If I find out about one more movie or book where the plot involves the main character losing his or her shit against a pretty background of voiceless natives, I am going to lose mine.
White people have been using people of color as backdrop fodder for as long as there has been a media machine with which to send their ideas along. The author Chinua Achebe, in "An Image of Africa" (http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html), once denounced Joseph Conrad for treating Africans as voiceless pieces of background, less even than inhuman. Conrad's Africa, he claimed, was "Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor," and added that "Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz." He was absolutely right; as he later noted in the piece, only one African was ever given a voice in the entire book, and that African disgusted Marlowe, the narrator, by suggesting the proper disposal of a dead comrade was to "eat 'im."
The Descendants, some century and a quarter after the advent of Heart of Darkness, is no well-meaning anti-imperialist tract. In fact, the main character, a wealthy lawyer named Matt King, goes out of his way to say that Hawaii (his ancestral home) is no paradise, and that it's been overtaken by "real life," just like most of the world. However, like Heart of Darkness, it involves the disintegration of some aspect of white society (in this case, a marriage; the mother of the titular descendants has been critically injured in a boating accident) - and much as in Heart of Darkness, hardly any natives are allowed to speak. The only East Asians, Polynesians, Filipino/as, or Native Hawaiians (ethnic groups present in great numbers in Hawaii) ever given a voice are:
- A disgruntled mother at the beginning of a movie, who's yelling at Matt for allowing his daughter, ten-year-old Scottie, to send insulting text messages to her daughter Lani about her weight and stage of puberty. The woman berates Matt for "buy[ing his] way" out of everything, and makes sarcastic comments about a land deal he's overseeing. She is overweight and permanently angry-faced, and is clearly meant to be seen as a humorous foil to Clooney's character.
- Her daughter, whose only line is "Okay."
- Scottie's teachers, concerned about the way she's been acting out since her mother's accident.
and
- The singer at a crappy country-music restaurant band.
See a connection? None of these characters would be present if they didn't depend on the white protagonists to necessitate their scenes - or if they couldn't be used for exposition. The Hawaiian mother, for example, was used as a convenient way to introduce the King family's land deal without a clunky introductory dialogue. By the time Matt's voice-over began to talk about the land he'd inherited from his great-great-grandmother (conveniently a Native Hawaiian princess, descended from Kamehamema I himself), the audience already knew what was coming. End scene.
There's another thing - Matt is 1/16 Native Hawaiian. Interesting, right? Good plot point, right? Wrong and wrong. By all indications, no one after good ol' great-great-granddaddy Edward King married anyone who wasn't white; none of Matt's many cousins show any signs of mixed heritage, and even an old photograph of his great-grandfather shows a man who clearly looks white (and this is a guy whose mother was supposedly a dark-skinned Hawaiian princess; genes don't work that way). If the family has lived on Oahu since the 1800s, there would have been plenty of East Asian, Polynesian, and Filipino/a immigrants to choose from, even if there weren't enough Native Hawaiians left for everyone to choose. Is it possible that a family could have remained white in all that time? Sure. But likely? Given the fact that said great-great-granddaddy didn't have any compunctions about marrying a native - are you shitting me?
The upshot of all that is that Matt looks completely white and enjoys all the perks of white privilege: money, prestige, respect, a good education, a lily-white wife, and a law career divorced of any connection to his heritage. Yet he uses that 1/16 of his DNA to justify keeping a parcel of land his family has owned for generations (see the saccharine speech above) - when the real reason he doesn't want to sell is that the sale would benefit a man who screwed his wife. Gimme a break. "Hawaiian blood"? Going by the regard Matt has shown to Hawaii and Hawaiians before this, I might as well ask what Hawaiian blood?
And, with that blood connection he supposedly loves, does he donate the land, or at least sell it to a national park trust? Does he build a Native Hawaiian cultural center? No. He keeps the land, knowing that the trust that deeded it to him will expire in seven years. "Twenty-five thousand pristine acres" - and he lets it rot just for the sake of making a point.
You might wonder, then, why is this movie set in Hawaii at all? After all, its primary plot points deal with Matt's wife's accident, their daughters' acting out, and the fact that before she hit her head, his wife cheated on him. That could just as easily take place in Indiana, Iowa, or Ireland, and it could just as easily be Celtic or Russian heritage he's touting. Yet it doesn't - and there's a reason.
White audiences don't like to think about the fact that they're in love with themselves, and with people like them. They want to forget - or at least pretend to forget - that they're watching just another white drama. Setting "The Descendants" in Hawaii helps them pretend that putting a few voiceless extras in the background is tantamount to equal representation - and, in their minds, gives them license to do more of the same.
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