison, adopting the convention of eliding the personal lives of African-American characters, audiences see Washington’s character, attorney Joe Miller, primarily in his professional capacity; selected scenes feature Miller with his wife and daughter or show characters raising questions about his sexual orientation. Yet the film’s focus on the personal life of Hanks’s character actually makes Washington the regular guy. With Hanks portraying someone identified with non-normative sexuality, Washington

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becomes associated with broad-based social norms. His character offers wide audiences a secure point of identification, as Miller – who goes from being a close-minded ambulance-chasing lawyer to a compassionate and effective agent of social change – comes to embody the film’s narrative arc wherein homophobic beliefs are supplanted by a respect for all individuals’ civil rights. From the start of the trial onwards, Washington’s character is identified with justice: the sequence opens with an aerial shot of the courthouse, which is then joined by the initial words of Miller’s polished but personable opening address to the jury. Washington soon becomes a central figure in the space of the courtroom. When interacting with witnesses, he is relaxed and engaged; his reactions to arguments made by the opposing side are controlled and calm; he is comfortable in his exchanges with Hanks. Washington shows that Miller, a bright but ordinary African-American attorney, belongs in this important space. His cultural experience makes him sensitive to social injustice; his heritage and personal abilities make him effective in American public life. Washington’s quiet professional manner sets up the moment when Miller breaks through courtroom formalities to get the jury to focus on the significance of the case; without apparent reason, he asks a witness if he is a homosexual. Halting the proceedings, the judge requires Miller to approach the bench. Yet rather than address the judge, in a wide, high-angle shot that places Washington centre stage, he faces the courtroom. His voice slightly choked with emotion, he explains that it is time to get the subject of the trial out in the open. Miller lightens the mood, noting how his sexuality has been questioned since the trial began. Continuing, he implores the people in the courtroom to recognise that the case is about the general public’s hatred, loathing and fear of homosexuals. Delivering one of the film’s key speeches in masterful fashion, Washington demonstrates his star appeal and abilities as an actor.

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Washington as the articulate voice of America’s founding principles in Philadelphia (1993)

By effortlessly embodying intelligence and integrity, he makes an African-American character articulating American values a natural choice for a Hollywood film. Washington’s roles in The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia prompted some journalists to see him capturing ‘the pure magnificence of the Black Everyman’ (Edwards 1994: 118). For others, he had broken ‘the final color barrier’ by showing that ‘a minority member can serve [as an audience surrogate] for general audiences’ (Brode 1997: 172). The roles led to more films where his character serves as a point of identification and voice of ethical values. In The Siege, Washington’s portrayal of Anthony Hubbard, the agent heading the FBI’s New York terrorism task force, mobilises his image as consummate professional and trustworthy individual. The film offers various points of access, from the interplay between powerful stars Washington and Annette Bening to the banter between Washington and Tony Shalhoub as an FBI agent ‘who tries to defend his family’s rights as the citizens of New York become increasingly suspicious of the Arab-American population’ (Campbell

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2004: 442). Importantly, The Siege pits Washington against Bruce Willis, who plays an amoral US general. To shape the audience’s view of their high-stakes contest of wills, the film uses Washington’s impeccable image and masterful performance to communicate its message that human rights must always be recognised. Cogently delivering the film’s key speeches, one against torture and the other against martial law, Washington is once again a star closely associated with social justice in America.

Bravura portrayals of black characters in a white world Washington’s depiction of Rubin Carter in The Hurricane, which offers an account of Carter’s life as a promising middleweight boxer who is imprisoned for two decades after being wrongly charged with murder, represents both a continuation and break with his roles in films that established a close connection between Washington and broad-based American values. The 1999 biopic presents Carter in a heroic light, with Washington’s ‘moving, fiercely compacted performance’ seen as inviting audiences ‘to marvel at the resilience of the spirit’ (Ansen and Samuels 2000: 62). In contrast to the black urban professionals in The Pelican Brief, Philadelphia and The Siege, Carter can be compared to Malcolm X, in that the boxer survives injustice by following the path of personal transformation. Washington had worked with Jewison on A Soldier’s Story and, as we have seen, was scheduled to work with him again on Malcolm X before Lee became the director. Articles about The Hurricane reported that Washington had read Carter’s autobiography and expressed ‘his abiding interest in the role whenever it was set to go’ (Mapp 2008: 91). He is said to have formed a friendship with Carter ‘years before making the film’, and to have used ‘no stand-in for the boxing sequences’ (ibid.: 92). When the movie was released,

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reviewers marvelled at the ‘physical transformation he underwent for the film [losing] 40 pounds in a grueling, six-month training regimen’, and reported that he portrayed Carter’s ‘mental and emotional journey’ so convincingly that he had ‘audiences leaving theaters with tears streaming down their faces’ (Whitaker 2000: 156). With biopics seen as serious but pedestrian, The Hurricane reinforced the idea that Washington was a great actor, but one associated with middlebrow fare. Esquire applauded him for creating ‘a human being with a complex and occasionally eccentric inner life out of a character the movie wants to use as a poster’, but then complained: ‘we’ve been down this road before. After Steven [Biko], Malcolm X and now Rubin Carter, what black martyr will he play next?’ (Carson 2000: 62). Echoing that view of biopics, but emphasising the distance between Washington’s work and the material, Mick LaSalle argued: Washington accomplishes an amazing feat of heavy lifting. He is in a picture that, in every way besides his performance, is obvious, manipulative and, at times, corny. But he raises it to the level of importance with an acting job that’s one unbroken chain of intense emotion. (2000)

Highlighting a few scenes in Washington’s portrayal, LaSalle explains: It would take paragraphs to describe fully everything going on in his face in the moment when Hurricane is sentenced to life in prison. It’s a mix of anger, terror, dignity and fatalism – all playing out at once. He has another fathomless moment, late in the film, hearing yet another verdict (that releases him from prison after nineteen years). (Ibid.)

Washington not only communicates Carter’s thoughts and feelings in these very different scenes, he also conveys the boxer’s chain of intense emotion in contrasting scenes that depict his moments of triumph and agonising despair. To lead audiences to

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Washington embodies the boxer’s fierce anger in The Hurricane (1999)

appreciate Carter’s deep sense of accomplishment in comporting himself well in the fight for the middleweight title, the film establishes his strength, skill and fierceness as a boxer in scenes showing his easy wins against Joey Carter (1961) and Emile Griffith (1963). These scenes suggest that his fight with Joey Giardello (1964) will lead to the middleweight title. As the boxers wait for the judges’ decision, Washington’s glaring eyes, clenched mouth and raised chin and arms convey the ferocious anger that has fuelled Carter through this fight, his boxing career and his life as a young black man in America. The film presents the decision in favour of Giardello as an injustice, when in fact it was an accurate assessment of his dominance. Conversely, it minimises the horrors of Carter’s experience in prison that eventually led him to cut himself off from his wife and daughter. Despite that, Washington communicates Carter’s prison experience in compelling terms. The film compresses his long devolution into despair into one dramatic scene where Rubin tells his wife that after losing two trials and having his request

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Washington makes audiences feel Rubin Carter’s anguish in The Hurricane

for an appeal denied, he has accepted that he is going to die in prison. Washington plumbs the experience of emotionally isolating oneself in order to survive so simply and persuasively that Carter’s experience could resonate not only with people who have family and friends incarcerated for no just reason, it could also touch mainstream audiences who respond to melodrama’s validation of human experiences that lie outside the domain of (white, masculine, upper-class) legitimate drama. LaSalle proposes that there is ‘a sense of privilege in seeing such acting’, because it gives audiences the experience of ‘stepping into someone’s soul’ (2000). For middle-class viewers like me, that observation rings true. But because biopics have limited critical value, to enhance his image as an actor, Washington needed to find a vehicle that would counter his association with middlebrow material. Training Day provided that opportunity. The film, which led the box office on its opening weekend (5–7 October 2001), mobilises gangster-film conventions to reveal the lie that the American Dream is within reach of anyone brave enough, smart enough and

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determined enough to seek it. Training Day pits streetwise cop Alonzo Harris (Washington) against novice narcotics officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) as Alonzo rips through a series of last-ditch efforts to avoid taking the fall for a botched drug deal. Alonzo is ‘a villain, to be sure, but his sheer complexity adds to the many different ways of being “black” rather than contributing to another one-dimensional positive or negative stereotype’ (Sung 2008: 264). To create that complexity, Washington ‘plays Alonzo like a con man with a one-two punch’ who has a ‘confident stream of palaver but always a hidden agenda’ (Graham 2001: C1). The interplay between the veteran and rookie officers can lead audiences to change their perception of the characters over time. However, given the ‘charm, sexiness, intelligence, and beauty … Washington can project into a role’, at the outset especially, they may also find ‘Alonzo’s morality understandable, alluring, and worthy of consideration’ (Flory 2008: 255). Early in the film, Alonzo and Jake meet at a greasy diner. From the scene’s opening moments on, the actors’ gestures and expressions establish a contrast between their characters: Hawke blithely enters the diner, using a light and free-flowing gait, whereas Washington starts in a secure position, his posture strong and bound. When they sit opposite one another, Washington maintains a more guarded posture than Hawke, who squirms throughout the scene. Washington uses his hands, arms and shoulders as a forceful coordinated unit, whereas Hawke employs flimsy, isolated gestures. At times, Washington darts forward, almost lunging at Hawke, who glances from side to side as if looking for a way to escape. Transforming the diner booth into a bunker from which he fires direct shots, Washington sits motionless before and after his gestural and vocal jabs to show the veteran officer observing how the young man deals with his attacks. The irregular tempo in Washington’s movements reveals that Alonzo is determined to keep any and all challengers off balance.

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He snaps his newspaper taut, suddenly taps the pistols in his shoulder holster together and abruptly replaces a smooth flow of dialogue with sharp, minced words punched out at Hawke. He will suddenly raise an eyebrow, drop into a whisper or fix Hawke in a cold stare. By comparison, Hawke’s physical and vocal expression takes on increasingly sustained qualities. With a glazed look coming into his eyes, he inserts longer and longer pauses between his words and phrases; replacing nervous glances with open-eyed stares, he shows that Jake is stunned and overwhelmed by the encounter. The difference between the weight and degree of resistance in the actors’ movements also establishes the characters’ contrasting temperaments. Washington’s strong movements, which emerge from an inner reserve of energy and determination, establish Alonzo as someone who has learned to anticipate resistance to his objectives. His voice deep and full, Washington shows that Alonzo enjoys his role of authority. His forceful movements, which fight against the downward pull of gravity, reveal that the veteran has a clear objective in his initial meeting with the novice; as his movements become even stronger over the course of the scene, it is evident that Alonzo’s immediate and long-term intentions are to dominate the bright young rookie. Although audiences see Alonzo bully and manipulate Jake from their first encounter onwards, Washington’s choices here and elsewhere not only give his character credibility, they also make Alonzo mesmerising. Noting this, Dan Flory observes that for ‘a good portion of the narrative … the film balances Jake’s critical perceptions with Alonzo’s allure, and keeps the audience anxiously uncertain which it prefers, appealing to them first one way, then another regarding which character’s morality they prefer’ (2008: 256). Driving the narrative forward, Washington’s acting choices show that Alonzo has learned that he can never be satisfied with anything less than all-out victory over every challenger. In scene after scene, he uses advancing movements, gestures that expand into the space around

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Washington in Training Day (2001): a dangerous man striving to survive in a perilous world

him and line readings marked by increasing speed, pressure and directness. Even at moments of rest, he is ready for battle. Focusing on the opposition between the streetwise black veteran and naïve white rookie, Leonard proposes that the film suggests that social problems are not caused by ‘the police or even the state but [by] the infiltration of these institutions by [black] criminals’ (2006: 55). He believes that in the film, ‘whiteness (and therefore the police, the state) signifies protection, heroism, and kindness’, whereas ‘state violence [is reduced] to the criminality of a black cop’ (ibid.). He sees Training Day erasing ‘the inherent violence of an increasingly powerful police state, [and] focusing instead on the inherent criminality of blackness’ (ibid.: 59). By comparison, Flory finds that while ‘many viewers no doubt … see Alonzo through the stereotypical lens of the black criminal’, the film arguably ‘offers viewers an evil black character whose badness is due to negative human qualities rather than racial ones’ (2008: 258, 257). Alonzo was once ‘a decent cop who wanted to do some good’, so that at the film’s conclusion, there is a sense in which he ‘too is a victim and worthy of our compassion’ (ibid.: 256). When Jake takes possession of the million dollars

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Alonzo has stolen, he not only eliminates Alonzo’s ‘last chance for surviving the moral decay of which he has become so much a part’, he also sentences him to death at the hands of the drug dealers who had given Alonzo one last day to resolve the botched deal in Las Vegas (ibid.). In Flory’s view, Training Day makes the point that highranking officials ‘bear ultimate responsibility for the moral decay that pervades life on the streets’ (2008: 257). Emphasising the ‘moral laziness and indifference’ of the powerbrokers Alonzo refers to as ‘the three wise men’, Flory finds them responsible, because they give Alonzo ‘permission to act as he does, as long as they receive a cut of the take’ (ibid.). Taking that point a step farther, one could argue that when Alonzo has a brief meeting with the corrupt officials (played by Tom Berenger, Harris Yulin and Raymond J. Barry), Washington’s performance not only confirms that their immorality is the ultimate source of the problem, it also reveals that Alonzo has patterned his actions on theirs – simply as a way of surviving. By this point in his career, Alonzo has stopped worrying about violating people’s rights, ‘so long as it cannot be detected, fattens his conviction record, advances his career, and supports him in achieving his self-centered personal aims, which he nevertheless persists in believing are, in the grand scheme of things, just’ (Flory 2008: 255). Yet Washington lets audiences see that the cop has learned all of this from his white superiors. His overly expressive ‘casual’ demeanour in the scene with the officials calls attention to Alonzo’s ‘performance’ of being equal to these ruthless masters of the justice system. Signalling the fear behind Alonzo’s pretence that he has things under control, Washington’s frozen smile and uncertain glances reveal the impossible predicament Alonzo has always been in – that as a black cop he will never be seen as anything other than a threat to white power and so is granted licence only as long as he serves its purpose.

