By now, you’ve likely heard about the New York Times piece about the new ABC series “How to Get Away with Murder.” Written
by Alessandra Stanley, the article purports to offer an analysis of the
new Shonda Rhimes production that will premiere this week.
Shonda Rhimes in 2013.
Ron Sachs
Titled “Wrought in Their Creator’s Image,” it begins:
When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called “How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.”
It’s just boggling that a New York Times television critic
is unable to write about black women without calling upon three of the
oldest racist stereotypes about black women.
And Margaret Lyons at Vulture, who reminds us there are just so many things wrong with the New York Times’ Shonda Rhimes article. Lyons goes on to carefully enumerate each of them.
And of course, Ms. Rhimes herself, who seemed more bewildered than enraged when she took to Twitter to fact-check the Times.
Yep, Rhimes is not, as Stanley asserts, the angry black woman creator of Annalise Keating. That honor belongs to Pete Nowalk, a white guy! Which is why Rhimes was clearly cracking herself up with this tweet:
With so many smart responses already recorded, I thought it might be
valuable to try something different. What if we rewrote part of
Stanley’s article–nearly word-for-word–about another hotly-anticipated
show in the fall lineup.
Imagine this.
Wrought in Their Creator’s Image
When Aaron Sorkin
writes his autobiography, it should be called “How to Get Away With
Being an Angry White Man.” This week, HBO announced that Mr. Sorkin’s
“The Newsroom” will return for its third and final season on November 9.
It is yet another series from Sorkin that showcases a powerful, intimidating white man. This one is Will McAvoy, a blustering, monologue-prone, workplace bully played by Jeff Daniels, who won an Emmy for the role in 2013. And that clinches it: Mr. Sorkin, who wrought Dan Rydell on “Sports Night” and Toby Ziegler on “The West Wing” has done more to reset the image of white men on television than anyone since… Dr Phil.
Jeff
Daniels, right, a cast member in “The Newsroom,” poses with
creator/executive producer Aaron Sorkin at the season 2 premiere of the
HBO series at the…
Chris Pizzello
Be it Jeff Daniels on “Newsroom” or Martin Sheen on “The West Wing,”
Sorkin’s white men can and do get angry. Although not written for TV,
one of the more volcanic on-screen meltdowns in history belongs to a
Sorkin white man: “You can’t handle the truth!”, from the Col. Nathan Jessup character played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
Mr. Sorkin has embraced the trite-but-persistent caricature of the
Angry White Man, recast it in his own image and made it enviable. His
are not like the bossy, mouthy, salt-of-the-earth working-class men who
have been scolding and fuming on-screen ever since Carroll O’Connor
played Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” They certainly are not as benign and reassuring as Chris Traeger,
the athletic and energetic bureaucrat on “Parks and Recreation.” Just
think of how Traeger was literally laying the foundation for the
vice-presidential campaign of Paul Ryan!
As Will McAvoy, actor Jeff Daniels, 59, is sexual–even sexy–in
a slightly menacing way. But the actor doesn’t look at all like the
typical star of a network drama. Ignoring the narrow beauty standards
some white men are held to, Mr. Sorkin chose a performer who is older,
paunchier and less classically beautiful than say, Patrick Dempsey of “Grey’s Anatomy,” or Scott Foley, who plays Jake on “Scandal.”
Nobody thinks Aaron Sorkin is holding back. He, and his characters, are walking and talking all over the place.
I’m just hoping they encounter some angry black women in the corridors. Now that would make for good TV.
Remember Howard Beale? Played by Peter Finch in the movie Network
(1976), the deranged former TV news anchor Beale tries to generate a
social movement by admonishing viewers with a simple sentiment: "I'm mad
as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Three decades later,
there are still a host of Americans who feel mad as hell, and who are
refusing to take it anymore.
Like Beale, a lot of them feel blindsided by history, and their rage
is turned outwards, towards scapegoats and unseen forces, but rarely, as
in the film, at the cynical elites who profit from Beale's descent into
madeness.
