The Green Book: Another spoon fed film about racial

reconciliation by whites?
Depending on how you see the problem, The Green Book could seem like a white
washing savior film or a movie that teaches its watchers the “truth” and lessons. Both
impressions have been pushing debates over the movie even until now. Criticism
attacking the movie for giving a misleading depiction of racism and carelessly
rewriting the history and reality-based stories have never ended. However, the movie
was never a strict bibliographical film that follows every historical event. The
characters represented a broader majority of different classes and races and many
other categories possibly (hints of intersectionality hear). They worked rather more as
a figure, a figure used to present its audience that discrimination and suffer occurs, yet
reconciliation can be reached in the end.
As an Oscar winning American comedy-drama movie set in 1962, the entire script
is based on the true story of African American classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley,
who is on a dangerous concert tour deep into the South, and his driver and bodyguard
Tony Lip, who is also an Italian American immigrant. During their journey, clashes
between characters when Shirley stands up and resists for his dignity and other
interactions happen from time to time—— yet as time passes Tony Lip and Don
Shirley’s relationship tightens. The movie is a very classic road trip based one, and
ends with a nice ending in which both sides throw away their stereotypes (no matter if
they were based on class differences or racial differences) and become friends.
Yet many question how much truth is beneath the happy ending. In the article
“Fact-check: How true is Green Book? ", the writer attacks the movie for adding the
sundown town scene: “’We’re not from around here,’ Tony tells the police officer that
pulled him over on the side of a Mississippi road.‘No, you ain’t… He can’t be out
here at night. This is a sundown town.’” Replies the officer after seeing Don Shirley
in the back seat.
Sundown towns are seldom founded in the South, at least based on what the article
says. However, in reality three sundown towns existed in Mississippi, and such
discrimination and oppression toward minorities were often seen in that era.
Debates over the accuracy of the film’s depiction of Don Shirley and Tony Lip also
occur. Was Tony Lip really a rude, easy headed, low class tough, Italian immigrant
with some slight violence tendencies? Was Don Shirley really a gay black pianist with
edgy temper, absurdly uptight, in some ways, Mysophobia? Evidence from family
members back up the opinions involving Don Shirley’s character description
accuracy. Shirley’s surviving brother, Dr. Maurice Shirley, called the film a
"symphony of lies" when being asked about the description of his brother being
completely isolated by the black community in an interview with Shadow and Act. In
reality, Shirley had three brothers and a regular contact with them during the trip. He
was also a friend of Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and a participant of the Civil Rights movement.
Yet the slight changes and assumptions made by the script writer were not done by
mistake. Both are portrayed based on broad stereotypes of what an Italian immigrant
and high class black pianist during the 1960s should be like.
A high class black man who has a special interest in well-tailored suits, speaks
Italian, and is fond of French Opera is, and should be isolated in real life. The concept
“intersectionality” fits right in this situation here. Character Don Shirley is high class,
gay, and black. First introduced in Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the
Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination
Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, the term discusses the nature in
which social categorizations such as race, class, and gender overlap upon one person,
creating complicated and new forms of discrimination or disadvantage. As depicted in
Farrelly’s film, Shirley suffers from racial discrimination even after his achievements,
feels alienated from the black population ——perhaps because of his class privilege
and achievements among whites, or perhaps due to his sexuality (he is, we discover, a
gay man).
LGBT groups are still mistreated today, and the 1960s only made the situation for
Don Shirley worse. There was a scene in the movie in which Don and a white man
attempted to have some romantic relationship at a YMCA pool and was caught by the
police officers. Tony soon bribed the offers to prevent the musician from getting
arrested. The discrimination problem was even harsher for Dr. Shirley as he combined
the characters of both “a high class musician” and “black”. “I live in a castle, Tony!
Alone. And rich white people pay me to play piano for them because it makes them
feel cultured. But as soon as I step off that stage, I go right back to being just another
nigger to them. Because that is their true culture. And I suffer that slight alone,
because I'm not accepted by my own people 'cause I'm not like them, either.” Dr.
Shirley says during the movie.
