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I don’t know whether or not I’m Through with White Girls––a low-budget, semi-high-concept rom-com about a black comic book nerd who makes a conscious decision to stop dating girls who look like me in order to start dating girls who look more like him, but ends up falling for a girl who looks like Lisa Bonet in High Fidelity, except more so––has the power to ignite a real, widespread conversation about interracial dating and the contemporary politics of race+class+coolness (or lack thereof). But after last night’s packed-house screening at BAM, which was followed by a surprisingly feisty Q & A, I do know that White Girls has the power to make a Brooklyn blogger self-censor, and that’s a feat to which few films can lay claim.
It was the title that did it, more than anything actually on screen. Screenwriter Courtney Lilly says he figured out what to call the film before he’d fully fleshed out its concept––he was inspired by a song called “I’m Through With White Girls,” by punks The Dirtbombs, who are playing a show in Fort Greene on Saturday as part of BAM’s AfroPunk festivities. When asked at last night’s Q&A if the film was based off personal experience, the sometime Arrested Development writer quipped, “Personal experience of listening to a Dirtbombs song, yeah.”
The screenwriter’s “it is what it is” treatment of his film’s provocative appellation pleased the crowd, but producer Phyllis Johnson––sister of the film’s star and driving producer, Lia Johnson––characterised it as a punk-rock badge of honor cum niche marketing strategy. “This film is kind of finding a cult appeal,” she said. “[The title] initially limits the audience as far as commercial base goes, but ultimately it’s bringing a more engaged audience.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but no shit. Last night’s Q&A didn’t even get started until 11ish and it ran long, and yet most of the audience not only stayed, but seemed eager to participate in a real discussion. I’ve never seen such a thing on a Monday night in Brooklyn.
But it wasn’t all a lovefest. At one point during the Q & A, a youngish black woman settled in a front row to ask her question––which was really more of a statement of offense. “I’m a blogger,” she said. “And I have a lot of white girl friends. I was going to blog about this movie tomorrow, but I felt like all I would be able to say is, ‘I saw this really funny movie and I can’t tell you the name.’
A murmur spread through the crowd, soft at first but escalating quickly.
“Why couldn’t you say the title?” asked screenwriter Lilly, not quite indignant but clearly tired of audiences getting hung up on this very thing.
As if certain that she had an unassailable point, the blogger responded: “Well, what if a movie was called I Am Through With Black Girls?”
Lilly could barely get his answer out before the crowd erupted in claps and cheers. “I would go see that movie!”
The wall of noise soon faded into an un-miked, un-moderated discussion amongst audience members with occasional interjections from the filmmakers on stage. A blonde co-ed broke through at one point to make a political statement: “I just want to say, it’s perfectly okay to make fun of white people.” With more pressing issues to discuss, no one immediately took the bait.
It’s hard to describe how unlikely such a sit-in seemed whilst sitting through the sitcomish film itself. A broad comedy that occasionally suffers for its leads’ lack of comic chemistry, it’s essentially a Lost Man Child story of redemption, with race, class and cultural affectations serving as both armor and weapons in the war of intimacy. It looks surprisingly glossy for an indie shot in 24 days with a mostly handheld camera on the streets of Los Angeles, and tonally, it plays a lot like a race-conscious version of Swingers, but lighter on the so-true-it’s-painful sparks of humiliation comedy. At times, it feels a bit too picture perfect; commenting on a scene in which lead Jay (Anthony Montgomery) finds himself flanked on a bus by a swan-necked black girl by whom he’s obviously intimidated, and white girl with an easy smile who seems much…easier, an audience member quibbled: “Anyone who’s ever been on a bus in L.A. knows that the people don’t really look like that.” She paused. “Except on the Santa Monica bus.”
But even if it takes the film a while to work through the stereotypes it traffics in before it can critique them, there is some inspired comedy here waiting for the patient. Near-brilliant one-liners sometimes seem to drop from the sky out of nowhere, often from the mouth of Jay’s white best friend Matt, whose subplot involves a crash course in hip hop culture in the name of impressing a girl. And I love the film’s last scene, a fractured musical number/rite of humiliation so thrillingly weird that it defies any expectation of how a scene in which Our Hero melts hearts on the dance floor is suppossed to play out.
White Girls features a number of character actor veterans of 70s and 80s TV in supporting roles, including Richard Lawson and Johnny Brown in supporting roles (Lawson was credited simply as Angry Black Man in an episode of All in the Family). “It’s kind of a testament to how few good black roles there are that they wanted to do this indie film,” said director Jennifer Sharp. Likewise, there was a sense of gratitude in the room last night, which is surely testament to the paucity of films made with a young, racially mixed, politically and intellectually engaged audience in mind.
