A group of guilt-ridden young white people head to a resort that allows them to role-play as slaves.
Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Marcus Flemmings
Starring: Stephanie Da Silva, Freya Crompton, Temica Thompson, Malik Kaddu, David Ajayi
Challenge: get through the next hour without hearing or reading about someone doing or saying something racially offensive. Good luck. People don't hide it anymore. Racism is in. Racism is big business. It's the ticket politicians run on, the fetid grease which oils social media. In the run up to the US election, a presidential candidate openly opined about Haitians eating cats and dogs, safe in the assumption that a considerable faction of his racist audience lap such idiotic shit up (no one actually believes a group of Caribbean immigrants are eating domestic pets: they just love that someone is expounding such miserable hatred. It places them above others). In Northern Ireland marauding gangs burned down houses and ransacked the businesses of people believed to be migrants (the chaos was ostensibly motivated due to a sex crime committed by Romanians. It is instructive that there is no similar concern when white men do the raping, as happens with miserable frequency). Last summer across the UK thugs used the murder of children as an excuse for weeks of day long race riots (although, fairs fair, not in Wales). And this is just the headline stuff, with the quotidian prejudices and slurs and exclusions which proliferate in the shadows of such outbursts remaining unreported.
The context is apposite for a missive such as black filmmaker Marcus Flemmings' White Guilt, a social satire-come-horror which exploits the cultural implications of its title. Via a pleasingly hauntological mise-en-scene recalling the porridge hued look of '70s British public information films, we witness a bunch of hipster sorts - affluent, white - on a coach en route to a resort where they can role play as slaves for a week. The build is sinister, with a mood of paranoia and threat established early within the film's lean 60 minute run time. The resort, an antebellum plantation, is a bit like when at Halloween there are those nights where you can get chased by people dressed up as monsters for a laugh, except here we see black men and women (some, it is established early, who envision the role as a payday, with others taking it more seriously) administer their white charges in the roles of slave masters. Upon arrival they order the coachload to strip and admonish discussion amongst the ranks whilst checking their teeth and sizing them up, making the sado-masochistic power dynamic clear.
While the Twilight Zoney paradigm is initially intriguing, the realisation is ultimately strange. Flemmings' previous films looked at the 2011 London Riots and the murder of Mark Duggan, so we can assume that this film is righteously charged, but the rhetoric of White Guilt is obscure. Is the implication that by race swapping the captives it brings the existent horror of slavery into a sharper relief? The slavers liberally use the racial epithet "cracker," but this word doesn't have the same insidious weight as the n-word (I don't even feel comfortable writing it, because every reiteration adds to the presence of the word), illustrating a problem inherent to the film: there is no equivocation. The weight of history is imbalanced. As the great Chuck D said, "People, people we are the same/ No we're not the same"... And narratively, what the opening initiates - that the experience is going to be gruelling and unpleasant for both participants and the audience - the rest of the film is left to duly execute with hostile inevitability.
And thus, as the group pick cotton and plant corn, we see increasing brutality in the form of whippings, people made to lie down in the dirt with no food and no water while the guards stand on them, and just generally treated in the worst way as it all goes progressively to shit. There is an interesting proposition in how both sides fall into their roles; Ella Bardot's Kelsey as the camp commander fully realises her position, and when the captives (who have, it has been instituted, paid highly for the experience) acquiesce to unreasonable demands a nonplussed guard questions the situation. "Why they lay down?," he enquires. "She said so," comes the reply. It's all a bit Stanford Prison Experiment (the veracity of which, it's worth remembering, has been questioned) and the suggestion that within the wider context we simply fulfil the functions which society affords us is compelling.
A discomfiting aspect of White Guilt is the representation of the black slavers. We see them go above and beyond their role-play; beating their charges (who, again, are hopeless trust fund wimps), singling out a mixed-race participant for not being black enough, and, eventually, one sexually abuses the most pale and blondest member of the group. Inherently violent and sexually predatory: an unhelpful fulfilment of the age-old racist depiction of black men. If this is satire then it is unclear what the underlying polemic is. As for the white participants (the film is binary in its representational codes), again the target seems misplaced. These sort of lip service, social justice warriors can get on everyone's tits with their self-righteousness and propensity for seeing victims everywhere, but, come on, their hearts are in the right place, and they mean well. A more interesting narrative development would have been if the gang decided to rebel, with the captives becoming the captors, in a thought-provoking reinstatement of historical injustice. Or, thinking aloud within the context of White Guilt's interminable racial politics, what if the resort consisted of imprisoned right-wing white extremists, and was open to customers to role-play slaveholders and mete out vengeance for the historical atrocities listed to camera in a bravura rant by Kelsey in the third act. As it stands, White Guilt intrigues but never fully capitalises on its interesting propositions. Following the deaths and animalisation of the experience, as it comes to a close another coach load arrives with yet more willing participants. Nothing changes, White Guilt suggests. A message which is uncomfortable in its validity.
White Guilt premiered at the Raindance Film Festival on June 22nd.
