Sometimes the most remarkable changes in the movies happen without anyone noticing. Mixed race couples, which were once banned in Hollywood, seem to have become the new norm . When two characters fall in love these days , they’re often of two different races.
Just look at the interracial romances featured in mainstream releases this year: “Spider-Man: Far from Home”; “Yesterday”; “Blinded by the Light”; The Netflix thriller “Secret Obsession”; “The Sun Is Also a Star.” You could even consider the multiracial Keanu Reeves’ pairing with Ali Wong in “Always Be My Maybe” part of the trend.
When did this happen? Changes in Hollywood can never be traced to single dates. Inclusion and diversity have improved slowly in the movies in the past ten years, with major players in the industry calling for giving people of color more opportunity even before the days of #OscarsSoWhite, a movement begun in 2015 as a response to an all-white group of acting nominees at the Academy Awards.
But interracial love historically has always been treated like a controversy, hot topic or serious issue, something with which to be reckoned and wrestled. The best-known example of this is the 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” starring Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn, released on the heels of the Supreme Court’s overturning of anti-miscegenation laws. But the phenomenon sees modern incarnations in a period piece like “Loving” (2016), the autobiographical culture clash of “The Big Sick” (2017); and even in Jordan Peele’s lacerating critique of white liberalism, “Get Out” (2017). Racial and cultural conflict fueled these films whereas, by contrast, 2019 was the year mixed-race coupling seemed to be just part of the cinematic furniture, not the entire narrative architecture. It’s just blending into the culture, with audiences, critics and the industry seeming not to notice.
And why would we? Sections of American entertainment have seemed to operate in a manner that isn’t quite “post-racial” but is at least post-segregation for quite a long time. There’s a casual easiness to the diversity featured in “Yesterday” and “Spider-Man: Far from Home,” a visual suggestion that a mix of backgrounds is simply what America (or the U.K.) looks like today. (Speaking of spider people, don’t forget the interracial flirting in “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”).
What could be more reflective of the zeitgeist, after all, than an upcoming middle-of-the-line holiday rom-com featuring the music of George Michael? The trailer for “Last Christmas,” coming out this November, just dropped, and it follows the formula for “Hollywood safe bet” to the letter. It’s directed by Paul Feig of “Bridesmaids” fame. It’ll have a smaller budget than a Marvel film but be more appealing to the masses than the film-festival favorites vying for Oscar attention in the fall. And it stars perhaps two of the hottest names out there currently — English Emilia Clarke (“Game of Thrones”) and Malaysian-English Henry Golding (“Crazy Rich Asians”).
That the two stars are of different races seems as relevant and important as their astrological signs. Really — who cares? Historically speaking, Hollywood did. In the 1930s, when interracial marriage was still illegal in most states, the Hays Code prohibited scenes depicting mixed-race romantic relationships.
The Hays Code miscegenation laws had an influence long after the Code’s abolishment in the late ‘60s. Yet interracial romances remained relatively rate. There was “Jackie Brown,” Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film starring Pam Grier doing everything in a major film that the industry didn’t want from her — because she was a black female actor no longer at the height of her career. The Indian filmmaker Mira Nair found such trans-national stories as “The Namesake” and “Mississippi Masala.” In 2015, the Netflix show “Master of None” put a mirror to a large segment of millennial generation by showing Indian-American comedian/actor Aziz Ansari picking out food trucks in New York, attending mosque and wooing white women.
But interracial romances by and large remained far rarer than they were in the real world. In 2010, the U.S. census found that 15 per-cent of all new marriages in the United States were interracial, the highest in American history — and that was a decade ago. That Hollywood finally caught up in 2019 and didn’t make a big deal about it is evidence of changing (or perhaps changed) norms. It’s a good thing no one’s really talking about it. The issue appears over. We can finally move on, for now, to more pressing topics.
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