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Washington as the black cop rightly afraid of the ‘wise men’ who control his destiny in Training Day

Academy Award-winning actor in the era of New Black Aesthetics Accepting the Oscar for his performance in Training Day, Washington recognised Hollywood’s business, aesthetic and cultural dimensions as he thanked: Warner Bros. President and COO Alan Horn and studio executive Lorenzo di Bonaventura for supporting the film; Antoine Fuqua, the film’s director, who Washington described as ‘a brilliant young filmmaker, African American filmmaker’; and Ethan Hawke, who Washington referred to as ‘his accomplice in crime’ to show his awareness that his Oscar-winning performance had emerged from their combined commitment as theatre-trained actors. Acknowledging the support of people closest to him, Washington also thanked his ‘beautiful’ wife and children, and his agent, described by Washington as the ‘beautiful’ Ed Limato and hometown boy from Mount Vernon. In addition, Washington paid tribute to Sidney Poitier, who, earlier in the ceremony, had received an award that recognised his accomplishments as an artist and a person. In mock frustration,

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Washington noted that, after ‘chasing Sidney for forty years’, because Poitier had received the Honorary Award that evening, he remained ahead of Washington, just when Washington might have caught up to him by becoming the second African American to win an Oscar for Best Actor. Washington followed the jest by saying: ‘I’ll always be following in your footsteps; there’s nothing I would rather do, sir.’ Washington’s comments echo points he had made in honouring Poitier a decade earlier, when Poitier was given an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1992. In his speech for the AFI event, Washington describes meeting Poitier in 1977, when he was in Los Angeles looking for work after graduating from Fordham. Seeing Poitier in a bookstore, Washington worked up the courage to introduce himself, and Poitier took time to offer advice. Describing the significance of that meeting, Washington explains that as a young actor, Poitier meant everything to him, because ‘he was a positive example of elegance and good taste, a source of pride for millions of African Americans, and a great movie star appreciated by millions of people around the world’. Thanking Poitier for the example he provided for him and other African-American actors, Washington concludes his speech by saying: ‘I love you. I respect you. I imitate you.’ Washington has often been associated with Poitier. Writing about Washington in The Hurricane, Tom Carson notes: through a combination of America’s abiding racial hang-ups and his own virtuous impulses, he’s gotten stuck being the new Sidney Poitier for an audience that neither remembers the old one nor flocks to see his replacement, yet has been slow to overcome its uses for the type. (2000: 62)

Discussing the same period in Washington’s career, Bogle finds that ‘in films as diverse as The Pelican Brief, Philadelphia, and The Hurricane’, Washington emerged ‘as the movies’ most distinctive African American leading man since Sidney Poitier’ (2004: 324–5).

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Bogle argues that Washington ‘gave backbone to one film after another with taut, controlled, and often remarkable performances [that] reminded audiences of some Sidney Poitier heroes’, because the characters were ‘thoughtful, committed, honest men, almost paragons of decency and virtue’ (ibid.: 424). As with Poitier, audiences ‘waited for that key moment in a Washington film … when he exploded in anger and righteous indignation’; Bogle notes that while Washington ‘did less of a slow burn than Poitier [both actors could] handle such scenes without resorting to histrionics or melodramatics’ (ibid.). Washington’s reference to imitating Poitier reflects his open acknowledgment of the positive influence of role models, and points to one aspect of his working methods as an actor. Describing the after-school hours he spent at the Boys Club in Mount Vernon, Washington discusses his early role model, facility supervisor Billy Thomas. He explains: ‘I’d catch myself trying to walk like Billy, trying to shoot a foul shot like Billy, trying to carry myself like Billy, trying to treat other people with the same respect and dignity he might offer’ (Washington 2006: 10). He adds: Even his handwriting was fascinating to me. He was an artist, and you could see it in the way he signed his name. There was a real flourish to it, and to this day I look at my signature and think back to how I used to copy Billy Thomas. It’s in the way I sign my name. It’s in the way I write a letter. It’s in most everything I do. (Ibid.)

Washington’s comments hint at his observational abilities, which have been crucial to his success in portraying characters who have their own repertoire of physical and vocal expression. Paying careful attention to people’s postures, poses, gaits and mannerisms, Washington has been able to build performances that are valued for their variety and the degree to which he disappears into the characters. Studying people’s behaviour to identify the

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values informing their interactions with others, Washington has also developed superior insight into characters’ given circumstances, objectives and the actions they employ to achieve their objectives. His open admission of imitating role models does not suggest a lack of imagination on Washington’s part, but instead reveals his willingness to invest the time and effort required to develop characters with rich backstories and complex inner lives, and to painstakingly build performances that communicate a character’s thoughts and feelings as they change moment by moment. As a theatre-trained actor embarking on a career in Hollywood in the 1980s, Washington could create performances using material from a range of sources. Like others in the New Black Aesthetic generation, Washington did not ‘need to deny or suppress any part of [his] complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people or black’ (Ellis 2003: 189). This was possible because ‘Washington’s heroes, at least on the surface, were supposedly living testaments to a free and open society’ (Bogle 2004: 424). Building characterisations from a host of observations and insights was also facilitated by Washington’s ability and determination to create individual characters rather than generic types. As he explains: ‘to have any kind of universal effect [as an actor], you have to be specific [and] very honest. As an actor, I work on that probably more than anything else [because within the] given world you have re-created, you have to try to be honest and truthful’ (Lee 1992: 116). Describing his use of script analysis as the starting point for building characters distinguished by their own individual circumstances and goals, Washington explains: I was fortunate enough to be taught as a young actor that it’s about the art. It’s about the work. The play’s the thing. To interpret the work. To service the play. Not to force the play to my will, not to bend it to make it a Denzel Washington vehicle, but to somewhat lose – and hopefully find – myself in the character and in the work. (Ibid.: 117)

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Washington’s drive to craft individualised characters rather than social types reflects the ‘heightened sense of individual autonomy’ integral to the New Black Aesthetic (Boyd 1997: 26). This focus rejects pronouncements about the death of authorship and the view that environment determines character (Fox-Genovese 1987: 163). Washington’s depiction of Malcolm X and Rubin Carter as individuals rather than abstractions, and of Gray Grantham and Joe Miller as integral members of American society, paved the way for the Academy Award Washington garnered for his fully realised portrait of Alonzo Harris. Washington’s Oscar for Best Actor secured his stardom. Given the presence of conflicting cultural-aesthetic values, his work in mainstream, critically acclaimed productions engendered dismissive responses from audiences interested in films at the margins or violent enough to offend middlebrow taste. To trace Washington’s ongoing negotiation of cultural norms, including ones that have made his black urban professionals and biopic characters uncool, the two following chapters look at his work in various genres, including action films and detective thrillers that subvert noir norms by ‘recasting the relation between light and dark on the screen as a metaphor for making black people and their cultures visible’ (Diawara 1993b: 263).

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4 ONE OF AMERICA’S FAVOURITE MOVIE STARS

Acting accolades have confirmed Washington’s status as a legitimate actor. Positive appraisals by audiences have made him a star. Washington’s popularity is reflected in the Harris Polls that show him to be America’s favourite movie star in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2012, and one of America’s top ten favourite stars every year but two since 1995. His box-office record confirms his star appeal. He has starred in more than ten films for which the adjusted gross domestic theatrical box office is greater than $100 million. In descending order they are The Pelican Brief (1993), Remember the Titans (2000), Crimson Tide (1995), American Gangster (2007), Philadelphia (1993), Safe House (2012), Training Day (2001), Inside Man (2006), Courage under Fire (1996), The Bone Collector (1999), Man on Fire (2004) and John Q (Cassavetes, 2002); the strong opening of The Equalizer (2014) led Variety to proclaim that Washington ‘may exert the purest form of star power in movies today’ (Lang 2014). This level of commercial success over three decades suggests that audiences trust Washington to deliver engaging entertainment. While Washington’s box-office record reflects well-funded marketing campaigns and wide theatrical releases, it also depends on him being ‘a high-quality brand’ (Ebiri 2013). That status has emerged from Washington’s association with well-produced films. It also reflects the perception that he is a star who delivers great performances no matter the material. Articulating this view, Iverem

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explains: if in ‘some future world we can only imagine, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences creates a “Saved Your Ass” award, there is no doubt that Denzel Washington would be a winner year after year’ (2007: 333). Discussing Training Day, The Hurricane and John Q, she asks: ‘How many times have we seen Denzel spin gold (and an Oscar nomination) out of straw? How many piddling to simply less-than-perfect films … has he raised from the realm of so-so?’ (ibid.). Iverem’s questions point to the fact that Washington’s portrayals resonate with people looking for great acting. As the critical and commercial success of programmes like Breaking Bad (AMC 2008–13) suggests, contemporary audiences appreciate compelling performances. They value portrayals built on careful preparation for the physical and vocal embodiment of emotion and are interested in work by actors who immerse themselves into each of their characters. The success of well-crafted portrayals by Washington and other star performers shows that audiences remain interested in performances grounded in acting principles established by Stanislavsky and taught by Method-acting interpreters like Stella Adler, who emphasised that ‘emotion should come from the actor’s commitment to the [character’s] circumstances’ (Barton 2006: 159). Washington’s ability to craft emotionally engaging performances in commercially successful films is now an integral part of his star image. This chapter examines his work in a collection of Hollywood films to illustrate the synergy between his high-quality brand, his films’ commercial success and his image as one of America’s favourite movie stars. As with his biopics and Oscarwinning or nominated performances, Washington’s roles in genre films have met with varied responses that reflect audiences’ disparate ways of valuing performances. Putting it in schematic terms, audiences who value Washington’s work in historical dramas see his roles in action films, such as those directed by Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123 and

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Unstoppable), as compromising his acting talent. By contrast, audiences who find Washington’s historical dramas uninteresting are engaged by his action thrillers. Describing Washington’s portrayal in American Gangster as one of the best in 2007, Mike D’Angelo writes: It’s hard to recall now that Denzel Washington began his movie career firmly in the Poitier mold, playing saintly, noble victims in message films like Cry Freedom and Glory [because] it’s when he taps into his dark side, unleashing buried rage and resentment, that he comes most fully alive. (2007)

The marketing of Washington’s action thrillers reveals a great deal about the Hollywood film industry and its assumptions about mainstream audiences’ taste; while distributors gave The Mighty Quinn, Mo’ Better Blues and Mississippi Masala limited releases, seeing them as suitable only for ‘ethnic’ audiences, the politically safe buddy-film aspect of Safe House and 2 Guns led Hollywood to invest in wide releases (opening in more than 3,000 theatres). His work in action films reflects opportunities created by Training Day and by the success of Will Smith and Samuel L. Jackson in Hollywood blockbusters. Washington’s participation in action films also represents his negotiation of industry challenges and an ongoing diversification of his professional portfolio. In the 1980s, Washington and Ed Limato effectively managed his career by combining romantic leading roles with work in substantial historical dramas. In the 1990s, they mixed Washington’s work in Oscar-worthy biopics with portrayals in crossover dramas like The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia. Since 2000, Washington’s portfolio has included films ranging from American Gangster to The Great Debaters in 2007 and from Safe House to Flight in 2012. The sustained series of substantial opening grosses for Washington’s films began in 2000 with Remember the Titans. The opening weekend for fifteen releases, including The Book of Eli and The Equalizer, exceeded $20 million, with American Gangster and

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Safe House each grossing $40 million or more. As of 2014, the only films to fall below the $20 million opening weekend mark were Antwone Fisher and The Great Debaters, which had limited, indie-film releases, and Out of Time, which made $20 million during its opening week. Remember the Titans introduced a wide audience to Washington’s appeal as a tough but trustworthy stand-up guy, an image confirmed by films like Courage under Fire, John Q and The Taking of Pelham 123. Released a year after The Hurricane and a year before Training Day, Remember the Titans also functions as a touchstone in his career, because in combination with the two other films, it reveals Washington’s range as an actor. In contrast to boxer Rubin Carter, high-school football coach Herman Boone has mastered the ability to channel his anger; Washington’s depiction of Boone features various moments that function as asides, when he communicates to audiences alone that Boone is annoyed or enraged. Moreover, whereas narcotics officer Alonzo Harris is brazen and erratic, Boone is self-disciplined and even-keeled; Washington’s portrayal of the coach includes a number of instances when he lets audiences, but not other characters, see Boone shaking off his anger and moving on. Remember the Titans, by African-American screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard and based on actual events, is set in 1971 in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside the US capital. Iverem notes that it occasionally falls into ‘Disney corn and spam’, but that in contrast to ‘Hollywood stories about the Black experience that are told through the eyes of Whites, Remember the Titans is told primarily through the story of a Black man’ (2007: 234). Boone is hired as an assistant coach at T. C. Williams High after the school board institutes integration. His initial meeting with the school’s well-liked and successful coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) takes place in Yoast’s office, just after he has kept his players from joining other whites who are engaged in a street confrontation with African Americans

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One of Washington’s telling asides to the audience in Remember the Titans (2000)

who are protesting the murder of a black teenage boy by a white store owner. Yoast, his assistant coach Herb Tyrell (Brett Rice) and the revved-up players bustle into the office. Just as one of the boys loudly states, ‘I don’t want to play with any of those animals’, they all see that a black man (Boone) is in the room, calmly holding a football that is among the trophies in Yoast’s office. Tyrell immediately goes on the offensive, demanding to know, ‘who are you?’ To show us that Boone is going to stand his ground, Washington explains in precise and measured tones, ‘I’m Herman Boone, the new assistant coach.’ Tyrell remains determined to remove Boone from a space that he believes is for whites only. To get rid of the interloper, he tries to incite a heated response by asking Boone, ‘Why aren’t you outside with all your little friends hollerin’?’ To let the audience, but not the

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characters, know that Boone is deeply offended by Tyrell’s racist question, Washington raises the football he’s been holding to his chest, and grips it tightly with both hands. Then, proceeding quickly to the next unit of action, Washington communicates Boone’s ability to move past anger and into productive dialogue by lowering the football with his right hand, giving it a quick shake of his wrist and placing it down firmly on the office’s interior window ledge. The series of gestures that Washington crafts into his performance here exemplify the reason why he is an actor who engages audience interest, for these small details make the character legible, and immediately establish how Boone will negotiate the crises he must confront, survive and resolve. Washington’s attention to craft confirms his high-quality brand and ensures that the audience will encounter a good performance.

