Opinion | In Netflix’s ‘Hollywood,’ One Movie Fixes Racism. Hooray!

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I was 12 years old when I first fell in love with the dreams spun by “classic” Hollywood: the myth of simpler times, the seductive glamour of men and women who often spoke in a quasi-British accent.

For a time, I longed to live in that period. But as they say, you live and you learn — and what I learned was that in reality, there was little glamour in being a black girl anytime from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Still, “Hollywood,” a splashy, star-studded Netflix mini-series set in the late 1940s and created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, is aimed squarely at my 12-year-old soul. In this alternative universe, the fictional Ace Studios serves as the backdrop for a series of history-making acts of good will on the part of straight white people, resulting in the production of “Meg,” a feature film penned by a gay black man, starring a black actress and directed by a half-Filipino filmmaker, whose wild success solves racism in show business for good. Hooray!

Mr. Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan have described the series as a fantastical experiment in “What ifs?” around gender, race and sexuality. What if Hollywood legends like “Rock Hudson and Anna May Wong and Dorothy Dandridge had had happy endings?” is how the actor Jeremy Pope recalled the story being pitched to him in an interview with Elle magazine.

That’s one way to describe it. A blunter question also came to mind as I watched: What if a handful of straight (and ostensibly straight) white people were actually willing to risk their careers and reputations in order to create opportunities for the underrepresented?

Both counterfactuals are played out in “Hollywood,” but they rest oddly alongside one another — one is playfully subversive; the other a retread of simplistic progressive logic about how to combat systemic oppression. The show’s appeals to the benevolent hearts and minds of “good” people are maddeningly naïve. I devoured each episode anyway.

A pattern develops throughout the series: Someone white or white-passing makes an impassioned plea for a more powerful white person to take a chance on hiring a person of color for a role. The argument is framed purely in do-gooder terms — an opportunity to “change the world,” to look back on this moment years from now knowing they “did the right thing.”

This plot mechanism reaches its eye-roll-y apex in the fourth episode, in which Patti LuPone’s Avis Amberg takes over as head of the studio after her husband suffers a heart attack. She doesn’t want to cast the black actress Camille Washington (Laura Harrier) as the lead, even as she agrees that Camille’s screen test is the best. Avis is worried about the inevitable backlash — that she could bankrupt the studio, that southern theaters will boycott a movie featuring a black actor in nonsubservient role.

Enter none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, who delivers a speech about “what it might mean to a dirt poor little black girl living in a shanty in some cotton town” to see someone like Camille onscreen.

Roosevelt goes on to say that she’s lost her faith in government’s ability to enact change, but what Avis and her colleagues do — make movies for the masses — is the real deal. The scene is just like the “message pictures” from that era: earnest, unintentionally self-aggrandizing, wildly oversimplifying complex real-world issues like racism.

The final episode takes a bold and bonkers leap in its rewrite of history, making “Meg” not only a box office hit but also an Oscars sensation — Avis, Camille and others, including Anna May Wong (cast in a supporting role in “Meg”), all take home awards. Additionally, Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope), the gay black screenwriter, walks the red carpet hand-in-hand with a young, then-unknown Rock Hudson and announces him as his boyfriend, thanking him during his acceptance speech.

Is it possible for a fantasy to be too absurd?

“Hollywood” is emphatic about what “Meg” is able to achieve for those like Anna May and Avis. Within just a year, it kick-starts a wave of major films starring women and people of color and “racial protests across the country simply melt away,” according to a fictional newsreel. In real life, Miyoshi Umeki’s win for best supporting actress for the 1957 film “Sayonara” didn’t instantly lead to significantly better parts for her or her peers. Halle Berry’s best actress win for “Monster’s Ball” didn’t suddenly open doors for other black women in Hollywood.

That’s because history has proved that even for those who have been sympathetic to the causes of the marginalized, there’s only so much power they are willing to concede. It’s how we end up with, say, the North capitulating to the bruised egos of the side that lost the Civil War, or politicians catering to the religious right in the race to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

This has been as true of the entertainment industry as it has been of government — which is why it remains a big deal when a “Black Panther” or a “Crazy Rich Asians” or a “Wonder Woman” gets made, much less finds success. Those films were borne of hard-won fights for equality.

And yet I keep coming back to the happy endings of the “Hollywood” characters. There is something to be said for the show’s fluffy confection of ahistoricism when it’s not indulging in myths of racial reconciliation and movies-as-changemakers.

The happy resolutions conjured up by message films from the “Hollywood” era almost always benefited straight white people and no one else. Here is a fantasy set in the past where women, people of color and queer characters ultimately win, too.

Yes, the Avises of the world are able to pat themselves on the backs for doing the right thing. But Archie, Camille and Anna May also get to pursue their dreams and see their success open doors for others. They survive, they flourish, they are happy.

A part of me can’t ignore what it feels like to see this Technicolor spectacle populated by these faces and experiences, to see the 1940s depicted through a 2020 lens — browner, less sexually repressed, more women calling the shots. “Movies don’t just show us how the world is, they show us how the world can be,” says one character in “Hollywood.” The line feels straight out of a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney vehicle, in which small-town kids conspire to put on a show (sometimes with blackface!).

Instead, it comes from an ambitious, if faulty, series that dares to imagine an assortment of characters conspiring to make a movie with a half-Filipino man, a gay black man and black and Asian women in 1940s Hollywood.

The show is willfully naïve and laughably self-satisfied. But as far as dreams go, it’s also progress.

Aisha Harris (@craftingmystyle) is a staff editor and writer in the Opinion section, where she covers culture and society.

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