And, like Beale, a lot of the current crop of the outraged are a lot
of white men. Not all of them, of course. There are plenty of angry men
of color and plenty of angry white women. Just look at those Tea Party
rallies! But as a political movement, as the rank and file of America's
fulminators -- whether the Tea Party or organizations on the extreme
right wing, or the guys, always guys, who open fire on their classmates
at school or their co-workers and colleagues at work, or the men, almost
always men, who beat and murder those they claim to love, or the young
men, always young men, who walk into movie theaters of places of worship
with guns blazing -- well it's pretty hard to deny that they're
virtually all white men. (And let us be clear: just because virtually
all these cases are middle- and lower-middle class white men, does not
for a nanosecond mean that all white men are crazed killers or white
supremacists. All members of the Mafia may be Italian, but not all
Italians are members of the Mafia.)
Yet deny it we do, often by assuming that these outbursts are
motivated by anything at all -- mental illness, access to guns, video
games, whatever -- other than gender. We'd notice, of course, if it were
poor black girls pulling the triggers in school shootings, or women who
walked into their workplaces with semi-automatic guns firing, or all
Asians or Jews or Latinos who were shooting up our movie theaters and
political rallies. But white men? Must be some other factor.
It seems so obvious, and yet so startling to see middle-class white
American men, arguably the most privileged human beings on the planet
(excluding, of course, hereditary aristocracies and the upper classes)
fuming with such self-righteous outrage. (The comedian Louis CK gets this sense of privilege: "I'm a white man," he says, "How many advantages can one persona have?"
So, to research my book, Angry White Men,
I traveled the country and interviewed scores of these guys -- from
"men's rights" activists who think white men are the victims of the new
discrimination, to the "white wing" on the rightward fringes of the
American political spectrum, who believe they are watching "our" country
being snatched away from them.
What unites them, I came to understand, was a sentiment I called
"aggrieved entitlement." Raised to believe that this was "their"
country, simply by being born white and male, they were entitled to a
good job by which they could support a family as sole breadwinners, and
to deference at home from adoring wives and obedient children. And not
only do their kids and their wives have ideas of their own; not only is
the competition for those jobs increasingly ferocious; they've also been
slammed by predatory lenders, corporate moguls, Wall Street
short-sellers betting against their own companies and manipulated by
cynical elites into believing that their adversaries were not the ones
downsizing, outsourcing and cutting their jobs, but those assorted
others -- women, immigrants, gays, black people -- who were asserting
their claims for a piece of the pie. The middle class white American man
expected to be more Don Draper, all self-made , in control, and
upwardly mobile. Instead he's more like William Foster, another
fictional character who's fallen off the cliff into that dark abyss of
despair, violence and madness.
Today's Angry White Men look backward, nostalgically at the world
they have lost. Some organize politically to restore "their" country;
some descend into madness; others lash out violently at a host of
scapegoats. Theirs is a fight to restore, to reclaim more than just what
they feel entitled to socially or economically -- it's also to restore
their sense of manhood, to reclaim that sense of dominance and power to
which they also feel entitled. They don't get mad, they want to get even
-- but with whom?
Alas, that multicultural, democratic train has long ago left the
station; it's impossible to imagine America rolling back the gains made
by women, LGBT people, immigrants, people of color. Angry White Men may
still strew some obstacles on that global path to greater equality,
making the road bumpier. But its direction is clear. And the loudest
screams are coming not from those whose fortunes are rising, but from
those over whom the engines locomotives of history are rolling.
Here, then, is a gallery of some of the more prominent angry white
men, both real and fictional. Each represents a different expression of
that aggrieved entitlement; they are not a coherent and unified
movement, and most of these men do not know each other nor recognize the
others as fellow travelers. They are, instead, isolated Howard Beales,
some with huge followings, to be sure, shouting into a strong headwind.
The past may have been theirs, but the future belongs to others.
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