Synergy between critical acclaim and box-office success Like other actors, Washington’s performances consist of observable, constantly changing qualities in his postures, gestures, facial expressions, vocal inflections, intonations, pronunciation choices, and so on. Yet as a star performer, his characterisations are also valued for their trademark movie-star moments. Watching a performance by this star with leading roles in more than forty films, an audience member might see a moment in one of Washington’s portrayals as ‘integrated into the dramatic fiction or … as independent and autonomous from the surrounding players and circumstances’ (McDonald 1998: 183). For some audiences, a passing moment in a Washington performance will focus attention on the character’s experience. For others, it might be valued because it involves a ‘reproduction of certain physical and vocal traits’, which audiences recognise as a ‘systematic preservation of continuities in

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the body and voice to accomplish similar meanings and effects across a series of film roles’ (McDonald 2012: 66). Capturing that second form of audience engagement, Iverem explains: ‘The purpose of Hollywood’s star system is amply illustrated by Déjà Vu. As soon as we see our main man Denzel Washington coming to save the day in a fresh shirt and cool shades, it’s ON’ (2007: 586). Amplifying her observation about Washington’s entrance in the film, she notes: ‘We (especially women) know, at the very moment of eye-to-screen contact, that this is a movie we are at least willing to try’ (ibid.). Washington is effective in making star entrances that succinctly introduce the individual character and capture audience attention. His wistful, wordless arrival at the scene of the ferry-boat explosion in Déjà Vu shows agent Doug Carlin (from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) to be serious, reflective, even emotionally vulnerable, but for Inside Man, also released in 2006, Washington quickly establishes detective Keith Frazier as a sharp, streetwise character who belongs to the fast-paced environment of New York. In a sequence that starts in the police station and ends with Frazier and his junior partner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) arriving at the bank where robbers are holding hostages, Washington’s rapid, low-volume line deliveries require us to pay close attention to him. He also inserts an open-eyed smile and whimsical tip of his head into Frazier’s stream of tough talk, thereby lending a bit of movie-star charm to the character. Washington keeps audiences focused on him by filling his performance with an ongoing series of small gestures. As Frazier and his partner leave the station, Washington adjusts and checks the brim of his hat. He folds his suit jacket over his arm, straightens both cufflinks and briskly trots down the steps to his car. When the detectives arrive at the bank, Washington keeps our attention because he remains in constant motion. Striding forward confidently, he puts on his tailored jacket, adjusts his shirtsleeves, hitches his shoulders together, checks his belt, flicks his hand to punctuate phrases and

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speaks in short, rapid bursts. These choices establish Frazier as the man in charge of the crime scene and Washington as the star who will take audiences through the film. Yet Washington’s star-performer status does not rest simply on his ability to craft performances that reveal character and secure audience attention. In his Oscar-nominated portrayal in Flight, Washington’s performance seems to have created ‘an awareness of [the] performer’s skill and talents and how effectively they are being used’ (Lovell 2003: 264–5). David Denby notes that the film ‘avoids any expressionistic recreations of an alcoholic’s world’, allowing audiences instead to look at pilot Whip Whitaker ‘from the outside’, with Washington working in long takes and without voiceover (2012: 94). Denby observes that ‘Washington allows his body to go puffy and slack. His gaze is unfocussed, his walk loose and shambling, except when Whip does some coke, at which point Washington moves in a confident, swinging lope’ (ibid.). Washington makes us see that the pilot is proud of his accomplishments, but that there is also ‘narcissism’ and ‘self-pity’ behind Whitaker’s pride (ibid.). Comparing Washington’s portrayal to Laurence Olivier’s bravura performance as the waning vaudeville star in The Entertainer (Richardson, 1960), Denby highlights Washington’s ability to keep audiences absorbed in the troubled character’s experiences, so that we are caught between ‘dismayed pity [for Whitaker] and a longing to see him punished’ (ibid.). Denby concludes: ‘Only a great actor could have pulled off this balancing act’ (ibid.). Washington’s high-quality brand contributed to the film’s opening weekend success. Ray Subers points out that Flight, a film produced for $31 million, ‘had an exceptional opening weekend’, because it secured the second highest gross at ‘$24.9 million from just 1,884 locations’ (2012b). He notes that Flight’s opening was even higher than Washington’s ‘recent thrillers The Taking of Pelham 123 ($23.4 million) and Unstoppable ($22.7 million)’, and that Flight’s success was ‘a stark rebuttal to Hollywood’s belief that in

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order to open a movie successfully, you need to get it into as many theaters as possible (which often means over 3,000 locations)’ (ibid.). Noting that ‘Flight was appealing enough to adult audiences that they sought it out at its 1,884 theaters’, Subers explains, ‘what this comes down to is if you have the goods, you don’t need to force the movie into every possible theater’ (ibid.). Washington’s high-quality brand also facilitated the film’s commercial success during its fifteen-week theatrical run (which led to a $93 million domestic gross and another $68 million during its international release), because Washington’s performance quickly became seen as ‘a strong contender to win the Best Actor race’ (Stone 2012). Award Daily blogger Sasha Stone explained: ‘Washington is the kind of actor people know and love so much that he really can just go by the single name, Denzel’; his performance elevates ‘what would otherwise be a by-the-numbers drunk-to-rehab movie’ (ibid.). Stone emphasised that Washington not only ‘commands the frame’, he also ‘digs in deeply to the role, disappearing into it’ (ibid.). Her publicity piece even featured a succinct analysis of the film; she writes: Whip Whitaker is a liar and a drunk but somewhere in there is a good person, which is probably why you continue to root for him as his life is taking the same kind of plunge the airplane took – something wrong with the plane, the resourceful pilot saved it. Something wrong with the man? The resourceful part of him helps to save him. It’s an obvious metaphor but a powerful one. (Ibid.)1

The critical acclaim for Washington’s performance in American Gangster seems to have contributed to that film’s commercial success as well. Brian Johnson argued that the film put Washington ‘on the Oscar radar again’ (2007: 60). Reviewer Peter Travers explained: Call it the black Scarface or the Harlem Godfather or just one hell of an exciting movie, but the fact-based … American Gangster is already looking like a major

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awards contender [and] Denzel Washington looms like a colossus as notorious drug lord Frank Lucas. (2007)

Noting aspects of Washington’s performance, Travers explains that it is ‘in the still, watchful center of his volcanic performance [that] you’ll find the measure of a dangerous man’ (ibid.). Echoing that, Mick LaSalle observes: ‘As Lucas, Washington doesn’t do much smiling, and when he does smile, his eyes don’t … Washington pins his performance on Frank’s cold-blooded business ethic, and he makes it work’ (2007). Highlighting an aspect of Washington’s characterisation found in many of the actor’s portrayals, Troy Patterson calls attention to Washington’s ‘restraint in revealing only the subtlest shades of what’s on his characters’ minds’ (2007). Expanding on that, Stanley Kauffmann notes that by maintaining the same controlled demeanour whether executing a rival or acting as ‘a family man and a square business dealer’, Washington actually intensifies Lucas’s dangerousness (2007: 32). Washington’s portrayal breaks with conventions found in other gangster films. Johnson notes that American Gangster is ‘in a different class from the blaxploitation films of the early ’70s … and from the current gangsta rap cliché’ (2007: 60). Kauffmann juxtaposes Washington’s portrayal with the ‘swaggering thugs’ played by James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson (2007: 31). Washington’s taciturn depiction also contrasts with the bravado of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone or James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. The closest parallel is with Al Pacino’s tamped-down portrayal of Michael Corleone, yet Washington’s performance is less compressed, less suggestive of inner rage under control, more guarded, more steely, more shrouded in layer upon layer of mask. His characterisation suggests that Lucas’s experience as a black man in America has required him to be more wary. American Gangster differs from films like Coppola’s Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990), Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990) or Carlito’s Way (De Palma, 1993) because, as Washington points out in

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an interview, ‘there are no black people in any of them [whereas American Gangster] is a Harlem story about a guy who was a kingpin’ (Brown 2007). Washington establishes Lucas’s extreme circumspection by making his face into a mask that rarely breaks from its impassive expression. However, to convey Lucas’s thoughts and feelings to the audience alone, Washington crafts expressive gestures into his hand movements. At the funeral reception for his mentor, Lucas sees that a glass set down by his rival will leave a water mark on a table; Washington’s smooth but decisive movement of removing the glass and wiping the water with his handkerchief shows us that Lucas will protect his mentor’s interests. To let audiences alone see that Lucas is furious about being confronted by his rival in his local diner, Washington’s face and voice remain expressionless, but he over-salts his breakfast, pours streams of sugar in his coffee and clangs his spoon against his cup as he stirs his drink. After Lucas executes his rival in front of his brothers and people on the street, Washington conveys his character’s determination to take full control of the neighbourhood by flamboyantly wiping his hands on a napkin when he sits back down at the head of the table in the diner, surrounded by his dumbstruck family. Throughout the film, Washington’s hands reveal Lucas’s emotions, with his closed fists suggesting his need to protect himself, his outstretched hands indicating a sense of wellbeing, and his emphatic pointing gestures conveying Lucas’s desire to command a situation. American Gangster’s success provided a basis for promoting several of Washington’s subsequent films. Analysts see mainstream audiences as especially interested in films like Training Day, American Gangster and Safe House, where Washington plays an intense and engaging antagonist. Subers notes that Safe House ‘clearly positioned Denzel’s character as the sort of clever, enigmatic “bad guy” that audiences love to root for’; as he points out, this ‘character was incorporated into a Bourne-esque plot surrounding an agent gone

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Washington conveys Frank’s methods of masking emotion in American Gangster (2007)

rogue [with] a dash of Training Day (Denzel vs. rookie) worked in as well’ (2012a.). Safe House had broad appeal; its distributor reported that in an audience ‘evenly split between men and women, 62 percent were 30 years of age or older [and] the ethnic breakdown was 38 percent African American, 31 percent Caucasian, and 23 percent Hispanic’ (ibid.). The packed audience at the opening-night screening of Safe House that I attended in Toledo, Ohio, was diverse and there because of Washington. During the early scenes that introduced the clever interplay between Washington and Ryan Reynolds, giggles swept through the crowd in response to trademark Washington expressions: quick wide grin, raised eyebrows, head cocked to the side, drop in vocal register to lend a comedic twist to mocking comments. Marketing might have drawn people into the theatre, but Washington provided the satisfying experience. His star performance was appreciated because it involved a ‘reproduction of certain physical and vocal traits’, and enjoyed because people could see a ‘systematic preservation of continuities in the body

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and voice to accomplish similar meanings and effects across a series of film roles’ (McDonald 2012: 66).

A star performer’s contributions to action films In addition to offering superhero franchises (Spider-Man, Batman, Marvel Comic films), fantasy franchises (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings), and action/thriller franchises (Die Hard, Bourne), Hollywood attracts audiences to nonfranchise films with stars like Washington. Marketing campaigns for action films starring Washington consistently promote the idea that audiences will witness the performance of an Oscar-winning actor. That strategy points to the integral connections between Washington’s high-quality brand, the success of his films and his favourite movie-star status. As my anecdotal evidence about Safe House might suggest, films with frenetic sound/image combinations essentially require an actor like Washington, who is able to establish and maintain a connection with audiences by crafting performances that combine star turns and moments of expressivity. Washington’s work in commercial action cinema goes back to films like Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide. As a 1990s film, Scott’s submarine thriller has more in common with his snappy fighter-pilot film Top Gun (1986) than with his moody but frenetic sci-fi love story Déjà Vu. In addition, with Crimson Tide’s first half and conclusion shot and edited as a drama, the crisp performances by Washington, as newly minted Lieutenant Commander Hunter, and Gene Hackman, as hard-bitten Captain Ramsey, share common ground with Washington’s work in The Pelican Brief. Echoing that political thriller and Philadelphia, in Crimson Tide Washington once again portrays a black urban professional, who is able to navigate the white world and is inspired by a code of ethics that allows him to resist taking the easy or subservient way out.

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While Crimson Tide includes action sequences, the central characters’ philosophical conflict takes priority. When the film was released, Owen Gleiberman proposed that what makes Crimson Tide a riveting pop drama is the way the [possibility and consequences of nuclear] conflict comes to the fore in the battle between [the] two men [and that] what holds us is the sight of two superlatively fierce actors working at the top of their game. (1995)

Echoing that idea in a retrospective piece, Emily Wilson explains that Washington and Hackman ‘give blistering performances in this now classic submarine film, and the tension that crackles between them comes to an explosive head in the central “I cannot concur” scene, in which the two go shouty crackers at each other’ (2013). Wilson notes that ‘Washington, cleverly, never pitches his voice above “mildly irate” until the big scene. He is mostly soft, civil and smooth as silk, although you’re sure there’s steel beneath’ (2013). In the characters’ initial confrontation in the officers’ mess, Captain Ramsey belittles Hunter for saying that war itself is the primary threat in the nuclear age. But Hunter stands his ground; Washington speaks quietly and firmly to show that Hunter has considered the matter carefully, and so is prepared to hold his position, even if it differs from the captain’s. Their second, more strained confrontation is sparked by Ramsey’s order to run a weapons systems readiness test moments after Hunter has extinguished a huge fire in the submarine’s galley. After Hunter questions Ramsey’s judgment by quietly mentioning during the drill that the fire might flare up again, Ramsey calls Hunter into his room to badger him into agreeing that he would henceforth unquestioningly preserve a unified chain of command. Washington maintains a professional demeanour throughout the scene, but his glaring eyes, clenched lips, rigid posture and shifts of weight let audiences see that Hunter must control his rage against

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Washington portrays another forthright NBA urban professional in Crimson Tide (1995)

Ramsey, who, in Hunter’s eyes, prizes control of the ship over the safety of the men. For audiences familiar with Washington’s early films, Hunter’s anger, dignity and self-possession are reminiscent of other figures (Malcolm X, and Peterson in A Soldier’s Story) associated with Black Nationalist pride. Washington has designed his work in more recent action films to interface with often extremely kinetic camera and editing choices. The humour or pathos that he and other actors convey in the comparatively quiet scenes is squeezed in between action sequences that allow little if any expression of complex emotion. Crafted to suit the productions’ overall design, performances in explosion-heavy films have an irregular rhythm that is marked by hyperbolic shifts in expressivity. Like other actors, Washington truncates expression in action sequences, but conveys emotion when a pause in the film allows for it. In these films, actors’ portrayals differ from performances where expression of emotion builds and ebbs more slowly; here they are required to communicate their characters’ inner experiences intermittently, in moments when the emotion they project is often intensified by exaggerated composition, editing and mise-en-scène selections.

