Our Family Dreading

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

When I lived ghetto-style in the LBC (or SnoopTown, as I insisted on calling it), our block was a delightful mélange of black, Latino, Gypsy (whose kids totally thieved!), and the young white crack mom across the street who was constantly murdering her children for hours at a time and screaming at my mother, who was taking care of me after a surgery and who’d shouted up to the crack mom’s balcony that her three-year-old was climbing on a table next to the railing, that she should keep her mouth shut and concentrate on her own kids, i.e. me, because of how I was a whore.

My neighborhood friends Honey and Carmen were black and Latina, respectively, and they were suspicious of one another, as black and Latino people often are really, but when we all sat down and had coffee? They treated each other with careful politeness, as one would expect of civilized people sharing a space and a friend. They would snipe mildly when the other wasn’t around, but they never once had a screaming match, and any outright racist thoughts they kept to themselves.

Oh, hilarious racism! Oh, Our Family Wedding! What a terrible, awful, soul-gacking movie you are. How I enjoyed your screening Saturday night on the Fox lot! It made me yearn longingly for Guess Who, the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner remake, starring Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher. Guess Who was like the poetry of Yeats, Dolly Parton, and Leonard Cohen combined, times a hundred, in comparison to Our Family Wedding, which stars Carlos Mencia.

Here is a good thing about Our Family Wedding, because I am generous: it portrays discrete L.A. locations well, from drinks at Cole’s to the gracious Victorians in Angelino Heights, with glowing shots of MOCA and the Disney Hall (though in the flick, Angels Flight is working, which, no) and a pretty gorgeous midcentury-modern bachelor-pad setup in (I think) Baldwin Hills as well.

intended demographic?

Here is a bad thing about Our Family Wedding, because Jesus: making the feuding black and Latino fathers of the happy couple really, really wealthy doesn’t make the racism or continual assholery cute. Taking the adorable America Ferrera and making her kind of a lying weak-suck jerk to her gorgeous, intelligent, and moving to Laos to join Doctors Without Borders fiancé (Lance Gross, a.k.a. my future husband) wastes Ferrera’s adorableness and those gorgeous teeth. Making me watch Forest Whitaker flop his monstrous self all over a beautiful strong black woman (Regina King, who unaccountably likes it) made me actually cover my eyes in my nausea. Racist Abuelita wasn’t as cute as she thought. Rick Famuyiwa’s direction was sluggish and draggy and honestly excruciatingly bad. But the goat that eats the Viagra and tries to rape Mencia and Whitaker? They should probably have dragged that scene out even longer! Pure comedic genius, raping goat! Good job!

The people behind us were laughing uproariously—uproariously—the entire time, and I don’t think they were shills. My son would have absolutely loved it, but my son also watches Yo Momma on MTV.

Here is an idea: if you get to the restaurant and find that by magical happenstance you have had a Crash-style unpleasant run-in just that day with the father of your child’s intended, take a step back, chuckle, stick out your hand and offer to start over, because civilized people don’t start in with the screaming in the fancy restaurant, or the flinging of racialized epithets. Here is another idea: don’t bring a goat to a wedding. Here is an idea still: Charlie Murphy, you old so-and-so, you are forgiven for being in this movie, and Taye Diggs, you were very funny! Who knew! But Sy Richardson, you are better than this, and it hurt me to check the IMDB page and find that you were “Grandpa.” Sy Richardson, I thought you were a fighter and a winner, but no. You’re a bad man. And I call bullshit on that.

I don’t love Los Angeles. People aren’t as friendly here as they should be—it’s no New York, where you can strike up a conversation with the person standing in line next to you, and they won’t look at you as though you have just addressed them without an introduction in 18th century England. But one thing I really do love about this city is the commingling of the races. I don’t mean block by block or even neighborhood by neighborhood—it’s still fairly segregated, duh, and when it’s not there are a fair number of clashes and brouhahas. I mean between the sheets. I feel very Los Angeles walking around with my Japanese boyfriend, and when we’re walking toward another couple, and they’re, say, a black guy and his Japanese girlfriend, the black guy and I will look at each other in recognition, a quick invisible high five, because we are the future, we are the world, and we are fucking awesome.

After the horrible, terrible, no good, very bad movie, my girlfriend and I went to Busby’s in Santa Monica for a laff about the flick, and to enumerate the atrocities. Just as soon as we sat down—instantly, that moment!—we made a new friend: Geo, a cornrowed, five-foot-nothing, bespectacled, black, broad-shouldered d-y-k-e. I mean: the dykiest dyke in all Dykeland, and she was in loooove with us! The rest of her friends may have been looking at us with suspicion (and they were, Blanche; they were!), but everyone was carefully polite. Nobody screamed anything, no racialized epithets were hurled, there were no racist grandmas in evidence and no raping goats, and civilization, as it almost always does, worked just fine.

We may have fears of the other, or plain discomfort. People really hated Crash; I didn’t. I thought it looked at the way we self-segregate and people’s petty and more-than-petty racist instincts honestly. Most of us have them, or at least a mild version, but we sublimate them pretty well, because most of us aren’t unbelievably trashy. Sometimes they come out in really unfortunate ways—ugly ways, and lethal ways. But not usually. It’s when you throw Carlos Mencia into the mix—and this bad, unfunny, unclever, hacky, meanspirited, sledgehammery script, for fuck’s sake it has a raping goat—that the result is just as gross and noxious as you’d expect. Fuck you, this movie. Except Lance Gross.

Comments

Comments closed.