Tropic Thunder

For Ruti Talmor's Spring course 'Visual Culture and Politics in the African Diaspora' I wrote a paper on racial  performativity and the persistence of whiteness in contemporary Hollywood films. While researching I watched and examined the 2008 film Tropic Thunder as a prime example of the confinement of black identity and racial performativity. In short, I wrote,

"Tropic Thunder is an ironic film all about the on-screen performance of identity and the ins and outs of creating a big-budget Hollywood films with big-name and big-ego stars. The film follows a group of actors playing Vietnam soldiers in a film in production who, after a series of events find themselves stuck in the jungle forced to become soldiers to survive. The film stars three main characters, Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.). Lazarus, playing a white actor who is asked to play a black man, goes into full blackface through a pigmentation surgery in order to truly embody his character. The use of blackface is both ironic and problematic. While he is ‘in character’ (in blackface) Lazarus is aggressive, ruthless, and uses poor grammar. The use of a white actor (Downey Jr.) playing a black man puts Hollywood’s representation of blackness on a whole new level of confinement; with the codes surrounding blackness on screen being played out by a man who is not even black. The irony in the film around ‘becoming the character you play,’ only furthers the problematic racial performativity because of the exaggerated performance of what it means to be ‘black.’"

The articles we've read on blackface minstrelsy have carried a common theme for me. The performance of blackness by white folks is not only a problematic representation of an identity not theirs, but a way of defining whiteness through representing blackness. In other words, instead of the white working class men in this historical context exclaiming 'this is what/who I am,' blackface minstrelsy allows the white man to understand their own identity through showing 'this is not what I am.'

In the case of Tropic Thunder, although the film's intention is recognizing and poking fun at Hollywood and the film business in general, the use of Downey Jr.'s character creates a whole different set of problems.