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Directors’ rapid ‘change of image-content … to maintain heightened levels of visual stimulus on the [large and] small screen [might] have been learned from formats such as advertising and music videos’ (G. King 2003b: 177). However, performers’ work reveals the influence of Bruce Willis’s comic portrayals in the Die Hard films (1988, 1990, 1995, 2007, 2013) and of performances in Hong Kong blood operas starting with The Killer (Woo, 1989). When The Killer was released in the US, critics described it as ‘Magnificent Obsession remade by Sam Peckinpah’, and ‘an unlikely fusion of The Wild Bunch and Dark Victory’ (Hoberman 1990: 33; McDonagh 1993: 47). Maitland McDonagh contrasted its ‘bizarrely stressed acting’, where ‘individual performers slip back and forth between low-key naturalism and exaggerated theatricalism’, with realistically modulated performances in Hollywood films (ibid.: 48). As Washington’s work in more recent Tony Scott films indicates, actors now create performances that shift quickly from inexpressive to highly expressive in order to coordinate with the films’ increasingly dazzling cinematic effects. In the Washington–Scott collaborations, Washington crafts minimalist performances punctuated with moments of intense expressivity. His body and voice ground the films’ flamboyant sound/image combinations, and convey engaging emotion in intermittent moments when filmic choices support and foreground his physical and vocal expression. By crafting bizarrely stressed performances, Washington keeps audiences emotionally engaged in Scott’s films, which work well on large and small screens because they generate spectacle through ‘rapid montage-effect editing [that is] combined with “unstable” camera movements designed to create an impression of subjective immersion in the action, [and] an “impact aesthetic” often increased by the practice of propelling debris and other objects out toward the viewer’ (G. King 2003b: 177). Man on Fire (2004) reveals how Washington’s facial expressions, poses, movements and gestures anchor the meaning of

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scenes that generate spectacle even in ostensibly quiet moments. Former CIA assassin John Creasy (Washington) has been hired to be the bodyguard for a young American girl (Dakota Fanning) who lives with her mother and stepfather in Mexico City. His job is to ensure that Pita does not become another kidnapping-for-ransom victim, but she sees him as a new friend. Early in the film, Creasy harshly stops her attempts to chat with him as he drives her home from school. Pita’s mother asks him about the incident in the following scene; Washington’s bound posture and gruff vocal expression make it clear that Creasy wants no emotional connection. Creasy is then left alone to reflect on his self-imposed isolation. Washington’s animated gestures and facial expressions are integrated into a whirl of filmic elements. The soundtrack is crowded by a cacophony of noise and music fragments. The camera spins, shots are filled with saturated colours, flares of light appear, and shots cut from one to another unexpectedly. Through all this, Washington’s eyes fill with tears; his mouth turns down in an exaggerated expression of sorrow; he puffs out his cheeks as he fills his mouth with a huge swig of liquor; he rubs his hand across his forehead; he covers his eyes with his outstretched fingers; he squeezes his lips together; he lets spit trickle out of his mouth. The cuts and camera movement slow down as Washington stands up, wavering, labouring several times to load and aim his gun. Then, cuts and camera movements return to their frenetic pace and feature another series of powerful facial expressions: Washington furrows his brow, covers his face with his hands, bares his lower teeth, breaks into a tightlipped grin and then flinches just before putting the gun to his head. The gun fails to fire. In a series of close-ups, Washington takes deep breaths, pauses, and then infuses his movements with quiet purpose as he lowers the gun and checks the bullet. This is a turning point for the character. Washington’s series of identifiable and communicative facial expressions show that he understands the adjustments necessary for

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Washington creates moments for emotional engagement in actions films like Déjà Vu (2006)

working in films filled with rapid editing and flamboyant camera movement. His performance exemplifies points made by professionals who specialise in the adjustments necessary for film acting. Patrick Tucker explains that while many people imagine that screen performance requires actors to do less with their faces, ‘if anything, the opposite is true’ (2003: xiii). He points out that effective ‘screen acting demands more reactions from [the actor] (but with less volume)’ (ibid.: 188). He emphasises that ‘in a close-up, you sometimes need to do more than you would ever do in real life or on the stage, because the only acting instrument you have for this shot is your face, and it has to do what you would normally use your whole body to do’ (ibid.: 38). In Washington’s subsequent collaboration with Scott on Déjà Vu, his performance reveals the same attention to communicating agent Carlin’s temperament and emotional responses in ways that work with the film’s attention-grabbing camera, editing, sound and set design choices. His smooth, sustained gait when he initially approaches the horrific scene of the ferry-boat explosion signals that his performance and his character will ground and centre the narrative from that point on. At various times, his alert but relaxed

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stillness creates an emotional connection for audiences, and a counterweight to the chaos created by Scott’s cinematic choices. For example, after Carlin rescues Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), the woman he has fallen in love with while assisting the FBI’s hightech surveillance unit assigned to solve the case, Washington replaces his character’s standard direct, bound movements with firm but gentle gestures when Carlin and Claire stop at her apartment so that he can dress his wounds before his final confrontation with the white supremacist responsible for the bombing.

Washington’s ‘Everyman’ appeal Washington’s roles in productions like Déjà Vu give female audiences a romantic leading man to follow, and appeal to the ethnically diverse and slightly older audience that consistently turns out for his action films, which provide a character with whom they can identify and opportunities to reflect on aspects of the narrative that lie outside the primary intrigue. Even Unstoppable and especially The Taking of Pelham 123 give audiences social factors to explore, for in contrast to the CIA and ATF agents accustomed to high-intensity situations, in Scott’s two train movies, Washington’s characters are just regular guys suddenly asked to do their jobs in unusual circumstances. These men have substantial work experience, but they are not upwardly mobile white-collar professionals. Instead their humble social status makes them comparable to roles Washington has played in other films that touch on middle- or working-class life, such as The Preacher’s Wife (Marshall, 1996), Courage under Fire and John Q. For those who had watched Washington portray the lanky, cold-blooded kingpin in American Gangster (2007), his physical embodiment of train dispatcher Walter Garber in The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) might have been a surprise, for here he is overweight and greying, and behind his unfashionable glasses his

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Washington creates a strong emotional bond with audiences of The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

face is highly expressive. In contrast to his smooth and precise vocal delivery as Frank Lucas, here Washington’s voice is gravelly with a heavy New York accent, and there’s an irregular rhythm to his delivery as he stutters, pauses and varies the pitch of his voice. In the tense interplay between Garber and the train hijacker (John Travolta), Washington’s flexible vocal expression creates a counterweight to Travolta’s hard-driving delivery; Washington’s animated facial and vocal reactions to the exhausting crisis create a sustained point of emotional contact. The physical and vocal details in his depiction of this ordinary man are so vivid that by the end of the film, Washington’s face alone conveys the emotional pain any regular guy would experience when required to shoot someone in self-defence. With Washington cast as an unexceptional character dropped into spectacular events, Scott’s action films qualify as cool entertainment. By comparison, middlebrow dramas such as The Preacher’s Wife, Courage under Fire and John Q are valued by audiences interested in the films’ look at black middle-class life. Describing Washington’s appeal in these dramas, Kimberly Elise explains: ‘Denzel is a combination of the Everyman and the

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Extraordinary Man [so that black men and women] appreciate him for his strength and his intelligence and his dignity [and for standing] by us as African-Americans’ (qtd. in Wilkerson 2006: 150). These dramas establish a strong connection between Washington and the regular guys he portrays, with the films offering evidence that, like his characters, he values family, hard work and community, and is someone who strives to fulfil his responsibilities as a husband, father and established African-American actor. Off-screen information can support that impression. Washington’s Mundy Lane Entertainment produced The Preacher’s Wife, directed by Penny Marshall and starring Washington, Whitney Houston and Courtney B. Vance.2 The film is based on The Bishop’s Wife (Koster, 1947), with Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven. While A Preacher’s Wife is akin to Heart Condition, in that Washington plays an angel, and so becomes a ‘magical Negro’, there are important differences, for here his character assists a black (not white) family, and with Washington in the role first played by Cary Grant, the angel seems more like a movie star than the stock racist character. The film’s performances also exhibit a warmth and humour absent in The Bishop’s Wife; as Ebert notes, Washington is ‘able to project love without lust and goodness without corniness’ (1996). That ability to embody a regular guy with admirable qualities has been crucial to Washington’s favourite moviestar status. Courage under Fire is another film where Washington’s ordinary man becomes the source of emotional connection. Meg Ryan plays Karen Malden, a medevac pilot who dies after her helicopter is shot down; Nat Serling (Washington) is assigned to establish evidence that will lead to Malden becoming the first woman to receive a Medal of Honor. As with The Pelican Brief, the film keeps the white and black stars connected but separate, by following Serling’s investigation but including flashbacks of Malden in the conflicting versions of the crash and rescue. As had happened in Philadelphia, the challenge to social norms (represented here by the woman in

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combat) is portrayed by the other star, and so Washington becomes tacitly associated with broad-based values. The film also increasingly centres on Serling, who is a tank commander haunted by guilt for covering up a friendly-fire incident he had ordered. Washington’s performance conveys Serling’s faltering journey from denial and isolation to responsibility and reconnection with family. Reflecting Hollywood norms, the black character’s family life is conveyed briefly, in a series of scenes between Washington and Regina Taylor that together last less than ten minutes. The first shows the dissolution of the couple’s emotional connection; in the second, the characters negotiate terms and conditions for rekindling their relationship; the third conveys their tentative efforts to re-establish connection; in the last scene, apology and recommitment create the foundation for renewed emotional intimacy. Despite the limited screen time, the scenes with Washington and Taylor create a rich narrative about a black married couple’s loss and renewal of physical and emotional intimacy, and their reunion signals the close of the narrative.3 Washington’s portrayal of Serling’s struggle with his conscience also illustrates the type of performances that have made Washington a star who combines ‘regular guyness with an aura of celebrity, mystery, [and] exclusivity’ (Randolph 1994: 110). Washington presents Serling as a black man isolated by his rank in the military, who then retreats emotionally after the friendly-fire incident. Reflecting Serling’s useless and now destructive habit of seclusion, Washington makes Serling’s bouts of heavy drinking lonely, agonising episodes; he conveys the emotional pain that engulfs the officer by draining the life from his face and increasing the heavy weight in his gestures and movements to the point that he becomes immobile. Allowing Serling’s despair and confusion to show in his eyes, Washington makes it clear that after a lifetime of finding order in military principles, Serling has no idea how to deal with his violation of its ethical code.

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Washington as a regular guy overwhelmed by his situation in Courage under Fire (1996)

Washington’s character in John Q is another regular guy who finds himself outmatched in a situation that challenges his commitment to be a good husband and father. Here he plays ‘John Quincy Archibald, a factory worker who, when failed by the nation’s unforgiving health-care system, takes matters into his own hands’ by forcibly occupying a hospital to demand that his dying son be given the heart transplant he needs to survive (Iverem 2007: 333). While this middlebrow message film failed to satisfy critics, its commercial success, topping the box office in its opening weekend and having an adjusted gross of more $100 million, reveals audience interest in seeing Washington portray an ordinary man. Finding a way to articulate critics’ objections to the film’s shortcomings and audiences’ enjoyment of the film, Iverem explains that despite the film’s collection of ‘stock characters and situations … Washington still manages to strike gold’ (2007: 334). His success depends on his ability to craft a performance that resonates with middle- and working-class people who care about their families and understand what it’s like to be overwhelmed by institutions.

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Washington and Elise make the experiences of regular people legible in John Q (2002)

Washington and co-star Kimberly Elise bring ‘a sense of emotional truth to the film’ as the couple forced to confront ‘the imminent death of [their] only son’, for both actors communicate their characters’ overwhelming pain ‘without saying a word’ (ibid.: 333). In films like John Q, Courage under Fire and The Preacher’s Wife, Washington plays characters who possess the emotional depth required to face universal ethical dilemmas. As a consequence, these films tacitly make black family dramas stand in for American family dramas. While not as acclaimed as films like Flight and American Gangster or valued as highly by audiences looking for action in films like Safe House and Déjà Vu, Washington’s work in these middlebrow dramas reconfigured film stardom to include actors who portray black middle-class men. The adjusted box-office gross for Courage under Fire is just below Inside Man, John Q’s is slightly lower than action film Man on Fire, and the adjusted gross for The Preacher’s Wife is just below landmark biopic Malcolm X. This data suggests that Washington’s middlebrow dramas have an audience. His participation in these films also reflects his complex negotiation

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of Hollywood business practices and contemporary social values, for while the regular-guy dramas keep black romance at the margins, they feature black characters defined by their grace, wit, dignity and inner strength. As part of his diverse portfolio of performances, the middlebrow dramas contribute to Washington’s image as a star known for his commitment to family and community. Together with his roles in genre films like Crimson Tide and Safe House, Washington’s portrayals in middlebrow films like Remember the Titans have helped make him one of America’s favourite movie stars.

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5 BLUES DETECTIVES

Washington’s diversified portfolio has made him a star who appeals to a range of audiences. To look at one more piece of that portfolio, and thus one more aspect of his star image, this chapter considers his performances in detective thrillers, and focuses on their black noir dimensions. His work in a film such as Devil in a Blue Dress (a 1995 release based on Walter Mosley’s novel, directed by Carl Franklin and produced by Washington’s Mundy Lane Entertainment) is important to American and African-American cinema, because this film, like other black noir films, ‘updates the history of noir by bringing to the genre the black subjectivity its label implies but ignores’ (Gates 2006: 212). Washington’s embodiment of Easy Rawlins establishes a decisive contrast with noir and neo-noir, for as in other black noir films, ‘the character who drives the narrative forward and also the voice that tells the story, literally, in a voice-over narration’ is African American (Gates 2006: 210). Putting an African-American character at the centre of the narrative, and making a black actor’s body and voice the basis for audience interpretations completely reverses the standard noir gaze; rather than looking at a dark, mysterious world through the eyes of a white character, audiences see the machinations of a white world through the eyes of a black individual. Black noir films unmask Hollywood’s norm of white experience, and then offer perspectives grounded in the experiences

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of black Americans; performances give expression to strategies and traditions African Americans have mobilised to negotiate the many iterations of racism. Washington’s depiction of Rawlins has important connections to his work in Virtuosity (1995), Fallen (1998) and The Bone Collector (1999), which also reflect trends in ethnic crime fiction, in particular the tradition of narratives that feature what Albert Murray and Houston A. Baker Jr would term a ‘blues detective’ (1973; 1987). Subsequent studies of African-American writers such as Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes and Ishmael Reed have explored the formal and ideological innovations in narratives with a blues detective, who is ‘a creatively improvisational hero [able to employ] whatever means come to hand to fill the “break” between, say, a secret crime and its successful solution’ (Baker 1987: 135). Baker emphasises that what distinguishes ‘the blues detective is his ability to break away from traditional concepts and to supply new and creative possibilities’ (ibid.). Amplifying this point, Stephen F. Soitos explains that the blues detective is ‘a curious amalgam’ of the classical detective (amateur, rational) and the hardboiled detective (private eye, instinctive), because he ‘creates a different set of priorities than either the classical or the hardboiled detective’ by focusing not just on the crime but also on ‘the social and political atmosphere [that is invariably] inscribed by racial prejudice’ (1996: 24, 32). Washington’s blues- and noir-inflected thrillers share common ground with productions in the black film wave of the 1990s that ‘employ film noir tropes to depict social injustice and the need for its rectification’ (Flory 2008: 25). By representing black experience using noir conventions, Washington’s work and black new wave films ‘deconstruct white racism and its intricacies by exposing how the forces of white privilege fracture and distort African-American existence’ (ibid.). This repurposing resonates with wide audiences, because even classic noir and neo-noir

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productions tend to cultivate ‘sympathy for and empathy with socially marginalized characters and others somehow distanced from mainstream culture’ (ibid.: 26). Performances in noir films play a key role in creating emotional connection with the central characters. For me, Washington’s work in Devil in a Blue Dress, Virtuosity, Fallen and The Bone Collector generates substantial compassion for the characters; I have feared for them, felt pain for their losses, and reflected on their personal and social experiences to a remarkable degree. My engagement with the characters depends on noir elements like voiceovers and flashbacks; it is also a response to Washington’s performances, which create sharp contrasts between the physical and vocal expressions meant for other characters and those designed for audiences alone. Such moments function as ‘Shakespearean asides’ that telegraph the thoughts and feelings Washington’s blues detectives cannot let the other characters see (Naremore 1988: 75). In films as different as Remember the Titans and American Gangster, Washington reveals his acting ‘virtuosity by sending out dual signals’ that allow audiences to see that the character is concealing his inner experience (Naremore 1988: 76). However, as Richard deCordova points out, ‘genres circumscribe the form and position of performance’, and noir requires performances thoroughly informed by ‘a model of dissimulation’ where depictions of disguise and concealment are actors’ highest priority (1986: 135). Washington’s portrayals in films like Devil in a Blue Dress are thus filled with acting choices that create emotional intimacy with audiences because they are allowed to see what the other characters cannot. Washington’s double-register characterisations generate empathy with the blues detectives because his performances highlight their efforts to conceal or disguise their thoughts and feelings. The emotional bond created by Washington’s depictions of noir heroes makes them useful for considering his appeal as a star;

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the complexity of the performances makes them useful for understanding his work as an actor. Scholars have discussed noir’s need for a ‘beneath-the-surface acting style’ that suggests ‘force and vulnerability’ (Cohen 1974: 27). Humphrey Bogart is thought to typify this ‘pared-down acting technique in which his stiff face … is only allowed an occasional smile’ (Spicer 2002: 94). Observers have noted that his eyes, ‘knowing and sad … express the sentiment that gave depth to his tough guys’, and that his ‘rasping voice, with the famous lisp, could convey scornful cynicism and bemused irony’ as well as ‘confused feelings churning inside’ (ibid.). Robert Mitchum is also seen as a minimalist, ‘with somnolent movements and hooded, lazy eyes [and] a performance style that lent meaning to the smallest gesture’ (ibid.: 96). Devil in a Blue Dress has prompted critics to say that Washington possesses ‘all the presence and laid-back gravity of a Robert Mitchum’ (Pawelczak 1996: 62). His performance is described as reserved ‘but agile, wary but thrusting when he needs to be, [so that he] gracefully reanimates a lost American archetype, the lonely lower-class male’ (Schickel 1996: 72). Guerrero finds that Washington ‘plays Rawlins with social vulnerability and caution mixed with a persistent toughness that gradually builds into a cunning, assertive rage against injustice as the narrative evolves’ (1996: 38). Washington’s portrayals in all of his noir thrillers suggest inner pressure and visible restraint. They are distinguished by a clarity that conveys each step in the character’s evolving interactions. The consciously crafted structure of his characters’ dramatic journey, from given circumstances to resolution, establishes a point of departure for moments when Washington drops into ostensibly improvisational behaviour that seems to reflect ‘the cultural heritage of blacks in America’ (Soitos 1996: 49). Using this multifaceted approach, Washington embodies the blues detective, whose behaviour is ‘compatible with his

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circumstances, which are nothing if not slapdash, jam-session situation or predicament in the first place’ (Murray 1973: 101).

