I’m going to introduce a film that won the 91st Academy Award. It was the most dazzling film in the ceremony.
The story is that Tony worked as a waiter in a nightclub. The club will be closed for a few months, but Tony had to pay the rent and living expenses, so he must find another job. At this juncture, a black pianist named Don hired Tony. Don was about to embark on an eight-week tour of the South. However, discrimination against blacks in the South was very strong at that time. Tony became Don‘s chauffeur and bodyguard. Along the way, their different personalities caused a lot of conflicts between them, at the same time, Don suffered in the south of a variety of unfair treatment also let Tony feel hatred of racial discrimination. In the process of getting along, they became close friends.
In that period, even though Don was a highly educated pianist, he was disrespected because of the color of his skin. Some people were polite to him just because of his talent. He is also struggling about his multiple identities, as they are released from the police station on a stormy night. He said, “I’m not black enough, I’m not white enough, I’m not even man enough, so who am I?” In the pub where he is beaten just because of his skin color, Dr.Shirley is in the Third Space and it seems that he also becomes the Third Space itself. Those words touched Tony deeply. Tony understood Don‘s loneliness, and why Don always drank alone at night, and what he thought when he looked in the rear view mirror. Tony, poor and happy, can eat 26 hot dogs for $50, while Don sits on a luxurious throne at the top of the castle, with no one to speak of.
But Dr.Shirley, who epitomized the black people of his time, was one of the luckier ones. There are so many black people behind him, in the eyes of discrimination and prejudice, quiet live the suffering but ordinary life. So, Don has to step up and change that. Don was willing to give up the security of the North and come to the South to endure hostile eyes. “Being genius is not enough, it takes courage to change people’s hearts,” he said. The year after the Green Book story, 250,000 people gathered in Lincoln Square in Washington, D.C., to speak out against racial discrimination. Not everyone has the ability to summon up courage, but as the film said, courage can change many things. Cultural inequity will cause unequal powers. However, in the process of such cultural hybridity, it can also provide the possibility for the relatively disadvantaged party to hear their voices and appeal for rights.
“It is often not the skin that determines who we are, but the world beneath it, made up of everything we have seen and loved.”
Word Cites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Book_(film)
