“‘THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI’ IS HOPELESSLY BAD ON RACE”
“During the “nigger torturing” exchange between Dixon and Hayes, everyone in the theater around me laughed. It was, of course, supposed to be comic relief. I was the only black person in the theater, lured to the film by its glowing reviews — at the time of this writing, it holds a rating of 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, boosted by several notices that gush about how the film is a dark but honest look at humanity and grief. I haven’t seen many reviews mention the nigger-torturing gag. I haven’t seen any review that asks about the joke’s purpose, or who the punchline might be serving. The joke is that the white cop who tortures black people is trying to stop calling them niggers. Or maybe the joke is that McDormand, the righteously angry white protagonist, has a black friend (one of two black people we see in the town) but still thinks provoking a joke about niggers is funny. Or maybe the joke is that if we got rid of every racist police officer, we’d have no police at all — according to the white police chief…
It is also worth mentioning that race didn’t really need to be a topic in Three Billboards at all”
So. Many. Movies. where race did not need to be a thing.
