Trumpian Nostalgia in Wright’s Baby Driver
From the stylized satires of the McDonagh and Coen Brothers to the mid-career work (let’s pretend The Hateful Eight never happened) of cinema’s waning enfant terrible, Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood fans have become increasingly fond of the blockbuster thrill ride that nourishes the mind rather than numbs it. By many accounts, Baby Driver, Edgar Wright’s 2017 action flick, was not only the film of the summer, but also the latest example of this genre of films that pack an intellectual punch in addition to the form’s characteristic violence. But rather than advancing new (let alone innovative) cinematic substance or technique, Baby Driver is an abrupt, tire-burning rush in the reverse. It makes a mockery of film and its potential to be a force of positive representation in a nation inundated by lethal mischaracterizations of marginalized identities. It is a film whose insistent, if implicit, brand of filmic nostalgia — enacted through tired tropes like the good old American love story (read: cis, white, and hetero), or the stereotyped super-predatoresque Black gangster — places it in the same universe of discourse as those four hateful words: Make America Great Again.
There is so much wrong with Baby Driver that it’s difficult to decide what to mention first. So let’s just start at the beginning. The movie opens with “Baby,” the film’s protagonist (played by a puerile Ansel Elgort) dancing through the streets of a bizarrely whitewashed Atlanta to the tune of Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle.” The scene recalls the grand opening of Damien Chazelle’s 2016 film, La La Land. Yet whereas La La Land featured a white man directing a cast of primarily white actors performing a genre trailblazed by people of color, Baby Driver takes this brand of erasure a step further: the performances of Black musicians pushed to the sidelines in La La Land are quite literally disembodied in Baby Driver, relegated to the inside of Elgort’s first-edition iPod. Bob & Earl, Carla Thomas, The Detroit Emeralds, Brenda Holloway: these are some of the Black artists whose uniquely soulful sounds are used to construct the sonic universe of the film.
Even more destructive than the film’s disembodiment of Black musicians’ voices is its treatment of its characters’ actual Black bodies. Bats (portrayed by Jamie Foxx) appears about a third of the way through the film. Usually shown dressed in a baggy, all-red ensemble, Bats’s costuming is as stereotypical as it is dated. Wright’s portrayal communicates the destructive archetype of the violent, hyper-masculine Black Southern Gangster that no doubt informed Hillary Clinton’s infamous 1996 indictment of “superpredators.”
In one particularly shocking moment, Bats makes a leering remark about a female character’s body, which is followed by the camera zooming in on her from behind, implicating the viewer in her harassment. A supporter of Wright’s film may point to Bats’s misogynistic behavior as simply the nature of his character; part of Wright’s creative license is the right to depict whomever he wants in whichever way he chooses. Such a laissez-faire conception of film is almost always built upon the white privilege of having your identity be one that’s constantly elevated in mainstream media. What’s more, such an interpretation ignores the fact that film isn’t a no-strings-attached sort of game. What we see in movies really does have an effect on how we see the world. The narratives and personas we choose to elevate in film are as influential as those we choose to denigrate. The problem is when this dichotomy is obviously split along racial lines.
In true Trumpian form, Baby Driver’s insidious brand of nostalgia isn’t limited to the kind of narrative that represents Black men as superpredators. In equal measure, the film elevates a representation of the traditional Hollywood love story — that which consists of a quiet, masculine man wooing a woman just waiting to be swept off of her feet. Most important to remember, though, is the fact that these two strands of cinematic memory aren’t discrete. They are inseparable. Wright’s film demonstrates this notion through the juxtaposition of sequences of high-octane criminality with slow scenes of dreamy romance between Baby and Deborah (played by British actress Lily James). These scenes abruptly switch from color film to a honeyed, old-timey black-and-white palette, screaming: remember when everything was so simple — when a white male director could get away with giving a film’s important roles to an almost exclusively white cast set to an oftentimes Black soundtrack in Atlanta, of all places; when a Hollywood film could tout the love of two cis, white, hetero lovers holding each other outside a suburban home, leaning against a real American car, without being chastised in the pages of reviews like these?
Now seems like the time to address what some might be thinking right about now while reading a very serious review of what many would call a not-so-serious movie. Plenty went to see Baby Driver and were reasonably entertained by its flashy action scenes, slick editing, and familiar soundtrack. They went and left, thinking not much of anything at all. And that’s the problem. Movies matter — especially films that clothe themselves in fun and frivolity while perpetuating systems of misrepresentation that get people of color killed. According to a 2011 study conducted by the Opportunity Agenda, a non-profit social justice organization based in New York, constant negative mainstream representations of Black men as violent criminals have been shown to lower life expectancies. “Distortions in the media are ultimately significant because of the real-world effects they have on black males’ outcomes,” the study argues, “which can be negatively affected any time a black male is in a position where his fate depends on how he is perceived by others, particularly whites.” And so when a film like Baby Driver overtly furthers such stereotypes, the real-world effects can be disastrous, including “everything from less attention from doctors to harsher sentencing by judges, lower likelihood of being hired for a job or admitted to school, lower odds of getting loans, and a higher likelihood of being shot by police.”
But what of the film’s treatment of white criminals? No doubt, even if the movie may present Bats in a deeply stereotypical way, surely Wright is non-discriminating in his adjudication of violent tendencies in his film’s protagonists? He isn’t. Though he may represent both Baby and Bats as serious criminals, such a parallel itself is proof of the deeply embedded white privilege beating at the heart of the 2017 film. Why? Spoiler alert (but honestly if you’ve read this far and are still thinking of watching this movie, wow): while Bats ends up dead by film’s end, punished in no uncertain terms for his offenses (by being literally impaled on some industrial materials), Baby — bank-robbing, carjacking, property-damaging, complicit-in-cop-killing Baby — ends up receiving a light sentence and getting paroled before finally (after 5 years) settling into the doting arms of his patient girlfriend. Bats gets killed. Baby rides off into the sunset. That’s called privilege.
As the revolutionary author and critic James Baldwin once said, “You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.” A film like Baby Driver doesn’t just spring from the tradition of the “white movies” to which Baldwin refers, it transmutes those old, obvious representations of marginalization into subtler, and so more insidious forms. Baby Driver is, therefore, not so much a movie as it is a piece of uniquely American propaganda: a car-chase spectacle whose cinematic fuel is our long history of white supremacy, a history reenacted through the film’s portrayal of Black criminality and death as the necessary foil to white heroism and love.
