By Janet Singleton

Movies are accidental history lessons. From the Jim Crow period’s Gone with the Wind to the Civil Rights era’s Nothing but a Man, they are the chunkier flotsam of zeitgeist. Black-themed works and those featuring African-American actors in the lead comment intentionally and unintentionally about the state of race relations for their time. By Barack Obama’s 2008 election, 2009’s crop of releases had been conceived and made. Yet certain ones incidentally whisper a sense of a new dawn; others are more products of the past. Here we will spotlight the historical celluloid backdrop of a swath of last year’s landscape of releases.

A Black Man as an Everyman

It was purely coincidental— perhaps a visible extrapolation perceptible only to a cultural acrobat in search of it— that one of 2009’s spring action films presented a black guy stepping into what was formerly a white guy’s role. In The Taking of Pelham 123, Denzel Washington plays a New York City subway dispatcher who is forced to negotiate with a terrorist (John Travolta), who is holding hostage a subway train car of commuters. Walter Matthau starred in the 1974 release. In the remake, Washington’s put-upon Walter Garber is essentially just a fellow who struggles to get through another workday and no longer incidentally, in a post- 9/11 Manhattan, wants to get home safely to his family at night.

Garber’s love for his family is a motivational force. His is a financially more humble clan than the Obamas, but like the President, Pelham’s protagonist appears to value human connections above millions of dollars. It’s Pelham’s terrorists that will do anything for a buck.

Futurist Nostalgia

Though This is It and 2012 represent different genres, they share futuristic undertones mixed with humane central values. Michael Jackson’s accidental swan song documentary, the inspirational rehearsal footage for his comeback concert, featured a motley but powerful crew reminiscent of the mosaic luminescent 60s tribal musical Hair, a head of its time (no pun intended). Obama’s election campaign, ended seven months prior, also depended upon the diverse skills of a talented cast willing to work for a collective masterpiece bigger than their individual panoply of tribes.

Inclusiveness reigns, too, in 2012’s doomsday world where people are too busy to be racist, as they flee a room-sized video game of sky-licking flames, giant waves, collapsing streets, and falling jetliners. Danny Glover and Thandie Newton were cast in June of 2008 as the US president and his art historian daughter.

We are told that Glover’s commander-in-chief has been widowed by his First Lady, who in her last days urged him to make room for more people in his evacuation plans. It is a White House, before its inevitable special effects destruction, that is inhabited by idealistic cerebral types, not a partying twin in sight. Despite a fantasy Armageddon plot, certain elements ring prophetic.

“. . . A Parent’s Willingness to Nurture a Child, That Finally Decides our Fate”

During President Obama’s inauguration speech he characterized as crucial “a parent’s willingness to nurture a child.” Published over a decade before that speech, a novel, by a social worker under the nom de plume Sapphire, drew a plotline based on a classic tale of hand-me-down oppression a tad comparable to The Color Purple. But this was that story with the stakes upped to a 115-degree fever. It told of unspeakable abuse of a young girl whose only crime was to be born to the lowest echelons of the crack culture.

Push became Precious, in 2009, a harrowing film that placed a talented actress’s face on a worldwide horror, the mistreatment and rape of children. The overweight pregnant 16-year-old played by Oscar-nomination-shoe-in Gabourey Sidibe, endures one horrific assault after another upon her humanity. Her predicament is a rare for the screen, but not so for the world. And since the early 90s, during which this now period piece was set, untold numbers of little white children have grown up with a meth lab as the family kitchen and cable porn running hours on end from the living room TV set, a Faustian parade of Ozzies and Harriets to influence mom and dad’s parenting style.

On his trip to Asia, President Obama may have been the first US president to speak internationally against child sex slavery. His administration comes along as an invisible but dauntingly evident scourge keeps fading into view.

Forgetting Pesky Ole History: Ain’t No Day but Today

Blind Side and Notorious debuted at different ends of the year, but both play like period pieces, though only one is. They wield spirited characters whose spunk seems disoriented and timeless. The figures feel ahistoric, like the George W. Bush Administration. The latter movie, about slain music mogul NOTORIOUS BIG, played by Jamal Woolard, focuses on 90s gangster rappers who live like there’s no tomorrow and thus, for many, there is not.

Notorious, neither a celebration nor a repudiation, is confined to its own world with no hint of anything auspicious around the corner. One gets the feeling that if someone had approached any of the hood boyz in this gallery of miscreants and said that in hardly a dozen years America would be headed by a kind, Harvard-educated black president, they would have cursed the fool, told him to be on his way, and if his steps were not swift enough: “bang, bang, bang, bang!”

Another film based on a true story, Blind Side is set in Memphis and shows its audience a neo-antebellum South, segregated enough for the big new black kid at school to be looked at like a hungry, swooping pterodactyl newly escaped from Jurassic Park. The movie is set around 2003, though. Quinton Aaron plays a teenage Michael Oher, tossed around as a kid, like the footballs the NFL star would one day dominate. In his mid-teens, he is taken in by a white Christian couple played by Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw.

Critics have slammed the movie for its objectification of its subject. Blind Side is told primarily from the viewpoint of Oher’s generous rescuers, not from the perspective of the child who had to preserve life, limb, and moral courage for 16 years to even be fit for such a rescue.

The film’s bright lighting appears to underscore its upbeat crowd-pleasing stance, and its vision is acute when depicting physical ethnic differences. Yet racial obliviousness occurs as the couple and Michael’s tutor, played by Kathy Bates, incessantly urge the coveted player to choose “Ole Miss” as his college. And as they drawl their cheers, it seems like unintentional comedy or insult to a viewer who knows of the cataclysm that followed when Governor Ross Barnett physically blocked the entrance of first University of Mississippi black student James Meredith in 1961.

It is coincidental to the film that the initial Obama-McCain debate took place at the University of Mississippi at Oxford in 2008. Otherwise, from the view of the aptly named Blind Side, one cannot spot the lights of even the immediate future.

Impossible Things Keep Happening Everyday

The films that serendipitously seem to sense the starlight have nothing to do with football (though one uses rugby as a unifying language). Both are about doing the impossible. In one a seamstress’s daughter takes a chance on kissing a frog, and after some tribulation, realizes positive results. Yet this is hardly more improbable than a black man locked away for 27 years by a wicked-witch empire internationally known for its genocidal policies, gaining freedom to peacefully govern and work with those who imprisoned him.

Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, looks at the leader as he gets his footing as South Africa’s first black president. As the nation prepares to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup, Mandela must unify the country behind its unpopular losing team, and inspire its captain, played by Matt Damon. And that means confronting waves of pain and hatred overwhelming enough to leave even the most magic wand shaken.

The Disney Company always believed in magic—but historically not for black folks, whose voices it relegated to its animated crows and monkeys. Yet by progressing beyond the potholes in the world’s most transcendent dreamscape, the studio in 2009 showed even dreams have dreams by unveiling its first African-American fairytale heroine in the Princess and the Frog .

Fairytales are underestimated vehicles, particularly the ones involving princesses. Like the beautifully and affectionately drawn Tiana (Anika Noni Rose), they start off as poor girls with no intention of staying that way. Defiance, as well as memories of her encouraging daddy (Terrence Howard), fuel Tiana’s hard work to capture her dream of owning a fine restaurant in her hometown New Orleans. The signature song “I’m Almost There,” performed by Rose, is expressly not as confident as The Little Mermaid’s “Part of Your World.” Tiana has to scramble even harder than the footless Ariel did to chase down a happy ending. But she knows in her heart that oppressive and evil villains, well, they were drawn just to be erased.

Janet Singleton is an award-winning freelance writer.