In teaching Magnolia, while I believe it is a solid example of multi-character narrative, I also believe that all movies should be held up to scrutiny if they perpetuate misconceptions and stereotypes. The following excerpt is from an article by Hsuan L. Hsu, Professor of English at UC Davis, and it artfully highlights the inherent or unintended myopia screenwriters often exhibit in their writing:
Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis’s Crash
Magnolia continues to explore the themes of dysfunctional suburban families and threatened white masculinity. The film’s subplots develop towards moments of forgiveness and reconciliation: an angry, abandoned son visits his father’s deathbed; a molested child becomes a prostitute and refuses to speak to her dying father; the prostitute wonders whether she can expect understanding from a naive Christian policeman who has taken a liking to her; and a child genius works up the courage to tell his emotionally abusive father that “You have to be nicer to me.” All of these subplots also highlight the fragility of white masculinity: a record-setting quiz show winner grows up to be gay and sexually repressed; an equally repressed Christian policeman loses his gun, to his great shame; a star contestant on the quiz show “What Do Kids Know?” wets his pants on stage; two old men who have cheated on their wives slowly die of cancer; and Frank Mackey’s popular seminar, “Seduce and Destroy,” teaches crowds of sexually insecure men how to “Respect the cock [and] tame the cunt.”
Given these concerns, it comes as no surprise that blacks and other ethnic minorities figure in Magnolia primarily as psychologically one-dimensional criminals, street kids, and serviceable workers who maintain hospitals and deliver groceries. For example, a Hispanic man and a black woman appear among the team of adult contestants competing against three children on “What Do Kids Know?” — to which the implicit answer is, “more than minorities know!” But the plotline that opens the film gestures towards a more complex development of black characters: responding to a reported disturbance, Jim — the white policeman whose loneliness and naiveté anchor the film’s movement towards redemption — forcibly enters a black woman’s home, argues with her, handcuffs her to a couch, and discovers a white man’s corpse hidden in her bedroom closet. Regarding the elliptical way in which he treats this story of a single black mother named Marcy and her gangster son (a mysterious hooded figure nicknamed “The Worm”), Anderson explains that originally:
“there was more of that, and I took it out, but here’s the thing. I stand by the fact that it does function really well the way it is now. It is the most truncated and elliptical bit of the movie, but I thank God that there is something truncated and elliptical in the movie, which does pretty much hit its points. The movie needs something that has mystery, and this one is sort of a representation of spending a couple of days in the Valley: that’s how much color would come into your life.”
(qtd. in Fuchs n.p.)
Among other things, this quote establishes that Anderson’s intended audience is white, and that “your life” is delineated by the marginalization (“thank God”) — or even the deliberate mystification of “color.” Like previous L.A. ensemble films, Magnolia presents a totalizing image of L.A.’s community by deliberately relegating its black characters to the sidelines.
Yet racial inequality seeps back into the film’s main plotline, in which Jim’s awkward love rehabilitates a white woman who works as a prostitute in order to acquire cocaine. Several parallels connect the love interest, Claudia, to Marcy, the angry black mother who ends up in jail: Jim meets each of them when answering calls about domestic disturbances, both are emotionally distressed, and both women appear to be prostitutes. Claudia’s character functions as a sort of surrogate for Marcy, insofar as the viewer’s sympathy for her victimization by molestation, addiction, and prostitution displaces any sympathy we might have felt for Marcy’s broken home, her intense anger towards the police, her economic dependency on prostitution, and her desperate desire to protect her criminal son. Claudia’s body provides the stage where the two kinds of sin explored by the film — personal transgressions (usually on the part of males) within the family romance and broader social and racial hierarchies — intersect, and where the personal overtakes and displaces the sociological.
L.A. ensemble films indulge in cinematic lyricism and magical coincidences in order to explore a nostalgia for a lost community — for a sense of community threatened by sexual transgressions against the nuclear family on the one hand, and black resentment on the other hand. Magnolia concludes with a reductio ad absurdum of this strategy as a torrential rain of frogs falls onto cars, streets, and bodies throughout the San Fernando Valley. For most of the characters, this plague of frogs comes as a form of redemption — a miraculous and unprecedented event that shocks them out of their trajectories of sin, obsession, and hate towards a resolution steeped in forgiveness. But the film’s playful yet insistent references to Exodus 8:2 compel us to recall that the Biblical scene has less to do with redemption than emancipation. When God tells Moses to say to the Pharaoh, “And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs,” the point is not to bring the Egyptian people together and (to paraphrase the Aimee Mann song that concludes Magnolia) “save” them from their loneliness and anomie, but rather to liberate and empower an enslaved and oppressed people from a materialistic and intolerant regime. Along with its marginalized subplot about the suffering mother of a black criminal, the very title of Magnolia (as both a film and an iconic boulevard) suggests that racial exploitation and segregation — the socio-economic mechanisms that lay the groundwork for the beauty of the old South — persist in altered, mysterious forms in Los Angeles.)
Read the full article here: Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis’s Crash