Black noir Noting that black independent and some ‘Hollywood productions [have long] used the techniques of film noir to depict problems of race’, Flory observes that noir elements can be found in ‘work by black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux’ (2008: 31, 32). Spencer Williams’s Girl in Room 20 (1946) and Dirty Gertie from Harlem (1946) have been seen as noir films, as has Ralph Cooper’s Dark Manhattan (1937). No Way Out, with Sidney Poitier, has been linked to black noir, in that this mainstream film ‘dares to depict [both] a race riot (where blacks triumph) and the unadulterated bigotry of some whites’ (ibid.: 31). Blaxploitation films in the 1970s include noir elements such as ‘darkened streets, glistening half-lights, bumbling and villainous cops’ (ibid.: 36). Starting in the 1990s, there are many instances when ‘AfricanAmerican and other filmmakers have refashioned the themes and techniques commonly associated with film noir in order to redirect mainstream audience responses toward race and expose the injustices and inequities that typically frame black experience in the United States’ (Flory 2008: 1). While classic noir films often ‘address matters of power, confinement, determinism, and marginalization’, in this new iteration, ‘noir elements … become powerful tools for disclosing the inadequacies of racialized understandings of humanity, justice, and morality’ (ibid.: 4). Like other scholars, Flory notes that noir elements are not confined to cinema. Starting in the 1940s, ‘a noticeable portion of black literary resistance to racism’ employed noir tropes ‘and directed them against presumptions of white supremacy and racial hierarchy’ (2008: 27). This work includes: Chester Himes’s novels If

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He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947) and A Rage in Harlem (1957); Ann Petry’s The Street (1946); Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953); Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953); Robert Beck’s Pimp: The Story of My Life (1969) and Trick Baby (1970); Donald Goines’s Dopefiend (1971), Black Girl Lost (1973) and Daddy Cool (1974); and Mosley’s series of novels that includes Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). Novels such as these suggest ways for film-makers to repurpose noir narratives so as to highlight racial injustice, and for viewers to better understand black noir films.1 For example, Diawara locates key aspects of black noir by looking at Himes’s novel A Rage in Harlem. He observes that whereas classic noir films feature ‘tropes of blackness as metaphors for the white characters’ moral transgressions and falls from grace’, Himes’s novel focuses on ‘a way of life that has been imposed on black people through social injustice’ (1993b: 262, 263). A Rage in Harlem subverts the main tenet of classic noir, namely ‘that blackness is a fall from whiteness’, and for Himes, ‘black people are living in hell and white people are in heaven not because the one colour is morally inferior to the other, but because black people are held captive’ by values and institutions shaped by racial prejudice (ibid.: 263). Writing in 1993, Diawara emphasises links between noirinflected African-American crime fiction and New Jack Cinema releases like Boyz N the Hood, Deep Cover (Duke, 1992) and Juice (Dickerson, 1992). He considers the black noir dimensions of Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992) and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983). Expanding on that, Flory examines New Jack Cinema films One False Move and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), Clockers (1995), Summer of Sam (1997) and Bamboozled (2000). His analysis includes The Glass Shield (Burnett, 1995), 8 Mile (Hanson, 2002), Never Die Alone (Dickerson, 2004) and Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997) and The Caveman’s Valentine (2001).

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Performances that create character depth and emotional intimacy Flory also examines Training Day, Out of Time and Devil in a Blue Dress as black noir films. Training Day leaves audiences with the sense that the white establishment’s ‘overwhelming moral corruption … may be criticized or rejected by characters but [still remain] largely unaffected by a single individual’s actions’ (2008: 257). Out of Time touches on ‘some whites’ inability to distinguish the features of black men, especially when considered as criminal suspects’ (ibid.: 278). Noting that Devil in a Blue Dress has generated substantial interest for the way it illuminates black experience and transforms classic noir, Flory observes that it sheds light on ‘the everyday oppression and harm done to African Americans trying to live unexceptional lives in the years after World War II’ (ibid.: 215). Other films starring Washington that ‘depict unknown or inadequately understood forces … far more powerful than their protagonists’ can be seen as black noir (Flory 2008: 4). In Ricochet (1991), his character’s middle-class life is almost destroyed by the seething, irrational rage of a white man determined to exact revenge for his perceived victimisation. In Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004), the threat posed to the black soldier by the massive conspiracy functions as a metaphor for African Americans’ vulnerability in a malevolent white world. In both instances, Washington’s characters are ‘framed [or] imprisoned for crimes they did not commit or [are] caught up unwittingly in conspiracies and plots’ (Bould 2005: 51). Virtuosity, Fallen and The Bone Collector also belong to black noir, because Washington’s characters become the singular target of especially malevolent white individuals. For audiences who look beyond the conventional cop versus criminal aspects of Virtuosity and Fallen, Washington’s portrayals illuminate the reality that life as a black man in America means being ‘an immediate suspect, subjected

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to sudden arrests, imprisonment, “legal” violence, and police harassment’ (Coale 2000: 176). In all three films, Washington’s characters have learned that interacting with a white world requires cool self-possession. The social critique in Virtuosity, Fallen and The Bone Collector is minimised by their use of Hollywood formulas. In Virtuosity, former police officer Parker Barnes (Washington) is platonically paired with criminal psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch) after he is released from prison to catch a nanotech android on a killing spree. In Fallen, detective John Hobbes (Washington) solves a supernatural murder mystery with the aid of theology professor Gretta Milano (Embeth Davidtz). In The Bone Collector, paralysed forensic expert Lincoln Rhyme (Washington) mentors beat cop Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie) as they partner to solve the serial murders. These chaste pairings reflect patterns in Hollywood films of the 1990s, which ‘saw not only the proliferation of black heroes with white male buddies but also those with white female buddies’ (Gates 2006: 204). Hollywood’s use of this formula continued in the 2000s, with Morgan Freeman and Monica Potter cast in Along Came a Spider (Tamahori, 2001), Samuel L. Jackson and Ashley Judd in Twisted (Kaufman, 2004), and Freeman and Judd cast in Kiss the Girls (Fleder, 1997) and High Crimes (Franklin, 2002). These films reflect Hollywood’s moribund practice of ‘denying the black man romantic involvement with any woman’, especially any white woman (Gates 2006: 204). They also seem to support the status quo. For example, while ‘the partnership between an older African American mentor and a younger postfeminist female investigator’ in The Bone Collector could be ‘threatening to white patriarchal power because it represents an alliance of those who have been excluded by it’, their partnership does not change institutional structures (Steenberg 2011: 125). Yet films like The Bone Collector, Virtuosity and Fallen are open to readings grounded in some viewers’ awareness of and objection to the reality that black

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men, even urban black professionals working as detectives, are vulnerable in American society. Looking at The Bone Collector as a black noir film, the suddenness and extreme consequences of the accident that transforms the globe-trotting forensic expert into a suicidal quadriplegic seems like a metaphor, for the accident makes Rhyme a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rhyme’s close bond with his nurse Thelma (Queen Latifah) suggests that even though he distances himself from his sister after the accident, he maintains his sense of himself as a member of the black community. The film ends with Rhyme happily surrounded by family and friends, reflecting blues detectives’ ‘sense of community and family that doesn’t exist in the mainstream detective tradition’ (Soitos 1996: 31). Employing familiar noir strategies, the film establishes sympathy for and empathy with Rhyme by opening with a flashback of the accident that is presented as if it were his nightmare. The Bone Collector tacitly uses the noir convention of voiceover, as Washington’s voice opens the film and directs our attention during scenes in Rhyme’s apartment; it employs that strategy when Washington’s voice guides Amelia as she searches crime scenes, and when Rhyme battles with the belligerent officer via police radio. The flashback and voiceovers in The Bone Collector ‘foreground the subjectivity and “interiority”’ of the central noir character, creating a black character of depth, and a portrayal marked by emotional intimacy between star and audience (Neale 2000: 168). From the start of the film, Rhyme is ostensibly feminised, passive and so depressed that he is planning his suicide; even at the end of the film, ‘the threat that his [black] masculinity might pose is contained because … he is still paralyzed and unable to perform his masculinity in the traditional ways of sex and action’ (Gates 2006: 209). Seeing these facts in light of black noir tropes, they communicate the perennial vulnerability of even black urban professionals. Yet the way Rhyme negotiates his paralysis also

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highlights the improvisational abilities of the blues detective, perhaps most strikingly when he defends himself against the killer and comes up with ‘slapdash jam-session’ style solutions (Murray 1973: 101). Rhyme finds ways to survive and solve crimes because as a blues detective, he mixes intuition and reason, tough-minded personal interactions with sensitive reflection and detached observation.

Illuminating violations of black families and black domestic space The Bone Collector’s character and narrative design encourage connection with Rhyme. The requirement that Washington communicate the character’s questions, ideas, plans and responses using only his face and voice actually creates a unique opportunity for him to establish an intimate tie between character and audience. Rhyme’s paralysis requires Washington to craft a performance where the slightest shift in facial or vocal expression discloses meaning; audiences can become attuned to watching for those minute variations. With his face featured in a wealth of close-ups, and his line readings directing our attention, Washington’s portrayal of Rhyme’s journey from suicidal depression to quietly delighted sense of belonging reveals ways that Washington, as an actor and a star, engages audience emotion. In Virtuosity, there are also key sequences that illustrate Washington’s ability to establish a bond with audiences and shed light on black experiences. In contrast to The Bone Collector’s commercial and critical success, Virtuosity’s $30 million budget exceeded its domestic box-office gross; comments on IMDb reveal that the film’s script and direction still generate negative reviews. One user notes that the film is ‘a standard cops [and] robbers plot moved ahead a few centuries to take advantage of modern technology (Franzen 2000). Valued for showing ‘the dangers of

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letting technology get too powerful’, it is seen as ‘another virtual reality-themed movie so full of action that it almost hurts’ (Eisenberg 2006). IMDb reviews reveal that despite negative responses to the film, audiences feel compassion for Washington’s character. At the outset of the story, we learn that Barnes is in prison for killing Matthew Grimes, a terrorist Barnes had been tracking down to arrest. As Barnes closes in on him, Grimes kidnaps Barnes’s wife and daughter, who are subsequently killed during Barnes’s attempt to rescue them from Grimes’s hideout. In the immediate aftermath of their deaths, Barnes kills Grimes and everyone at the hideout. Noting those events, one user explains that they ‘elicit empathy’; another emphasises that Barnes is ‘driven by a brutal tragedy from before the film begins’ (Adler 2003; Bogmeister 2005). For the first half-hour, Virtuosity is a black noir film. Barnes is a black man living in hell: his family has been killed, he is imprisoned, and his short reprieves from solitary confinement involve the sordid practice of prisoners being used as guinea pigs in scientific experiments. The virtual world where Barnes’s opponent does not play by the rules seems like a metaphor for the nightmarish dimensions of black life in a white world. In a brief exchange with a former police colleague who has just witnessed the dangerous virtual-reality experiment, Washington conveys Barnes’s anguished experience of isolation; hanging on this fleeting moment of human contact, he squeezes his words out in a hoarse whisper and blinks back the tears welling up in his eyes. Moments later, Barnes is subjected to the brutality of institutionalised racism, as the prison guards do not allow him to return to his cell, but instead release him into a cell block occupied by white-power inmates. In a surreal space with rows of cells containing silhouettes of ghostlike figures, Barnes is confronted by a thug who has a white-power tattoo and is armed with a knife. Revving up the inmates locked in their cells, the biker-type raises his knife and shouts:

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Black noir sees the world through the eyes of an incarcerated black man in Virtuosity (1995)

‘who wants dark meat!’ Despite the thug’s advantage, Barnes wins the fight. Yet the moment of victory is brief, as white guards come in and beat Barnes unconscious with nightsticks. The next time we see Barnes, he is in an interview room with psychologist Madison Carter, who is uncomfortable because Washington’s belligerent glare conveys the rage that has been stoked by Barnes’s prison experiences. Yet he also uses a hoarse whisper to quietly but firmly remind Carter that his wife and daughter are dead; the restraint of that vocal choice makes audiences understand Barnes’s love for his lost family, even though Carter fails to notice. The double-register (rage and mourning) of Washington’s performance illuminates the subjectivity of this black inmate and the larger reality that incarcerated black men are human beings with deep familial connections. A few scenes later, the film again reveals the despair that has enveloped Barnes after the loss of his family. A brief sequence intercuts Barnes’s memories of his wife and daughter with shots of him in solitary confinement, lying face down on the floor, using chalk to draw images of his previous life. Barnes’s identity-defining bond with his (black) family is a thread throughout the narrative, and at