Or maybe everyone was just happy to have been spared a bit of sanctimonious bloggy hand wringing. For sheer virtue of who it upsets, White Girls would appear on the right side of the fight.
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Wow! I’m the blogger in question. LOL. God I love web 2.0. Thanks for putting this up so quickly.
I can only go off of what you have written about this event and it seems like there were a lot of clueless people there. Was there no one there that understood why the same story with the racial roles reversed would be more controversial?
I’m surprised that was only criticism considering the content of the film. It wasn’t exactly flattering to black women, not even in the slightest.
Think folks need to see the film before they consider it’s content! You can pre order it on Netflix!
[...] and i left early into the q&a afterward, but apparently it got kind of heated afterward. this blogger does a good job with the play-by-play. of course, i wasn’t there, but methinks those folks [...]
To be frank, I’m still a fan of the second, less controversial title: The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks. Lilly hated it, saying it never made any sense to him, but I think it actually speaks more to his journey in the film.
In any case, at its core the film ain’t all that controversial. It’s just really cute and well-made.
[...] that such a title may overwhelm one’s access to the film itself. At a recent screening at BAM, as Karina Longworth reported about over at Spout, a black female blogger commented that she feared to tell her white female friends [...]
I realize I am 2 months behind this thing but I wrote and sang the song,”I’m Through With White Girls” while I was a member of the Dirtbombs and I’m white!
Where’s my royalty check?!?!?
Jim
I enjoyed this movie and would recommend it to anyone. And 2 Star Trek guys were in it(Anthony Montogomery and Cirroc Lofton). Yes!
hey um… whats this about just wondering if you can help me on that.. cause that be so cool if any one let me kno what this is ^^ so yea tuddles
It’s funny, I never seen a film and felt immediately compelled to write a blog about it. I happen to be a fan of the low budget variety movies and I thought this movie was hilarious. I actually cared about the stories and felt I related more to the lead character in Jay than most other leading male roles. Being the geek that I am, you do fall prey to the intra-stereotyping in dating circles. I remember in High School, where people would make the distinction of who as black and who wasn’t, in Seattle, Washington. Yes, Seattle, Washington. lol Anyway, loved your thoughts on the film, would’ve loved to have been at this screening.
It would be very different if the title was (Iam done with black girls) simply because that statement is true. Saying “Iam done with white girls” is pretty much laughable white girls probably seen the title and laughed and said yeah right. In movie is some what of a mockery like the white women he was with was not cast to be sexy,fun or wanted so man (even though it’s a movie) would say man If those are the white girls you’re getting then I would turn to sistas too. I don’t know about other black girls but me personally we don’t actually need a movie saying (Iam done with black girls) we can just get up in the morning and live our daily lives.I heard a man say black girls don’t appreciate a black man I wonder did that statement come first or the unappreciation
I just watched this movie a short while ago on cable tv- six months after the blog and accompanying comments were made.
All I want to say is that your perspective on the movie obviously depends on who you are- black, white, male, female etc. As for me, I thorooughly enjoyed the movie and identified (although I am a much older female- fifty-something year old) with the role Lia Johnson, the lead female played.
Being biracial, with a white mother and black father, I laughed outloud because I, too, have experienced that observation from blacks who have said I talked “white” (or “Valley Girl”). I guess biraciality comes out in strange and often funny ways sometimes…
Wanted to first help validate Linda H’s claims… I’m actually from the Valley (SFV) and I’m, too, biracial. Although to Whites from the Valley I sound like Snoop Dogg, to most PEOPLE (in general) throughout the remainder of the country, I’ve been told I sound like a “valley dude” (or by Blacks in the South - I just sound like a “White boy”). I believe it has as much to do with my complexion (and their overbearing perception that people from So. Cal. especially people with lighter hued skin - if “hued” is a word - must think we’re White or want to be White) as it does my articulation (or as Easterners say - my over annunciation) of the English language. We, in the west, and especially in Cali, are very phonetic people. And the “dudes”, “likes”, and “you knows” don’t help our cause.
I’ll sort of contrast the perception you may have of me based on that first paragraph by saying this… I just saw this movie for the first time last night and I missed the very beginning so I’m not sure exactly why he stopped dating white women but, in the 12th grade (1992) I made a conscious decision to stop dating White women myself. It was the height of Public Enemy and the rebirth of Malcolm X and I thought it was my social responsibility to “hold high the Black woman.”
