The Resisting Spectator and The Green Mile

Abstract

Contemporary Hollywood filmmakers often look to classical Hollywood cinema for inspiration. In doing so, they also often coopt the codes of production of the earlier era of Hollywood filmmaking and reproduce its racist stereotypes of blacks. The memory film, The Green Mile, is an example of such a film. Reading the film as a resisting spectator, a term coined by the film scholar Manthia Diawara, I show how in making a return to classical Hollywood cinema and to the codes of production of the D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation, the film sacrifices the opportunity to tell a compelling story about black incarceration and criminal justice reform for a windfall at the box office.

Keywords:

• Memory
• contemporary cinema
• classical Hollywood cinema
• codes of production
• racist stereotypes
• representation
• criminal justice reform