The disadvantages of being a black and the following discrimination Dr. Shirley
bears can be seen everywhere in the movie. Though being invited to do his final
performance in Birmingham, Alabama, the country club where he will be performing
refused to let Dr. Shirley into the whites-only dining room, the same place where
many of his audience members are currently having dinner. Dinner can be ordered
from the menu but will only be served in a cramped pantry, which is also Dr. Shirley’s
changing room. Such reactions from country clubs were quite common during that
period. Black performers touring the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century bared high
risks of racist attacks around the country. In 1956, Nat King Cole was attacked
onstage by the Ku Klux Klan during a show in Alabama. Dr. Shirley himself in 1963
of Wisconsin faced similar issues. Traces of how Dr. Shirley was treated by his race
are also portrayed in the movie. The act where he shuffled around the other blacks
uneasily, looking uninvolved, holding himself apart from them and turning up his
nose in his fine clothing in a black-friendly motel proved to the audience that he
indeed, seemed to be completely divorced from his black siblings: a lonely, isolated
“alien” or genius.
Don Shirley was not the only when suffering from intersectionality features in the
movie. Tony lip, the other main character, has similar characters also. He was a rude
lower class Italian immigrant employed by a black musician. Numerous times in the
movie was him asked why was he working for a black man, and he was even insulted
one time for being an Italian immigrant in the US. When being arrested by some
Mississippi officers in a sundown town, he punched a policeman after being insulted.
You might realize now the loop the Green Book tried to reveal to its audience. Tony
Lip disliked Dr. Shirley in the first place due to Dr. Shirley’s skin tone (maybe also for
being gay), while Dr. Shirley looked down at Tony Lip for being a little educated
lower class employee. When applying for Dr. Shirley’s driver along the tour, Tony Lip
first was surprised by the luxurious room Dr. Shirley as a black man had and then
refused Don’s request that involves him iron his clothes and shine his shoes, saying
that he is not his butler. In the end Tony Lip got the job. Yet Don Shirley was soon
sick of Tony Lip’s rude talking and loud voice. After arriving at the first tour shop,
Don tries to convince Tony Lip in using different last name and talking in better
manner in front of the guests, but Tony says if they have a problem with how he talks,
he'll wait outside, which he does. Both of them represent a larger population in our
society today, showing how different characteristics combine together, forming a
unique discrimination chain where the top and bottom of the chain sometimes connect
together when focusing on different categorizations.
However, most things have a bright side. In the movie after Don Shirley’s refusal to
perform in Birmingham, Tony Lip took him to a nearby black blues club, Orange
Bird. Being tense at first, Dr. Shirley soon won the crowd and impressed the blues
band with a passionate rendition of Frederic Chopin's Winter Wind etude. He softens
and took the first step forward, opening up his heart and inviting other blacks in. An
interview with Don Shirley from the 2011 documentary Lost Bohemia further
approved Dr. Shirley and Tony Lip’s relationship. “I trusted him implicitly,” Shirley
said of Vallelonga. “Tony, not only was he my driver. We never had an employer-
employee relationship. We got to be friendly with one another.”
In “The Problems With Green Book Start With Its Title, and Don't Stop Coming”,
the writer states that the movie’s biggest flaw is when it tried to portray racism as the
result of individual ignorance of the majority when rather it was based on “a
systematic structure of purposeful inequity”. Tony Lip turns from a bigot who throws
away water glasses that two black handymen drank from into a man that befriends the
black pianist Don Shirley and invites him home for Christmas dinner. It seems to the
writer, and many other people among the audience, that the journey with Don Shirley
only made Tony Lip .realize how great Don Shirley is ——it wouldn’t change his
own impression and ways of treating blacks in his life. But remember, changes only
happen when someone made the first move, right? (“The world's full of lonely people
afraid to make the first move.” Tony Lip)
Reference:
1. Bruney, Gabrielle. “The Problems With 'Green Book' Start With Its Title, and
Don't Stop Coming.” Esquire, Esquire, 15 Mar. 2019,
www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a26486233/green-book-true-story-
explained/.
2. Crenshaw, Kimberle "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A
Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics,"University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1,
Article 8. Available at:http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
3. Tobias, Manuela. “PolitiFact - Fact-Check: How True Is Green Book?”

@Politifact, The Poytner Institute, 7 Feb. 2019,

www.politifact.com/article/2019/feb/07/green-book-oscars-fact-check-true/#4.