Surveying the cinematic landscape this awards season, one question keeps coming to mind: where are all the white films for white people? That might seem an odd concern to have in 2024, when white people are well represented at every major awards ceremony and the cultural event of the last 12 months was Barbenheimer, a set-to between the greatest of the Great White Man biopics and a jubilant celebration of the archetypal blonde. Or it might just seem a misdirection of energies when, at long last, we also now have some serious east Asian, Black and Indigenous-centring contenders to cheer on, in the form of Past Lives, American Fiction, The Color Purple and Killers of the Flower Moon. Yet even in our racially diverse times, whiteness on screen is everywhere – and nowhere.
White people still make up the vast majority of lead characters, as well as writers, directors and execs with green-lighting power. And yet, a film or show about white people is rarely ever also about white people. Whereas a film or show that centres Black Britons or Korean Americans or Indigenous Australians is almost always about the experience of being a Black Briton or a Korean American or an Indigenous Australian. Whiteness derives its power as much from its invisibility as it does from its ubiquity, because white humans are depicted as just human – no “white” descriptor necessary – while every other race belongs to some subcategory. This allows white artists a special privilege, as film studies professor Richard Dyer pointed out in White, his 1997 text. They can “claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people can’t do that … they can only speak for their race”.