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the film’s conclusion, it anchors the story’s black noir dimensions. When Barnes eventually rescues Carter’s little blonde daughter using knowledge he gained in the futile attempt to rescue his own family, Washington’s performance in this conventional scene of blacks saving whites allows audiences to see his character’s private sorrow amidst the joy surrounding the reunion of (white) mother and daughter; his wistful glances and dropped shoulders give visible expression to the reality that ‘black people are living in hell and white people are in heaven … because black people are held captive’ by institutions that cater to racial prejudice (Diawara 1993b: 263). Fallen is another black noir film that can ‘make people think about existing structures of power and privilege’ (Flory 2008: xi). The narrative follows John Hobbes (Washington) as his investigation of murders – all involving the same methods used by a killer apprehended by Hobbes and subsequently tried and executed – leads him to discover the presence of a demon that moves from human host to human host through touch. As in Virtuosity, the malevolent character takes great pleasure in causing pain for Washington’s character. Here again, the evil figure’s primary means of injuring Washington’s character is to threaten and destroy the people he loves. Like other black noir films, in Fallen, ‘whiteness is not desirable or superior’ but instead ‘represents confusion, terror, sickness, and death’ (Reddy 2003: 87). Illustrating a crucial aspect of black noir, the film dramatises the perspective of the black family, for whom whiteness is a centuries’ old malevolent force that causes confusion, terror, sickness and death largely because it has the power and privilege to enter and dominate black domestic space whenever it pleases. Fallen received primarily good reviews when it was released (16 January 1998), but it was one of many films that failed to compete with Titanic (Cameron, 1997), which dominated the box office from the middle of December 1997 to the end of March 1998. It is highly rated by ancillary market audiences. One IMDb user describes it as a ‘chilling psychological thriller, that is cleverly written

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A harmonious black domestic space before its invasion by white evil in Fallen (1998)

and superbly portrayed’ (mjw2305 2004). Another thinks it is a ‘brilliant film’, with ‘superb’ camerawork that shows the evil spirit going from person to person in a way that recalls ‘the subtle touches one makes in a normal walk about town’ (BigHardcore 2005). The film’s voiceovers and subjective camera techniques create sympathy for and empathy with Washington’s character. Emphasising the importance of family and community for this blues detective, from the outset Fallen illustrates Hobbes’s powerful bond with his brother Art (Gabriel Casseus) and nephew Sam (Michael J. Pagan). It establishes the working-class apartment they share as a place of love, humour, mutual support and emotional comfort. More specifically, by introducing us to this domestic space when Hobbes gets the first of many phone calls from murderers possessed by the demon, the film illustrates the vulnerability of the black family’s peaceful and harmonious domestic space. As the narrative develops, Hobbes’s family becomes threatened and then destroyed by the demonic force. Art is murdered in the bedroom he shares with his son; Hobbes and Sam are forced to go on the run, with Hobbes framed for several murders and Sam established as the demon’s next victim. Eventually, to save his

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nephew’s life, Hobbes leaves Sam with the theology professor who has become his ally. Travelling to an isolated cabin to confront whoever might be the demon’s current host (it’s his partner from work), Hobbes kills his partner and gives himself a lethal dose of poison, hoping the demon will die with him. However, as in Training Day, Fallen’s resolution illustrates the reality that the boundless power and moral corruption of white privilege is ‘largely unaffected by a single individual’s actions’ (Flory 2008: 257). Grounded in a historical rather than metaphysical setting, Devil in a Blue Dress offers another example of how black noir films can lead ‘audiences to reflect on such questions as what it means to be white, what it means to be African-American, what it means to be treated equally, and what it means to be acknowledged as a fullfledged human being’ (Flory 2008: 1). Its flashbacks and use of voiceover enhance connection with blues detective Easy Rawlins. Washington’s double-register portrayal allows audiences to see the thoughts and feelings Rawlins must hide from other characters. His carefully crafted orchestration of connotatively rich vocal and gestural details, anchored by narrative circumstance and amplified by lighting, framing, editing, sound and design elements, makes Rawlins’s inner experiences legible so that audiences understand the stakes and the significance of his encounters over the course of the story. With the narrative shaped by Mosley’s rejection of hardboiled crime fiction’s racist dimensions, Washington’s depiction of this blues detective can speak to audiences whose social values accord with the principles behind, say, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Like Fallen, Devil in a Blue Dress illustrates the richness of black domestic space and the degree to which it is vulnerable to whites, who can enter and control it whenever they please. Exemplifying black noir aesthetic and ideological values, the film’s opening scene establishes the vibrancy of thriving black neighbourhoods, as a deft crane shot reveals the film’s vivid

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recreation of bustling Central Avenue and 34th Street in 1948 Los Angeles. With the vitality of the African-American community surrounding the blues detective succinctly depicted, audiences are then introduced to Rawlins as he scans a newspaper looking for jobs. Washington’s voiceover segues into a flashback of Rawlins losing his job as a machinist weeks earlier. The film establishes that his sudden termination of employment has nothing to do with his skill or work ethic, and everything to do with being a black worker and so the first to be fired as the booming war economy comes to an end. Rawlins’s situation creates an immediate connection with viewers. With Rawlins sharing his thoughts in voiceover, audiences are immediately introduced to experiences with which they can identify: ‘needing an income, looking for a job, and wariness about’ a thug offering ‘too-easy money’ (Flory 2008: 215). In short order, Rawlins’s stressful but still self-directed activity of looking for a job is disrupted by Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) striding into Joppy’s bar, the first of many intrusions of black domestic space. The violations continue. Two brutal cops arrest Rawlins when he comes home after his night with Coretta (Lisa Nicole Carson). They revisit his home to issue an ultimatum: if Rawlins cannot prove that someone else killed Frank McGee, he will be charged with the murder, since it involves a white man and someone has to pay. On another occasion, Albright and his thugs take over Rawlins’s home and terrorise him to get information about Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), who has photographs that reveal their client to be a paedophile. Later in the film, Albright and company barge into Rawlins’s home and kidnap Daphne. With blacks drawn into the whites’ conspiracies, Daphne’s brother Frank Green lies in wait for Rawlins when he comes home one night; at one point even Daphne breaks into Rawlins’s house and surprises him on his return. Thus, as in other black noir films, black domestic space is shown to be something often violated by whites, and by blacks whose lives have been impacted by a white world.

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Threats created by white privilege are momentarily at bay in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Devil in a Blue Dress parallels other black noir films by suggesting that in the end, despite an individual’s efforts, a ‘corrupt and corrupting racial order’ will continue to result from ‘white advantage’ (Flory 2008: 216). Its final scene shows Rawlins surrounded by neighbourhood kids jumping rope, selling ice tea and having their pictures taken on a pony. One feels a moment of calm; Rawlins’s neighbourhood is ‘a place of camaraderie and contentment, where he may interact with friends and forget about all his … troubles by playing dominoes, talking, and drinking whiskey’ (ibid.: 218). Yet Elmer Bernstein’s elegiac score ‘suffuses the sequence with a certain sadness that represents not only a nostalgic yearning for this lost time and place, but also casts over Easy and the neighborhood’s future a certain ominous mood’ (Flory 2008: 219). The film also makes the threats to Rawlins and his neighbourhood visible. The pair of brutal police officers cruise down the street, ‘indicating that the cops will be keeping their eye on him as a troublemaker and a

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suspect, but also foreshadowing more oppressive forms of police surveillance in store for the neighborhood’s real-life correspondent in a few decades’ (ibid.: 218–19). Similarly, the headline at the top of the newspaper that O’Dell (Albert Hall) reads as he sits on Rawlins’s porch announces: ‘Negroes Angered by New Property Restrictions’. For someone who grew up in Los Angeles, the film’s ending can be heart-wrenching; starting in the late 1940s, downtown neighbourhoods (like the one depicted) were essentially destroyed by the freeway system that facilitated travel to white suburbs, and housing restrictions forced African Americans into the overcrowded South Central districts of Compton and Watts. Watching it in the years after its release, I still cannot believe that this remarkable film was not a commercial success. Given the historical significance of adapting a Mosley novel and the filmmakers’ loving attention to detail, it is troubling that, after decades of Hollywood policies and practices designed not to offend white racial prejudice, this film had a limited release and was not a priority for audiences. It is possible, as scholars have argued, that the film’s mediocre box office reflects racial tensions surrounding the O. J. Simpson murder trial (Gates 2006: 213); after months of publicity surrounding the trial that began in January 1995, the acquittal verdict was announced on 3 October 1995, during the second week of the film’s run. Yet regardless of current events, Devil in a Blue Dress was distributed as a film suitable only for ethnic audiences; Sony designed the same type of four-week release (late September to mid-October in 1,414 theatres) that Buena Vista gave He Got Game (May 1998 in 1,432 theatres). Devil in a Blue Dress also had to compete with Lee’s crime drama Clockers, the Vietnam-era film Dead Presidents (Hughes, 1995) and Se7en (Fincher, 1995), the detective thriller starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, which was number one at the box office from mid-September to mid-October. The audience for black films was thus split between three

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productions and trumped by the compelling but conventional black and white pairing of Freeman and Pitt. Hollywood’s institutional practices, which have influenced audience taste and buying habits, have meant that Washington’s films as a director have also had limited commercial success. While The Great Debaters received several NAACP Image Awards and praise from The New York Amsterdam News, people overlook this middlebrow drama. Yet its depiction of racism in 1930s America and of the black debate team from Wiley College led by fiery Melvin B. Tolson (Washington) compares to the vision behind novels like Devil in a Blue Dress. Both suggest that ‘knowledge is not only possible, it is a more reliable means to power than violence’; both propose that ‘knowledge consists of understanding the conditions of power in order to recognize opportunities for authority within the dominant system and to discover sources of potency within the black community’ (Wesley 2003: 137). Tolson and his team embody those ideas, combining research and lived experience to make views grounded in black experience visible. In the team’s unprecedented debate with Harvard, James Farmer Jr (Denzel Whitaker) crafts his final rebuttal by drawing on his debate training and his insights from growing up in an era when lynching goes unpunished. Arguing for the morality of civil disobedience, Farmer concludes his remarks by stating: My opponent says, nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral, but there is no rule of law in the Jim Crow South [and as] Saint Augustine said, an unjust law is no law at all, which means I have a right or even a duty to resist, with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

The Great Debaters is another instance when Washington’s work illuminates the experiences of black Americans. By directing attention to systemic and institutionalised racism, the film shares

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common ground with his portrayals of blues detectives. While less visible than his Oscar-winning roles and the box-office hits that have made him a bankable star, Washington’s roles in black noir films contribute to his image as a classic movie star and make him an important figure in African-American cinema.

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CONCLUSION

As with other stars, publicity surrounding Washington promises insights into his off-screen life. Press coverage explores his image as a loyal husband, engaged parent, generous community member and role model for young people. Biographical accounts touch on his philanthropy, his work as spokesperson for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and (like Magic Johnson) his contributions to the West Angeles Church of God in Christ. With his down-to-earth image crucial to his romantic leading-man status, publicity about Washington as a matinee idol highlights his stable and fulfilling marriage. The same year People magazine named Washington the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’, ‘A Love Story: Denzel and Pauletta’ was the cover story of Essence magazine’s December issue (Robotham 1996: 54). In that same vein, countering or perhaps fuelling another round of gossip about an impending divorce, the official Facebook community page for Denzel Washington was updated at the start of 2014 with a photo of the handsome couple, and the message: ‘With a foundation in faith, legacy and family, Pauletta and Denzel Washington are now celebrating 30 years of marriage. And their union proves that the best is yet to come.’ Washington’s reputation as a valuable member of the AfricanAmerican community depends on his portrayals of individuals (Malcolm X, Rubin Carter, Herman Boone and Melvin Tolson) whose stories have special historical importance for American and

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African-American audiences. Even his sexiness emerges from his public image as an upstanding member of the community, with journalists noting that ‘women like what they perceive in Washington the man: a committed husband, a devoted father, a superstar who never allows his family to become a sidebar to his career’ (Randolph 1994: 110). Despite the many articles about his private life, Washington remains a film star rather than a celebrity. From essentially the beginning of his career, he has been seen as a serious actor known for the detail, depth and intensity of his characterisations. The boxoffice success of films like American Gangster and Safe House leads some analysts to identify his brand with R-rated genre films. Others see Washington as a star known ‘for playing heroic roles’ in films like Courage under Fire, The Siege and Remember the Titans (Wooten 2003: 11). Some audiences might think of his roles that have garnered Oscar nominations (Cry Freedom, Glory, Malcolm X, The Hurricane, Training Day and Flight); others might think of independent films like Mo’ Better Blues or He Got Game. Still others might focus on his black noir films or on his work directing and producing films like Antwone Fisher, The Great Debaters and The Book of Eli. If there is a unity to Washington’s image, it does not arise from a narrow consistency in the characters he has portrayed, for in his more than forty leading roles he has played a sharp political reporter (The Pelican Brief) and a not-so-bright small-town police chief (Out of Time), an angel come to earth (The Preacher’s Wife) and a veteran caught in a corporate nightmare (The Manchurian Candidate), a burned-out government assassin (Man on Fire) and a guy with a carpet-cleaning business (Mississippi Masala). What seems to underlie these varied portrayals is Washington’s brand as a consummate actor and glamorous movie star. With Washington’s image closely linked to his acclaim as an actor, articles in the press often include observations by directors and

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fellow actors that highlight his preparation for and immersion in his roles. They emphasise his ability to improvise and to rework scripts so as to sharpen characters’ dramatic conflicts (Rafferty 2012). Washington’s winning smile and commanding stride are now part of what audiences see as the star’s idiolect. Some audiences are impressed by his deft use of firearms. Some enjoy watching the sudden bursts of anger in his characterisations. Others prize the less overt details in his performances that suggest a certain reserve or restraint that adds a sense of mystery to Washington’s characters and star image. Audiences see connections between the gestures he has used to portray characters (tightened jaw, quick sideways glance, squared shoulders) and the image that has been crafted by Washington, Ed Limato, and other managerial and publicity intermediaries who have been so successful in ‘cultivating, directing, and sustaining’ his star image in the post-studio era (McDonald 2008: 168). When Devil in a Blue Dress was released, The Nation’s film critic Stuart Klawans praised Washington’s performance, explaining that the role ‘calls for an actor who has more than star power. It needs someone with such an innate sense of dignity that he wouldn’t even think of swaggering’ (1995: 480); echoing that view in discussing several other performances, Essence writer Isabel Wilkerson finds that even ‘when a role calls for him to be arrogant, selfish, abusive, or corrupt, his authentic delivery redeems him’ (2006: 151). One way to interpret observations about Washington’s authentic delivery and innate sense of dignity is to see them as a reference to his capacity for embodying characters and establishing an on-screen presence, so that audiences engage with the multiple layers of the character and the actor’s virtuoso performance. Washington’s recognised ability to create characters with depth is significant; as Barry King explains, performances conveying the ‘rich interior’ of both the character and the performer ‘are the essence of stardom’ (2003: 46).