While I think my effort was noble and in certain situations necessary, it was based on a fallacious premise. The premise was that “Black woman gave a damn whom I dated.” LOL — I was an arrogant bastard thinking I had power to make Black women feel good about themselves (or even like they needed me to).
While watching the movie some of those thoughts came back but what I found was that the character played by Lia Johnson was the woman I was actually looking for the whole time. A Black woman who I could relate to (on most levels - culturally) who had experiences within many subcultures, spoke grammatically correct English, did not relish in “Hood-rattidness”, seemed pretty happy (not the “angry black woman”), and could actually (not just hold a conversation) but brought to the table a wealth of character that made the leading man a better guy!
My official stance: I have a crush on Catherine Williamson. Thanks Courtney, you’ve put yet another unattainable woman there in the space of Mike’s mind! : ) The movie gets an A+ for me and it just took the place of another low budget flick (created by my Frat Brother) “Sprung” as my new favorite Black love story!
Your blog is pretentious trite.
It begs the question, why so serious?
At first i was not going to watch this movie the title turned me off, anytime you have a title like that the characters usually are going to spend some time on racial politics or situations dealing with race like”White Men Can’t Jump”. But i did glance at a few scenes mostly because it starred the guy from Star Trek Enterprise. the movie was not as bad as i thought it would be not having seen the movie from the beginning i am not sure of the amount of white girls the star had dated except one woman that confronted him on the street layer in the movie. the character seems to have settled on a woman that was just the right combination of black and white for him although i seriously doubt the girl would go out with another black guy so soon after breaking up with another, the character did not seem like the dating black guys type. as for the title since the movie has no A,B or C list stars the title is the only way to attract attention.
I love the movie. I watched it about two weeks ago and loved it so much, I watched it again. I’m sure there are several factions of Americans who would be offended, but the musings of Jay are reality. I wasn’t going to watch because of the title; thought it’d be a trite renditon of racial politics in millenium America. Instead, there is an honest treatment of the intersections of race, class, and culture alongside some straight hilarious moments. Beyond the Jay-Catherine relationship, the movie portrays other elements of the black middle class with just the amount of drama necessary to bring home the point. There is the old Black middle class (the family of the woman who was getting married), the new Black middle class (the family of the man getting married), the black-conscious Black middle class (Jay’s black best friend), and finally the black geek stuck in between two worlds (Jay). If this movie does not highlight the dilemmas found in DuBois’s “double-consciousness”, a state of mind many, if not most, black folks are in, I do not know what can or will. In the end, Jay just wants someone who can understand why he as a black man has to be preoccupied with race (depicted in the movie with the offense he takes with being called another famous black person) yet why he as a black man navigating a non-black society ultimately has a broader perspective of the world than that simply attached to his race (depicted with the relationship he formulates with his white best friend). I could talk of the many other instances when this movie provides us a more complex version of racial politics than is currently heralded in the media, but I will end by saying that we need more films like this. Keep producing Jennifer Sharp!
I absolutely love this movie. I can watch it over and over again. I certaintly can relate to the lead character in the move. I would recommend this to my family and friends.
I don’t see why people keep mentioning the title. Obviously the title is meant in jest. furthermore, to me its more magnetizing–not deterring.
if the title was the inverted variant (”I’m through with black girls) I still would be interested in seeing it.
the movie’s whole point is to draw out a dialogue about “whiteness” and “blackness” and why anyone gives a crap. those describe races of human beings, not their true being.
human beings really need to grow up…wise up.
enlarge your hearts.
I just love this movie. I found this movie about six months ago, and I must have watch it a least 10 times since. I so relate with the character of Jay (myself being a software engineer computer geek sci-fi lover). Although I’ve never dated white women mostly due to the fear of stares from Black women, yeah I know it’s a childish fear but real notheless. What I like most about the movie is that it tells a story about a young black male that wasn’t the stereotyped thugged out gangsta. But that of a young man following his passions making his way through life in search of love - In a city like LA were image is everything. I notice that there were several previous comments about the title, I will say this I have recommended the movie to several friends and they have not bothered to watch the film to this day because they were turn off by the title - some people are just too shallow.
As an undercover black nerd myself I’m probably more than somewhat pre-disposed to like this film based on subject matter alone, but I thought Lia Johnson entirely adorable in the role and Anthony Montgomery sympathetic enough to keep his character’s crappy treatment of the female characters from making him too detestable for us to care whether or not he ends up getting the girl in the end. Indie filmmaking techniques like hand-held camera help rough over some of the smoother, sitcom-y edges to the story (penned, after all, by sitcom writer Courtney Lilly).