a review of 亲爱的白人们

February 1/28: Dear White People (Hulu) Another one that I've had in my queue for a while, and thought I'd take the occasion of Black History Month to give it a spin. I'd heard comparisons between director Justin Simien's film and the early work of Spike Lee, and while I feel the comparison is apt (particularly between this and Lee's School Daze) the target of the satire is quite different. Whereas Lee was primarily criticizing African-American campus culture, Dear White People (starting with the title) is unmistakably attacking white privilege and the uneven embrace of multiculturalism in white-majority Ivy League schools. I thought it was interesting that my biggest learning curve while watching this movie wasn't in terms of grasping the race/gender based challenges faced by the characters. It was in figuring out the hierarchy of Ivy League society, which all of the characters were participating in as more or less active players. I went to a state college and basically spent all four years living in the alternative social scenes of tabletop gaming and comics/movie fandom, so a lot of the scheming and intrigue going on here was sort of unfamiliar to me. Overall, I enjoyed the movie, but I felt like it took a little while to really get going in terms of setting up the situations and characters. The last 30 minutes of the film pay off in a satisfying way that proves the film's thesis (that the structures of white privilege impede both black and white people from honest and fruitful communication as equals) but it almost feels abrupt after the almost casual pace of the first hour. I'll be interested to see what Simien comes up with on his next go-round, though.