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Especially since 2000, Washington’s films have been commercially successful, and his astute career choices exemplify what King terms ‘the star as entrepreneur [who is] ready to switch roles as business opportunities arise’ (B. King 2003: 49). His career choices, which include portraying flawed characters like Frank Lucas and heroic figures like Steve Biko, are comparable to strategic career decisions made by other contemporary film stars, in that they allow Washington to stretch ‘an apparent core of personal qualities to cover’ a range of performances (ibid.: 60). Washington’s observation, ‘What people write about me is who they are, and what they think I am’, should prompt research that illuminates his career in the post-studio era, when stars are required to manage their public images as ‘an occupational response to the new conditions of production’ in the entertainment industry (Brode 1997: xi; B. King 2003: 45).1 As King notes: ‘Stars are no longer employees (on a freelance, let alone fixed-term, basis), but stakeholders in the enterprise that manages their career’ (ibid.: 49). Whereas studio-era stars seem like ‘personal samples of pre-existent social types’, for contemporary stars like Washington, a carefully delineated public image is ‘differentially activated’ in a series of roles (ibid.: 48, 47). Given the demands of being an independent contractor, Washington has recognised that his critical and commercial success depends on his high-quality brand remaining unencumbered by links to a genre or franchise, so that it is associated instead with an ‘elastic’ performance-centred image that allows ‘an apparent core of personal qualities to cover all contingencies’ (ibid.: 60).2 Washington’s varied role choices reflect the specific demands on African-American stars, who are ‘constantly re-negotiating the terms of their engagement with public life’ to mediate discrepancies between Hollywood conventions and audience values (B. King 2003: 52). Yet an emphasis on Washington as a cultural sign (a black actor), rather than on his business acumen and abilities as a theatre-trained

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actor, elides the labour and skill required to manage a complex career and create salient performances. Everyman, matinee idol, award-winning actor, bankable star and blues detective are all pieces of the star image that emerged in the 1990s, when Washington’s portrayals of articulate black urban professionals distinguished by their New Black Aesthetic masculinity garnered the attention of (black and white) mainstream audiences. Stars represent different cultural ideals to different audiences; crossover stars illuminate the complex operations of race in American society and corporate media. Washington has said that ‘keeping it simple’ is something he has tried to embody in his performances and over the course of his public life (Norment 1995: 26). Rather than ease, the phrase suggests that effort is required to keep things simple, as when managing things that are complex and contradictory, whether that be a character’s frustration or the fraught situation of being an actor whose crossover success has been both damned and valorised. Washington’s career represents a complicated situation where he has ‘campaigned for and won roles written with white actors in mind (Courage under Fire, The Pelican Brief)’ (Whitaker 2000: 154). His need to campaign for these roles reveals the depth of racism in America; that he secured the parts reveals his skill and Hollywood’s strategies to increase profits; that the films found a wide audience confirms his star power and perhaps points to a selective lessening of prejudice in America. At the outset, I noted my two objectives: to show how Washington’s performances are able to create characters of depth and an emotional connection with audiences, and to describe the aspects of stardom, post-studio Hollywood and post-civil-rights-era America that his career and star image illuminate. I hope the close studies of Washington’s performances illustrate the basis for his starperformer status. In addition, I hope my discussion of his varied career choices sheds light on the ways that he has addressed the challenges of working in an industrial system shaped by risk-adverse

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financial practices. I would also hope this look at Washington’s body of work has illuminated reasons why his performances resonate with various audiences, who read against the grain of mainstream narratives and focus instead on meanings created by his embodiment of characters who speak to many people because they have been crafted, as Washington has noted, in light of the acting principle that ‘the universal stems from the specific’ (Lee 1992: 116).

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NOTES

The full publishing details of the works cited in this section can be found in the Bibliography.

Introduction 1 Work at the intersection of star studies and representation politics includes: chapters by Alexander and Mercer in Stardom: Industry of Desire; McDonald’s references to Dandridge, Danny Glover, Eddie Murphy and Will Smith in The Star System; G. King’s essay on Will Smith in Contemporary Hollywood Stardom; and S. Smith’s The Musical: Race, Gender and Performance.

2 After Blaxploitation, before New Jack Cinema 1 For chapter-length studies of Glory, see Brode (1997) and Nickson (1996). Glory belongs to a cycle of films on American war experiences, including Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). It reflects Hollywood’s tentative look at the legacy of slavery in The Color Purple (1985) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and so contrasts with assertive films like Do the Right Thing (1989), which garnered a Palme d’Or nomination and Golden Globe and Oscar nominations the year Glory competed.

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2 There are many other key factors in American society from the 1950s on. Paul Robeson’s blacklisting reveals that ‘the horribly fraught domestic issue of relations between whites and blacks posed a political bind for U.S. leaders’ in the 1950s (Locke 2009: 46). The ‘Cold War foreign policy to win hearts and minds around the globe’ was weakened by ‘the glaring contradiction between the country’s democratic ideals and its long history of black mistreatment’ (ibid.). The US tried to present itself as the City on the Hill, but the world kept hearing ‘reports about the ongoing struggle for black civil rights’ (ibid.). To bridge the gap between domestic realities and the foreign policy goal to present the US as a beacon of democracy, President Truman called for ‘federal legislation to ban Jim Crow, lynching, and poll taxes’ (ibid.). He issued Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the US military in response to A. Philip Randolph’s formation of the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation (ibid.: 48). These moves led to the subsequent emergence of the Republican Party as the ideological home for socially conservative voters. 3 Washington first attended Fordham University in the Bronx. During a period away from college, he developed an interest in acting after appearing in a talent show ‘at Camp Sloane, a YMCA camp in Lakeville, Connecticut’ (Washington 2006: 17). When he returned to college in 1975, he ‘switched to the school’s midtown campus in Lincoln Center, which had a real drama program’ (ibid.).

3 Academy Award-winning actor 1 See Mapp (2008) for information about Oscar nominees for acting, screenwriting and other awards. See Lambert (1996) for data on the exclusion of minorities in Hollywood, and Watson (2008) for challenges still facing black actresses.

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4 One of America’s favourite movie stars 1 Flight was criticised for its representational politics. The black alcoholic and Washington’s Oscar nomination were seen as reinforcing stereotypes (Simmons 2012). Critics objected to the black character’s relationship with the white character played by Kelly Reilly (Milloy 2012). Yet Reilly’s character is addicted to heroin, and so initially of interest to Whip only insofar as she is another addict. As a morally suspect character, she also compares unfavourably with the black women in the film, who are attractive, capable and emotionally grounded; the black alcoholic’s interest in the white addict is perhaps a sign of his disordered psyche. Still, this is another film that can trouble audiences sensitive to racist images, and is thus akin to movies like Man on Fire and Safe House where the black character sacrifices himself to save the white character. 2 Penny Marshall had also directed Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), with Whoopi Goldberg. 3 The characterisations reflect the contributions of story consultant Susan Shilliday and the craftsmanship of the two actors. In 1986, Taylor was the first black woman to play Juliet on Broadway; she is an awardwinning playwright and recipient of Golden Globe and NAACP Image Awards.

5 Blues detectives 1 The literature on ethnic crime fiction that can inform studies of black noir includes: Klein’s Diversity and Detective Fiction; Coale’s The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs; Reddy’s Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction; Wesley’s Violent Adventure: Contemporary Fiction by American Men; and Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction, edited by Fischer-Hornung and Mueller.

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Conclusion 1 Seeing Washington as only a cultural sign makes him as invisible as the character in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952). His comment might suggest that he recognises and rejects the experience DuBois described a century ago as ‘a particular sensation, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (2011: 3). 2 While commercial success for Devil in a Blue Dress might have led to additional films with Washington as Easy Rawlins, he kept his distance from franchise productions prior to 2014. This position might change after The Equalizer, which secured a worldwide gross of more than $180 million in its first five weeks and prompted trade papers to discuss ‘the grittty R-rated thriller’ as launching Washington’s first franchise (Lang 2014).

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FILMOGRAPHY

CARBON COPY (Michael Schultz, US, 1981), Roger Porter A SOLDIER’S STORY (Norman Jewison, US, 1984), Private First Class Peterson POWER (Sidney Lumet, US, 1986), Arnold Billing CRY FREEDOM (Richard Attenborough, US, 1987), Steve Biko THE MIGHTY QUINN (Carl Schenkel, US, 1989), Xavier Quinn FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY (Martin Stellman, UK, 1989), Reuben James GLORY (Edward Zwick, US, 1989), Private Trip HEART CONDITION (James D. Parriott, US, 1990), Napoleon Stone MO’ BETTER BLUES (Spike Lee, US, 1990), Bleek Gilliam RICOCHET (Russell Mulcahy, US, 1991), Nick Styles MISSISSIPPI MASALA (Mira Nair, US, 1991), Demetrius Williams MALCOLM X (Spike Lee, US, 1992), Malcolm X MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (Kenneth Branagh, US, 1993), Don Pedro THE PELICAN BRIEF (Alan Pakula, US, 1993), Gray Grantham PHILADELPHIA (Jonathan Demme, US, 1993), Joe Miller CRIMSON TIDE (Tony Scott, US, 1995), Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter VIRTUOSITY (Brent Leonard, US, 1995), Lieutenant Parker Barnes DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (Carl Franklin, US, 1995), Easy Rawlins COURAGE UNDER FIRE (Edward Zwick, US, 1996), Lieutenant Colonel Nat Serling

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THE PREACHER’S WIFE (Penny Marshall, US, 1996), Dudley FALLEN (Gregory Hoblit, US, 1998), Detective John Hobbes HE GOT GAME (Spike Lee, US, 1998), Jake Shuttlesworth THE SIEGE (Edward Zwick, US, 1998), FBI Agent Anthony Hubbard THE BONE COLLECTOR (Phillip Noyce, 1999), Detective Lincoln Rhyme THE HURRICANE (Norman Jewison, US, 1999), Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter REMEMBER THE TITANS (Boaz Yakin, US, 2000), Coach Herman Boone TRAINING DAY (Antoine Fuqua, US, 2001), Detective Alonzo Harris JOHN Q (Nick Cassavetes, US, 2002), John Quincy Archibald ANTWONE FISHER (Denzel Washington, US, 2002), Dr Jerome Davenport OUT OF TIME (Carl Franklin, US, 2003), Officer Matt Lee Whitlock MAN ON FIRE (Tony Scott, US, 2004), John W. Creasy THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (Jonathan Demme, US, 2004), Ben Marco INSIDE MAN (Spike Lee, US, 2006), Detective Keith Frazier DÉJÀ VU (Tony Scott, US, 2006), ATF Agent Doug Carlin AMERICAN GANGSTER (Ridley Scott, US, 2007), Frank Lucas THE GREAT DEBATERS (Denzel Washington, US, 2007), Melvin B. Tolson THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 (Tony Scott, US, 2009), Walter Garber THE BOOK OF ELI (Albert and Allen Hughes, US, 2010), Eli UNSTOPPABLE (Tony Scott, US, 2010), Frank SAFE HOUSE (Daniel Espinosa, US, 2012), Tobin Frost FLIGHT (Robert Zemeckis, US, 2012), Whip Whitaker 2 GUNS (Baltasar Kormákur, US, 2013), DEA Agent Robert Trench THE EQUALIZER (Antoine Fuqua, US, 2014), Robert McCall

Television DEATH WISH (1974), alley mugger #1 (uncredited) WILMA (1977), Robert Eldridge, age eighteen FLESH & BLOOD (1979), Kirk ST ELSEWHERE (1982–8), Dr Philip Chandler

156

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LICENSE TO KILL (1984), Martin Sawyer THE GEORGE MCKENNA STORY (1986), George McKenna HAPPILY EVER AFTER: FAIRY TALES FOR EVERY CHILD (1995), Humpty Dumpty (voice) HAPPILY EVER AFTER: FAIRY TALES FOR EVERY CHILD (1997), Humpty Dumpty, Sergeant Louie, The Crooked Man (voice) MOTHER GOOSE: A RAPPIN’ AND RHYMIN’ SPECIAL (1997), Humpty Dumpty, The Crooked Man (voice)

Theatre CORIOLANUS (Wilford Leach, 1979), Aedile A SOLDIER’S PLAY (Douglas Turner Ward, 1981–3), Private First Class Melvin Peterson CHECKMATES (Woodie King Jr, 1988), Sylvester Williams THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD III (Robin Phillips, 1990), Richard, Duke of Gloucester JULIUS CAESAR (Daniel Sullivan, 2005), Marcus Brutus FENCES (Kenny Leon, 2010), Troy Maxson A RAISIN IN THE SUN (Kenny Leon, 2014), Walter Lee Younger

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157

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate detailed analyses; those in italics denote illustrations; n = endnote. A Academy Awards African-American actors and actresses 19, 39, 63 controversy surrounding The Hurricane 29, 63–4 debates about award for Training Day 63–4 significance for Washington’s star image 15, 18, 28, 29, 30, 58, 62, 68, 72, 89, 136 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 15, 68, 91 acting methods Adler, Stella 27, 91 compared to Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg 45–6 Ball, William (American Conservatory Theatre) 46

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D E N Z E L WA S H I N G T O N

acting methods cont. Stone, Robinson (Fordham University) 45 Tucker, Patrick 107 action films 6, 30, 89, 91, 92, 102, 104, 107–9, 113 acting style 104–8 actor, in relation to star 1–2, 5–7, 9, 13–14, 26, 52–3, 61, 75, 95, 97, 136, 137 African-American cinema 1, 9, 65, 115 Black film 9, 10, 11, 22, 66, 116, 119, 132 Black New Wave 65–6, 116 New Black Cinema 9, 10, 22, 29, 60, 65 New Jack Cinema 9, 34, 120 African-American crime fiction 122–3 see also ethnic crime fiction

African-American film executives 15 African-American musicians as model of performance 23–4 African-American roles in film influence of US Office of War Information 37–8 limited casting opportunities 44 see also censorship; studio era Allen, Flo 36 American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) 46, 49 American Gangster (2007) 31, 33, 58, 62, 90, 92, 98–100, 101, 108, 113, 117, 136 Antwone Fisher (2002) 8, 10, 15, 93, 136 Aronson, Ruth 36 Attenborough, Richard 49

B Baker, Houston A., Jr 116 Ball, William 46 Baraka, Amiri 20, 66 Berry, Halle 22, 63 Bingham, Dennis 67, 68 biopics 6, 27, 31, 46, 66–8, 77, 78, 80, 89, 91, 92, 113 Black film see AfricanAmerican cinema black masculinity 3–4, 7–8, 11–12, 23–5, 26–7, 60–1, 123, 139 Black Nationalism 2, 27, 104 see also New Black Aesthetic black noir 115, 119–20, 121, 123, 125, 126–7, 129, 130–1, 134, 136, 143n1 (Ch. 5) acting style 117–19, 124 black perspective in 115–17 blues detectives 115, 116, 118–19, 123–4 contemporary black cinema 119, 120 detective thrillers 122–3 ethnic crime fiction 119–20 silent and studio-era films 119 Washington’s roles in 115–18, 121–31, 133–4

Blaxploitation 9, 22, 60, 71, 99, 119 blues detectives see black noir Bogle, Donald 2, 8, 26, 30, 35, 48, 68, 86, 87 The Bone Collector (1999) 9, 28, 32, 90, 116, 117, 121–4 The Book of Eli (2010) 15, 92, 136 Boyd, Todd 11, 21, 66 Boyz N the Hood (1991) 29, 36, 120 Brando, Marlon 23, 99 Breen, Joseph 38, 40 Brode, Douglas 6, 18, 28, 42, 141n1 (Ch. 2) Brown v. Board of Education (1954) 38, 39, 60, 129 C Cagney, James 99 Carbon Copy (1981) 20, 36, 42–4, 43 censorship, of miscegenation and black romance 38–40, 52, 54, 56–8, 72, 74 Checkmates (1988) 50 civil rights era, movement and values 4, 37, 39, 57, 71, 74, 142n2 post-civil rights era 4–5, 8, 14, 139 pre-civil rights era 3

