Obsessed

Are we in post-racial America?

That was the question that was most on my mind as I sat down in a deserted theater last week in Leominster to see an early matinee of Obsessed. In case you haven't seen the trailer, the premise is basically this:

A charming and handsome African-American executive, Derek (Idris Elba), is married to a beautiful African-American woman (Beyonce Knowles) and has a young son. They live in a nice house in Los Angeles. One day a pretty young white temp worker (Ali Larter) arrives at the office and takes a liking to him. Eventually she stalks him, and makes life hell for him and his family.

The trailers mentioned nothing about race, and I correctly anticipated that race would not be an overt issue in the movie as well. In fact, race is never mentioned outloud in the entire story.

The question I asked myself right from the beginning was: do the characters' races actually matter to the story? That is, could one have made the same movie with a different racial mix among the characters?

By the end of Act One, I had my answer. Race definitely did matter to the story. It was impossible for me to imagine the same movie being made with an all-white cast, or with the racial roles reversed, or in some other perturbation. But actually this is overally broad. Really it is more correct to say that Derek, the male protagonist, definitely had to be African-American for this story to work.

Why? It actually had a lot to do with our current norms of sexuality. The executive protagonist is a strong character, with a definite moral compass that he attempts to follow. He resists temptation at every turn. He does not sleep with his beautiful stalker. He pushes her away when she tries to give him a blow job in a toilet stall.

Simply put, Americans would never believe that a white man would be able to resist such temptation. There isn't a single white actor alive that I could think of, who could pull off this role, at least not in the age group depicted here.

In the Classical era, there were dozens, nay, hundreds of actors who could have done this, because that's what honorable men were expected to do. But American men are no longer considered to be honorable by default. They are considered to be dogs who are unable to resist blow job offers, even at the cost of their marriage and family. No (white) man, we believe, can resist such temptations, but he is still a scumbag when he succumbs.

But a black man is perhaps believable is this regard because we know that black men have to play by a stricter set of rules. We all know that black men must try harder in the work place, and must take special precautions to guard their public images. It is believable to American audiences that Derek could muster up the courage to push the vixen away.

Once I made this realization about the looming subtext of race within this story, I began to appreciate the movie, which turned out be not so bad.

In most respects, it is a simple standard plot line:

1. Attractive woman falls for her married boss and tries to seduce him.
2. He resists her
3. She tries even harder, becoming desperate.
4. He continues to resist her
5. She becomes unstable and takes extreme measures, overtly endangering his position.
6. The man's wife finds out about the stalker.
7. There is a breach between the man and his wife over the issue.
8. The breach is repaired.
9. The stalker is defeated.

The arc of the plot went pretty much as I expected. Like I said, without the subtext of race, this wouldn't have been a very interesting movie. But it was indeed interesting, because of the part of the story between the first attempts of Lisa, the white woman, to seduce her boss, and the eventual moment when the wife finds out about it.

In this type of plot, the critical element of this story, the one that drives the narrative, is always the choice by the husband to conceal what is happening from his wife. Instead of telling her about the attempts at seduction, he keeps everything to himself. The concealment is the "poison" that escalates into the near-destruction of his family. In this respect the movie was very Classical: secrets within a marriage are bad.

During this critical part of the story, the movie utterly transcended race. The blackness and whiteness of the characters didn't matter at all, and the movie felt post-racial because it posited that the black protagonist actually had the same kind of Postmodern weaknesses as contemporary white men.

Although the executive fended off the advances, he actually did encourage her by openly flirting with her. He crossed the line in this respect, in that he wanted to feel erotic energy in his office interactions with her without having any consequence to it.

More critical, however, is his weakness once his wife finds out about the non-affair. She does not believe him. She throws him out of "her house." He complies like a whipped dog (imagine a Classical hero leaving his own house!) and holes up in an apartment, unable to understand what he has done wrong.

"Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it," he pleads to his angry wife, all the while proclaiming his total innocence. It is exactly the disease of weakness one sees in nearly every white husband on screen. One could inscribe those quoted words as the motto of the Postmodern husband.

One thing I learned from this movie is that Beyonce Knowles is a very good actress. There is a scene near the beginning of Act Three, after the couple has been estranged for several months and are finally having dinner together. The husband has begged for dinner together on his birthday. In the restaurant, he finally admits that he should have told his wife after the very first incident with the stalker.

At that moment, one sees a shift in Knowles' eyes, and the tiniest flash of a smile. It's the kind of subtle gesture you would have seen from, say, Barbara Stanwyck back in the Forties, an action that might slip past any man but would be inescapable to any woman watching the movie. The hero has finally taken responsibility for his actions, and realized what he did wrong. It is the magic moment, and her heart melts. The breach is repaired, and the story can move forward.

From that moment on, the couple's energies are aligned, and thus when the crisis of the climax arrives, when the stalker makes her last stand, they are able to defeat her.

By that time, I had mostly forgotten who was black and who was white.