Clooney, George 8, 11, 19, 52 Corliss, Richard 8 Cosby, Bill 4, 36, 64 The Cosby Show (1984–92) 40 Courage under Fire (1996) 8, 9, 28, 32, 90, 93, 108, 109, 110–12, 112, 113, 136, 139 Crimson Tide (1995) 8, 9, 16, 28, 30, 32, 90, 91, 102–4, 104, 114 Cripps, Thomas 66 crossover directors 20 films 20, 66, 92 stars 11–12, 19–21, 30, 64–5, 139 Cruise, Tom 28 Cry Freedom (1987) 10, 18, 27–8, 31, 36, 45, 49–50, 50, 52–3, 55, 59, 65, 68, 71, 92, 136 D Dandridge, Dorothy 38, 141n1 (Introduction) Davis, Viola 51 deCordova, Richard 3, 117 Déjà Vu (2006) 31, 32, 91, 96, 102, 107–8, 107, 113 Demme, Jonathan 32, 121 Denby, David 97 De Niro, Robert 19

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detective thrillers see black noir Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) 12, 20, 29, 32, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 129–32, 131, 133, 137, 144n2 Diawara, Manthia 8, 120 Donalson, Melvin 2, 3, 4, 25, 67 Duke, Bill 8 Dyer, Richard 3, 7, 37 E Ebert, Roger 54, 110 Edwards, James 38 Ellis, Trey 4, 40, 64 see also New Black Aesthetic The Equalizer (2014) 32, 90, 92, 144n2 ethnic crime fiction 31–2, 116, 119–20, 129, 143n1 (Ch. 5) see also black noir F Fallen (1998) 32, 116, 117, 121, 122, 127–9, 128 family 31, 44, 53, 72, 74, 76, 80, 99, 100 black family dramas as American family dramas 113 black family life 29, 58–9, 110, 111, 127 importance for blues detectives 123, 125–8

160

D E N Z E L WA S H I N G T O N

family melodramas 6 see also middlebrow dramas Fences (2010) 18, 51 Flight (2012) 18, 62, 92, 97–8, 113, 136, 143n4 (Ch. 4) Flory, Dan 82, 83, 84, 119, 120, 121 Fonda, Henry 60 Fordham University 45, 46, 49, 86, 142n3 For Queen and Country (1989) 36, 55–8, 56, 57, 65, 71 Foxx, Jamie 19, 39, 63 franchise films 33, 102, 138, 144n2 Franklin, Carl 8, 20, 32, 115, 120 Freeman, Morgan 18, 19, 35, 63, 122, 132–3 Fuller, Charles 47 Fuqua, Antoine 32, 85 G Gabbard, Krin 11, 22–5 gangsta rap 25, 36, 99 Gledhill, Christine 3 Glory (1989) 10, 18, 27–8, 32, 33, 34–6, 35, 52, 55, 58–9, 63, 65, 71, 92, 136, 141n1 (Ch. 2) Goldberg, Whoopi 20, 22, 63, 71, 143n2 Gooding, Cuba, Jr 22, 63 Gossett, Lou, Jr 63 Grant, Cary 27–8, 110

The Great Debaters (2007) 15, 17, 31, 92, 93, 133–4, 136 Guerrero, Ed 68–9, 118 H Hanks, Tom 17, 18, 28, 33, 51, 74 Harris, polls on America’s Favourite Movie Stars 17, 90 Hawke, Ethan 8, 12, 24, 81–2, 85 Hays Code 38, 40 see also censorship; studio era Heart Condition (1990) 42, 71, 110 He Got Game (1998) 10, 25–6, 26, 29, 29, 31, 32, 33, 132, 136 Hernández, Juano 38 Himes, Chester 116, 119–20 hip hop 4, 21, 25, 27 Hoffman, Philip Seymour 19 hooks, bell 8, 9, 72, 73 Horne, Lena 38 Hudlin brothers 71 Hughes brothers 71 The Hurricane (1999) 18, 29, 32, 62, 63, 64, 65, 77–80, 79, 80, 86, 91, 93, 136 I Ice Cube 4, 29, 36 independent films 9, 11, 19, 22, 36, 119, 136

Inside Man (2006) 10, 32, 33, 90, 96–7, 113 Isaacs, Cheryl Boone 15 Iverem, Esther 9, 10, 35, 63, 90–1, 93, 96, 112 J Jackson, Samuel L. 19, 92, 122 Jewison, Norman 32, 47, 66, 77 John Q (2002) 90, 91, 93, 108, 109, 112–13, 113 journalism, colour barrier in 73 Julius Caesar (2005) 50, 51 K Kauffmann, Stanley 99 King, Barry 137, 138 Klawans, Stuart 137 L LaSalle, Mick 78, 80, 99 Lee, Spike 4, 10, 25, 28, 32, 33, 50, 58, 63, 66, 67, 71, 120, 132 Leon, Kenny 51 Leonard, David 10, 83 Limato, Ed 36, 52–3, 55, 71, 85, 92, 137 see also Washington, agents and managers Lott, Tommy 9

M McDaniel, Hettie 61 McDonagh, Maitland 105 Mailer, Norman 23 Malcolm X (1992) 10, 18, 28, 31, 32, 62, 63–4, 65–70, 69, 70, 71, 77, 113, 120, 136 The Manchurian Candidate (2004) 30, 32, 121, 136 Man on Fire (2004) 12, 32, 90, 91, 105, 113, 136, 143n1 (Ch. 4) Mapp, Edward 63, 142n1 Marshall, Penny 110, 143n2 middlebrow dramas 6, 64, 66, 68, 78, 80, 109–14, 133 The Mighty Quinn (1989) 36, 53–5, 54, 56, 57, 58, 65, 71, 92 Mississippi Masala (1991) 12, 32, 36, 58, 59–60, 71, 92, 136 Mitchum, Robert 54, 118 Mo’ Better Blues (1990) 10, 12, 28, 32, 36, 50, 58–9, 59, 71, 92, 136 Mosley, Walter 32, 115, 129, 132 Much Ado about Nothing (1993) 41 Mundy Lane Entertainment 15, 110, 115

Muni, Paul 27 Murphy, Eddie 18, 19, 20, 33, 60, 72, 141n1 (Introduction) Murray, Albert 116 N NAACP 37, 44 Image Awards 18, 34, 133, 143n3 Nair, Mira 58 Negro Ensemble Company 47 New Black Aesthetic (NBA) 4, 7, 25, 27, 41, 57, 64–5, 67, 73, 85, 88, 89, 104, 139 New Black Cinema see African-American cinema New Jack Cinema see African-American cinema Newman, Paul 19, 28 Nickson, Chris 6, 7, 34, 35, 49, 60, 70–1, 141n1 (Ch. 2) No Way Out (1950) 38, 119 O Obama, Barak 18 Out of Time (2003) 32, 93, 121, 136 P Pacino, Al 99 The Pelican Brief (1993) 28, 30, 65, 72–3, 74, 76, 77, 86, 90, 92, 102, 136, 139

INDEX

161

Philadelphia (1993) 32, 65, 72, 73–6, 76, 77, 86, 90, 92, 102, 110 Poitier, Sidney 3, 4, 20, 22, 38–9, 42, 54, 55, 63, 85–7, 92, 119 post-studio era 9, 10–11, 14, 15, 19, 32–3, 137, 138, 139 see also studio era Power (1986) 42 The Preacher’s Wife (1996) 108, 109, 110, 113, 136 Pryor, Richard 20, 44, 60 R A Raisin in the Sun (2014) 51 Redford, Robert 8, 28 Remember the Titans (2000) 30, 31, 90, 92, 93–5, 94, 114, 117, 136 Ricochet (1991) 32, 42–3, 71, 121 Robeson, Paul 3, 7–8, 12, 20, 39, 142n2 Robinson, Bill ‘Bojangles’ 27 Rudin, Scott 51 S Safe House (2012) 30, 90, 92–3, 100–2, 113, 114, 136, 143n1 (Ch. 4) St Elsewhere (1982–8) 13, 41–2, 44, 52

162

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Schultz, Michael 20, 42 Scorsese, Martin 18 Scott, Tony 32, 91, 102, 105, 107–9 Shingler, Martin 1 The Siege (1998) 28, 31, 32, 76–7, 136 Singleton, John 4, 36, 71 Smith, Susan 141n1 (Introduction) Smith, Valerie 42–3 Smith, Will 18, 19, 20, 22, 92, 141n1 (Introduction) Snipes, Wesley 9, 29, 39 Soitos, Stephen F. 116 A Soldier’s Play (1981–3) 44–5, 47–8, 60 A Soldier’s Story (1984) 32, 44–5, 48–9, 48, 53, 55, 59, 77, 104 Spacey, Kevin 29 star image 1–5, 37, 60 see also Washington, star image star studies 1, 3, 7, 9, 13, 141n1 (Introduction) Sterritt, David 19 Stone, Robinson 45 Streep, Meryl 18, 19 studio era 27–8, 37–40, 42, 43, 52, 54, 58, 67–8, 138 see also post-studio era Subers, Ray 97, 98, 100 Sung, Wendy 63

T The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) 32, 91, 93, 97, 108–9, 109 Taylor, Clyde 48 Taylor, Regina 111, 143n3 Thomas, Billy (Boys Club, Mount Vernon) 87 Townsend, Robert 8 The Tragedy of Richard III (1990) 50 Training Day (2001) 10, 12, 18, 24, 30, 32, 62–3, 65, 80–5, 83, 85, 90–3, 100–1, 121, 129, 136 Travolta, John 11, 109 Tucker, Patrick 107 2 Guns (2013) 16, 17, 92 U Unstoppable (2010) 32, 91–2, 97, 108 US Office of War Information (OWI) 37 V Vasey, Ruth 40 Virtuosity (1995) 32, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124–7, 126 W Washington, Denzel Academy Awardwinning actor 5, 33, 62, 85, 102, 142n1

Washington, Denzel cont. acting ability 5, 15, 18, 22, 35–6, 43, 45, 55–6, 59–61, 78–80, 97–8, 136 ability to establish emotional intimacy 28, 52, 72, 91 ability to establish point of identification 64–5, 75–7, 110, 112, 124 acting approach 45–6, 49–50, 77–8, 81–3, 87–8, 91, 95, 99, 102, 104–5, 107, 117–18, 124, 136–7, 140 acting awards 2, 16, 18, 33, 34, 47, 51, 62, 72, 89, 90 and actors with prodigious talent 19 African-American cinema 9, 65 agents and managers 2, 13, 19, 36, 45, 52–3, 55, 71, 85, 92, 137 America’s favourite movie star 17, 90, 91, 114 bankable star 15, 17, 51, 134, 139 black urban professional 42, 72, 73, 77, 89, 102, 123, 139

Washington, Denzel cont. box-office success 16–17, 30, 51, 80–1, 90, 95, 112, 113, 134 career in the 1980s 15, 33, 36–61, 64, 68, 72, 92 career in the 1990s 12, 13, 19, 21, 25, 28, 58, 61, 64, 67, 71, 92, 116, 119, 122, 139 career since 2000 16, 30, 90, 92–3, 138 see also Academy Awards, significance for Washington’s star image classic movie star/ stardom 16, 26, 36, 53, 55, 61, 134 crossover star 11–12, 19–20, 30, 64–5, 139 director 8, 9, 15, 19, 133–4, 136 diverse audience 17, 41, 101, 108 diversified portfolio 72, 92, 114, 115 entertainer of the year 16 entrepreneur 15, 138 Everyman or regular guy 2, 74, 76, 108, 109–10, 111, 112, 114, 139

Washington, Denzel cont. fans 2, 6, 17, 28, 51–2, 135 high-quality brand 6, 33, 62, 65, 90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 102, 138 impersonations of 18 mainstream American cinema 5, 11, 33 and Malcolm X 27, 46–8, 67–70, 89, 104, 135 matinee idol 5, 27, 36, 41, 52, 54, 57, 61, 72, 135, 139 and Melvin Tolson 31, 133, 135 most trusted people in America 18 New Black Aesthetic image and masculinity 4, 7, 25, 27, 41, 57, 64–5, 85, 88–9, 139 prestige star 5, 62 producer or executive producer 15, 110, 115, 136 public speeches 2, 16, 36, 85–6 romantic leading man 15, 18–19, 26, 27–8, 36, 52–4, 56, 58–61, 65, 72, 92, 108, 135 and Rubin Carter 29, 77–80, 89, 135 ‘sexiest man alive’ 16, 135

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Washington, Denzel cont. signature or trademark 6, 16, 45, 95, 101 star image 2–5, 7, 27, 36, 39, 60, 62, 64, 91, 115, 137, 139 star performer 5, 6, 18–19, 26, 33, 52, 62, 64, 65, 91, 95, 97, 102 and Steve Biko 27, 31, 49–50, 78, 138

164

D E N Z E L WA S H I N G T O N

Washington, Denzel cont. television 13, 19, 41–2, 44, 45, 52, 60 theatre 36, 44–8, 50–1, 60, 85, 88, 138–9 Washington, Pauletta 135 Waters, Ethel 38 When the Chickens Come Home to Roost (1981) 46–7

Whitaker, Forest 8, 19, 20, 39, 63 Wilkerson, Isabel 137 Willis, Bruce 11, 77, 105 Wilma (1977) 45 Wooten, Sara McIntosh 45 Z Zwick, Ed 32, 36

List of illustrations While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future editions. He Got Game, © Touchstone Pictures; Glory, TriStar Pictures; Carbon Copy, Hemdale Holdings/RKO Pictures/First City Films; A Soldier’s Story, Columbia Pictures Corporation/Delphi Productions; Cry Freedom, Universal City Studios Inc.; The Mighty Quinn, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc./Star Partners II/A & M Films; For Queen and Country, Zenith Productions/Atlantic Entertainment Group/Working Title Films; Mo’ Better Blues, © Universal Pictures; Malcolm X, © Warner Bros./© Largo International N.V.; The Pelican Brief, © Warner Bros.; Philadelphia, © TriStar Pictures; The Hurricane, Azoff Entertainment; Training Day, © Warner Bros./© Village Roadshow Pictures; Remember the Titans, Disney Enterprises Inc./© Jerry Bruckheimer Inc.; American Gangster, © Universal Studios; Crimson Tide, © Don Simpson/© Jerry Bruckheimer Productions/© Hollywood Pictures Company/© Walt Disney Pictures and Television; Déjà Vu, © Touchstone Pictures Inc./© Jerry Bruckheimer Films; The Taking of Pelham 123, © Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.; Courage under Fire, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/Fox 2000 Pictures/Davis Entertainment Company; John Q, New Line Cinema/Bourg/Koules Productions/Evolution Entertainment; Virtuosity, © Paramount Pictures Corporation; Fallen, Turner Pictures/Atlas Entertainment; Devil in a Blue Dress, © TriStar Pictures Inc.